Game play mechanics / turn meter issues

cannon_fodder_jr

I think it started with JRey, but is much more prevalent with the preponderanceof zEP leads in arena now. Prior to JRey, running a TM swap with Thrawn or Call to Action with CLS very nearly exclusively made either the target of the TM swap or CLS go next. There might have been occurrences where that didn't happen, but they were few and far between enough that they went unnoticed. For all intents and purposes, either of those actions led to a predictable next action.

With the advent of these two leadership skills / uniques / team compositions, this is no longer the case. I've had many recent instances of both actions in which the target never gets to actually go again because someone else has 'interrupted' the TM chain, resulting in other toons going first. I understand this could be explained away as 'well, X toon already had 100% turn meter as well, so why shouldn't they get to go.' Perhaps this is true, but it most certainly behaves differently than it did and, in my thinking, breaks an implicit contract described in the action.

All that aside, actual numeric TM values would be significantly more helpful to players than the current bar. If we knew what the actual TM numbers were and didn't have to try to divine them ("is that pixel a frame border, or is EP ready to go?"). This would help players make informed decisions about what actions they should take. For example, maybe I would fracture EP if I knew my TM swap to CLS wasn't really going to be the next thing to take place and that EP was actually going to stun us all.

Perhaps, in the case of Thrawn's skill, it's a simple matter of ordering (in his case, it's conceivable that a buff would have expired, causing EPs TM to go to 100% before the target of the swap - I would consider this a bug and fix it). Perhaps it's working as designed, in which case the design should be reviewed as the intent of the action and it's past performance has been altered.

The trend towards TM percentage based buffs leads to unpredictable ordering. In a game where ordering is of the utmost importance, this makes game play much less fun, especially when playing against the current TM Train methods that make EP and Jrey so effective.

Thanks for your consideration.

Kyno

Who goes first when multiple toons have 100% TM has always been RNG, (after the poe era coin flip was resolved)