Broken record - Stun kills Neo

Neo Monsters
1

I strongly oppose anything that is so oppressive that it limits team building.

If you’re like me and you run just 3 stunable monsters, all it takes is for a good opponent to remove the stun protection you’re getting stunned to hell in the mid or end game. Once you get stunned once, you’re probably going to get stunned again and again.

Can we team build around this? Yes. But it means removing those monsters and limiting ourselves to stun immunes. and boring ourselves to death. Seeing Jag, Draco and stun immune fire end games everywhere is boring.

Stun kills Neo. We need it, but not so long ago poison got nerfed to hell; was fast and powerful, but not more oppressive than stun.

Is stun worse than sleep?

Yes. It’s so much easier to recover from sleep.

  • Lava entrance is common, brings back all monsters.
  • Purify is quick, brings back all monsters.
  • Give turn - brings back just one. Gets hammered by Times up and Chrono killer.

Stun protection.

Stun absorbers are really not fit for purpose. Stun counters die so easily to chrono and open you up to so much weakness.

Looking at common stun protection.

  • Tortogeist - absolutely liability - gets repulsed or Knockback too easily. Deadweight if stunned before its slow speed.

  • Freeze cobra - dead weight. Gets stunned out of the game. only useful in poison.

  • Emerald. dead weight. Gets stunned out of the game. Only useful in throw.

  • Iris. Deadweight. Gets stunned out of the game.

  • Bulbie. Deadweight in general.

  • Willow. Deadweight. Gets stunned out of the game.

  • Shiny Fox. Deadweight. Gets stunned out of the game. Not only that but it’s so overrated it’s insane. It’s nice that it comes back, but the low health mean that monsters that shouldn’t be charged get charged soooo easily. Like a Draco where there’s no fire or poison. Also helpful to the enemy for entrance control.

  • Joco is mixed. Can get stunned out by 80 sec stunning entrance, but it’s not bad. It dies easily though and now you’re open to stun.

All of the above will risk 3 vs 4 and then 2vs 4 situations.

  • Bloom - Camo and shielding are great to keep it alive, but it’s deadweight unless built around. Either it gets stunned out of the game or you’re running some sort of bloom spam team.

  • Duscy - Amazing. Stun it out of the game and it doesn’t matter.

  • Angel / Leo- Punishes stun but gets punished just as hard back. Currently limited.

  • Sakura - in all honestly could have been an absorber with dreamland. Amazing.

  • Aethereon - Perfect, but very few have this luxury.

Most of these are bad options, but the main issue is that if you run 3 stunables and an absorber. What’s stopping the enemy from just killing your absorber and then stunning you?

I’m frustrated because I run 3 forms of stun protection within my first 7 mons and then I find myself with 0 protection, 3 of 4 charged mons, which are now stunned to hell.

My most successful team ever, ran stun protection every other monster and I used monsters that could retreat, cannibalise or step back, but options are limited, as shown above.

Devs. I genuinely believe the oppression of stun kills so much Neo’s creativity.

I’d like to know if others feel the same. Does stun kill
Neo and limit its diversity?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

10 Likes
2

tranquilizing entrance : hold my beer :joy:

10 Likes
3

I might have just voted no cuz I started running such a heavy stun team

4

Ofc it does, is there even a counter argument?
There are so many cool & strong monsters but you can’t play them because you need such a high % of your team building dedicated to stun protection, leaving you with very few “open” spots.

6 Likes
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I absolutely agree.

2 Likes
6

Bang on.

2 Likes
7

Alternatively,
Do you think you would win pvp if you had a team comprised only of stun counters/ stun converters?

8

We saw the stun immune meta. 16 stun immune monsters back to back, and often they are S tier too. So yes? You can call it S tier spam or stun immune spam.

4 Likes
9

I agree with this, I’d also like to point out that the very reason this is possible is because of the moltitude of monsters which can stun a whole lineup by themselves.

You can run a team without specifically seeking Sleep or Poison protection, and you’re still not gonna really suffer from that, except against VERY heavy Poison/Sleep teams (or Lemon endgames), but you can’t win against everything.

On the other hand, if you’re not protected enough from stun, a simple 7 cost Thordrake is gonna push a good chunk of your monsters 80sec back in the turn queue. Automatically, by entering the field.

The worst possible case is Cybereon. 120sec Shocking Entrance followed by Stun Boom. If it lands, it’s Game Over, and that’s only one monster doing that all.

They should make stun less AoE and more single-target based. Or, in the case of AoE stun, reduce the amount of it.

9 Likes
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This was my plan in my team 2 years ago. Stunboom into Angel and then Nova cobra. It’s still used by many today. Teams like that can allow themselves to get wrecked all game, as long as they remove the stun protection, because it’s so hard to come back from that. It’s not healthy

1 Like
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Me who uses 7 cost Thordrake

image

3 Likes
12

:joy:

1 Like
14

To be honest, just like you said, chrono killer or time’s up finishes off stun counters and so. However, a lot of monsters have time strike in the game, from voltiger to raizen. I’m not a huge fan of stun as I was when I first entered the game, I ran ventokaiser, electric cheetah and blitz dragon in the same team!

I stopped that when I started to encounter a lot of stun converter and stun counter monsters.

A lot of new players use stun, I think that’s why they gave out that purecore lion as a bonus.

The best stun protection out there might be utopion or bitter beast, simply because of their over watch.

While I do agree that stunning limits diversity, I do say that they would need an effective nerf that makes it less powerful but not that bad.

I’d say that this would be a good idea but idk how timestrike would work, unless your monsters were far back when they got stunned.

A huge brain storm would be needed tbh.

15

Same as before, Timestrike is not a priority sweeping move anyway (you’ll see people use it if they have no other choice/need to get a kill).

Though yeah, some monsters rely completely on Stun to work so there shouldn’t be a blanket nerf for Stun (see what happened to the RAW nerf, which balanced the likes of Padrinorca and Ahuizard but unnecessarily nerfed others).

You mean Bitterbeast

1 Like
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I’m choosing not to vote because while stun does limit diversity I don’t think it’s to the point it kills Neo. You could argue that anything strong in PvP limits diversity, it’s all on a scale. Stun is at the top of that scale but it’s also a core mechanic in the game and I enjoy many of the interactions with it.

I still stand with the opinion that we have a bunch of monsters that are great for offering protection to stun. Owning Bloomeluga, Angelion, Leogeist, Willowyrm, Jocodragon, Spectrefox (s), Bulbieboom and a number of stun converters has allowed me to pretty much build whatever I want. Sure, I still lose to stun occasionally but we don’t want to kill off the strategy completely. I think the problem comes from people not having enough of these monsters to put into their teams. So we just need more of these monsters that protect the rest of your team from stun added to the game over time so people have enough. Two brilliant ones missed by the original post were:

  • Pitayagon (halves all stun, tanky monster, no killer weaknesses. Only restriction is it must be in a link earth/fire team)
  • Abyssoldier Poseidon (our new stun counter, the moveset looks a bit clunky but as stun protection this is excellent if you don’t have the top options. It even becomes really hard to kill for minimal effort)

The other big problem is having ways to come back from heavy stun. Grizzleguard, Jawshank, Houdinoid and Nightingale are the monsters we’ve got so far for that. We definitely need some more, especially because Grizzleguard and Jawshank aren’t exactly the best for PvP. When we’ve got some more of these there should be some proper risk stun locking an opponent.

One last thing I’d like to see is more passives like Bulbieboom and Jocodragon have. Either the monster dies when it gets stunned so it doesn’t become dead weight or it gives some positive benefit for the team, or both. I’m not talking in the way Freezecobra, Emeraldont and Dusicyon give passive benefit, I mean only punishing stun so it’s when the monster is stunned beyond 400s.
Example upgraded stun absorber passives could be…

  • Sacrificing itself and fully healing the team
  • Sacrificing itself and purify + shielding the team
  • Sacrificing itself and adding itself straight back into the battlefield
  • Healing the whole team by a small amount on every monster’s turn (Runedragon style - this idea is for a mythic)

I’m sure other people can come up with good ideas for either a sacrifice effect or passive benefit when the monster is stunned above 400s.

3 Likes
17

Thats true.

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As above, I just don’t think the majority are fit for purpose. Most become deadweight or easily remove and there’s a reliance on having too many

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This sounds a lot like how it is in the middle-range of PvP. Bitterbeast and Utopion (plus other stun absorbers) get ignored when they become stunned in high level PvP so the match becomes a 4v3. There’s also almost no reliance on timestrike moves in any team utilising stun. They use stun purely to push the enemy team or specific monsters (absorbers) out of play to make the opponent have a hard time fighting back while they pick off the newly entering monsters or ones that weren’t stunned.

The other way they do it is simply targeting everything which has protection from stun (stun immune, converter, counter, etc) so what’s left is a bunch of stunnable monsters. Then it doesn’t matter how badly their team is losing because they’ll have a stun setup near the back of their team and as soon as that enters they will turn around the match and win. There’s not really any way to fix your team being stunned to 300s+ once it happens so it reliably wins games. This is the particularly common and very annoying setup used in high level PvP and it’s what pushes people to spamming stun immune monsters.

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I know we differ a bit with our opinion on this but I personally use 2-3 of these stun absorber/counter monsters in every team along with 3-5 stun immune/converter and that serves me perfectly well. Protecting from stun is definitely a big team building consideration but it’s possible to make things work without going crazily overboard and I think the options do work well when you have them all available to you (so you pick what fits the team best).

21

Stun is stupid powerful. Anyone that argues otherwise runs at least a solid portion of their team as stun immune/convertors, and has a decent enough collection to add some decent absorbers and counters. Nova, cyber, and husky carry the stun aids to a new level. Unless you have zero places you could get stunned in your team, they can and will find a way to stun you.

5 Likes