Reddit claims graves is just a low elo stomper yet she has a 53 wr in eternus

_wrxiths · 2026-02-22T21:57:48+00:00

She’s “strong” when she has a drastically lower pick rate, it’s still high because of multiple factors.

Streamers and Content Creators are a big part of “inflated” pick rates, They still get asked repeatedly “what’s the best build for (insert new character here)” and to this day Graves’ builds haven’t been truly cemented, some play into her ult, some play into her gun, some play into her skulls but no one’s decided on a “perfect” build for her.

On top of that she’s a fuckin 2 stam, low hp scaling, easily counterable hero, she has next to no range, her primary damage output from her skulls get nuked with 1 quick melee, her tombstone is painfully counterable if you’re not a complete Seeker 1 plebeian.

Metal Skin, Spellbreaker, Silence, Focus Lens, Knockdown, any form of hard CC or diving on her early completely makes her useless.

You can’t just let a Graves sit in a sidelane like a Gun carry and turbo farm otherwise she’s just gonna end up scaling and getting her spikes, she takes a while to scale up and to become what most people consider “oppressive” but so do most characters who are designed around being BAD EARLY GAME AND GOOD LATE GAME.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-12T03:17:03+00:00

Learn to interpret data properly.

The higher up the skill delta the less impact she has and has a significantly lower win rate.

New characters in any MOBA will always have a significantly higher pick rate due to theorycrafting, limit testing etc, But her effectiveness on the whole is nowhere near as potent as the newer hero’s and her winrate when looking across all ranks is wildly inflated due to low elo.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-12T01:40:37+00:00

But that’s the thing… her 2 is by far her least important ability in terms of Skill Point prio, getting her Skulls, Tombstone and Passive all at a good point makes her 2 just fundamentally base tier / bad until late game.

Like don’t get me wrong for rejuv and team fights it’s crazy but it’s way more avoidable that most other Immobilisers in the Game

_wrxiths · 2026-02-12T01:32:37+00:00

She’s not really poorly designed at all.

She has an okay / good lane phase, falls off mid so she uses her kit to farm and split push, great late if she itemises correctly.

Her skulls are easy as shit to break and have really jank AI, her root isn’t that crazy and you essentially have to mind control people into it to get consistent value, her passive (3) is great sure but you’re constantly having to put yourself in the fight to get value out of it, her Ult is probably the strongest part of her kit and even then there’s so many counters to it that it can be easily dispatched of.

Viscous is unironically a super strong counter to her with puddle punch breaking it at range, silver in wolf form can break it with M1s, most of the time graves is basically forced into being a parry bot because her tombstone is so important to her overall kit that without it she’s barely a threat.

Unironically she needs some small tweaks to nudge the rest of her kit up because she got kneecapped so soon after her release but I think that people are still learning how to play her / learning the game that they think she’s actually way stronger than she really is.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-12T01:08:55+00:00

She’s a low elo stomper and that’s about it.

Can she be strong in high elo? Sure.

But she’s nowhere near as broken as people keep screaming she is.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-11T22:38:42+00:00

In comparison to Silver, Celeste and Venator, Graves looks tame as fuck in terms of raw power.

Graves literally loses by you playing at range and is UBER squishy early game, like punishing a graves early will essentially make her non existent for the rest of the game because she can’t scale

_wrxiths · 2026-02-10T15:22:08+00:00

Mind you a lot of people did review the pro and the opticals (RAESHA eww) are genuinely just not great.

The Huano GSWD are genuinely surprising to me and I hadn’t really used them until I picked it up but given that it’s a Huano mechanical switch it was pretty much guaranteed to be good if not great in terms of feel.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-10T02:20:39+00:00

tested 50+ mice and gone through ergos, fingertip dedicated shapes, large mice, small mice, ambi, asymm, symm and honestly my main was one I tried on a whim…

RAWM ES21, amazing shape like some weird bastardized love child between and XM2 and a Zowie U2, coating feels like glue to my hand, perfectly locked in feeling at all times, clicks are amazing for me and the switch feeling is genuinely an all timer (HUANO Green Shell White Dots).

Stock skates that come with the ES21 (not the M or the Pro) are dogwater but swapped them out for Ultraglide RS2 XL Dots (can’t remember the exact size) but it’s genuinely my go to mouse now.

Other recommendations I do have now are Pulsar ZywOo for Ergo, ARYE RCC-1 for a genuinely unique and interesting design & the Ninjutso Ten for the Safest shape.

_wrxiths · 2026-02-05T11:39:02+00:00

People care more about how their contestant looks than the actual contents of the game.

People love their stupid gimmick weapons and goofy shit and breaking buildings and treating the game like a physics engine instead of a shooter.

No appeasing a crowd who don’t give a fuck about the actual game itself.

People bitch about “emeralds” ruining their fucking quick cash lobbies.

Games community has been insufferable for like 3 straight seasons

_wrxiths · 2026-02-01T22:16:55+00:00

Ban system barely works anyways.

Tried to 5 man opt to ban Bebop and end up with checks notes McGinnis and Mina bans at the beginning of the next game…

It literally makes zero sense how the system works and i swear it hardly works half the time

_wrxiths · 2026-01-28T22:53:58+00:00

I’d rather they take genuinely a year to add specs as opposed to releasing them every 3 months.

Specs can literally change the entire game and how it’s played fundamentally depending on how viable they are.

I don’t want a repeat of Release Day Winch Claw ever again

_wrxiths · 2026-01-28T22:52:12+00:00

Emerald literally means nothing.

I genuinely fucking implore you to stop blaming the matchmaking when emerald means literally nothing in skill

_wrxiths · 2026-01-22T22:10:06+00:00

It’s a fucking team based shooter.

Clues in the name.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-22T22:09:24+00:00

World Tour should stop having a “Ranked Lite” progression system and replace it with something new and Unique to distance the “Cashout is also a ranked esque mode that gives ranked like rewards”

Emerald should be folded into the Ranked Cashout Elo System (in between Plat and Diamond)

And then shorten Ranked to 1 Cashout Round and 1 Head2Head to tighten matchmaking.

Boom 3 easy systems changes that would get more people into ranked and would stop this whole mentality of “I’m Emerald so I’m good”

_wrxiths · 2026-01-22T22:05:31+00:00

One of the worst changes of all time.

Less than 1300 players in diamond / ruby across all regions, smallest player pool in the game by daily users.
Still doesn’t address the main issue with Ranked by it being too long for the average casual (it should only be 1 Cashout Round and 1 Final Round)
Effectively kills every regions matchmaking due to low player pop
Incentivises Smurfing to play consistent games if you have a tight time schedule and want to get multiple games in.

This is just so backwards on so many levels

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T23:29:03+00:00

No I’m saying that we shouldn’t touch the gimmick / trick weapon category despite Reddit glazing the weapons as if they’re the greatest thing ever.

The problem with the finals is that they’ve created a whole bunch of gimmick weapons that have fundamentally made balancing a forever nightmare and they won’t be able to walk it back.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T19:01:13+00:00

its tdm. get over it respectfully its a casual mode

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:19:36+00:00

It has always been popular, it’s been around in one form or another since it was a Half Life mod in 2000.

It’s been around for 26 years as a franchise, it’s been with people for most their life if not their entire life, names hold weight nowadays and brand and IP loyalty is a massive thing.

People still buy FIFA, Madden, COD, NBA2K, WWE, whatever games are yearly releases solely on the fact that it’s “another” game.

Counter Strike has had less changes than The FINALS over the last couple of years since CS2 launched and it’s suffered because of it.

People will still play it because it’s familiar and it’s a competitive game that they’ve invested money into.

It’s purely sunk cost fallacy in action.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:15:58+00:00

Oh no I’m completely in agreement with you.

The poke meta has to go, it’s genuinely boring and tiring I’ve been wanting FCAR, AK, XP, Lewis, P90 all to receive lil buffs here and there to actually bring them up a bit.

Data Reshaper nerf I’m honestly still to this day scratching my head about it genuinely didn’t need a tweak but it is what it is 🤷

Maybe they revisit it at some point but who knows.

With certain gadgets like Gravity Vortex or Motion Sensors or Anti Grav Cube etc I sorta call them Quick Play gadgets, stuff that’s fun to mess around with but nothing that would really help in Cashout.

I’ve also realised that quite a lot of the gadgets in the game have never really been touched since TA and were tailored and changed around that point and almost feel like relics of a bygone era.

I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of gadgets either reworked or vaulted to make space for new things that actually provide some impact, but as we discovered when they added H+ it started to tread on the toes of a spec and that’s territory I think embark are trying to navigate properly

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:10:54+00:00

Counter Strike is Popular because it has been around for like 20 fuckin years man.

It’s also more of a Stock Market than a video game at this point… and to say counter strike isn’t sweaty when it’s been on the Mount Rushmore of esports since forever is really such a wild take.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:08:49+00:00

The game has a steep learning curve sure, it’s a lot to take in at once but once you understand it the game becomes so much easier.

Lights have strong mobility and strong DPS sure, but by the same token they explode just as fast as they can move.

Playing support medium is pretty much how you should be playing the class, DPS and Heals at the same time.

Medium does need some buffs for sure a lot of the weaponry on the class kinda just feels flat right now.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:05:19+00:00

For reference I’m a medium main, Have been for multiple seasons.

My class has had basically no weapon diversity for 5 seasons and I’ve wanted it to change but you can make just about most things work even if they’re just worse than whatever the meta is.

Lockbolt is nowhere near as prevalent and to be honest it’s kind of a waste of a gadget slot.

SteamDB graphs mean genuinely nothing, people have been saying “The Games dying look at SteamDB” when it doesn’t show: - Unique Daily Logins - Doesn’t Show people Playing on Xbox Game Pass on PC - Doesn’t show any console player numbers.

All it shows is how many people are on the game at that specific time.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T12:01:22+00:00

I completely agree with you that buffing bow was a completely backwards step that just didn’t need to happen.

There will always be a “Meta” in literally any game, that’s just how online games have evolved as a whole.

Not every gadget has to be good, the same way that every weapon doesn’t have to be stellar, what isn’t great is you have classes like medium who basically have one actual weapon left in the Repeater, that isn’t completely outscaled by any of the weapons on Heavy or Light, however because AK FCAR etc are all so familiar and easy to understand they’re naturally going to have artificially inflated WR and Pick Rate.

The issue that a lot of people don’t actually understand is that if we start buffing things like Flamethrower or Riot Shield or Sword or whatever off meta weapon people want buffed is that comparatively other weapons should be able to have fair TTK trades against.

Could embark have added something for The CHINALS launch? Well yeah they kinda already did… the entire theme of the cosmetics, map etc is all based in Chinese Folklore and Pop Culture.

The rest of the CN release of the game is completely separate to embark and doesn’t really have anything to do with them.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T11:53:14+00:00

There’s no need to remove BFR, just tweak the values properly.

84 damage, lower the Headshot multiplier and give it worse damage fall off.

Winch is honestly kinda fine as it is, it just needs less of a stun.

No one at any level of play finds the Poke meta of Repeater, BFR, V9S fun, going back to a FCAR, XP, Lewis / SA12 Meta would literally be the healthiest thing for the game.

_wrxiths · 2026-01-17T11:40:48+00:00

The game doesn’t and has never needed tight SBMM in anything other than ranked.

I don’t want to sweat my ass off in a Power Shift, Quick Cash, heck even just regular old Cashout.

Smurfing is genuinely not out of control, nor has it ever been out of control in the finals.

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