 What's up everybody, I'm TheMangoose, you were awesome, but today I wanted to talk about some of the gameplay choices I don't like with OverPrime. Soul Eve has created something special here and many of us have been enjoying the hell out of it. They've shown us that they know how to capture the look and feel of old Paragon. However, I think they picked a few wrong ingredients when putting everything together. This is completely separate from the clusterfuck of an installation and patching system they have. No, I'm talking about specific mechanics I believe need to be changed. I'm also not really going to address balance as I think that's something that will come with time. We shouldn't care right now about winning or losing or what heroes overpowered or underpowered. We need to focus on finding bugs and talking about design choices we don't particularly care for. Right now, I personally believe Soul Eve's order of priorities should be to create a real launcher, get servers online, fix bugs, reconsider some design choices, and then they can balance the game. I can't do anything about the first three, but after playing the game and discussing things with various players, I think I can provide some feedback concerning the mechanics of the game. My opinions are not set in stone though and I am often wrong, so feel free to disagree with me in the comments. Let's start off with a small one, the item system. The item system in overprime functions much like the item system of any other MOBA. Items are usually part of a three tier path with one item upgrading into another. However, you have, I guess four now, used to be three, active slots, and two passive slots. If you buy this shovel, it's called shovel, which is a passive item and you place it in your sixth slot, which is a passive slot. You won't be able to upgrade to pancakes, which is an active item unless you free up an active slot, unless of course you don't want to use the active. Also, when you're looking at card costs in the game, it factors in the cost of the item you already own. I'm looking here and I see I have seven points. Pancakes cost nine, so I think sweet. I can sell the shovel to get me the two more points I need for pancakes. Nope. Once I sell the shovel, the price goes up because it was already included. You also can't pick up an upgraded item while keeping the lower tiered one. It just goes away when you buy a new card. If this all sounds confusing, it's because it IS confusing. They do have the item paths displayed on the screen, so this isn't a huge problem. It does lack clarity and I heard a lot of confusion in the card shop when I was playing though. The first big problem I have is with respawning inhibitors. I don't particularly have a problem with them respawning, but this mechanic combined with a few others makes for what I believe to be unfun gameplay. If you don't know, inhibitors will respawn over time or when a team gets a defensive dunk with the orb prime. All this does is prolong the game. I know many people will view it as a valuable comeback mechanic, but I think it's just an unnecessary pain in the ass when combined with some of the other design choices they've made. It doesn't matter if you were able to capitalize on a good teamfight and push down an inhibitor because it's going to come back. Most games of Paragon, if you down an inhib, you can either push through for the win, or if you've lost several people after getting one down, you can hard push another lane to keep the pressure on the opponent. Not so in over prime, pushing the core down is very difficult unless you have a few waves of minions as it takes next to zero damage without minions present, and hard pushing another lane is rendered ineffective because the inhibs respawn. With travel mode, the enemy team can quickly clear waves of minions and still respawn to your push, or just come charging out of the fountain at full speed and run you over. These require overwhelming the enemy team and respawning inhibs do nothing in that scenario because you're just going to win anyway. Travel mode plays a lot into this, I think having respawning inhibs is fine as long as you make some changes to travel mode. So let's talk about travel mode. It was a huge problem in legacy and it's a huge problem in over prime. I don't want to see it go though, I think it's a fun mechanic and I love the travel mode animations, I just think it needs a change. Possibly put it on a long cooldown so you have to be smart about when you use it. Here's an example of why it's a problem. The team we were up against won a teamfight, there were several of us down and the Faye here was doing what she should do, taking advantage of numerical superiority to push the lanes. She was keeping an eye on respawn timers and was starting to back away as I spawned in. However, because I was in travel mode and she couldn't activate it because of Gideon, I just ran her down. No chance for outplay there, she didn't die from making a poor choice, I didn't kill her because I played well, bitch just got flattened by a runaway fridge and there was nothing she could do about it. This is an example of leapfrogging. One person keeps an enemy from entering travel mode while the other uses travel mode to either run up on them or run past them. You can alternate between two people to make any kind of outplay impossible for the person being leapfrogged. This is also why deathballing became so prevalent in the legacy. You can have one person hold someone in place and then completely surround them with the rest of your team in travel mode. You can't even rely on tower humping because they'll just trade tower aggro until you're dead. If you watched the live stream of the initial launch of overprime, you saw this tactic in action. I'm a little surprised they wanted to show that off. This is the kind of tactic that doesn't feel good for anyone involved. Tying into travel mode are all the damn movement speed items in the game. Here are all the items that give some sort of movement speed bonus. Why? You already have travel mode, why have all these other passive or active speed boosts in the game? They stack with travel mode and abilities too. This is the same grim game I was playing. I was straight handling this Murdock in the early game. However, he used this crazy ass hit-and-run Murdock build that combined movement speed with travel mode and his wee-woos that just come flying out of nowhere, pop a buckshot and a basic attack, and then just book it. And then he would just wait until you could activate travel mode again and repeat the process until people were dead. I ain't mad at him. It was both hilarious and ingenious. Rig magic, if you're out there, buddy, I salute you. I was cursing when I died, but damn it, it did make me laugh. That's great use of the game's mechanics to accentuate Doc's kit. That shouldn't be a thing though. Move speed items and passive should not work with travel mode. It should be one, the other, or neither. I built a move speed Murdock, had Narbash boost me while I was in travel mode, moving at a low health target, and I traveled to the fucking future. I saw how I'd die. It's not pretty, and I do not look forward to it. This is another thing I don't like. When you have items that boost speed, then you end up with items that are almost required to be competitive. And that's not limited to speed boosts with overprime. Take the Kingslayer card that gives ranged heroes a boost to their attack range. If you have two equally skilled ADCs, the one with this card will always win a duel. So then it becomes a requirement for ADCs to have this card. And if all ADCs are using this card to get the same attack range, then the question is, why not just chuck that card and give them all that increased attack range? The next change I want to see is a very small one, and it is very debatable. That's the effectiveness of knockbacks. Holy shit. When you knock someone back with Buckshot, Colossal Blow, or Displacement Blast, they go flying. Look at this Greystone. He gets some serious hang time there. I think if we want to add some of overprime's lineup to the other games, we could just like put Sarath on the edge of the map and hit her with a Displacement Blast and chuck her over into Fault. Maybe left side for Fault, right side for predecessor. This may be fine, but I was just kind of taking it back by how far the knockback ranges are. Speaking of Grim though, his ult kind of takes a while to cast. It's like three, maybe four fucking ever. I'm just sitting there trying to cast it while Chimera beats a crap out of me. It doesn't even go off. He interrupted it. I think that's about all I have for now. Let me know if you noticed some things that you would like to see changed, or if you disagree with my assessment. I see a lot of potential in Soul Leave. However, I think they may have wasted it by writing a love letter to Legacy in order to give the fans a nostalgia boner when they can't have used the lessons taught to us by the failures of Paragon to create a better, more sustainable game. They are obviously very good at what they do and have created something special here, but those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. No one said that before me. That's my quote. I made it up myself. I swear. This is the Mangoes signing off. You guys have a good one. Like us, subscribe and stuff. Mango.