Wednesday, August 29, 2018

An Hour with Dragoz

Last night, four of the Potato League members were actually in a group together in Paladins. Gotta give it up to Eboni, Beau, and Lemonz for joining me last night. Thank you, team!

There were some general lessons learned from the exercize of playing a different game -- there are some matchmaking "issues" with this game, there are some definite differences with its mechanics (like not being able to switch heroes mid-combat), we had an AFK thrower, etc. . . . but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I was able to play Dragoz a few times and get a better feel for the character.

Fight or Flight
My first thought was that this character seemed to be a Pharah clone, but what I found out after being easily shot out of the sky a few times was that . . . no . . . this is not a Pharah clone. It's basically putting giant wings on Reinhardt and sending him into the air -- you're going to get shot down, and just from practicing in the shooting gallery, it's easy to see that the hit-boxes on these characters are already exaggerated. The other difference with the flight is that you can't really hover high up like you can with Pharah. The gravity pulls you down with greater force so pulsing flight to regenerate fuel isn't really something you can do. You *will* run out of juice.

This seems to make his flight powers very situational . . . easier to get to high ground, easier to spring up in the air and get behind someone, easier to gain vantage on a situation -- use it sparingly, the other team will shoot you down.

(It was pretty handy for jumping up and grabbing the ball out of the air for the capture the flag matches.)

Mishaps with Missiles
Dragoz has an interesting ability called "Salvo" that allows him to load several missiles in his cannon and fire them in a cone in front of him with auto-aim precision. It's possibly his most powerful attack . . . but you have to load them . . . which takes time. I'm used to being able to spam an attack when its cool-down is done. It seems you can't do that with Dragoz's missiles. You have to stop firing completely, pause, press the missile button, then attack. It's not horrible, but it is "different." And different takes time to get used to.

Need to level him up to get those WYRM Jets and Reign of Terror abilities. Fun!

Ultimate Charging or Charging Ultimate
The ultimate ability is basically a charge forward that autokills a person upon impact. A very valuable lesson from last night was, you aren't invincible while it does the power up animation. I was looking down on a very skilled Viktor player last night and ult'ed on him . . . he just shot me down. So the pro-tip here is that you need to be hidden when you activate this ult. It takes about 2 seconds to fully charge up, which is 2 seconds where you're very vulnerable and unable to do anything else, but when you unleash it . . . somebody is going to die!

A Dash of Splash
Dragoz can spit out a big ball of Magma that does a pretty good bit of splash damage. It is slow moving, however, so it can be easily avoided if you're paying attention. Saving it for up-close encounters may be your best bet . . . but I don't think I'm fully understanding all of its power yet. I think that, while in my time at the practice range, eventually Fire Spit gained a larger AOE. And that's part of the difference with this game. It's more MOBA-like in that you level your powers. Lemonz was mentioning that it felt more like Smite than he had anticipated. I can see that since it's the same company that makes that game.

So there you have it . . . my big beautiful scaley boy is a flying pinata full of missiles.  I'll have to let you know if I can discover more out about him in the future.

Also something to explore in the future are loadouts beyond "default."

Happy Dueling!

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