Pre-Emptive Strike on Sealed Deck

My suggestion is pretty simple:

Make sure that the sealed deck format does not have maps involving shrine capping or anything similar. Shrine capping is a very unpopular format of gameplay, and promotes really uninspired and dull gameplay. Hero battles turned into a lamefest because of this, and I really don't want to see this new format ruined because of this.

I only worry because they are reusing the HB maps. I'm hoping the modifications that they make to it involve the removal of the capping shrines, or at least place a lesser importance on capping them (Shrines don't count for any points, they have weaker effects etc).

Shrine capping has been to seem more of a success that is actually should have been because of the popularity AB saw in the year after it was first released. AB is very causal because you're playing with random teams against other random teams, however, if you were able to make full 12-man co-ordinated teams, the flaws would readily show themselves.

Tanks and shadowsteps would become outrageously overplayed, with teams of pure monks or defensive characters just nesting on the caps they wanted and waiting the game out. The argument of "find a counter" doesn't work because a team with variety in mind simply can't kill a group of monks with no consideration for attack power.

While I strongly believe Sealed Deck should not simply be annihilation or kill count, and I don't think rotating objectives would be best of the format, there should be some creative secondary objective that mixes things up. Obelisk Flagstand is one option, so are shrines with certain perks. The tiebreaker definitely needs to be thought through carefully, and a time limit on each match is a necessity.

In 4v4, what's the value of splitting? Should it be encouraged?

I get if you just "dont like" shrine capping as a mechanic, but it works pretty well in costume brawl. That's because you can't put together builds to properly abuse the format.

Sealed deck is like that 90% of the way, recall is just one of a billion assassin skills and you'll be lucky to get more than one copy, and frankly you're doing well if you can even put together one decent healer build let alone two. Sealed builds rarely lend themselves to the kind of defensive boreways that you can afford in regular matches, simply because on average you get so few defensive skills.

One thing that makes costume brawl work though is that every class has a relatively self-sufficient build. Unless things like heal sig and troll unguent are wildcards, this could be a big issue.

Two words:

Costume Brawl.

I understand that it worked alright in Costume Brawl, but I really did hate the focus on capping shrines in HB. If the game does focus on capping shrines, then skill choices are going to be vastly different, leading to overly defensive builds purely designed to hold shrines. Yes I understand the skill selection is random, but that doesn't change what will happen.

I would much prefer a straight battle than running around capping shrines.

Yes, it does. Have you done much sealed deck? In an 8-player GvG deck you can often only manage 1.5 healers, almost zero off-monk defense, and that's WITH a wildcard per character. In 4-player decks w/out wildcards you end up with situations where your primary heal is Watchful Healing, or you are trying to keep people up with infuse health + generous was tsungrai combo. There's 40-some attribute lines and only 4 of them do healing, so the outcome isn't surpising.

If you prefer annhilation that's cool, and it's true that skill choices there will differ compared to shrine capping. But super defense is not going to be a viable strategy in most pools regardless of format, and if you try to force it, you're likely to just get squashed fast by the stronger offensive options.

Agreed with this, if it was exact same as TA is now, but with sealed deck, it would be a huge success

Linsey mentions some things here about what Sealed Deck will be like, and one thing she mentions is something like, "You don't know what sort of skill pack you're gonna get, you don't know what skill set you're gonna get to work with..." which makes it seem to me like there are predetermined skill sets which are given out at random.

Sounds to me that with enough time, all of those sets will be sorted through and team combinations from them will show up on PvX. Hopefully, the skill selection and availability is a little more randomized.