Looking at the 30th March Major Nerf Patch in Retrospect™

Looking at the Soccer Spirits 30th March Major Nerf Patch in Retrospect™

This is a 'WOW' patch for everyone.

But for players at different stages of the game, it brings about different impacts and consequences. 

And what I am going to do here, is to see the patch in the eyes of the different players. 


Patch TL:DR 

• Active Heal HP amount and AB recovery nerf (60% HP /50% AB > 30% HP /20% AB)
  
  
• Spirit recovery/drain of most spirit recovery players nerfed. (Virgil/Miho/Pinol/Bora/Black Daisy)

Think I will start with the middle class players, people who form a bulk (20%~25%) of the SS population.

We will look at the impact of the nerfs on PvP, CoD and CoT.


Middle Class Players

First, let me define middle class, people who reach galaxy league (~1500 players), top 1% of CoD, CoT 35/40 etc.

For this class, there are 2 groups of players. Group A that uses many active healers in PvP, and Group B that doesn't use as many active healers.

Group B face a lot of frustrations against active heals from mono light teams (Beth, Ivy, Virgil) or just Virgil alone, whose AB recovery from active heal could ruin their game. 
Players in Group B who doesn't run as many or any active healer is heavily penalized in PvP.
Players in Group B are the ones who complain and are responsible for the nerf. 

Hence, Group A that run active healers in PvP, are unhappy, due to nerf to their key PvP strategy and no resulting recall.
In contrast, Group B, are happy with the nerfs, because their PvP team has gained advantage.


For Colosseum of Despair, the middle class players mainly run active heals strategy, to do the Elaine > Assist > Striker combo.
With the AB nerf in active heal, your CoD frontline is unlikely to move first past CoD 52.
Hence, it will kill their CoD strategies. 
Alternatives? Legends such as Metatron, Shu, Beth.


For Colosseum of Trials, its not so much affected for the middle class people who runs CoT up to 35/40. 


Next, let me show you the patch in the eyes/world of the TOP endgame players.

Top Endgame Players

First again, let me define TOP endgame players. This is basically a group of people who are in Universe league, runs 6,000,000+ score in CoD and CoT 50.

For PvP in Universe league, Virgil is almost non-existent, except in mono light teams.
It's only the middle class players who run Virgil.
At the top of the PvP league, ~60% of the teams run Black Ivy, not Virgil. And Black Ivy is mainly used for her HP/crit resist totem, not heal.
Heals mainly come from Metatron, Aiolos, Jibril, Shu etc.
If you exclude mono light teams, the existence of Virgil in Universe PvP is close to zero. 
Therefore, this patch doesn't affect the TOP pvp teams much except for Ivy active heal. 

For CoD, the score attack strategies doesn't involve any form of active healing. 
We mainly use Askeladd>Baltheon>Striker and OHKO with EBM celus/jibril as totem instead of elaine.
Hence, the CoD strategies for top players are totally unaffected by the patch.
(Except for CoD 59 maybe)

For CoT, only CoT 5-5 is affected if you use Kirin strategy. 


For the new players

This is a group of players who are nowhere near the galaxy league, top 1% CoD and barely makes CoT 30/35.

• The bad news is, if you have invested in the nerfed players, your investments have gone down the drain.
  
  
• The good news is, it went down the drain early so you didn't invest as much as the middle class players. 
  

Hence, you can start from scratch again, and hopefully, in the right direction this time.

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Up to here, you should observe that active healers are becoming obsolete after this patch. (TL:DR: Bench them)

2 bars of spirit for 30% HP and 20% AB recovery. Even a shu does better. 


For PvP, previously, if you had an active heal, it could give you an extra shot against Presty. 

Now, probably not. 


Casual spenders, F2P are being heavily penalized if they don't got the same legends to compete against the huge spenders in PvP.


Reviewing the Developers' Comments:


Nope, HP/AB recovery's not the reason why matches take so long to finish. 

It's because the current meta, favours defensive play and strikers are unable to crit or kill enemy GK due to passive heals from Aiolos/Jibril/Metatron/Shu/Gaphyl/Virgil etc.  


Hence, people were complaining about AB recovery from active heals, gave enemy team huge advantage that ended their match earlier, resulting in them losing, not that it resulted in 45 mins matches.

The real culprits that resulted in 45 mins matches are:



Now this brings us to the question:

And the answer is, I am unhappy. 
And a game that doesn't make their players happy, doesn't deserve a saving grace  ;puke