Star Guardian Invasion - My impressions
I'll start off with the tl;dr version of the whole post: The game mode flat-out sucks because it's extremely unbalanced. It needs a LOT of balancing. The rewards aren't worth the time wasted.
I've noticed a couple of things (coming from someone who spent some time away from League and has returned, on a new account because I forgot the logins for my old account) about this new gamemode. Right now, it is lacking in a LOT of aspects that make PvE games good, but excelling in a LOT of aspects that make a PvE game bad. I've heard similar things from others who I have been paired up with. What I found were a good chunk of things in here that make Star Guardian a terrible gamemode, and underneath those observations are suggestions on how I (personally think) would improve it in case Riot decides to pull this out again.
1: Gold generation This is the most obvious one I could find: The lack of gold generation makes it "difficult" (I'm using the term extremely loosely) to play. This is because along with some items that have been taken out of the game (e.g. Runaan's), there isn't enough gold to actually get a decent build to last a while. It forces players to either look towards a build that has been confirmed to be decent in the game, rather than actually having to experiment and pretty much have fun.
Solution: Gold generation. That's pretty much it. You get a certain amount after each round, and it's honestly not enough. There's only one chance to buy, and with the gold given, the event is much more difficult than it actually is (The game itself isn't even that hard, but there are a lot of handicaps that force the game to be hard).
2: Death Yeah, dying is supposed to happen, awesome. It means someone "messed up", and they paid for it. However, when someone dies, and then is revived, only to die less than a quarter of a second later? Yeah, that's just bad. Not even a chance to fight back, and they're already gone. Given that mob waves (I'm addressing this later) tend to chase one player more often than not, if that one player is the last one alive and is desperately trying to revive their teammates, it doesn't make any sense that the teammate that they revived immediately melts after reviving. It takes 2 seconds to revive them, and the player that is recently revived is pretty much a liability rather than an asset because the player that is still alive wasted their time (as well as the revived player's time) due to death pretty much occurring less than one second after revival.
Solution: A small gap of invulnerability. I don't consider that half a second of invulnerability to be actually helpful, especially when the entire mob is pretty much rushing you down after reviving. 3 seconds, maybe 4 seconds would be enough to get away from the mob and then continue helping out. Because, really, you're revived at the cost of the person who revived you's health, and it's gone to waste.
3: Mob waves/The mob itself I get it, Riot is definitely going for the Sailor Moon-esque, anime magical girl route where they save a city from monsters. Great reference, I like it. Mob waves are fun too, since it allows people to buckle down and try and kill high value targets before going wild. The AI, however, is little to be desired. In a nutshell, the AI patterning is bad. Along with point number 2 that death is way to easy to happen because of the lack of safety net available, the AI patterning is extremely punishing towards players who just revived. That section of the game where the safety bubble moves while hordes of monsters come from the front and from behind, and the player just died? Their teammate revives them, and then the Skarner AI immediately pulls them out of the bubble, then dies again, while the bubble moves on. The team is now down 1 player because the AI seems to focus recently revived players more often than players who are attacking them.
Also, let's not forget to address that the mobs (at least, the champion based ones) are bullet sponges. They literally will soak up all the bullets and still manage to destroy the team (especially the final boss). Along with global attacks, the mobs, from what I've seen, are more of a hassle to deal with rather than actually fun.
Solution: Work on the AI. If they're being attacked by someone who does massive amounts of damage, they shouldn't be attacking a player who just recently revived. I'd assume that any AI that is being attacked would retaliate to preserve themselves rather than screwing over the newly revived player. Also, make the mobs less of Destiny bullet sponges and more fair, like decrease health or armor, and increase movement speed in return, or something. Everyone criticized Bungie for the bullet sponges in Destiny, and for good reason.
4: The skill curve Straight to the point, the curve is bad. The first few stages are absurdly easy, and does not much brain power to deal with. The curve doesn't really increase in difficulty until the very end, when you're going against the final boss. By that time, the curve goes from barely increasing, or even flatlined, to a 90 degree curve. If the mobs weren't bad enough, you have to deal with the final boss, who not only releases more mobs on you, but it also has a global attack that can be spammed, is a bullet sponge, is extremely quick, and hits like a truck. Prior to that, there really is no mob or mini boss in previous sections of the gamemode that was on that level of BS. I've seen and been in organized teams that have breezed through the entire gamemode until the very end, and the most common complaint that I have seen is that the final boss skill curve is absolute BS and the previous sections don't prepare the team or players for that.
Solution: Reduce the boss's speed, damage, mob output, limit the global attacks, or make the skill curve of the gamemode increase over the sections. The gamemode is long, and it's honestly a waste of everyone's time if all the work they did up to the boss is pretty much eliminated because the gamemode didn't prepare them for that monstrosity.
These are just some of the ones I noticed right off the bat that makes the gamemode, in blunt terms, terrible. I love siege mode games, and I definitely love games that are difficult, but Star Guardian Invasion just isn't that: It's definitely a siege type game, but the game at its base isn't overly difficult. What makes the game difficult is the amount of balance that the gamemode lacks. It limits you on gold, and to pair it along with that, the mob AI tends to attack more vulnerable players who were just revived over the players who are trying to kill them through their bullet sponge skin, and the skill curve of the gamemode isn't that great either.
The gamemode does need a lot of rework, since it does have a lot of potential to be as fun as Doom Bots, but right now, I haven't really seen people giving glowing reviews of the whole thing. The solutions I provided aren't too specific, so others can chime in and add, or take out parts of it. The rewards that people can get in the game aren't worth the time being wasted playing the game.
