balrog (official)

this unit is so fucked up dude (main blog @destruktow, largely inactive)

[greaterbalrogcat]

three quick notes

-if you ever disagree with or dislike something i say or do, go ahead and say it. i cannot improve without criticism

-if i do something factually incorrectly, such as miscalculating a unit's stats, PLEASE let me know. i am but a man

-send asks to ask about anything or ask for unit reviews, send submissions if you want to post something but you want to do it on my blog

[greaterbalrogcat]

IMPLICIT BALANCING

go back, real quick, and look at the last few Big Things added to this game. we got sage subtrait, we got zero legends, we got the end of uncanny legends, we got behemoths, we got aku... now zoom in a little bit. miko mitama was added in v5.8, becoming the consensus best uber - relics are added in 7.0 to hurt her CC, 7.2 introduces loris to completely counter her, surge in 9.2 makes her lack of updated immunities more apparent, and 10.8 creates the eternal threat of aku shields to block her slow when she was already well on her way out of peak relevancy. kasli the bane in 9.5, but it takes a while for people to understand how powerful she is - behemoths as a common surge immune subtrait in 11.5, counter-surge in 12.4, hard pushing curse resistant sages in 13.1, and explosion in 13.7 to do to her what surge did to mitama.

my point is simple: ponos knows what units are good and what units are too good, and partially builds new mechanics to hurt the viability of these overtuned meta definers.

in terms of where this leaves the current meta, look no further than the community's least favorite new problem children, lunos and dlunos (luna's also an issue, but she'll be a separate post). their viability as standalone, typical units is pretty mediocre for a fest, but their 10 second cooldown and conjures completely break the game in half.

lunos gives you an on-demand breakerblast, a free ~150k damage 600 range hit, and a kaoluga-esque mini surge that will hold enemies in place for just long enough for the next lunos to come out. wait for lunos to die, conjure, KB the whole field, deploy next lunos, repeat. this is referred to as "lunos cycling". it's probably better than cyberstacking ever was, and it takes absolutely no time, skill, or sentient thought to pull off. KB/surge immunity can kill this strategy, but those are rare.

dlunos is largely worse than lunos, by virtue of not having the option of a first form that costs less than a burger and fries while still breaking the entire game, but let me pose this hypothetical to you: slime can can. slime cat's wave with the double money and damage of can can. dlunos can give you one of these every nine point eight seven seconds, with an 800 range AOE blast of the exact same damage as a talented can can at the same level, a wave (effectively doubling that damage), and double cash on anything it kills. this doesn't solo the game like lunos, but it's one of the most unnecessarily plug and play units to ever touch this game.

in any other game, these units would've been gone the first week of their existence. not nerfed, either completely reworked or fully removed. ponos doesn't do that. so what's the realistic path forward?

my theory is as follows: we'll see an uptick in KB immunity and wave immunity for a while, especially on advent/ZL bosses. this won't kill either unit, but will hurt them slightly. sage will get played out at some point, and ponos will have the opportunity to move on to a new subtrait, which i'm tentatively going to refer to as "mystic". mystic (or whatever the name ends up being) interacts with conjure in some way, whether being able to attack it, being immune to it, disabling the ability to conjure at all, and/or having a conjure of its own when knocked back/killed. lunos and dlunos will continue to be unstoppable through lategame, but endgame will introduce counters that cause them to fall to around where dasli is now (mid-low top 10 ubers). thus, the ponos game balance cycle will be completed.

will something along these lines happen? who knows! if i'm ponos, i might give up on the "no changes" gimmick and just nerf those boys into the ground. however, i think it's a pretty likely scenario that aligns with previous meta cycles. yorikatsu please do something about these jits man you have no idea the suffering balrog isn't even TOP FIVE

[greaterbalrogcat]

so where actually is the limit of what a new mechanic can be?

i can't imagine ponos has a poster up on the wall that says "1. DON'T DO BEHEMOTHS AGAIN / 2. WE MAKE ULTRA FORMS GOOD NOW / 3. NO WARP/TOXIC UNTIL WE FIGURE OUT HOW TO NOT DESTROY THE GAME", but the central design of the game, the "send out your guy to beat up their guy, wait for your guy to recharge, destroy their base before yours gets destroyed" concept went untouched for almost 12 years... until they added conjure.

the idea of an "active ability" on a unit had been thrown around since time immemorial, with the only non-unit deploying means of influencing a battle being cat cannon, sniper the cat (powerup), and the cat god, who you can't even use outside of very specific near-irrelevant circumstances. people had thrown around notions of a second attack! a teleport! a summon (generally of another normally functioning unit)! hell, i've seen proposals of units that would be able to self-destruct and kill enemies and allies. conjure covers, effectively, two of those, and answers the question of how they could be implemented. the seal has been broken.

a few other proposals i've seen more recently: -AOE buff to surrounding units -temporary invincibility, similar to conjure -some form of affecting cooldown, similar to how darvin drains unit cooldowns on hit

speaking of darvin, we've never seen anything like him before either. he's an alien sage with curse, high pierce multihit, and doubles a unit's remaining cooldown if he hits them. this sort of "fourth wall break"-esque ability is completely foreign to any design we've seen before, and sets the precedent for an incomprehensibly annoying future enemy peon. hope you're ready.

if cooldown and deployment aren't sacred, is anything? it's entirely possible that we could see an enemy that affects your cat cannon recharge, a unit that passively increases your money generation, or anything else in that vein. i would say i have faith in ponos to not break their game too badly, but they did just add luno and dluno. whatever comes after conjure had better not be that bad.

[greaterbalrogcat]

UNIT REVIEW: AWAKENED BAHAMUT CAT (TALENTS EDITION)

it's not an exaggeration to say battle cats is built around bahamut cat to a degree. it functions as your signature backliner for nearly all of early game, acts as a gateway to the first glimpses of real exciting content (crazeds/SoL), gives a lot of players their first taste of Real Power in true form, and became the blueprint for the high speed, high damage, rebound rusher units that define endgame. that said, nothing lasts forever.

the year is 2025. bahamut is approaching being lost to the sands of time, having been slowly outclassed by the ever-growing number of new abilities, insane statblocks, ways to use units, and things that just do his job, but better (cough, cough, immortal yukimura). his unmatched power has been matched. so what does ponos do?

they feed him a nuke!

quick explanation of "blast attack" (explosion): when a unit or enemy with explosion attacks, after .33 seconds, it creates a 150 range (centered on the point of creation, generally at the edge of the attack) blast of death, lasting for .5 seconds and dealing 100% of the unit/enemy's damage. after another .33 seconds, two more blasts, each 100 range, are created on each side of the initial, dealing 70% of base damage and lasting .5 seconds. .33 seconds later, another two on each end of the previous two, 100 range, 40% base damage, .5 second duration.

this gives anything with this ability: -a slightly weaker extra 275 forward pierce on top of any LD/omni -an automatic minimum 2x DPS -the ability to juggle anything with low enough KB threshold -one of the best options to clear low health annoyances in the game

this gives bahamut with this ability:

about 74,000 damage per second, with pierce up to 475 range doing 44.000 damage per hit to anything behind the frontline.

220,000 damage per hit to its initial target(s). 110,000 damage to anything that walks into the first explosion (which happens surprisingly often!).

this cool ass montage:

and incomprehensible amounts of usage. bahamut's fundamentals were perfect for the current meta, as i mentioned at the start, but he just struggled to keep up with the magnifications. fixed that pretty easily! plus speed talent makes him just a tad more mobile which is really nice.

bahamut is the board the game is played on, and explosion flips the board over. comically important unit for endgame. thank you, mountain dew: baha blast.

[greaterbalrogcat]

been a minute

[greaterbalrogcat]

i leave for a measly two and a half years and you all let balrog fall out of top 5 ubers smh

[greaterbalrogcat]

posts about:

-bahamut explosion -jizo UF -cosmo UF -lunos/dlunos -luna/dluna -trait specialists vs subtrait specialists -the implications of conjure as a mechanic -how ponos treats game balance -brutal advents

COMING SOON (for serious this time)

[greaterbalrogcat]

been a minute

[greaterbalrogcat]

i leave for a measly two and a half years and you all let balrog fall out of top 5 ubers smh

[greaterbalrogcat]

been a minute

[destruktow]

elaborate on phono vs. dasli?

look dasli has been the best uber in the game for years at this point. 12k base dps at lvl 30 with surge, insane survivability, we all know the routine. phono is a really good superbackliner but lacks nearly all the immunities, large area insane dps (his insane dps is in a tiny area and the space around it is his average dps), and his only real advantage is that ponos made an entire class of enemies to beat dasli and then centered the game around them and she's STILL the best uber in the game bc not every behemoth is surge immune and not every LZ stage will have behemoths (just like not every UL stage has relics). phono is the new kid on the block, and as his meta develops, he might become the best uber in the game, but as for now, he's like third best? maybe? behind dasli and balrog

tl;dr: dasli > phono bc phono lacks immunities, has a weird multi-hit and odd LD, and dasli has better dps in like every situation (except when she gets outranged but c'mon 400 range is crazy)

[greaterbalrogcat]

happy one year anniversary to baby's first meta post, doesn't feel like that long tbh

[ancient-cats-unite]

One cat has to be permanently removed from the game. Who?

Some are better than others.

Can Can Cat

Cameraman Cat

Ramen Cat

Seafarer Cat

Cyberpunk Cat

Manic Eraser Cat

Courier Cat

Voting ended onJan 29, 2024

[greaterbalrogcat]

can't remove ramen bc angels are balanced around it being broken

can't remove courier for same reason but replace angel with behemoth

i am a firm seafarer enjoyer it was my first gacha cat

cyberpunk's based fuck y'all

cameraman stays bc people don't talk about how crazy it is enough

can can or meraser. hard decision but i think it's can can at the end of the day cuz it's not fun good it's just really good and meraser has arms

[i-am-the-teeth-collector]

Courier dies so that we can have a meta where Ponos balances the behemoth meta to be less

[greaterbalrogcat]

you seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that ponos would balance their game. if courier goes any possibility of behemoth stages being okay amounts of hard is gone

[raw-pickles-blog]

I took it as 'this unit just wasn't made in the first place' which might not have been right but courier then definitely bc i want like a balanced behemoth meta or whatever

[greaterbalrogcat]

oh yeah if it's like that then courier 100% lmao

[greaterbalrogcat]

Balrog mid, Dasli better

at this point it's pretty clearly the same guy but i'm gonna keep responding because this is good content this is what the people want

balrog good dasli mid checkmate liberal

[ancient-cats-unite]

One cat has to be permanently removed from the game. Who?

Some are better than others.

Can Can Cat

Cameraman Cat

Ramen Cat

Seafarer Cat

Cyberpunk Cat

Manic Eraser Cat

Courier Cat

Voting ended onJan 29, 2024

[greaterbalrogcat]

can't remove ramen bc angels are balanced around it being broken

can't remove courier for same reason but replace angel with behemoth

i am a firm seafarer enjoyer it was my first gacha cat

cyberpunk's based fuck y'all

cameraman stays bc people don't talk about how crazy it is enough

can can or meraser. hard decision but i think it's can can at the end of the day cuz it's not fun good it's just really good and meraser has arms

[i-am-the-teeth-collector]

Courier dies so that we can have a meta where Ponos balances the behemoth meta to be less

[greaterbalrogcat]

you seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that ponos would balance their game. if courier goes any possibility of behemoth stages being okay amounts of hard is gone

[i-am-the-teeth-collector]

They have historically done balance patches before; Bahamut got multihit, Fests got target relic and aku, growing strange got a mooth removed, IIRC. It can happen again.

[greaterbalrogcat]

i mean you gotta understand

ponos is a small company. they got like 150 people in that bitch it's weirdly indie for how big the game is

historically balance patches have been rare as fuck. abaha getting multihit, balrog getting weaken immune, gstrange getting nerfed, were all YEARS ago. most recent change i can think of would be green stone desert IV getting nerfed and that wasn't even that relevant of a change tbh

the question doesn't specify that anything else in the game will change and assuming ponos will fix something because something else in their game made it different from original vision is generally false, they added octo and every SoL wave stage instantly became free

there are other behemoth units just cuz it's harder to balance out courier doesn't mean ponos would automatically think "now that courier's gone we need to nerf those things" they would go "add another behemoth true form uber or smthn go do that" we have non-courier powercreep now

[ancient-cats-unite]

One cat has to be permanently removed from the game. Who?

Some are better than others.

Can Can Cat

Cameraman Cat

Ramen Cat

Seafarer Cat

Cyberpunk Cat

Manic Eraser Cat

Courier Cat

Voting ended onJan 29, 2024

[greaterbalrogcat]

can't remove ramen bc angels are balanced around it being broken

can't remove courier for same reason but replace angel with behemoth

i am a firm seafarer enjoyer it was my first gacha cat

cyberpunk's based fuck y'all

cameraman stays bc people don't talk about how crazy it is enough

can can or meraser. hard decision but i think it's can can at the end of the day cuz it's not fun good it's just really good and meraser has arms

[i-am-the-teeth-collector]

Courier dies so that we can have a meta where Ponos balances the behemoth meta to be less

[greaterbalrogcat]

you seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that ponos would balance their game. if courier goes any possibility of behemoth stages being okay amounts of hard is gone

[greaterbalrogcat]

"APPARENTLY TUMBLR HAS A RULE AGAINST "VIOLENT CONTENT" AND "THREATENING MURDER" SO SUFFICE IT TO SAY ANON YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED AND I'M COUNTING THAT SHIT DOWN BROTHER"

Not this mf becoming an edgy anime character bruh

i was feeling myself 🙏 cry about it as needed

[ancient-cats-unite]

One cat has to be permanently removed from the game. Who?

Some are better than others.

Can Can Cat

Cameraman Cat

Ramen Cat

Seafarer Cat

Cyberpunk Cat

Manic Eraser Cat

Courier Cat

Voting ended onJan 29, 2024

[greaterbalrogcat]

can't remove ramen bc angels are balanced around it being broken

can't remove courier for same reason but replace angel with behemoth

i am a firm seafarer enjoyer it was my first gacha cat

cyberpunk's based fuck y'all

cameraman stays bc people don't talk about how crazy it is enough

can can or meraser. hard decision but i think it's can can at the end of the day cuz it's not fun good it's just really good and meraser has arms

[greaterbalrogcat]

BALROG FUCKING SUCKS

YOU WANNA GET OFF ANON SAY THIS SHIT TO MY FACE LIL PUSSY BOY HUH EXPLAIN WHY YOUR BITCHASS COMING TO MY BLOG TRYNA HATE BUT DON'T HAVE THE GODDAMN BALLS TO MAN UP SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST YOU GOTTA HIDE BEHIND YA LITTLE PATHETIC ANON OPTION GET THE FUCK OVER HERE

APPARENTLY TUMBLR HAS A RULE AGAINST "VIOLENT CONTENT" AND "THREATENING MURDER" SO SUFFICE IT TO SAY ANON YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED AND I'M COUNTING THAT SHIT DOWN BROTHER

anyway hanzo post coming soon shoutout other anon for being patient, send in more asks 🙏

[blueberryuserboxes]

[greaterbalrogcat]

to the anon who asked for hanzo i'm getting to hanzo i swear the post is being crafted over the course of several days

send more please tho

[greaterbalrogcat]

i do not use (unit that is good with talents/boost/UT/UF) because it is not good. it is not good because it is not (talented/boosted/UTed/UFed). i do not (talent/boost/UT/UF) it because i do not use it. this is how it feels to talk to those who speak without thoughts