LLD 3v3 Meta Break Down and Trends 9/28/14

LLD 3v3 Meta Break Down and Trends 9/28/14
This is a piece on my observations, thoughts and opinions of the recent 3v3 LLD tournament, its trends and results. LET'S GO!

First I'd like to talk about the 3v3 team structure(meta) with some language and examples from other popular games LoL (League of Legends) and other MOBAs.

Whether the teams considered it the optimal composition or it just happened by chance. Most teams consisted of a Physical "Ranged Carry", a Melee based "Bruiser" and and Elemental based "Support". While this was not strictly true for every team, it definitely made up the majority of team compositions. This includes the two teams I played on (winning in both leagues) AND our finals opponents. So let's talk a little more deeply about each of the three positions that seemed omnipresent in the tournament, their roles and the applicable in-game builds.

First of the three we have the role I'm most familiar with (and played in both tournaments) the Physical Ranged Carry. This player's role is to lay out the damage and control space. These characters put out massive hits from long range via bows with the Puncture skill or more recently Tornado Shot. This player will usually be picking up most of the kills on the team. Using Arrows to block the flow of enemy movement down hall ways, through choke points and Tornado shot to hit around obstacles you can apply pressure and influence enemy movement. Allowing your team better angles and the ability to capture and hold terrain with advantageous cover and safe movement lanes. These builds also utilize traps (Puncture,Tornado Shot,Bear Trap) to provide an additional line of defense while standing still to fire or offensively using traps to block choke points or pin in cornered enemies. No other builds at the moment competes at range with these characters, they are the best for putting out extremely high damage from long range. However this range and damage come with trade offs in defenses often resulting in effective life pools ranging from 800-1100 and a general loss of (block chance and resist) because of the use of a quiver and generally multiple uniques. For that reason the next role I'd like to discuss is the predator of the Ranged Carry the Bruiser.

The Bruisers is the master of 1v1 combat, Bruisers can 1v3 an entire team given they can isolate a player just long enough for a quick kill and then start setting up the next isolation and pick off. Bruisers are often very tanky and in-game builds feature a myriad of defenses. Using either a 1H sword/dagger and shield(Crest of Perandus) or Dual Ungil's Gauche (all which come with excellent block chance) stacked with Acrobatics for dodge/Spell dodge, Immortal Call negating physical damage, less uniques allowing highly over capped resist, along with a considerable life pool makes the Bruiser quite a sturdy foe. The skills of the Bruiser commonly consist of Whirling Blades(movement/DPS), Flicker Strike(closing distance/DPS), Arc or Bear Trap (trap clearing/constraining movement) and a devastating single target attack Heavy Strike, Double Strike and Dual Strike all being excellent options each with their own merits (though Whirling Blades has made a name for itself as possibly the most overpowered melee skill even for single target DPS). The Bruisers role in-game is two fold. #1 picking off separated enemy players, especially the enemy teams ranged carry sometimes even diving the enemy team to create chaos and potentially snipe a ranged carry or weakened enemy. #2 protecting your teammates and keeping enemy pressure off them or at least applying a constant threat (curses/DPS etc) to advancing enemies. Bruisers typically have a bow swap with either Puncture or Rain of Arrows to round out their solid all around build. (Projectiles from the Bruiser will be considerably weaker than the Ranged Carry as their Passive Tree does not afford them many opportunities for projectile/bow damage nodes.)

The third build I'd like to talk about is often much subtler than the previous two, but plays a huge part in the composition and overall flow of team play. It's the Elemental based "Support". These characters are not often called upon to provide brute force DPS because Supports feature mid range spells and have difficulty closing distance. HOWEVER, That does not mean that they cannot crush an enemy if the opportunity presents itself. The Supports DPS skill of choice seems to be one of the three Freeze Pulse, Arc or EK as they offer the best returns. I know!, I know! EK?? "I thought this was an Elemental Support?". Well EK is just the a DPS skill. The real bread and butter of the support is in it’s utility skills. The most powerful of which(IMO) being Cold Snap. Cold Snap offers a huge cold damage hit which virtually guarantees the target is chilled for some duration and can also freeze if they do not have immunity. Landing a single Cold Snap can spell death for an enemy player. Frozen or chilled means they retreat much more slowly and are left vulnerable to a Ranged Carry’s arrows or being engaged by a bruiser via Flicker Strike or Whirling Blades. Even the support themselves using a Quicksilver Flask to get in range and finish the job. Support characters will often use Asenath’s Touch or rare gloves corrupted with Temporal Chains on hit to ensure that any hit from them be it Cold Snap or another spell creates an opportunity for a kill. An enemy caught out of position and unable to fall back because they are chilled or Temporal Chains'd can easily be picked off. The last weapon in the supports arsenal i'd like to talk about are traps. They're are multiple variants from Bear Traps to Freeze Pulse Traps, Fireball Traps even Arc or Cold Snap Traps. Having hidden traps around the map or protecting your teams position behind cover allows for much safer play and can randomly pick off wounded enemies.

All of the above builds of course utilize curses and are each very powerful in their own right. As a team though it seemed the most effective and most popular composition was the 3 combined. This does not mean that another composition would be less effective going forward. 3 Bruisers, 2 Ranged 1 Bruiser, 2 Supports and a Cast on Death Character (not mentioned above, but possibly coming soon if I continue a 3v3 meta article)

Wrapping up I thought the tournament was pretty sweet, I was excited to play and to see people turn out. Good job by Greendude and Willy hosting. I hope to have WAAAYYY more teams in the future and I think 3v3 could really be a better PVP format than 1v1(I do enjoy both!) Hoping this was at least informative and helpful to newer players and even players in the tournament. This is how I saw the 3v3 meta Breaking Down!

i could kiss you right now sidro

"

Oats_PT wrote:

i could kiss you right now sidro

~Beast 2014

Dont get too excited Lordsidro, beast is known to kiss random people all the time...

It was indeed evident that teams had setup three distinct roles for each player, however the community would see it as Puncture vs Puncture, which is dissapointing. I know that puncture is strong, they are right about that, but it was sad to see they didn't not realize the scope of everything else going on from other builds.

About the 3v3 topic: We found it hard as commentator to keep up with the chaos and names. I know for viewers, 1v1 is much easier to follow especially if you know nothing of pvp. It is easy for you to realize whats happening and for the commentators to support the visual with some audio explanation.

Furthermore, organizing 3v3 is harder because it requires more people to be online. In 1v1s, if someone does not show they are simply removed the tourney. In teams though, if the player does not show the team is rendered useless (thats 3 ppl essentially lost because of 1).

For the reasons above, I believe we should consider making the next one a 2v2 tournament and see how that goes. It might be less hectic to view, commentate, understand and organize.

We also realized with this tournament how archaeic the spectator mode still is. It has received improvements but some of the new features like /spectate are argueably worse because we are not pulled into the arena alongside the players like when we killed ourselves with blood rage. Also switching povs using the arrow keys will bring you to dead player corpses which means you have to scrolls through multiple bodies to watch a 1v1. I hope to help GGG improve the spectator mode further by giving them some feedback on it via email.

Despite some minor mistakes on our end due to the fact that we are 2 people doing a 5 man job, I think the tournament went well and this has given us a lot of footage to look back and analyze for future balance changes and teams meta.

thanks for putting this together guys

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GreenDude wrote:

but it was sad to see they didn't not realize the scope of everything else going on from other builds.

Which is hopefully what this Meta Break Down will help address.

To expand upon the strategy behind having an elemental support, i want to say that the character essentially is is a glorified gear check. It checks at least 3 things that are easy to point out. Using spells with curse on hit puts a ton of flask pressure on anyone. When you have a puncture character on your team, Ideally they would be using most flask slots for staunching flasks. When it's possible to have double or triple curses on hit with a cold snap, it quickly becomes hard to decide which flasks are more important.

Secondly, you can really force them into getting their full resistances. Just because you arent having huge dps and winning 1v1's against their melee, it doesnt mean you arent exerting a lot of control in others ways by using these spells. There are strong spells from all 3 elements that you can utilize. A strong caster will cycle through the spells and be able to find weak spots in the opponents resistance. The simple fact is, for a lot of builds, it's extremely difficult to get 75 resistance across the board. This is especially true for a puncture character. (Elemental damage tends to counter puncture!)

A huge part of it is forcing wanderlust or dream frag on the opponents. Boots and rings can offer a ton of really strong stats, and you have to give one up.

There is also a gigantic opportunity for a spellcaster to use cast on death spells during a 3v3. I personally didnt utilize cast on death during the 3v3 because my +1 color links restricted me away from it, however there is absolutely no denying the power of having a few spells linked to a +1 cast on death linked item.

Cheers

What, no triple Raging Spirits team??? (I'm actually half-serious about this.)

Good read though.

I'm sorry I missed the tourney but glad to hear that it was a success!

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Fightgarr wrote:

What, no triple Raging Spirits team???

I was also hoping we'd see a team of 3 raging spirits characters with a team name like "R U SRS?"

They could of won the tourney too lol. it would of been very funny to see.