What went wrong and where we're going
MOBA vs ARENA BRAWLER
Let’s start with the first big high level direction change. In the past, we heavily took inspiration from MOBAs to follow. This was true in almost every aspect of our development. From a design side, we took values from MOBAs and applied them to our game, including Health, Cooldown, Damage, Speed and more. This made it difficult to balance and design around because that’s simply not the kind of game we are. FANGS is not a traditional MOBA. Fangs is an Arena Brawler with a focus on macro objective gameplay.
What does this mean exactly? First, it means we are NOT a MOBA. We have no lanes, we have no minions, we have no towers, no gold, no levels, no ability skill leveling, no mid-game item progression, etc. Those are all features that make a MOBA fun and deep, which FANGS does not have. While a MOBA has characters with health, abilities, damage, cooldowns, speeds etc like FANGS, the values of those abilities were specifically tuned with all the macro depth and pacing of that game.
Instead the pacing of FANGS is much closer to an Arena Brawler. It’s a big focus on combat that is longer paced than MOBA combat. In MOBAs, you blow all your abilities and the fight is determined quickly in seconds while in Arena Brawlers, you’ll run through multiple rotations of your abilities and the fight lasts much longer. It was a mistake to use MOBA values for FANGS, instead we should be using values closer to Arena Brawler characters.
HERO CLASSES
We’ve structured our Hero Classes to have more guidelines. Prior we were setting the health, damage, range, speed, projectile speed and etc on too much of a case by case basis. This made it difficult to balance and identify exactly what might be off on a Hero when it comes to its power, or even simply its fun. For example, Ishir used to have a health pool of 650 and Belroth used to have 1500 (with augments). This made damage inconsistent; a few 55 damage LMBs might decimate Ishir but would barely tickle a Belroth. Bringing everyone closer in line will help bridge the gap from these extremes of feeling like “wtf killed me” and “I’m not doing anything at all”. Everybody will still have their strengths and weaknesses, but it won’t be as extreme as before.
Ranged Class will have high LMB damage but will tend to have low to mid HP. These LMBs typically hit harder at the cost of attacking slower than Melee LMBs. Melee Class will tend to have higher HP to make up for the fact that they can get kited and poked more easily. Support Class is the wild card; the tanks will have higher HP with lower damage so they can tank, but the healers will have the lowest HP as they have better sustaining tools on hand.
DAMAGE AND COOLDOWNS
The other rule we’re placing down is no more high cooldowns. In the past, we’ve had some abilities with 10-20 second cooldowns, and balanced it by putting more power and/or more reliability in them. While from a balance point of view this is fine, it didn’t lead to satisfying combat. First of all, it’s just more fun to have more options to choose from and be able to use your abilities more. That’s what playing the game is all about. Beyond that though, it led to a lot of design clarity issues or “what just happened” moments. Having such huge damage and swingy abilities caused more moments that made you wonder “how did I die” rather than “oh that person outplayed me”. You see a lot of high cooldown abilities in MOBAs because the kit was designed to revolve around ALL aspects of the game like minions, waves, towers, vision etc rather than just the combat. Since we ARE a combat focused we are striving to have most cooldowns under 10 seconds. You’ll have your LMB at a sub 1 second cooldown to spam, a secondary ability that usually resonates with the Hero’s core kit at 4-6 seconds (like Rose SHIFT) and the rest at about 8-10 seconds to use in the fast paced combat.
Speaking of LMBs, that’s another big change we’ll be making; we’re increasing the damage and threat. For most characters in MOBAs, the ability damage is the bulk of the damage in late game. We designed our Heros the same way, when in reality, for a fun and competitive Arena Brawler, the LMB should be very threatening. Skilled players should be rewarded for consistently aiming well, and not just rewarded for knowing which ability to use at what time.
OBJECTIVE GAMEPLAY
We’re not just an Arena Brawler though, we’re an Arena Brawler with Macro Objective Gameplay. While one CORE element of FANGS is Combat experience, the other CORE element of FANGS is the Macro Objective Gameplay. I won’t be touching on this too much for now (sorry). I just want to let you know that we know that Objectives is what separates FANGS from other Arena Brawlers and we will make sure that this Macro element is deep and rich to allow for big brain players to shine. We’ll be taking things one step at a time. First we’ll polish up the Base Hero combat experience. Then we’ll polish up the Augments. Then we’ll polish up the macro objectives. While we’ll be thinking about a lot of these things in parallel because they tie in to each other, the order of our primary focus will be Base Heros -> Augments -> Shards/Captain Lives/Aspect.
Let’s start with the first big high level direction change. In the past, we heavily took inspiration from MOBAs to follow. This was true in almost every aspect of our development. From a design side, we took values from MOBAs and applied them to our game, including Health, Cooldown, Damage, Speed and more. This made it difficult to balance and design around because that’s simply not the kind of game we are. FANGS is not a traditional MOBA. Fangs is an Arena Brawler with a focus on macro objective gameplay.
What does this mean exactly? First, it means we are NOT a MOBA. We have no lanes, we have no minions, we have no towers, no gold, no levels, no ability skill leveling, no mid-game item progression, etc. Those are all features that make a MOBA fun and deep, which FANGS does not have. While a MOBA has characters with health, abilities, damage, cooldowns, speeds etc like FANGS, the values of those abilities were specifically tuned with all the macro depth and pacing of that game.
Instead the pacing of FANGS is much closer to an Arena Brawler. It’s a big focus on combat that is longer paced than MOBA combat. In MOBAs, you blow all your abilities and the fight is determined quickly in seconds while in Arena Brawlers, you’ll run through multiple rotations of your abilities and the fight lasts much longer. It was a mistake to use MOBA values for FANGS, instead we should be using values closer to Arena Brawler characters.
HERO CLASSES
We’ve structured our Hero Classes to have more guidelines. Prior we were setting the health, damage, range, speed, projectile speed and etc on too much of a case by case basis. This made it difficult to balance and identify exactly what might be off on a Hero when it comes to its power, or even simply its fun. For example, Ishir used to have a health pool of 650 and Belroth used to have 1500 (with augments). This made damage inconsistent; a few 55 damage LMBs might decimate Ishir but would barely tickle a Belroth. Bringing everyone closer in line will help bridge the gap from these extremes of feeling like “wtf killed me” and “I’m not doing anything at all”. Everybody will still have their strengths and weaknesses, but it won’t be as extreme as before.
Ranged Class will have high LMB damage but will tend to have low to mid HP. These LMBs typically hit harder at the cost of attacking slower than Melee LMBs. Melee Class will tend to have higher HP to make up for the fact that they can get kited and poked more easily. Support Class is the wild card; the tanks will have higher HP with lower damage so they can tank, but the healers will have the lowest HP as they have better sustaining tools on hand.
DAMAGE AND COOLDOWNS
The other rule we’re placing down is no more high cooldowns. In the past, we’ve had some abilities with 10-20 second cooldowns, and balanced it by putting more power and/or more reliability in them. While from a balance point of view this is fine, it didn’t lead to satisfying combat. First of all, it’s just more fun to have more options to choose from and be able to use your abilities more. That’s what playing the game is all about. Beyond that though, it led to a lot of design clarity issues or “what just happened” moments. Having such huge damage and swingy abilities caused more moments that made you wonder “how did I die” rather than “oh that person outplayed me”. You see a lot of high cooldown abilities in MOBAs because the kit was designed to revolve around ALL aspects of the game like minions, waves, towers, vision etc rather than just the combat. Since we ARE a combat focused we are striving to have most cooldowns under 10 seconds. You’ll have your LMB at a sub 1 second cooldown to spam, a secondary ability that usually resonates with the Hero’s core kit at 4-6 seconds (like Rose SHIFT) and the rest at about 8-10 seconds to use in the fast paced combat.
Speaking of LMBs, that’s another big change we’ll be making; we’re increasing the damage and threat. For most characters in MOBAs, the ability damage is the bulk of the damage in late game. We designed our Heros the same way, when in reality, for a fun and competitive Arena Brawler, the LMB should be very threatening. Skilled players should be rewarded for consistently aiming well, and not just rewarded for knowing which ability to use at what time.
OBJECTIVE GAMEPLAY
We’re not just an Arena Brawler though, we’re an Arena Brawler with Macro Objective Gameplay. While one CORE element of FANGS is Combat experience, the other CORE element of FANGS is the Macro Objective Gameplay. I won’t be touching on this too much for now (sorry). I just want to let you know that we know that Objectives is what separates FANGS from other Arena Brawlers and we will make sure that this Macro element is deep and rich to allow for big brain players to shine. We’ll be taking things one step at a time. First we’ll polish up the Base Hero combat experience. Then we’ll polish up the Augments. Then we’ll polish up the macro objectives. While we’ll be thinking about a lot of these things in parallel because they tie in to each other, the order of our primary focus will be Base Heros -> Augments -> Shards/Captain Lives/Aspect.
