Does anyone else feel like this is the most underwhelming of all the SE archetype based mons we have?
Consider the Thlugs. Not the most diverse of the archetypes, but with proper team building, they become one of the most threatening forces in the game currently with powerful sweeping moves that ignore Hold Ground and Shield, 100% guaranteed Sleep on the enemy team, solid Team Turn abilities and all of which are next to ridiculous to stop due to their excellent shared passive of being immune to Stun, Sleep, and Poison.
Consider the Flutter Drakes (F.D.) archetype. Able to stand solidly on their own with no passives that require another member of the archetype, only a single of their four moves, the other 3 of which often work perfectly well on their own. When placed together, I view it similar to having a Legend gain its SS, not necessarily a needed ability for all, but for some it can make or break the game. A solid archetype boasting a myriad of strong entrance Passives and solid sweeping moves as well as functioning as great support with or without their brethren, from a general standpoint F.D. can be viewed as the strongest SE archetype.
Then we get to the Abyss Soliders (A.S.). I have been acquiring a number of these buggers from events the past months, and I cant help each time feeling incredibly excited at the announcement and initial vibe of the newest A.S., but then severely underwhelmed once it is in my possession. The entire archetype has more in common with their brethren than the other SE archetypes in that they all share a single passive that let’s them work alone in the form of Lone Fish, requiring them to be the only A.S. on the field (this includes the opposing team) and generally giving a boon to their stats. This seems fine and dandy as it would appear to make their stats similar to that of a legend. The downside here is found typically in their movesets that often do not compliment well. They all share the same dual attack of Ultra+element, a stand alone move, and 2 solo moves that require it to be the only monster of that type on your side of the field. The issue created here is the immense restriction you now have if you want your psuedo legend to carry any weight, being able to fulfill the SOLO need for their more powerful/useful moves by having them be the only type of their kind on your board, and keeping Lone Fish active by ensuring their is no other A.S. on the field. This is the playstyle to use if utilizing an A.S. without any of its clan and you must keep these requirements met last your Fish becomes absolutely dead weight by violating those restrictions.
Now let’s say you want to use them in a team aspect, working with other members of their archetype. This seems to be promoted by their other shared passive: Bond. This passive varies from Soldier to Soldier, but they all have the same requirement of granting a boon to your A.S. if it shares the field with another A.S. and typically the Bond Passives are where the true cake of their abilities lie, strongly supporting team playstyle.
Looking at these in this light, for me at least, it is obvious their are some crucial flaws with this archetype. The passives that are meant to allow the soldiers to either fly together or alone actively work against eachother. A good example of this is the two newer A.S. mons, A.S. Hill and A.S. Des.
A.S. Hill has a Bond passive that let’s him regenerate 800hp every turn, thus ensuring his Confident Strike ability is able to deal maximum damage each time it gets a turn and keeping him healthy to shoot off SOLO Bloodcrave once he gets a kill. The issue is that while Bond is active with another A.S. on board, he loses the stat boosts from Lone Fish and it makes it incredibly hard to actually get a kill with him without the boost even with full strength Confident Strikes. So let’s say you go the Lone Fish route and play him without other A.S. mons. While he now has the power to get a kill, he loses out on the health recovery and due to the abysmal speed of the A.S. archetype as a whole (not a single A.S. that I am aware of has a max speed stat over 60 without pots) he will be unable to use full strength Confident Strikes and will be arguably harder to use than with his comrades.
A.S. Des suffers a similar fate. His Bond passive gives him Death Revenge, a seemingly excellent resource for this archetype. He has SOLO Protect Teammates and SOLO Blood Duplicate/Blod Clone Next. Again, this seems great on paper. In practice, not so much. Again in part due to terrible speed the TU for both these SOLO moves is quite high and, without Lone Fish, his defenses cannot cope with even a couple of strong AoE attacks before he bites the dust, so most of the time you are forced to choose whether you want to make a clone or protect your teammates. So let’s say you take the clone route and in the time that takes, your opponent kills another of your mons, perhaps an A.S. since you are going the Bond route, and your second copy of A.S. Des comes in. Well, now you are kind of screwed, as your abilities that you need to use most (protect on your former Des and Clone on your new one) are SOLO moves so you now have 2 dead weight mons that cannot generate any real value because not only can you not make more, but you cant force your opponent to kill them either until they decide they are ready, basically making the fight a 2v4 simply for trying to play an archetype with its fellow comrades.
I dunno guys, in my opinion the A.S. feels by far the weakest of the SE archetypes and get severely overshadowed by not only the other SE archetypes but even by normal SEs and quite a few Epics and, more recently, the event rocks we have been getting through PvP. A handful of the A.S. have found SOME niche spots in things like poison teams but are often just a placeholder until the SE that does the job far better is hatched.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way as I have seen many of you post with excitement about the newest A.S. coming out month after month only for it to fall quickly into obscurity once it is acquired.
I am proposing we discuss and come up with ideas to change this archetype and make it viable so that 1, it is not so restricting and 2, its passives dont keep being counterproductive. By trying to make these things able to do a little bit of everything they have become great at nothing.
The saying goes, “Jack of All Trades, Master of None,” and I feel that phrase kind of embodies this archetype.
