LogFAQs > #972590713

Week 3

I am a dissenting opinion and an absolute minority, but High Tier has always been my favorite tier to work out. Teams are at full strength here -- all of your options are available, and victory or defeat are entirely contingent on having built a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. The first of the two High Tier weeks did exactly what I hoped for: It Delivered (TM). Close matches, wacky matches, unique matches. No match this week was anything but a ball.

The cash infusion went live here, to immediate and positive effect. Teams came out and fixed their faces, so to speak, rounding out their comps significantly. Everyone's teams became significantly more complete by the time the dust on Peacetime settled. And this week, there were no Bounty Hunters, so we finally got to see 6 and 7/weeks (Raiden and Samus, honestly) in their natural environment, unshackled by counters. So, how did they perform?

The answer to that question is...complex. They both won, but it was two tough wins, all told. Close, tricky matches with lots of arguing back and forth. Raiden and Gordon defeated Mewtwo, a super fat DK, Bowser and some fodder (sorry Diddy & Dixie). Samus with her arm cut off used the power of her global supertaunt to draw fire off B.J: Blazkowicz, allowing him to grind down Mega Man and then tear Leon Kennedy and Kazuma Kiryu to bits.

That second match deserves a little elaboration. Cutting Samus' arm off is as devastating a non-KO debuff as they come. Her battle output was crippled. Short of hitting a mage with antimagic or something, it's unlikely you'll ever see a meaner non-Removal nerf. And yet...she made it work anyways. Voters believed in her to tank and dodge so hard and so well multiple other characters couldn't beat her. How's that happen overall? These were my takeaways:

-TERRAIN MATTERS. This seems like a very obvious thing to talk about, but it really has to be emphasized. One of the lesser quibbles with M4 (which I'm not even sure if anyone who wasn't myself noticed, really) was how simplistic most terrains were. By and large, the majority were just cage matches in disguise, or large open areas with no significant unique features. When designing mercenaries, we set out to fix that as much as we could, and this match was an excellent showcase of that. B.J. Blazkowicz's terrain, the iconic Castle Wolfenstein, was deliberately given the cable car or underwater tunnel approach, making it into an actual fortress to be conquered, instead of just a corridor shooter experience. Thanks to this, the defenders managed to entrench nicely, neutralizing Rika Furude's time loops in spite of the size of the terrain, enabling BJ and Samus to win several iterations of the match outright in the eyes of the voters.
-High Tier merc versatility. Samus DID lose her gun access, it's true, but she was more than just guns. Eddv posted convincing videos of her fighting in melee, dodging like a queen and employing sonar and scanners. These things weren't fight winners, but they combined to add extra intangibles on Samus' side that increased her odds of victory.
-High Tier resilience. Other people may disagree, but to me, High Tier mercenaries are star players. They are the flagships of your team, the poster boys and girls who lend their likeness to the team's banner, the pointmen who lead the charge and the first line of defense. They have to be dealt with, or they will win matches outright if not opposed by another High Tier titan in turn. Boko HAD to chop Samus' arm off, which meant BJ was left untouched. Failure to do so would've spelled an instant loss for him. And yet, she persevered. High tier mercs earn their value not just by performing in battle, but because they are just about the only mercenaries in the game who can be hit by ability hax and still be argued to play through it regardless of being debuffed or weakened. Their 'soft passive' is that you need 1 more ability than you think you do to actually keep them down -- sometimes even two -- and that frees up their team to run rampant and uncontested. Their mere existence is passive ability redirection and consumption. In short, they have clutch factor, and most other mercenaries just don't. This came up big here, as a Samus that was, generously speaking, 70% less effective than normal still won a match for her team.

It was, at least to me, a reassuring indication that high tier mercs still had value, even in a bounty hunted world, a world where mercenaries across the board were made significantly cheaper, except them. Buy one and they will carry you. They're worth their upkeep and price tag.