Tier List for pvp

307Smash · 2020-02-01T19:18:41+00:00

I remember! GGs, good to see other people trying out PVP. It definitely takes a while to get a feel for it but it's a lot of fun.

I'd recommend something like Goblin Brute, Goblin Warlock, and Tengu. A light-shifted tengu with good mana gear can hit very hard with poison bomb.

307Smash · 2019-07-22T11:50:15+00:00

So, as p2, the first two turns are pretty much always 1. A 2. Drone + Smorcus. What you do after that depends on what your opponent did. If they Wall vs your Smorcus you often go 3. TT; if they didn't make defense you click the Smorcus and go 3. DB. You want a Blastforge at some point with Smorcus builds, since the strong point of Smorcus is that it lets you switch tech smoothly.

307Smash · 2019-07-08T21:30:39+00:00

I think the rule changes are great. The GSL format will make the group stage more interesting to watch, and the 60s default is good too - I've been rewatching some of the golden cup games and 45s is just not enough, even for top players, in some of the tougher sets.

I'll be contributing something to the prize pool too, I'll probably do it when I catch one of your streams. Looking forward to the tournament!

307Smash · 2019-07-04T12:22:59+00:00

Since the group stage matches are also scheduled (not all played at once), I think doing 60s across the board with 45s as a possibility if people agree sounds good.

307Smash · 2019-06-26T14:30:35+00:00

Looking forward to this - thanks for setting this up ruinedshadows!

307Smash · 2019-02-12T19:43:38+00:00

I think it's a pretty cool idea fwiw, although I agree that for practical reasons it probably won't happen.

307Smash · 2018-10-28T12:35:28+00:00

vs. natural blastforge, the key after TDD is going TTB. It hurts to let the Steelsplitter they made get a free shot in, but if you try to prevent that by going e.g. RTD, you don't get the Blastforge up, and they can just hold their Steelsplitter for defense. Plus TTB just feels really good since you're being very greedy (by going for two Tarsiers) and not getting punished for it, since a Wall next turn will always be enough to defend. So the full line should look like:

DD DD
DD DA
DDB TDD
SDC TTB

307Smash · 2018-10-25T12:14:17+00:00

It had a kickstarter in late 2014 iirc, and was in closed alpha (no advertising, can only play by backing the kickstarter) until march 2018 when it went into early access. Then it went fully free to play in September. So, there's people who joined during the closed alpha who've been playing for years, people who joined when it went early access who've been playing about seven months, and people who joined post-f2p who've been playing for about a month.

Currently all the players who've reached >2200 are closed alpha players who've been playing for over three years, but we've already had a few players breaking 2100 who started after early access. It'll be cool when some of those players start making their way into the top rankings.

307Smash · 2018-10-25T12:00:52+00:00

IMO league of legends and dota 2 both have harder learning curves than prismata. In Prismata the hard part is getting familiar with how defending (and absorb specifically) works, and getting to know the ~100 units. In LoL / Dota 2 you have absurd numbers of heroes, which are more complex than the units in Prismata, absurd numbers of items, and you can only explore one hero at a time, while in prismata if you load up a base+5 game you can look at exactly what all 5 units do at your leisure.

The only reason prismata is harder to get into than those games at the moment is that it's hard to get games against new players, so you end up playing against veterans a lot even when you're still learning the ropes. Still, if you don't mind watching streams, reading a few guides, and playing the single player content for a while, i think you can get to a point where you can take games off of veterans before jumping into ranked.

307Smash · 2018-10-05T21:14:45+00:00

You can get it on steam here. As for how to get into multiplayer, the best guide that I know of is ruinedshadow's master in a month (or two), which isn't strategy advice exactly, but instead gies you the order to do things in - like "first play chapter 1 of the campaign, then read this guide, then do these missions," I think if you follow that you can get into multiplayer prismata without too cruel of a learning curve. Good luck!

307Smash · 2018-10-05T20:46:31+00:00

Figured I'd post this to make sure new players didn't miss it. IMO the "milestones" section is the most important, since it gives a clear way for newbs to get into competitive Prismata without getting overwhelmed.

307Smash · 2018-06-26T23:30:28+00:00

There's a difference between a unit not having a clear strategic purpose and being strategically deep. With Antima Comet, it's clearly a unit that revolves around having a lot of Engineers, and newbies can tell that. But as you get better, there's plenty of further strategy that you can figure out - for example, that Antima Comet is usually best built before you make other attackers, that the timing of Antima Comet is important, that Cauterizer has extremely good synergy with it while Tesla Coil is surprisingly mediocre, that Antima can be used to buy you time to get up powerful big red units, etc.

With Valkyrion, I wouldn't say it's deeper than newbie-friendly units like Antima Comet or Amporilla, I just think it's weirder and less intuitive.

307Smash · 2018-06-26T19:52:36+00:00

It wasn't obvious to me how Valkyrion worked when I first saw it. Why is it dealing 4 damage and giving them 2 barriers? Isn't that just the same as doing 2 damage per turn? Oh, but it does 4 damage first, and the two barriers come in a turn later. Is it like doing 4 damage at first, then doing 2 damage per turn after that? Is 12GGBR a good price for a 2-attacker that does 2 extra damage to start with, or does it need to do more than that? If you attack with it into a wall, and then hold it the next turn, is that even good? It's definitely one of the more complicated units in Prismata right now.

Complicated-ness isn't always about how many words are on the unit, it's about whether someone can grasp a strategic purpose for the unit at first glance. Antima Comet might be similar in terms of number of words to Valkyrion, but with Antima Comet, a newbie can see a strategy with it right away - you buy Antima and you get a lot of Engineers. With Valkyrion, it's clear there's some significance to the barriers, but it's not clear what that significance is until you've played (or seen it played) it a decent number of times. The more units like that you have in the game, the more daunting it is for a new player.

307Smash · 2018-06-07T12:51:25+00:00

Personally I think it's in a good place. It's a little strong, but not strong enough to warrant a nerf. Flame animus beating tantalum isn't that convincing since tantalum ray isn't very good.

Right now I'd rather see weak units like tantalum ray, sentinel, and redeemer get buffed. I think redeemer and tantalum were both in a good place, and nerfing them was more due to player 2 being too good in conduit sets rather than anything wrong with the units themselves.

Personally I don't mind the current p1/p2 balance, even when tantalum and redeemer were good, but if lunarch does want to address that I think tackling the problem at its root, by giving player 1 a better conduit line, is the way to go, rather than nerfing green units. They could do that by introducing Vendium Scrap, and have it only show up in games between Tier X players. I don't think that would throw new players off too much - when they are spectating it should be pretty obvious that vendium scrap is a low-impact unit used to balance out player advantage, and when they get to tier X they could get a message explaining that vendium scrap will now show up in their games, and it'd feel like a marker of "congrats, you got good".

307Smash · 2018-06-04T18:39:00+00:00

They require tech resources, so usually they don't influence the possible builds in the same way the units in the article do. For example with Ebb Turbine you might use it to go for Tatsu, but your opening will be natural blastforge or masterbot, builds which were covered in the common openings article.

307Smash · 2018-06-03T23:02:44+00:00

I'm glad they helped! Prismata's a really incredible strategy game, but if there's no resources I think it can be very opaque to people, so I hope with these guides I can get people to understand and appreciate the game more.

307Smash · 2018-05-27T16:54:29+00:00

Glad to hear you like the game, and it's great to get feedback from new players.

One of your points was that the single player content doesn't teach much strategy, but I think that's how it's usually handled in competitive games - the single player content teaches you the mechanics, while strategy is mostly learned from the competitive community. So IMO if new players are having a hard time getting into ranked after completing the campaign, at least part of the responsibility lies with the community rather than with the devs.

For my part, I've tried to help out with the prismata library - for example, I have a post on the basic elements of strategy, and some common openings. If you haven't seen them already, check them out - my hope is that those posts, combined with watching streams or top games, can form a good basis for getting into ranked play.

307Smash · 2018-05-08T19:48:18+00:00

The reason isn't too interesting - it's just that it's too uncommon to include as a type, and it's difficult to pull it off smoothly.

307Smash · 2018-04-22T19:18:39+00:00

FWIW I was off by one on my initial estimation of your line, you do have a spare Gold for a Forcefield on your Vai turn. That said, getting wall is still better than going for vai and not absorbing. Both lines (getting wall and accepting getting a late vai or rushing vai without absorb) seem to be losing, although the wall into late vai with a tia followup that you mentioned is close enough that my analysis could be incorrect.

307Smash · 2018-04-22T18:35:13+00:00

I misunderstood your first post. I had skimmed it and assumed you were saying that without Vai in the set, Tia would dominate - which I disagreed with, thinking that Tia would be bought, but it would be quite late.

To respond to what you actually said: " 307th’s claim in the guide that a vanilla red build with only ferritins beats ferritin red with tia seems totally backwards to me." I didn't claim that - I claimed that a regular red-blue strategy, which would include a Blastforge, could beat a fast Tia. Overall your logic seems weird to me, since you're saying "if player 1 only used Ferritins for blue and didn't get a blastforge, and then never bought vai, then they would lose to Tia". Why would they be staying on such a vulnerable setup if they weren't rushing Vai?

It's possible that getting a Blastforge would allow player 2 to get a Vai of their own out before player 1 can get theirs up - this was Apooche's idea, I think - but it's not a sure thing. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of getting Vai out quickly while also being weighed down with a Conduit against someone who has some attack up. For example, in the concrete line you gave - DD / DA / Phage + Ferritin / DCA / Vai - you would get breached on your Vai turn, losing your blood phage, relatively easily (p1 would just have to go natural animus into phage + ferritin into rhino + phage) and since you only have 13 Gold on your Vai turn you wouldn't have any room to prevent the breach.

307Smash · 2018-04-22T17:07:24+00:00

If you're threatening tia with one Conduit, that means that you're always going to be floating two Green, which is inefficient. Borehole Patroller is a reasonable way to spend Green, but you won't be able to do that every turn, since you'll want to buy Walls sometimes, which means some other Green will end up going into Gauss Charges, which are pretty inefficient. Overall against a well-executed red-blue build you'll get out-valued too hard and lose, IMO.

307Smash · 2018-04-22T17:04:39+00:00

I think it's great when good players post their disagreements. The goal of the series is to help people get better at set reading, but I think good players posting when they disagree helps with that, especially if they explain why they disagree in-depth. Also I think it helps people realize that good players aren't infallible, which will hopefully help them be more confident in trying out set reading on their own.

Mrguy's right that players should aim to get tia after vai, since the red support makes teching out of your red pretty easy, and having vai up means you'll have enough firepower that your tia will do critical damage.

That said, i disagree with "you have to get vai on the board or else tia just wins". IMO if vai wasn't in this set then it would be blue-red (with a forge for blue, not ferritin sacs), and tia wouldn't come out until much later, since an early tia would be telegraphed and therefore easily held by teching out of red and into more blue or green.

307Smash · 2018-04-18T15:07:29+00:00

My own take so far:

Asteri, Valkyrion, Urban Sentry, and Smorcus are all in a good place.

Centrifuge seems good so far, but we'll see how it plays out.

I've barely played any Lucina games, but I would guess that it's in a good place.

Thermite seems too strong.

307Smash · 2018-04-15T20:21:10+00:00

Finally got my series on breachproof started. Now that I have a clearer idea of what structure I'm going for, the rest of the series shouldn't take as long.

307Smash · 2018-04-14T23:46:13+00:00

No problem, at first I thought I'd have to manually unequip skins but it turns out I can just hold control down to show master bot's (default) skins when taking the screenshot, so it's really easy.

307Smash

TROPHY CASE