After the launch of Monolith I thought it was about time to take a look at how Paragon is doing and how healthy the game is. After update v36, is Paragon worth playing?

Meta

The meta of Paragon has evolved rapidly after the arrival of Monolith and with Epic having rebalanced health and armor, it immediately lurched to full damage with a prevalence on crowd control. The shift away from players building “tanky” has not only reduced the time to kill to mere seconds, but has resulted in far too many stands-offs, especially during the mid to late game. Fundamentally, players know that the first team to attack and the first secure a kill can often steamroll to victory. Heroes such as Steel, Rampage, Dekker and Howitzer can easily facilitate this as their stuns (or knockbacks) comfortably ensure little if any counterplay from the opposition.

While most players have welcomed the increased movement speed and move away from players withstanding dozens of attacks the meta is unquestionably a mess and for a variety of reasons.

As noted above, most fights amount to little more than who choose to group first, who stuns first and who dies first. Whereas in Legacy’s meta of health and armor many Heroes could comfortably withstand some crowd control thrown their way, it’s near impossible to survive against such lengthy disables. When Heroes such as Murdock can deal as much as 650 damage per basic attack (sometimes higher) and with few, if any, players building health or basic attack armor, it’s not impossible to bring players down within just three hits. Considering a stun lasts for a little over a second (nearer to two in reality) you’ll often find you’re dead before you can react. That’s not a good thing and it’s not conducive to a MOBA attempting to offer deep and meaningful combat. In fact, it’s often incredibly frustrating unless you happen to be part of a team coordinating such spikes.

It’s unquestionable that the cause is such heavy handed reductions to health and armor, but also the fact that armor is, pretty much, a useless investment (its mitigation is negligible in comparison to raw damage). With no clear distinction between “tanks” and “fighters” (they all scale pretty much the same), core roles/archetypes are lost in favor of damage.

If we were to look at any other game in the genre, there is a clear distinction between roles and that of a warrior (fighter in Paragon’s case) and guardian (support). While I suspect part of the reason for Paragon’s simplicity in homogenizing these roles is to create accessibility, this simplicity is having significant ramifications for the balance of the game that cards alone cannot fix.

Rampage is classed as a "Fighter" and has a stun that lasts for 2 seconds - an enormous amount of time.

Digressing a little, heroes such as Steel, Rampage, Riktor and Sevarog should not be considered fighters. Their kits are all quintessentially support based, encompassing hard crowd control and tools designed to protect their team or to secure a kill. The card system should provide players the flexibility in allowing them to build damage or defence should they wish, but these types of heroes need attributes and scaling to differentiate themselves and their purpose. I’m not in any way suggesting the likes of Grux can’t peel or Greystone can’t protect a ranger, but it would be intentionally contrary to suggest they’re “support” or “guardian” heroes. In contrast, the likes of Steel or Riktor couldn’t be any more cookie-cutter and were they to be placed in League of Legends, DOTA 2 or Heroes of the Storm, they would unquestionably be tagged as “Warrior” or “Guardian” and they’d have scaling to match.

The Paragon card system should give players the creative freedom to break out from their respective roles to the degree that if a “Guardian” (ala Steel) wished to pursue damage they could, but they’d never reach the heights of, say, Grux, were the two heroes to invest the same points.

It feels as though Epic could tinker with power, critical hit chance, health and armor until they’re blue in the face, but until they divide their heroes based on kit and scaling, we’ll be going around in circles for many months to come.

Hero Balance

At the moment it’s largely fine but heroes that were strong in Legacy remain strong; that’s partly as a result of the meta but partly because their kits are inherently superior to those around them. This is largely because of hard-crowd control (such as stuns) or knockbacks. In contrast, heroes who are rarely picked - or picked far less - tend to lack these tools. The likes of Iggy & Scorch, Grim.exe, Khaimera and Riktor have fallen massively out of favor because the game has moved on past their kits. In contrast, some heroes that were already strong (Dekker, Howitzer, Rampage) are even more so because of the speed at which they can now attack.

Besides the fact most crowd control lasts too long, there are also far to few tools for actually dealing with it effectively. If we take Heroes of the Storm as example, Blizzard made the decision to significantly reduce stun durations because they found - as Paragon is experiencing - that they were too paramount to compositions. Not only this but they also revisited all support Heroes to ensure that they had access to Cleanse, which can be cast on one player (with a long cooldown) to remove a stun or root and make them Unstoppable (invulnerable to further CC).

The difficulty Epic have is that the lack of talents, default active items (available to all in SMITE) and a removal of Passives severely limits their ability to create such counterplay. Unless they explicitly redesign existing support Heroes so that there’s a passive Cleanse effect on certain abilities and their use, it falls - yet again - to cards and deck building. While I’m largely fine with that, there’s currently only one and even then it’s limited to Growth. Expanding the selection is urgently needed, but is still hampered by limited deck sizes and the fact crowd control in general still lasts far too long.

Iggy & Scorch are truly terrible in Monolith and yet in Legacy and in the previous meta, they were king of the Casters. 

Besides the need to take a much closer look at crowd control and their duration's, a handful of heroes desperately need intervention. My beloved Iggy & Scorch are ill suited to the pace and design of Monolith, while the changes to armor and health have him them hard. Combined with the fact his turrets are near useless, he’s unquestionably “trash tier”. Other heroes such as Riktor desperately need animation revisions to make him snappier while Sparrow, despite seeing recent improvements is still unquestionably dull. I only look at the likes of Artemis in SMITE and pine for something similar.

To find its feet balance updates need to come quicker and serious attention needs to be paid to all heroes far more often.

Final Thoughts

Besides the usual meta and balance discussion, I have to say that the Paragon community in game, right now, is probably one of the worst I’ve ever encountered in a MOBA. I don’t know why but in recent weeks its reached the point where just getting into a match is near impossible due to the number of draft dodges, while the level of abusive behaviour is absolutely staggering. Even now, as I write this, I played a match that lasted 12 minutes because our Twinblast, whom happened to die just once, decided to AFK after hurling abusive messages. Three matches before had another AFKer, another abusive player (who intentionally killed themselves) and a Riktor in my final match of the day who did nothing but call everyone “fucking noobs” while doing nothing but sit under our tier two tower. All in all, I had five matches in a row where one of my team was cancerous to the rest for no reason at all.

If Paragon is to survive, it not only needs a functioning report system (the current implementation is nigh on useless) but there has to be greater consequences for draft dodging and spouting abuse. AFKing because you’ve died once, resulting in a loss for the entire team, because you refuse to play - as far as I’m concerned - should be an instant 7 day ban. Better yet, allow them to play the game after their ban but versus AI only. Unless Epic take a stand against it and soon, there’ll be few players left to even support the game. Ten of my close online friends stopped playing for this reason alone.

As for profanity and general abusiveness towards other players, a harsh stance also has to be taken. I shouldn’t have to feel angry when playing Paragon (pretty much constantly at the moment) because one player is calling out my team mate within a matter of minutes. It’s exhausting to listen to and deal with every single game. In fact, I can’t remember the last pleasant Paragon match I had where my team was amicable (despite playing every day at ranks 1500-1600, according to Agora).

The above is especially a shame because the direction Epic are heading in is the right one and while Paragon is in need of refinement when it comes to its heroes, core mechanics and the pacing of the game, fixing a community is an entirely separate beast. I play a great deal of online games and many of them MOBAs, and yet Paragon and its playerbase is something else entirely. It’s a real shame because its communities (such as its Reddit or its Discord channel) are great places to discuss the game. Unfortunately, the problems start when you get into a match; that’s something I have no solution for.

All in all, Paragon still has heaps of potential and it’s now down to Epic to fine tune it to the point where it can truly compete against the likes of SMITE. If they can implement heroes with greater depth and remedy the lack of hero identity (what’s wrong with tradition monikers?) it’ll find itself in a much better place.

What are your thoughts on Paragon right now? Are you still enjoying it? What do you dislike and how could Epic fix it? Let me know.