I’ve seen a lot of people complain about roar-spamming and I’m surprised this doesn’t seem to have been suggested yet.
It’s way too easy for a decent dragon to sit on a high ground, roar, eat a crusader or two, and repeat. This is especially done on Amphitheatre and Toy Room, and it’s honestly not fun at all to play against in my opinion.
Reducing the frequency at which people can roar wouldn’t throw off the balance of the game and I think it would make playing against people who like to spam roar much more fair. And to those who will say that this would make dragon too hard, even if that’s true, people shouldn’t be forced to be dependent on spamming a single mechanic in order to succeed as dragon.
So, I believe there’s two reasonable options to make roaring more fair:
Increase cooldown for roaring so that it’s less spammable
or
Buff scared knights, such as giving them more stamina when it is forcibly used
My reasoning for the latter is that, unless you anticipate the roar and react immediately, you usually don’t get much distance to flee from the dragon before you run out and become a sitting duck (unless you happen to be roared in a certain spot where you can dodge).
I disagree, mainly because the game feels pretty balanced as is, with no strong need for changes.
I see the roar as a sort of exchange, the dragon can’t move for a bit, and nearby knights are forced to run away. However, for knights not in the roar’s radius, this is their chance to move in on the dragon, who will be left without a backup roar, and is fixed in place until the roar ends.
It can feel unfair if all the knights are caught in the roar, but otherwise, the dragon must balance going after scared knights, and the non-scared knights which are now sprinting towards them. It sort of forces the scared knights to be “the bait”, giving others a chance to take advantage of the dragon while it’s hunting them.
In smaller lobbies it can be a little rough, but that’s sort of the nature of games like these. All in all, I see it as a good tool that disincentivizes knights to linger so close to the dragon. If you keep your distance as a knight, the roar can be more of a blessing than a curse.
EDIT: One last thing, it doesn’t seem to me like something the dragon relies on. It’s a last ditch effort when you’re in a tight spot, and I often see dragons win games without it.
The issue with the idea of ‘baiting’ is that, in my experience anyways, teamwork is rarely a thing. There’s almost always stragglers which can easily be picked off one roar at a time, at which point it’s difficult to be overwhelmed as dragon (or alternatively, everyone ends up in one spot at which point everyone is fair game). Even if you have a couple of knights waiting just outside your range, it’s easy to simply eat one or two of them instead and go back to letting roar recharge while sitting atop a giant stack of crates/a pillar/giant legos.
I don’t see roaring as an exchange, the dragon being unable to move during the roar isn’t an equivalent downside to any crusaders within range being rendered defenseless. Of course, if you decide to go and roar near a bunch of crusaders with an obvious height advantage you’re going to have a bad time. But, if you’re on high ground, you still have complete control over the situation.
The only map where I don’t see these points being applicable is throne room but that’s a notoriously crusader-sided map in full games.
Also, I worded my point about reliance badly. I think that roaring seems to be a crutch if you don’t have the experience to know how to take 1-on-1 battles without it. I try to never use roaring for easy kills, and can win dragon rounds often without roar kills, but I spammed the hell out of it when I was learning how to play and could win rounds fairly easily while barely knowing what I was doing. Just sat in a corner on top of something and roared anyone who approached.
Roaring is a great tool for saving your own ass but it really shouldn’t be the main method in which people get kills in my opinion.
I don’t have too much to say beyond my original post, and I’m generally not the type to think super technically about these things. Like I said, I’ve never gotten the impression that one side has any particular advantage, or that one map favours one side better, etc. So all of this is just about how it feels to play for me.
The main thing for me, is that if I’m playing against a dragon that keeps roaring, all I need to do is just find a spot with similar height to the dragon’s, wait for them to roar, then rush them while they’re busy with others. LC is inherently a team game, so there’s bound to be some reliance on others, but in my experience, that window where the dragon is chasing after scared knights is quite exploitable.
I agree that the game is pretty balanced. I don’t see this as a game-breaking problem, but rather something that could be changed to improve the game. Making roar cooldown 1.25-1.5x its current amount I feel would improve the game without drastically changing the approach to playing dragon. It just feels too spammable to me the way it is right now, but of course that’s just my opinion.
I might be in a small minority in how I feel about roaring but I wanted to express what I thought about it. If most people feel it should not be changed then it’s ultimately up to them.
I don’t want the cooldown to be increased, but I think a better change would be to have a limit for how many times you can roar each round.
I think there would be a lot more strategy involved to being a dragon if you could only roar 3 or so times each round. A limit would be a better way to stop dragons from spamming roar, too, since you would have to choose the best time to roar instead of just roaring every time you had the chance to.