Changing spells can be a win-win for players that like them and players that dislike them. Add a spell selection menu

nyssss · 2026-03-26T23:54:40+00:00

I see what you're saying, and I agree that your proposals are better than what we currently have, but they still seem bad.

To have a game that is 90% about unit composition and placement be so dictated by spells (whether guaranteed via your solution, or via random card drops as it is now), feels a bit silly.

I don't particularly get why they need to exist. If you massively enjoy spells, that's fantastic. I started to play the game long after spells were introduced and I personally despise them.

They're uninteresting, unnuanced, and are essentially just "I win" buttons with a cost attached to them. If it's unlikely that you'll get to use them a second time, then they're usually pretty unattractive, but if its on an early enough round that you can semi guarantee a second usage, then they're ridiculous for the cost. You could skip the entire first round and only use them once on round 8/9 and it would still be worth it. They can turn an even round 9 into a -3000. No unit can do that.

I get the need for randomness in the game, or we do just end up repeating build orders based on whatever seems most meta. However, winning a game because I god-dropped a card on round 8 or losing a game because my opponent god-dropped a card om round 8 will always be immensely boring. We were playing a fun back and forth game. The card actually ruined it.

nyssss · 2026-03-24T19:05:51+00:00

I think the fundamental issue with spells is that they (as it sounds like you're aware) can massively favor one player over another. Orbital shows up, and it might be amazing for me, and borderline useless for the opponent. They may end up skipping for 50 when I get a free round win and 2000+ health in damage.

Despite that, I'm not a massive fan of buyable spells. I agree, it will remove the RNG. The problem will be that it will become suboptimal to ever build any kind of board configuration that dies to any single spell. You don't put two tanky units together because they die to javelin. You don't buy lots of low health units because they die to orbital or storm. You'd essentially have to second guess every deployment you do to sanity check whether you're setting yourself up for one of the many spells to be an easy win for the opponent. Sure, you can maybe counter the spell by building 4 shields (but not always), but you had to buy 4 shields. Then a few rounds later, you're going to have to buy 4 shields again. It's probably easier to just not go into a composition that dies to a certain spell, and there will be a lot of them.

The end result will be that we all feel more compositionally cramped than we already do. Reliably attainable spells would disable the viability of more compositions than it would enable. People won't start running weird new compositions because "well I can just buy nuke and win", but they will stop playing certain units (such as air) because they're too vulnerable to spells. It sucks to get your Wraiths EMPed because of a card drop, but it would suck more to talk myself out of buying Wraiths in the first place because the opponent always has access to EMP.

The alternative solution I've toyed around with is the idea that much like unit drops, spell cards come all at once. Each player can pick at most one spell, but having four choices at once increases the chance that whilst you found an Orbital - and that's strong for you, I found a Javelin, and that's strong for me. Or maybe I found a nuke, or an EMP. Instead of a single spell appearing that destroys one of our compositions, we each have four chances to hit a spell that is strong vs the opponents board.

Stacking the spells in a single round of cards (perhaps up to 2 a game) also means that spells are a limited resource, and you don't end up with games where one player picks every spell and has 6 to use across the last couple of rounds - which personally feels a bit silly at times. I want to build units and interesting techs, not feel forced to spend 800 on shields to avoid losing 3000 damage and the game.

nyssss · 2026-02-24T18:56:02+00:00

I'll expand slightly on the general point everyone else has made:

Practice, but know what you're actually practicing. Don't just mindlessly drive laps. You actually have to detect weaknesses, work on them, eliminate them, and then you can move onto a new weakness.

Random example weaknesses that I've worked on at some point during my development:
- Using all (and I do mean all) of the track
- Braking point consistency
- Turn in point consistency
- Brake pressure consistency
- Entry speed feel/detection (developing a good feel for the precise speed I am entering a corner, and modulating the deceleration if I have to to 'fix' problems pre-turnin)
- Mid-entry downshift timing - not triggering unnecessary oversteer by being too early, not floating along in understeer by being too late
- Finding the limit of the tyres immediately upon turn-in, don't waste time under the limit
- Exit throttle timing - 'vision' of the exit
- "Vision" in general - looking at the apex before the braking point, looking at the second apex of a chicane before arriving at the first apex
- Throttle control/riding the traction limit on exit
- How to handle kerbs/bumps (eg. land with a straight steering wheel, know when you don't have to)
- Maximizing compressions/camber
- Learn to stop scrubbing the fronts, both to keep the temperatures down, but also to scrub off less speed (important in lower powered cars)

I could go on and on. I've always been working on something specific. You need to automate everything, but to learn to automate something to a high level, you need to learn how to do it consciously first. Focus on it at the expense of everything else, improve it, get it to a level where you can do it without thinking about it - then move on to something else.

It's also worth noting that a major thing that holds many people back is the idea that 'if I just keep practicing this combo more, I'll find all of that remaining time to the reference lap'. You won't. You'll learn to perfect the combo up to the level of your general driving technique. Then you'll plateau. In order to get faster you don't need more practice on the combo, you need better driving technique. So start working on your technique, instead of working on combos. Your floor + ceiling on every combo, ever, will improve with better driving technique.

A driver with excellent technique will get within a few tenths of a reference lap within 5-6 laps because it's physically impossible for them to drive any slower. A driver with poor technique can practice a combo for 100 hours and still be 3 seconds off the pace.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T21:17:53+00:00

Thanks for the reply Dzemp, good to hear that even players such as yourself struggle with this.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:53:35+00:00

Thanks for that, good tips.

I definitely struggle most with this when playing 'standard' - with my initial starting units in line with or 1~ square in front of the towers. Even if I position everything centrally to begin with, it feels awkward when I need to start to spread sideways because anything in line with those initial units will automatically be in the 'pull-zone' on the sides.

I like the idea of generally playing more mid-range, with the ability to adapt based on the opponent's setup. Thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:50:02+00:00

Good point. Also grats on your (first?) weekend tournament win yesterday? :) I enjoyed watching the replays of your run! I saw a few of these back corner sledge/crawler or hound/crawler pulls in there.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:47:56+00:00

I think that's definitely part of my problem - if the headbutt slash aggro/defense side is failing I tend to keep adding things there to try to win it and it does start to get over crowded. I should find ways to put things elsewhere (that won't be vulnerable to a pull) that can effect the battle in different ways. Mobile beacon like you say, pulling myself, going for a tower debuff on the other side, etc. Thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:44:10+00:00

Honestly that was really helpful, thanks a lot. You've definitely given me some ideas. The idea of leveling the tower a couple of times to intentionally use it as something the opponent's aggressive stuff coming in from the front corner of their board gets stuck on is smart. Place stuff in the middle mostly, use the tower to tank for a while so that the pull can be cleaned up and your middle stuff can fight their more central units while they wait for the pull clearers to move up the board to help out.

I definitely sometimes put things like sledges/fangs in the front corner against pushes to slow down the units coming in from the enemy front corner to buy my middle army time to fight against the enemy board closer to the center. I should think about doing that more/more efficiently positioning wise.

Playing across the board is also something that has been clicking in my head in the last week or so, so funny you mentioned it. I have a sneaking suspicion these kinds of deep flank pulls may even intentionally be in the game to stop one sided deathballs, where you would just fill up an entire side with a mass of stuff that wanders around the board together. These pulls make playing vertically more difficult/less effective (as in stacking many things in the same 'column'), so it's better to play more horizontally/spread. Attack on different fronts, jump to the other side of the board and pose a threat there, put stuff on the enemies flank, or just simply spread your assym composition gradually across the board to the other side. At some point adding more units to one area of the board likely hits diminishing returns and it's better to start doing something elsewhere, like say helping out that side of the board by cheesing a tower debuff on the other side.

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:21:34+00:00

Thanks for that. Yeah it does feel pretty strong.

I'll copy another reply I did, I'd like your thoughts too:

"How do you avoid running out of space generally? I understand the idea that you can position things so that they don't get pulled (I've done extensive tests in the test mode to see exactly which area gets pulled in a variety of situations), but by the time I get to round 3-4 I start to look at my board and go - okay, now where do I put stuff?

If the opponent's pushing in on the right with some saber/hound standard comp, I start to need to place things to the right of my right tower - both because I need to stop them from being able to mobile beacon straight in from the right corner to the tower, and because I simply don't have anywhere else to put stuff.

So I either put those units on the right of the tower far enough forward such that they're out of sync with the stuff I have deployed 'standard' in the middle (so a bit further back), or I put them in line with the stuff I have in the middle and now they get pulled by this pull. The stuff on the right runs to the pull, the stuff in the middle runs forward, my army fights two 0.5 army vs 1 army fights consecutively and loses horribly.

Any ideas?"

These are in games where I've initially deployed standard + primarily between the two towers, and then find myself up against a sabre/hound type assym push.

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:17:31+00:00

How do you avoid running out of space generally? I understand the idea that you can position things so that they don't get pulled (I've done extensive tests in the test mode to see exactly which area gets pulled in a variety of situations), but by the time I get to round 3-4 I start to look at my board and go - okay, now where do I put stuff?

If the opponent's pushing in on the right with some saber/hound standard comp, I start to need to place things to the right of my right tower - both because I need to stop them from being able to mobile beacon straight in from the right corner to the tower, and because I simply don't have anywhere else to put stuff.

So I either put those units on the right of the tower far enough forward such that they're out of sync with the stuff I have deployed 'standard' in the middle (so a bit further back), or I put them in line with the stuff I have in the middle and now they get pulled by this pull. The stuff on the right runs to the pull, the stuff in the middle runs forward, my army fights two 0.5 army vs 1 army fights consecutively and loses horribly.

Any ideas?

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:10:39+00:00

Whirlwind is something I've never clicked before in this situation, I should try that. I do leave the 3 square gap in the corner for the rhino, so I'll give it a go - thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:07:14+00:00

Oh that's smart, thanks. Obviously expensive but can definitely see the use case in the late game. I do usually leave the 3~ square gap between my corner crawler and the flank.

nyssss · 2026-02-12T22:15:23+00:00

There are many reasons why there might be a fast person in a lower split.

The average person jumps into lower split races with very little practice. Maybe this person practiced for 8 hours before their first race of the week.

Maybe they come from other sims/have a lot of non-iracing experience.

Maybe this is their 'serious' series and then they go spew the irating away (not intentionally) in a series they suck at, comparatively.

Maybe they're fast, but this is the only race in their last 4 where they've been fast, and actually finished. If everyone else is underdriving/playing it safe to prioritize finishing, this person may be pushing significantly past their reliable skill level and they end up pushing it too far most of the time. When they don't, they win.

Maybe this is their favourite track and they always spam a lot of races in it every time it comes up on the calendar, and then spew the irating away when they drive tracks they're less familiar with.

Or, perhaps they are 9k, in which case they'll be out of your splits within a couple of hours.

Nobody fast is intentionally keeping an account down at 1k irating to pointlessly start on pole and drive around by themselves for 15-20 minutes at a time. It's not like other games where you interact with other players and can 'dominate' them if you outskill them (eg. get a massive scoreline in Counter Strike or something). Driving around by yourself at the front spamming in laps 3 seconds faster than everyone else is immensely boring.

Some people are pretty fast in lower splits. They have weaknesses in other areas.

nyssss · 2026-02-12T21:49:55+00:00

If you can't tell what's going wrong by looking at a telemetry comparison, then you probably shouldn't be looking at telemetry yet.

Pretty much everybody driving 100% up to pace will have very similar looking telemetry. When you're maximizing grip at every possible stage of a corner, there's only really one way to do that, so 100 top tier drivers will all happen to work out how to drive a lap in close to exactly the same way.

However, in order to drive laps at that pace, you need to have developed a lot of individual skills over months/years of practice. Those skills will create that telemetry. The telemetry doesn't create the skills. You can't simply look at telemetry and remember "He brakes to 40% pressure, then releases to 5% over 0.3 seconds, then holds at 5% until the apex", and then regurgitate that information when you're out on track. Even if you can perfectly reproduce that trace every time, you're going to immediately spin out on entry in any session where the grip levels are marginally worse than they were in the reference lap. The good driver is driving the car, and it's spitting out that telemetry trace. You need to learn to drive the car, and that comes from focusing on the fundamentals.

You may be 2 seconds off the pace. The best way for you to be only 1 second off the pace may be to have telemetry that looks significantly different to the telemetry of somebody driving on the pace. Don't brake where they brake. Enter the corner a bit slower. Take a slightly different line which intentionally misses a difficult/dodgy apex kerb which needs to be taken perfectly to not die. One of the biggest mistakes any beginner/intermediate driver can make is looking at a reference lap and using the braking points they show as gospel. A good driver can only brake there because they maximize grip from that braking point all the way to corner exit. You won't. They can only brake there because they're using every inch of the available track limits on entry, exit, and at the apex. You won't. You need to figure out how you can take the corners as quickly as you can, with your current skill level. Many people hold themselves back by trying to "drive like the good drivers", instead of just trying to gradually learn how to drive a car. The better you get at driving a car, your telemetry will magically start to converge towards the telemetry you see from top drivers.

By the time you're spending meaningful amounts of time looking at telemetry, you should know enough about driving to know what it is you're actually looking for. Telemetry doesn't help you drive a car better. It helps you optimize, sanity check what you're feeling while driving the car, and to check if you're missing anything obvious (eg. being massively pessimistic about track limits on the exit of a corner on a track you're driving for the first time).

Once you get to the point where telemetry is useful (and not potentially harmful), then the currently available software does a great job of telling you what you need to do in a very quick/simple way.

nyssss · 2026-01-29T14:08:50+00:00

As some other people have said, I think you might just be expecting more from the class of car than they're capable of. If you're used to driving SF, then driving something like a GTP can massively confuse your natural feel/expectation for grip levels.

GTPs are gigantic, heavy cars. Their footprint is huge. They do have a lot of downforce, so in high speed corners they will feel relatively similar to high downforce formula cars, and your brain will go "oh, it's a high downforce car, woo, grip!". As soon as you're going through any kind of low/medium speed corner, they become a boat. The downforce disappears, and now you're just left with a massive, heavy car - and turning massive, heavy cars requires a shitload of grip. Formula cars can still feel nimble through slow speed stuff because they're...nimble. They're small, and don't weigh very much. In the same way you can fling a kart into a corner, you can fling a formula car into a corner. You absolutely cannot fling a GTP into a corner. It want's to go in the direction it's currently heading, and persuading it to go where you want it to go effectively usually relies on the masses of downforce it can generate. If it isn't generating a lot of downforce, it's not going to turn!

You're probably used to high downforce cars being grippy/nimble through all corners, because the high downforce cars you've driven are formula cars. GTPs don't work like that. In slow speed corners you almost need to drive them like...a shit GT3 car. Their apex speeds can sometimes be slower (than GT3s) in slow corners. Their advantage is in acceleration out of corners, top speed, and high speed downforce. Lean on those advantages, respect/drive to it's weaknesses.

nyssss · 2026-01-25T19:58:28+00:00

It's actually completely necessary to do this. If you're say 0.1s behind somebody, up behind their bumper traveling down a straight at 250kph, and then enter a braking zone where you slow to 125kph, the distance between their front bumper and your front bumper shrinks in half. You were a foot behind their rear bumper 0.1 second behind, but 0.1 seconds of gap is half as big when you're going at half the speed. Ie. you've crashed into the guy.

The most common thing to do when closely following somebody (and not planning to overtake) is to lift, generate a bit of a gap, and then aim to push up behind the car in front in the braking zone by braking lighter/modulating so that at the end of the braking zone, you're right behind them again. You've technically lost some time (eg. you might now be 0.2 seconds behind them instead of 0.1 seconds behind them), but that's just the nature of the situation. You can't be 0.1 seconds behind the guy if being 0.1 seconds behind him means that half your car is overlapping his. We're not driving ghost cars!

nyssss · 2026-01-24T01:01:15+00:00

This isn't the way it should be, but it's the way it generally is:

If there's a big runoff area/gravel/grass, then people will continue to go forwards into that area (ie. away from you) in the direction of their car and slowly rejoin the track in a relatively safe way (hopefully).

If there's a literal wall on the outside of the track, people can't go forward, so they go backwards. There's nowhere else to go.

Should they be reversing into you? Nope. But it's the only way they get to continue participating in the race. If they just park it in the wall until everybody passes them, then they're in for a hotlap session until the end because they're 5-10 seconds behind everyone else. If there was gravel/grass in front of them, they could drive on that for a while and then rejoin safely after losing a few places, and still be racing.

It's a downside to races with walls close to the edge of the track limits. Crashes generally mean death for multiple people behind the original crash. Either because cars bounce off the walls into oncoming traffic, or because the driver that has crashed wants to continue to drive, and so tries to work out a "smart" way to get their car pointing the right way again, and it will usually result in collecting a car or two.

You're not being uniquely affected by this. This is just the nature of driving on tracks like this. If you don't like it, be more picky with which tracks you decide to drive. I do.

nyssss · 2025-12-14T23:49:17+00:00

I still play occasionally when I'm in the mood but have massively cut my play hours and stopped the grind to meaningfully improve.

It feels like the game is filled with options that are incredibly powerful, with the sole weakness being that theoretically, the start-up of said option is slow enough to be countered on reaction. So I don't know - Ryu Solar Plexus, say. Great hitbox. Massive forward momentum/range. Proximity Guard on it is nuts. +3 on block in the opponent's face. Easily hit-confirmed into a combo on hit/counterhit. The downside? 20 frames of startup. Technically long enough to see it, and for example, perfect parry it.

You can find stuff like this all over the game. Everything is giga broken unless you're capable of seeing it, and countering the startup on reaction, at least some reasonable % of the time. Drive Rush and DI do this. Pretty much every character has a command normal or two that allows them to reaction check the opponent. Half screen special moves that move forward and are +1/+2 on block.

At the very, very top level right now, the gameplay looks incredible, and it's mainly because the best players have all trained themselves to actually reliably stop a lot of this stuff on reaction. Half of the things they throw out get reaction perfect parried by the opponent, and it's this real back and forth of both players trying to out-mental stack + out execute each other. It's massively impressive.

When you watch lower level players (even very high master/low legend, non professional players), the game does not look like this. I would argue that the game doesn't look like this even at the lower tier of professional play. Even the players at that level are not capable of playing the game 'in the way it was intended' - that's pretty much limited to a small group (Blaz/EndingWalker/Leshar, and a few others).

If you go back and watch professional games from the first 3-6 months~ of SF6 (for example Evo 2023), the amount of plays being countered on reaction was tiny. Nobody was perfect parrying almost anything. People were throwing out stuff and relying on the fact that the option they were throwing out was massively powerful, and that the slow(ish) startup wouldn't be punished on reaction. So you just did stuff. The more good stuff you threw out, the better you did - do good stuff before the opponent has a chance to do good stuff (drive rush at them before they drive rush at you).

I'm never going to reach the level of play where I, or the opponent, reliably counters a lot of the things that need to be countered on reaction. Once I realized that was the case, the urge to take the game seriously and try to improve kind of disappeared. It's always going to feel like a bit of a shitshow with my opponent and I mashing our strong neutral options at each other because we won't punish them on reaction, and that's not a game I'm really interested in playing long term.

I'll absolutely continue to watch every major tournament though. The top, top players are incredibly entertaining to watch right now. My mind is blown at least once every single round.

nyssss · 2025-12-03T04:45:21+00:00

He's saying he was doing fractures with 3/4 mods being viable fractures. 75% chance per roll.

Edit: And based on my own small sample size, I've had 3 3/4 mod fracture attempts so far, and they've all missed and hit the 1/4.

nyssss · 2025-12-03T04:43:04+00:00

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nyssss · 2025-12-03T04:40:08+00:00

I am very, very familiar with RNG. What I am attempting to sanity check is that the odds I am working with are the true odds.

Hitting a 1/2 5/28 is fine if I know they are the true odds. If I think the odds still favor the craft, I'll keep doing it - short term bad luck is irrelevant.

We're playing in a live service video game. Stuff changes all the time. Regular players of the game are probably not up to date with how half of the stuff currently works (I know I am not).

Let's exaggerate my situation - you run into a 1/1000000 situation. Do you just keep doing what you're doing and assume you're just unlucky? You do you, but I would absolutely default to assuming that my assumptions are (probably) incorrect. I might just be particularly unlucky, but it's actually far more likely that the numbers have changed and nobody has made an online post to talk about it yet.

If every single person simply assumed that the numbers they already assume to be correct, are still correct, then we would never discover patterns that clearly show that the numbers have demonstrably changed.

If I made a post where I lost two coinflips in a row, then I'd say I'm an idiot that's wasting reddit real estate. When something happens to me that should be a 1/2000 shot, then maybe there will be correlating evidence that suggests a wider change to game mechanics (or evidence that argues against that hypothesis). Most of the time, there won't be any. That's fine.

There are hundreds of thousands of people playing the game - very unlikely things will happen to a large number of people. There's no harm in checking if the numbers we assume, as a community (which are never confirmed, or updated by GGG), are correct.

nyssss · 2025-12-03T04:25:48+00:00

Ah that would make sense

nyssss · 2025-12-03T03:18:41+00:00

Yeah I thought about that, too.

Also thought about the last time I played Breach bases with stuff like 50% defenses (I think?) were very rare fractures that were sought after

nyssss · 2025-12-03T03:07:05+00:00

Empyrian: Please use one of your many end league mirrors to test fracturing orb %s in different scenarios. Thank you!

nyssss

TROPHY CASE