Smashcraft is the new competitive MOBA style game taking over the US custom maps list, featuring fast-paced, reactive/predictive team combat and a diverse set of character playstyles and depth.
The current version now boasts 10 heroes, 3 arenas, and more to come.
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Smashcraft is a unique 3v3 deathmatch arena game based loosely on World of Warcraft's 3v3 arena format, but spare yourself the long gear grinds, horribly balanced RNG-favored combat, and class favoritism. In Smashcraft, there is no farming, no gear grinding, no thousands of items to confuse yourself with, you pick your character, and smash the other team.
Four character archetypes:
Guardians specialize in protecting their teammates, while dealing decent damage, their key focus is on controlling and subduing the enemies. They can take quite the beating without falling, but Psions tend to be particularly effective against them. Guardians are strong vs. Assaults and weak vs. Psions.
Assaults specialize in dealing fast, hard damage but tend to be a bit squishy. Assaults specialize in taking the squishies on the other team down and applying heavy pressure to their support. They often have abilities which can silence, slow, and deal lots of damage very quickly if left unchecked. While Assaults may be extremely effective against Psions, they struggle with Guardians.
Psions the literal powerhouses of Smashcraft, the psions can unload huge bursts of damage often times to many targets at once. Specializing in heavy AOE damage, psions are at the bottom of the food chain in survivability. They tend to crumble easily but the payload they can dish out is more than worth it. Most psion abilities will require casting times but have unparalleled range and damage capability. Psions are quite strong at dealing with Guardians, but Assaults tend to rip them to shreds.
Supports are the gears behind the machine, Support characters are not strong or weak to any other archetype, but they tend to have little to no damaging capabilities instead focusing on aiding their team and subduing enemies. Everything from buffs, to healing, to cursing enemies, supports are an integral part of any good team composition.
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Skill-Based Combat (Reactionary Abilities)
In addition to aiming your skills well to get the most out of them, every character has the same reactionary skills to use in combat. These abilities are on short cooldowns and require timing to be used to their most effectiveness.
Instant Block: Blocking will reduce incoming damage significantly for a very short period of time. If timed right, you can survive a heavy focused burst attack or just use it to build increased "fury".
Instant Dodge: Dodging will get you out of harm's way, using the dodge skill is like a miniature teleport in any direction. You can use this to juke enemy fire or even to catch up to someone who is running away.
Escape Mechanisms: Every hero has an escape mechanism that will free them from stuns, roots, snares, the whole deal and most abilities will grant them other bonuses, such as HOTs, or damage absorption, even immunity to CC effects for a short period of time. Use these wisely, however, as they are on limited cooldowns.
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Fury Abilities
As you deal and take damage, your hero will gain Fury. Once maxed, they can unleash an incredibly powerful attack that can quickly turn the tide of a battle. Finishing your opponents with a Fury skill will also end the round in a stylish way!
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Gameplay
Each team starts on either ends of an arena, the objective is to KO the other team completely. Good teamwork, and knowledge of your heroes abilities is only half of the skill behind the game. The team that wins 3 rounds takes the victory in a best out of 5 round matchup. Each time a team is KO'd, the next round begins until one team hits 3 points.
Each team can have one instance of one hero, you cannot have multiple copies of the same hero on one team, however, so choose your composition wisely. Rolling out with 2 Supports and a Guardian may be incredibly hard to kill, but you also won't be killing the other team very quickly with a setup like that. Balance and good hero control are what make a skilled Smashcraft team.
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More To Come
As this is a beta, feel free to leave suggestions, comments, and complaints in this thread. In addition, look forward to more features coming soon!
-20+ heroes planned for the future
-4 fully detailed arenas w/ their own unique cinematic intros.
-Player Stat tracking!
-EX abilities: use some fury to enhance your normal abilities on the fly
-Self healing: All characters will have the ability to apply a weak, channeled heal to themselves at any time, this puts some strategy into playing a team composition that doesn't include a healer, but still is inferior to having a dedicated support.
This map is currently on page 1 of the Customs list, and growing in popularity every day. It reached page 1 in only 32 hours of its initial beta release. A dedicated forum for the map will be coming soon!
Once it goes 1.0 yes. Which won't be long from now. I want to have at least 12 heroes for the official release and the stat tracking, PSR ranking system in place before. I still need someone to volunteer to host/boost it on other servers.
This game is outstanding, I played a good number of rounds today. I see this game going pretty far. Best custom game I have played by leaps and bounds, finally someone is able to mix up the MOBA format and make it work for SC2.
The game's been out barely 5 days, it took DOTA years to balance well, and even then its still a balance nightmare.
In any case, I am looking into some things with Rush. From observation Sarina and Dex are fine, they are working as intended and to me, do not feel overpowered. For one, I want to make his pull escapable like any other stun, I think that is the biggest problem with Rush right now balance-wise, is that his pull is unbreakable in any way if he hits you with it, even with escape abilities.
On January 07 2011 15:13 Moa wrote: This game is outstanding, I played a good number of rounds today. I see this game going pretty far. Best custom game I have played by leaps and bounds, finally someone is able to mix up the MOBA format and make it work for SC2.
To be fair the the genre this style of gameplay was done already as a seperate game. BloodLine Champions, which is fun in its own right, outside the stupid payment plans
Now as to this map. I personally feel the DarkTemplar Assault Class is somewhat weakish on the tight maps, Mainly the Fire map. It's just to easy to get knocked out of stealth as there are no open areas to abuse.
Rush's obvious strenghts are already discussed. And i feel that The first support hero is on the meh side compared to the medic. He's like a jack of trades hero who at the same time isnt a jack but more of a 8...
The main issue with Rush is that he's got an extremely reliable stun (or set of stuns), while outputting thoroughly more reliable damage than his peers (especially Pyro). Compound this with Ezz who does absolutely ridiculous damage while not being as squishy as he probably should be while also having a stun as well. An Ezz took out half of Rush' HP at the start of combat through Serina's heal... you also routinely see Ezz OHKO casters through Serina's heal. His damage output is ridiculous compared to other heroes. The issue I have with Serina is that I was basically out-healing some DPS heroes with just her beam. At the very best she should honestly only be blunting the damage output... but I'll basically see someone unload on a teammate and my beam would keep their HP stable. The survival balance between Serina and Dex isn't even close IMO, especially given that Dex' survival support is stationary, making him less effective against ranged stuff like Psions.
Rush does do quite a bit of DPS, not in his auto attack but his cleave does about 70'ish per swing (80 to assault characters). He is, however, melee only, where Revolver is quite good range, and Pyro's damage is also compounded over time.
The Guardian archetype is built upon doing mediocre damage output, but having more control over the flow of a battle. Revolver, for instance, can save allies from stuns, trap players with a fissure (sort of like Earthshaker), but his damage output is only mediocre at best. Guardians have the HP to stand in the middle of a fight and spam their abilities.
Now Rush, being melee, needs to make up for having no range. Of course his pull is very reliable since it cannot be broken. I aim to fix this first, by making it possible to break and make the drag effect not hit things that are stun immune as well. That may do a lot to fix Rush's balance issues. I already shortened the duration of his AOE stun. His ult does stun, but you can break out of the stun effect and run away from the damage with most heroes. I will probably look into extending the stun immunity effect of most escapes that aren't already there. I might lower the damage of his cleave attack. Right now it doesn't seem that big of a deal, and a damage nerf would be miniscule.
Pyro, I think leans more heavily towards being a defensive hero. Using Forgebond generously is part of playing him, as he extends his team's life quite a bit, and a ranged interrupt that does splash damage as well is his main source of damage. His ability to counter-stun is also more reason he should be head-rushing the other team and trying to be the focus of attack. I should probably also point out that even if Forgebond isn't protecting anything, it does reduce damage he takes by 50% regardless of where he is, so it should be spammed if nothing else.
Ezzerat is an Assault character, so he should be able to dish out lots of damage. Again though, he is melee, and outside of his rogue-like play he is controllable. If you don't control him, he can very easily shred your squishy teammates. Ace can do this from a range, but he isn't quite as bursty as Ezzerat.
Sarina's channeled heal recovers 38HP/sec, and Burst of Life instantly recovers 225 HP. All DPS based heroes CAN damage through her channeled heal, but also keep in mind that if she's channeling, she's vulnerable. She's immobile. She's an easy target since mobility in this game is equal to survival. She can't break roots or snares like most escape abilities, only stuns. Hawk can have a field day with her if she's spamming Refresh. She also can't refresh herself. Part of the game is decision making, not just having good aim. Picking the right target to focus is just as important as being able to aim your attacks.
Any psion or assault character easily can out-dps her heals. 2 psion/assaults will murder her heal output if they play their cards right. The point of support is to add survivability to the team, at the cost of DPS. And this is also why healing is a bit easier than doing damage, but healing overall is more about decision making skill than aim alone.
Comparing Dex to Sarina. Dex's decision making relies on choosing to drop a Nanomed vs. another drone. He is built to be tankier than Sarina and can dish out more damage with the way his shotgun works. But his healing power is weaker, obviously, since he has to use drone cooldown to drop a med, and also his heals are immobile. They both extend the survivability of their teams quite a bit, but in different ways. The point of support isn't JUST to heal or JUST to do X or Y kind of support ability, otherwise all support characters would be the same.
The next upcoming Support character is actually an offensive support, sort of like a shadow priest in that they heal by doing damage only. Every support character is basically classified as "a character with abilities that directly help the team in one way or another" it doesn't just mean "healer".
Honestly, in this game so far I've found ranged heroes significantly more difficult to output damage with than with melee heroes, especially when the melee heroes have a stun. I find Pyro dead weight more often than not because he has no reliable way of actually outputting his damage - he does most of his damage when something like the ice dude lands his snares, otherwise he just runs around like an idiot doing piddling damage. Related to this melee damage being ridiculous is that Ezz has much more reliable damage output than any other assault hero (primarily off his stun), again because melee hits tend to be easier to land once you're in range (and his blink-stun lets him get in range, even if they G out of the stun), Not to mention the G CD is high enough such that if the other team has Rush + Ezz you've got one guy that's pretty fucked, because you can G out of one but the other will get you, + Rush has two stuns IIRC. Ezz does enough damage that you can severely cripple or remove one player from the game immediately.
This is why Rush and Ezz are extremely strong from my experience; they do "extra damage" to make up for their being melee, but because they have reliable ways to keep people in place (especially Rush, who IIRC has a speed boost) they actually land way more hits than a ranged hero.
This is especially the case for someone like Hawk, who has a ridiculous firing time; I found it no problem whatsoever hitting S *dodge* S *dodge* S *dodge* because the load-up time on Serina's channeled beam (and lack of after-cast) means she doesn't REALLY need to stay in place, she just needs to stay in place for like 0.5 seconds. Now, if her beam worked more like, I dunno, a Void Ray and punished short bursts while rewarding longer and longer bursts, that could be the case. Hawk struggles to land anything against attentive players without a setup stun or something.
As for Serina, you're going to have to make a decision at some point about how important you want support heroes to be. Right now I've mostly been seeing teams of X + X + Serina vs X + X + Serina because it's largely suicide to go into a game without her, that's how effective her healing is, and how hard it is to punish her (especially because she's not really that squishy herself, considering that focusing her leads to D + F for a lot of effective HP. Combine that with the chain stuns of heroes like Rush and Ezz and you get hilarity :p) I've had a team go all-out to triple team me and they'd eventually get me down after about 30 seconds but by that point they're pretty dicked themselves.
I usually don't run premades with any support TBQH, just feels like a team like [Ez/Ace] + [Alseir/Hawk] + [Rush/Revolver] can beast any team with 1 support on it.
Hawk is actually really really good, but I've only seen a couple other players that are good at Hawk. She's kind of a tricky character to be effective with, but she is good and working exactly like I want her to.
I also disagree with you on Pyro being shitty. He is probably the most annoying Guardian in the game right now for the other team to have to deal with. If you want to play some team games I'll play any hero =p
I'm not sure that Pyro's "shitty" per se, but he feels worthless when your teammates are being nuked down by Rush/Ezz But you're dealing with Rush so we'll see if that adjusts the balance spectrum there.
I guess I'll check out a non-Seri team and see if I run into someone with. We (and almost everyone else) are probably not good enough with landing some of the bigger ranged skillshots yet to see the damage overload.
On January 08 2011 01:42 Southlight wrote: I'm not sure that Pyro's "shitty" per se, but he feels worthless when your teammates are being nuked down by Rush/Ezz But you're dealing with Rush so we'll see if that adjusts the balance spectrum there.
Besides the fact he redirects all the damage to him AND cuts it in half? Add in block spam and he takes like no damage.
EPT
But you're dealing with Rush so we'll see if that adjusts the balance spectrum there.
