What's the point of different stats per character in competitive play?

[gitblame]

Let's look closer to stats. As we all know each character has 4 stats - Strength, Ability, Defense and Health and they are a little different per character. In competitive game mode we can put character in few groups, let's call them stats tiers (ordered by number of characters in that tier):

1600/1650/1350/1250 - 1st
Catwoman
Harley Quinn
Batman
Red Hood
Joker
Deadshot
Poison Ivy
Capitan Cold
Dr Fate
Green Arrow

1700/1600/1500/1050 - 2nd
Sub Zero
Green Lantern
Superman
Firestorm
Aquaman
Wonder Woman
Black Adam
Brainiac

1600/1650/1450/1150 - 3rd
Flash
Blue Beetle
Robin

1600/1700/1450/1100 - 4th
Cyborg
Supergirl

1650/1650/1350/1200 - 5th
Cheetah
Black Cannary

1850/1400/1350/1250 - 6th
Atrocitus
Scarecrow

1800/1400/1450/1200 - 7th
Gorilla Grodd
Bane

1700/1500/1600/1050 - 8th
Swamp Thing

1800/1500/1150/1400 - 9th
Darkseid

9 different groups for 31 characters. That's a big diversity (I think that there are more than before patch). But what exactly does it mean?

So idea behind each stat is quite simple. Strength indicates how strong character can hit. Ability how strong are character special moves, Defense how much damage character take and Health how much HP.

So, do characters with higher attack stat have better damage? Each character has different combo potential, their bnbs works differently, scales differently and in the end there are some strange results. Black Adam had the best damage before patch. Now it's just high, but his stats was untouched. Harley does one of the highest meterless damage and she has the lowest strength. Catwoman also has better damage than many characters that have better strength than her.
Maybe it has different impact on normals and combo strings? Not really. First look among characters move list and we see that their hit and damage output from normals are their individual thing not related to stats. For example Green Lantern's 223 string does less damage on hit and on block than Batman's 223 string and GL has better strength (at least on paper).

So we can safely assume that ability and strength stat is kinda pointless on competitive mode.

What about defense and life points? They definitely matter and results are really bizzare.

I tested Green Lantern's bnb (b13 trait 123 ex lift b3 223 lift) on each tier.
1st tier 359,22 (28,73%)
2nd tier 323,30 (30,79%)
3rd tier 334,45 (29,08%)
4th tier 334,45 (30,40%)
5th tier 323,30 (29,93%)
6th tier 359,22 (28,73%)
7th tier 334,45 (27,87%)
8th tier 303,09 (28,86%)
9th tier 421,69 (30,12%)

I just don't see any logic here. Poison Ivy gets 2% less damage on bnb than Men of Steel himself. I think that on higher damaging combo difference is even bigger, but I did not really run tests.
Is this intentional? Why would you give high defense to a character but his low life mean that he gets the highest damage from the entire cast? And the last question, do we really need that in competitive play? I know 2% on a combo is not that much but still.

My conclusion is that different defense and health are just for giving us some diversity and also should balance each other. But it seems that someone in NRS did not do a necessary math. Maybe I am wrong, maybe it's used for some balance I am not seeing.

What do you guys think?

 

[DDutchguy]

Strength and Ability stats are pointless to look at if you play with competitive mode on.

Defense and HP sorta cancel each other out so they're not very useful either, although I believe @Lokheit made a thread where he showed that different defense/HP combinations caused combo damage to differ from about 3% if you compare the lowest defense/HP tier to the highest one.

 

[gitblame]

Yeah, but my main question is, was it implemented correctly? I just do not see any pattern and reasoning behind those stats.

 

[DDutchguy]

Yeah, but my main question is, was it implemented correctly? I just do not see any pattern and reasoning behind those stats.

Dunno, as you said it's pretty weird like with Harley having probably the best meterless damage in the game while having a low strength stat. It seems to be exclusively a gear thing and not relevant in competitive play at all because in the competitive case the stats make very little sense regardless.

 

[Juggs]

Yeah it's pointless really to have defensive/offensive stats with HP stats. The point of different HP values is to help with balance. If a character has a lot of tools or does a lot of damage, them having low HP is a way you can balance them out. But with the defense values, it makes it pretty pointless when the difference between the characters is 1-3%.

 

[Jelan]

I think they just didn't bother to hide the stats in competitive and nothing more. They basically cancel out each other and as such is useless information, 3% or so difference on bnbs barely warrants having to juggle all this extra information on the screen.

MKX has a legit better UI.

 

[Lokheit]

It has been used for balance in the last patch (I have to update my stats sheet and durability values but my PS4 died so it's going to be some time until I can check everything again). Bane, Swampy, Grodd and I think some other jumped a bit over the "Batman" tier in terms of resistance (the Batman tier was the more resistent before, being 107% more resistent of what the Superman tier had when combinin health and defense).

Honestly in my opinion even if I agree that increasing "health/durability" is a balance resource, I don't like the way it's done in this game as the stats themselves are a mess. The characters that got their defensive stats increased had their offensive stats decreased by the same amount, but offensive stats don't matter at all as all characters that had their damage adjusted were adjusted via changing damage scaling and natura damage of their moves.

In fact it's BETTER to have lower offensive stats from start as the same gear will increase your offensive power more (and initial power is really balanced with your moves, not your stats) if the initial number was lower (this doesn't matter much for competitive mode but for the gear modes, it should've received more thought to be honest).