After extensive testing with friends in 3v3 custom games, I can confirm that both Forge AND Serina need work.
A lot of work.
And by work, I mean debuffing.
Forge’s Y ability is far too powerful. As a Banished leader, dealing with this early game is extremely difficult. It’s basically a rush to get Tech 2 done so you can start building Hunters, but at 160/160 cost per Hunter squad, building them is extremely cost prohibitive at that ~3 minute mark. Forge’s “cost to performance ratio” is through the roof. It’s almost reminiscent of pre-patch Jerome a few short weeks ago. How this made it out of testing, completely confuses me. Even when you get those Hunter squads out, if you are not extremely careful about spreading them out, Forge will hit you with the Y ability and kill them. Attempting to mass produce hunters at this stage in the game leaves you open to literally everything else, especially air, all to just deal with one Hero unit.
Serina’s cryo abilities are WAY TOO MUCH and WAY TOO SOON in the first few minutes of the game. It’s spam spam spam. Having the ability to basically lock down power nodes in a MASSIVE radius at the beginning of the game is insane. It’s incredibly hard to get to the power nodes, let alone the units defending it, at the beginning of the game. This ability makes Atriox’s cloaked mines look worthless, as they are expendable. I think it would be fair to give this particular leader power two level upgrades, with the base ability being a much smaller radius. Serina’s leader powers, especially in the first few minutes of the game, are incredibly broken, and when there are two or more Serinas in the game, which is often the case lately between her and Forge, there are noticeable performance issues with the Xbox One when they are all SPAM SPAM SPAMMING cryo abilities that have the effectiveness of late game abilities within 3 minutes.
I think there is an inherent issue with the people developing patches and deciding what needs to get patched when. Those people are trying to balance too many things at once, instead of addressing common complaints. The complaints get addressed between the patches, which is a start, but what good does THAT do when you break many more things at the same time, creating MORE complaints, and messing up the launch of every new DLC leader(s) that comes out every month?
