The Current Metagame

The metagame has evolved pretty far and this is what I'm thinking at the moment:
1. The tank is the best 1v1 class when mastered. You have an option for almost every situation, an instant health regen, most health in the game, good mobility with skill pill and charge, and the 2nd best close and long range guns in the game (debatable).
What separates the tank from the sniper in terms of map control? The tank has the most health in the game, a quick escape move, and a strong CQC game, which allows him to get aggressive and then simultaneously shift back to surveying the field at any time as he pleases.
With gunner range nerfed, it can't even compete at mid-long range. Assaults have to be in the sweet-spot "out of jet gun, not in rail gun" range to get a kill, and even then the tank is just a charge away from closing the gap in either direction. Snipers can only win at long range with headshots, which is hard when the rail gun shoots back and the tank is jet packing everywhere. Supports and assains, lol. And the ability to kill bots just as easily? Any team without a strong tank will suffer pretty greatly.
2. The sniper has developed a higher learning curve. Although it's still easy to explosive shot, you won't get far against a good team if you can't shoot for the head.
3. The assault is insanely powerful in a pair. The gun requires little aim and drops people so quickly with 2 constant streams of fire, especially with crits factored in. The bomb has a huge radius, does at least 50% damage to most classes, isn't too hard to use, and has a quick cool-down. 2 assaults can take down almost any combo of 2-3 slayer classes at once with relative ease.
4. The support is becoming a less and less viable class in competitive matches. The air strike nerf disables its biggest contribution to the team with its easy turret clearing and anti-camper uses. Having no real offensive attributes, the support's only real option now is to sit back until he gets juice. The firebase is still helpful, but is quickly taken down by team-fire.
5. Gunners and assaults dominate high-lag games. Especially assault. The ability to jump around avoiding bullets while yours are given extra magnetism towards the enemy is pretty hard to counter.
6. The assassin has lost almost all killing power since the start of the game. Against an organized team, your options are :
A. Go in cloaked and try to assassinate someone.
B. Go in uncloaked and try to assassinate someone.
C. Use shurikens to kill the enemy.
The outcomes are:
A. The enemy hears you and instantly knows where you are.
B. You are seen by either your character or name and called out.
C. Chances are, no good player is going to stand still or let themselves die by shurikens.
Your only options left are to kill and push bots, get juice, and harass enemy players with shurikens so their health can't regen and an assault can chase in to finish the kill. It's still one of if not, THE most important class.
7. Armor over power. A good team-shot will take down enemies even quicker than a crit-3 assault. Having extra armor to take shots and get away is very helpful. Coordinate with your team to take down opponents, don't rely on having the strongest gun, because more bullets at once will prevail.

At the moment, I feel that the best team setups are:
1 Tank
1 Sniper
1 Assassin
1 Gunner
2 Assaults

1 Tank
1 Sniper
1 Assassin
1 Gunner
1 Assault
1 Support

2 Tanks
1 Sniper
1 Assassin
1 Gunner
1 Assault
I feel that Zyn's 2 sniper setup is no longer viable due to the fact that once pushed on, they will have a very hard time pushing back. You need to be able to play aggressively and adapt well, so versatility is needed.

I may have given out a few keys to success here for any team looking to compete in the upcoming tournament(s), so read closely and start practicing!

nice post. this should be over in strats though right?

i think that the tank is too OP with an experienced player a skill 3 endorsement. its ok when an average player plays it, but when the mastery comes, its too strong. i guess it IS the tank.

sniper seems to be less fun to play because games are usually so laggy headshots come down to flat luck without host. i think that connection matching would be glorious for this game. i never really spammed the explosives too hard, i always thought that that was a lame tactic and im glad they turned it down. now you have to actually headshot bots to take them out quick. luckily the lag doesn't seem pertain to the bots as it does the pros.

lately my favorite team to try to orchestrate with my two man party and random people is:

1support
3assaults
2tanks

if you travel in packs with the support back and forth, it becomes very annoying for the opposition. two tanks can shred a base together no juice.

Two tanks or two assaults is always a good idea, especially when they stay together an cover rach others backs.

Great write-up. And the metagame has most definitely shifted.

Used to be the more supports the better. Now one is all you really need. I like how every class has a needed role and balanced teams will beat overloaded or even slightly imbalanced teams of equal skill.

Question. Why do gunners dominate high lag games? Literally the only thing you posted about Gunners is that they dominate high lag games, which seems strange to me, especially because of the gunner's RoF cap.

SHHHHHH you're gonna get the tank nerfed.

The improved bullet detection in laggy games only effected gunner and assault from what I can see. Everything else has a hard time hitting shots, while their bullets are like magnets.

The tank needs to be nerfed. Needs to be able to die by assassination without a lunge. And the radius of his charge needs to be decreased. Only way to make him even remotely fair vs. assassin.

I'm glad SOMEBODY agrees that assassin's fighting skills have been over-nerfed. Once again, give assassins back the ability to cloak mid-grapple. That's all we need.

Anyway, I'd say the best team setup would be something like this:

1 tank and 1 assassin is necessary for any pro game. 1 support is almost just as necessary (to keep turrets healed if anything else. I do agree support has been too nerfed, but they still have the ability to play some great defense). I don't think multiple assaults are necessary because they can't really push bots. Everybody else can kill pros enough while still pushing bots to not have to worry about getting multiple assaults.

If I was going to go for the dream team, I'd say

1 assault
1 tank
2 assassins
1 support
1 gunner or sniper

2 assassins will literally hold down the bots completely for the entire game. it can allow each assassin to focus more on one lane, which allows you to get more assassinations, and it lets the assassins camp the ejectors a lot more.

the tank is also extremely necessary to take damage and help kill bots. The tank needs to be on one side, and the gunner or sniper on the other. The assault can worry primarily about the top control (and gunner and snipers can help with this, as well).

But ultimately, it's all about matchups. If their team had 6 tanks, i wouldn't recommend getting 2 assassins. I might not even want one, and recommend using 2-3 snipers and a bunch of assaults instead. If the team was all assassins, I'd tell everybody to go tank or assault; maybe even 2 supports because firebases OWN assassins.

1 assassin can lock all the bots down though. I've tested out different setups and now from experience that you need all the guns you can get. An extra assassin or support means 1 less gun, and that's never good.

The sin and support both need to be brought back up to par imo

The sins glaring problem is her reliance on grapples to do anything to pros, however good players will be wallwalking, bunny hopping, flying and keeping their eyes and ears peeled at all times.
Add in the fact she must be in melee range and that every single class has one or multiple tools to insta-kill or just simply shut her down once she gets there...and she becomes purely relegated to a bot pusher and nothing more until juiced.
Even juiced she is still probably the weakest pro killer of them all.
(This wouldn't be so much the case if juice increased lunge damage)

I Think the tank vs sin/assault matchup's need to be changed and balanced a bit more.
A buff to smokebomb/ regular slash attack damage vs pros would go a long way imo
Maybe even reduce the duration of grapple animations, once you commit your a sitting duck for like what 4-5 seconds?
And unfortunately against a decent team you will not be catching anybody alone Except maybe the other teams sin.


I must agree with shamas about the 2 assaults, the assault class has amazing team synergy and pairing two together provides ridiculous killing power, having two bombs greatly improves that teams map control and team fighting ability.
I also agree that each team MUST have a good tank, he is the rock, the solid foundation, the glue that holds the team together.
The tank as pointed out, is almost TOO good.
You never see complaints though as there just are not many GOOD tanks out there playing.


Its hard though to justify buffs to the sin and support pros , as soon as they become a real threat in a competitive setting, the nerf posts from inexperienced players will rain from the sky simply due to how the mechanics of each of these pros work.

My 2cents~

The shurikens are actually very helpful in killing tanks. Gunners are easiest to kill with them, but there's nothing you can do against an assault really.

Tell me something I don't know

But as you pointed out, good players are not gonna just stand still and let you hit them with slow moving projectiles.

I love shuriken, I'm pretty good with em (1600 kills and counting)
But due to their travel speed they are mostly just for harass and health regen prevention.

While it's true that the Assassin sucks against good pros, she absolutely rapes bots. I don't want her to be buffed up in pro killing only because she fills her niche as bot killer or team wallet so well.

My dream team is:

1 Offensive Gunner (Kills Pros and Turrets)
2 Offensive Objective Tanks (Takes priority for bot pushing but aren't afraid to take on pros)
1 Versatile Assault (Can help anyone, anywhere)
1 Neutral Support (Offers healing in mid battle for offensive players and is able to turtle if necessary)
1 Defensive Sniper (Keeps turrets safe and keeps other snipers under control)

I agree with this mostly. I would say either 2 Gunners or 2 Assaults instead of 2 tanks.

I never really find tanks all that helpful. As an assault I can push bots and kill pros. I never really see a tank doing all that much, probably because its a difficult class to be really good at. But that's just my opinion.

2 gunners will be absolutely dominated by a good tank and sniper. When you play at very high levels of skill and competition, it's a pretty different game. Stuff like sniper grapple and assault with charge 3 that seems overpowered in pubs is useless. Imagine it's only the most talented of players, and think of what would work and what wouldn't. Honestly, assault is overpowered in public because people are figuring out how to use it, but a skilled tank defeats a skilled assault pretty easily. I think tank may be the best class to go against an assault, other than another assault. In the end, it all comes down to team chemistry.

I've only ever played pubs so you can see where I'm coming from. Since there aren't that many good tanks in pubs I've never really had to deal with one. But ya chemistry is almost always a deciding factor in any competition. (cough*Miami Heat*cough).

Oh, I can absolutely push both lanes with the assassin. But if there are 2, it's nice to have more downtime to go for kills. On LazerRazr and AmmoMule I can push bots and still have fun messing around, but if I want to push both lanes on Grenade III and steel peel (unless the other team sucks) it's about 90% of what I'm doing. If there are 2, one on each lane, you're only pushing one lane, so it's MUCH easier to note everything that's going on, much easier to help push pros back, etc. I kamakazi all the time to help push pros back. I don't care if I die. My k/d doesn't matter. If I'm pushing a lane with somebody and there's a person or two that is preventing us from pushing up any further, I'll sacrifice myself to take out whoever needs to be taken out. For example, I remember playing with Scented Midget once, and there was a Sniper and an assault holding down a lane that we were pushing up. I ran in and killed the sniper. Even though the assault killed me right after, it allowed Midget to kill the assault, letting our lane push up.

We had 2 assassins that game (Grenade III arena). If the other assassin wasn't pushing the other side, I wouldn't have had time to go kill the sniper because bots would have been pouring in on the other side.

Exactly. I mean, she really is simply the hardest class to play. And while she's effective, just being a bot machine can get boring. What if they decreased her grapple cooldown, but gave her more speed, less detectability while invisible, and a OHKO to every class with a sword back grapple? And reduce the damage she takes while lunging.

I mean, the name of the class is assassin. When you think assassin, you think "stealthy unit that does high damage quickly to a single target and then gets out." But that's really not how she is played at all.

I guess I should explain my reasoning for two tanks and no assassins. One tank can only keep one lane clear because of its lack of mobility, but it can't get bullied out of a lane nearly as easily as an assassin can. It also has a lot better of ability to take out enemy pros than an assassin. The only area it really lacks in compared to the assassin is juice gain and mobility. And juice gain isn't very important in competitive games, because with skilled players, you will get CC'd almost immediately. So the only area the assassin beats tank is in mobility, and I wouldn't consider that as a huge advantage, actually the assassin is almost worthless in really competitive games so it is much better to have a tank in each lane with good control over it than two assassins getting pushed around due to their lack of health and pro killing abilities.

Assassin can cover both lanes. Tank can cover one. So assassin can both take out his lane, and aid the tank with his.

Plus, assassin/tank combo is the 2nd best pro killing combo (next to gunner on a leash). Assassin counters everything that counters a tank.