Valiant Force Forum

From the cancerous quad archer trigger squad to the new meta "double-faye-double-ronan" lineup, certain of the meta lineups seem almost undefeatable.


The solution isn't a hero-targeted nerf, but the addition of a new unbiased rule that applies to PVP only - lineups are restricted to 1 character per team. This means no more double ronan, double faye or double cybellas to trigger attacks and finish your tank in round 1; only 1 of each in every lineup/team. Different characters of the same class are still allowed, so double archers like GS cybella + GS kane are still allowed and nowhere near as abuse-able as before.

What you consider 'cancerous' quad archer trigger squad is countered by the "double-faye-double-ronan" lineup, or to a certain extent, by most of the teams that have BK Aden in it, in case you didn't know, it is almost the perfect answer to the former squad, with the 'almost' being you can't just slap BK Aden in the squad and expect to win archer trigger squad. The latter squad is also countered and punished badly by the ninja squad such as Ninja Kai or Ninja Kira. With that being said, the archer trigger squad may or may not punish the Ninja squad depending on how the latter squad's formation is made. Personally, at the highest level of Arena MMR, it looks like a perfect scissors-paper-stone game.

The Arena scene was pretty much a joke, with everyone I know that has an above 80% win rate against the predictable AI system, and I certainly do not hope that they turn the Arena into something that is 'with enough Arena Orb, with any squad you have you are able to make it up to Master 3 or even Champion as long as you're loaded up on it'.

To elaborate more on why I do not agree that this should be implemented and status quo should be maintained, here are a few factors that should be considered: 

1) By implementing this system, you're essentially punishing everyone who invested in their current PvP-focused squad, there is a currently ongoing false impression that as long as you use 4 Archers in your squad, anyone and their mother can fight their way to the top easily by rolling their face on the keyboard, this is totally NOT true. You can't just slap 4 lv 30 archers with mediocre equipments on them and expect them to take you to the top effortlessly, if you realized, most of the top rankers that are using the four or three archers squad have all their archers sufficiently levelled and geared, to the point that even when they suffer from damage penalty from both trigger & natural formation reduction (2nd row and behind, when attacking protected units), they're able to still deal damage, not to mention that they are highly critical-reliant squad, which means that they have to forgo their attack damage to min-max for their critical instead. This proves, again, that you have to be sufficiently geared and level broken in order to achieve a 5500-6000 MMR rating worthy squad. 

The exchange is very simple, if a squad is sufficiently invested with the goal of winning in PvP, in both defense and offense, then the opposing squad should be sufficiently invested as well to be worthy enough to challenge the former squad, the issue was prominent pre-patch because there were no proper answers to the archer squad, there is an answer now, which is the FayeRonan build, and pretty much any properly-formed squad with BK Aden in it. Again, it is very simple, you want to deal with archer squad? Build an AdenDrake/FayeRonan yourself. You want to deal with Aden/FayeRonan? Build a good Kira/Kai/Drake yourself. 

The above applies to Ronan squad as well, without a sufficiently high magical attack, your duo Missile is at best going to tickle an opposing geared lineup, without a Ninja with above 9k Attack, you won't be able to guarantee a kill on Ronan even if you displace their Aden or Faye. 

2) That unbiased rule is going to restrict remove a lot of potential strategies and lineups waiting to be uncovered. Players were complaining because there were no potential counters to archer squad, if you are going to restrict this 'cheesing' to a rule, people will just find another way, and then what's going to happen? You gonna ask the developers to make it so that there can only be one class of each in the squad? And then the vicious cycle would happen all over again, this time with even lesser potential strategies and lineups waiting to be uncovered. Personally, I have already seen a few theorycrafted builds with the new addition of Aden that would shit on many squads, but it boils down to whether are you willing to forgo a month of Valiant and build an Aden to make your Arena life easier, or would you rather not incur on that opportunity cost and deem a squad 'cancerous' in order to get it nerfed? 

3) With reference to Point 1, it is clear that Archers aren't really prominent in the PvE, not to mention FOUR archers, I don't think that two faye and two ronan is going to help you a lot in most of the boss fights on the event either, in other words, by investing on squads that are focused on PvE, you are essentially incurring a huge opportunity cost on other aspects of the game (let's not talk about the whales who do not hesitate in throwing cash, we talk efficient allocation of limited resources provided perfect information), which means that to put it nicely, they won't be able to excel as much in the other aspects of the game as they do in Arena, or to put it badly, they're one trick ponies. 

In case I'm being mistaken for one of those cancerous user with a biased opinion, I'm just a humble 5.5k MMR peak Arena player who do not use any of the two squads you mentioned, I'm also always screwed over by the 'cancerous' quad archer trigger squad you mentioned for a dozen times almost everyday helplessly when they go first but I do not blame it on the fact that they are 'cancerous', I rather, blame it on the fact that I refused to invest my blood tokens and other resources in units that will help me tremendously to achieve that 95% - 100% win rate in Arena. They invested enough in their Faye and Ronans, they deserved to win, they invested enough in their quad archer, they deserved to win. 

P.S. I never lost against quad archer squads who are poorly invested (record-breaking was triggering almost 30 times on his first turn and barely tickling all my units) and the squads that I mostly lost to were heavily invested units with none of their archer below level 34 or 36. 

P.P.S. I apologize in advance if my tone of text sounded passive aggressive or sarcastic, it is hard to convey in a normal neutral tone through typing on the internet and I definitely do not mean it that way. What that said, I noticed from the other thread you made that went full ad hominem on both side and so I'd like to state in advance as well that I'm actually interested in hearing from the other side because for what it's worth, I've been hearing majority of players wanting a nerf on the squads in topic and I fail to understand why is that, I'd appreciate it we could keep this topic discussion going because I believe it is one of the more-worthy-to-discuss-about issues that is currently ongoing in VF.

What you consider 'cancerous' quad archer trigger squad is countered by the "double-faye-double-ronan" lineup, or to a certain extent, by most of the teams that have BK Aden in it, in case you didn't know, it is almost the perfect answer to the former squad, with the 'almost' being you can't just slap BK Aden in the squad and expect to win archer trigger squad. The latter squad is also countered and punished badly by the ninja squad such as Ninja Kai or Ninja Kira. With that being said, the archer trigger squad may or may not punish the Ninja squad depending on how the latter squad's formation is made. Personally, at the highest level of Arena MMR, it looks like a perfect scissors-paper-stone game.

The Arena scene was pretty much a joke, with everyone I know that has an above 80% win rate against the predictable AI system, and I certainly do not hope that they turn the Arena into something that is 'with enough Arena Orb, with any squad you have you are able to make it up to Master 3 or even Champion as long as you're loaded up on it'.

To elaborate more on why I do not agree that this should be implemented and status quo should be maintained, here are a few factors that should be considered: 

1) By implementing this system, you're essentially punishing everyone who invested in their current PvP-focused squad, there is a currently ongoing false impression that as long as you use 4 Archers in your squad, anyone and their mother can fight their way to the top easily by rolling their face on the keyboard, this is totally NOT true. You can't just slap 4 lv 30 archers with mediocre equipments on them and expect them to take you to the top effortlessly, if you realized, most of the top rankers that are using the four or three archers squad have all their archers sufficiently levelled and geared, to the point that even when they suffer from damage penalty from both trigger & natural formation reduction (2nd row and behind, when attacking protected units), they're able to still deal damage, not to mention that they are highly critical-reliant squad, which means that they have to forgo their attack damage to min-max for their critical instead. This proves, again, that you have to be sufficiently geared and level broken in order to achieve a 5500-6000 MMR rating worthy squad. 

The exchange is very simple, if a squad is sufficiently invested with the goal of winning in PvP, in both defense and offense, then the opposing squad should be sufficiently invested as well to be worthy enough to challenge the former squad, the issue was prominent pre-patch because there were no proper answers to the archer squad, there is an answer now, which is the FayeRonan build, and pretty much any properly-formed squad with BK Aden in it. Again, it is very simple, you want to deal with archer squad? Build an AdenDrake/FayeRonan yourself. You want to deal with Aden/FayeRonan? Build a good Kira/Kai/Drake yourself. 

The above applies to Ronan squad as well, without a sufficiently high magical attack, your duo Missile is at best going to tickle an opposing geared lineup, without a Ninja with above 9k Attack, you won't be able to guarantee a kill on Ronan even if you displace their Aden or Faye. 

2) That unbiased rule is going to restrict remove a lot of potential strategies and lineups waiting to be uncovered. Players were complaining because there were no potential counters to archer squad, if you are going to restrict this 'cheesing' to a rule, people will just find another way, and then what's going to happen? You gonna ask the developers to make it so that there can only be one class of each in the squad? And then the vicious cycle would happen all over again, this time with even lesser potential strategies and lineups waiting to be uncovered. Personally, I have already seen a few theorycrafted builds with the new addition of Aden that would shit on many squads, but it boils down to whether are you willing to forgo a month of Valiant and build an Aden to make your Arena life easier, or would you rather not incur on that opportunity cost and deem a squad 'cancerous' in order to get it nerfed? 

3) With reference to Point 1, it is clear that Archers aren't really prominent in the PvE, not to mention FOUR archers, I don't think that two faye and two ronan is going to help you a lot in most of the boss fights on the event either, in other words, by investing on squads that are focused on PvE, you are essentially incurring a huge opportunity cost on other aspects of the game (let's not talk about the whales who do not hesitate in throwing cash, we talk efficient allocation of limited resources provided perfect information), which means that to put it nicely, they won't be able to excel as much in the other aspects of the game as they do in Arena, or to put it badly, they're one trick ponies. 

In case I'm being mistaken for one of those cancerous user with a biased opinion, I'm just a humble 5.5k MMR peak Arena player who do not use any of the two squads you mentioned, I'm also always screwed over by the 'cancerous' quad archer trigger squad you mentioned for a dozen times almost everyday helplessly when they go first but I do not blame it on the fact that they are 'cancerous', I rather, blame it on the fact that I refused to invest my blood tokens and other resources in units that will help me tremendously to achieve that 95% - 100% win rate in Arena. They invested enough in their Faye and Ronans, they deserved to win, they invested enough in their quad archer, they deserved to win. 

P.S. I never lost against quad archer squads who are poorly invested (record-breaking was triggering almost 30 times on his first turn and barely tickling all my units) and the squads that I mostly lost to were heavily invested units with none of their archer below level 34 or 36. 

P.P.S. I apologize in advance if my tone of text sounded passive aggressive or sarcastic, it is hard to convey in a normal neutral tone through typing on the internet and I definitely do not mean it that way. What that said, I noticed from the other thread you made that went full ad hominem on both side and so I'd like to state in advance as well that I'm actually interested in hearing from the other side because for what it's worth, I've been hearing majority of players wanting a nerf on the squads in topic and I fail to understand why is that, I'd appreciate it we could keep this topic discussion going because I believe it is one of the more-worthy-to-discuss-about issues that is currently ongoing in VF.

What also makes one of these lineups mentioned cancerous is the fact that you need a specific lineup/unit to deal against it, and that using this lineup puts you at a severe, if not crippling, disadvantage against the ordinary lineups, which make up more than half of the lineups out there. 


This is to say that by running either of the cancerous lineups, you win against a very significant proportion of the population of your tier, and those that try to beat you by running this niche deck is in turn beaten by most of the regular teams out there, which make up majority of players. This is akin to playing a skewed game of scissors-paper-stone, where scissors, paper and stone win 60%, 30% and 10%(to prove the point) respectively if pit against each other randomly. Running this niche counter-cancer team(stone), you might win against said teams(scissors), but you lose against more than half of the teams out there.


When one consumes an arena orb to find an opponent, your team is already pre-determined, and your enemy is randomly generated. This is a fact. And by running the meta cancerous teams, you win a very significant proportion of the teams out there, given that they are limited by resources to LB their own meta units to the level to be competitive. This is why a limit of 1 character per team is the optimal, non-biased solution to this problem, not to mention improving the diversity of units that are deemed to be arena-viable, something developers wish to achieve.

Well, getting a bonus for using different base classes sounds cool. I have no idea how'd it actually fare though. I think double Ronan post-Archer nerf would still be strong if he doesn't get balanced on his skill CD.