Sorta Legend League Titan Report (Aether Rant)

Posted this to Reddit too, but was interested in what you guys had to say about it:

So I initially wanted to do a rant post about one of my biggest issues in War Robots (Aether) but then I decided that it’d be good to have some backing to my rant.

I surveyed the top 100 iOS players and found a grand total of 8 titans that were not Aether. 5 Luchador, 2 Indra, 1 Minos, and surprisingly didn’t see any Sirius in anyone’s main hangar (yet). Salute to those not using Aether in legend league, btw!

Here’s a pie chart if you like: imgur.com/a/pX4OnAn

But it’s even more depressing when you look at it in spreadsheet form: imgur.com/a/GuR2NCm 

With that being said, here is my incredibly long and detailed Aether rant. I don’t expect anyone to read this part, I’m honestly just blowing off steam here.

TLDR: Aether is a must have titan that kills anything else with little to no skill required and it’s virtually impossible to be competitive without one.

Aether is probably one of the worst metas to have ever happened in war robots. I have lived through just about every single War Robots meta (playing for 7 years) and never has it been as impossible to kill the max meta players when you are not one yourself. Even in some of the most hated previous metas, you COULD catch the enemies while they were vulnerable, but Aether is NEVER vulnerable. A good example is a really old video on my YouTube channel during a comparable titan meta: the Ming meta. This screenshot: imgur.com/a/45ooywb is taken from a game I won. Ming had weaknesses, you could get around it and pull through, but this is not the case for Aether.

Aether offers no strategy, no counterplay, nothing other than “purchase and max out an Aether of your own” to defeat it. I seethe when they start to spawn in, and the most fun games nowadays are the 1 out of 100 games where there’s a diverse cast of titans doing battle instead of just Aether Aether Aether.

When compared to Aether, every other titan in the game is a handicap to the team. All games in champions league are decided by who has the most Aethers on their team. Players spawn in one robot, charge up their Aether, and spend nearly the rest of the game in that one titan.

Aether requires no activation of any areas of your brain evolved more recently than the amygdala in order to dominate. This thing is an invincible god titan no matter what the person in the cockpit does. You could give this titan to someone who has never played the game before, as long as the enemies don’t have one, they will win.

A few days ago I played a game where we were dominating the enemy for the first half, and then were getting spawn raided in the second. I’ll give you one guess as to what may have happened that turned the tides.

I have two separate filmed occasions - and two more I can remember but didn’t film - where an Aether blew all of its firepower into my Fafnir’s shield and was not punished for it. Why? Because it tanked all my Fafnir’s damage and one shotted me as soon as the shield went down, so my Beak couldn’t activate stealth. Even when im lucky enough that it does activate stealth, or in the past, mild absorber, the Aether sits there and waits it out (tanking the bajillion damage per second from my charged up gun), and then one-shots me after. 

When an Aether targets your non-Aether, it’s not a matter of if you will die, it’s a matter of when. This thing has no drawbacks, it’s invincible, it’s fast, it will fly in a straight line towards you and you’ll be down in seconds.

Really, the most effective way I have found to kill Aethers is to use my Ao Ming as bait. If i tried to shoot them down myself, it takes like 30 seconds of concentrated fire (that is, if they aren’t shooting back for some reason).

It’s much more effective to have an Aether use all its speed boosts to fly to my Ming and shoot it down, and then drop in the middle of the open and get shot down by a blue Aether. This is what chess players call a “positive trade.”

Anyway, In game balance, something that excels in one area must perform poorly in another. There is nothing Aether can’t do, and nothing that non-Aethers can do that Aether can’t do better.

Well, that’s the end of the rant: Here’s where I do something useful and propose a solution. Obviously, nerf Aether, but don’t murder it! I might hate this bot, but if it were balanced I’d like it. As is, it’s just a 1:1 Murometz clone but better. Make it a glass cannon, it can’t be an all in one tank and ambusher, and for gods sake reduce the damage on those dang instakill cannons! This, alongside some buffs for older titans could be wrapped up as a nice titan rework and make a much more diverse meta with much less annoying OP titans.