A long time ago I talked about tier lists, what they meant, didn’t mean, and how they affected competition. This spawned some good discussion in a bunch of different directions and it was great to hear all your perspectives on this game and others. Greetings Dragon Ballers, Didier here with what I hope will be a large helping of brain food.
Point blank, I love putting numbers to things. Data sets seem to light the fires of my passionate loins. All of the comments from the aforementioned article got my wheels turning. What did the power level breakdown actually look like? Did the Double Power Rule really skew the environment? I set out to find these answers. But why stop there? If you know anything about me, I often take things much too far. It’s a blessing I’m married.
What I did
So I hear you guys like graphs. Boy you’re in for a treat! I decided to run some statistics on level one main personality levels. In order to begin, a population must be defined. It’s where you group your data set, make any assumptions, and where it’s easiest to introduce a bias.
Population Definition: “Level one personalities with the ability to be a Main Personality set that either has high usability or brings a unique personality power”
I looked over every personality in the current DBZ game, marking those that fit this population definition and got a total of 102 personalities! To me this was comprehensive enough to get a good feel for how trends were; adding/removing a few won’t change the results that much.
I then built a spreadsheet of these personalities’ power levels from one to max and what bracket on the PAT they were in. I compared each personality against one another with various first turn rules and ran numbers for each scenario with over 10,000 data points each. Needless to say, I have no life.
Beatdown or Control?
One thing that I think is very important is how these first turn rules affect the meta game overall. Having the first turn based on power translates into strong versus weak. You may tend to think stronger personalities are used in beatdown, but several weak personalities like Goku, the Puppet are wonderful for beatdown while some strong personalities like Majin Buu Defensive HT are great for control. Contradictions aside, if we want to find a definitive answer to this we can use our data. So what would be the main factor in a personality’s preferred deck type? The main thing that changes: Their powers.
Definition of a Beatdown Personality: Has a power that is an attack, draws cards, or gains anger/levels
Definition of a Control Personality: Has a power that is defensive or manipulates either player’s hand, field, or life deck.
I ran through my population again and categorized each personality into beatdown and/or control. I did have some overlap and made personalities considered both control and beatdown (like Android 18). Doing this allowed me to take a population power level average:
Beatdown Average Power Level: ~845,000
Control Average Power Level: ~425,000
That’s convenient…looks like control is about half that of beatdown. Double Power Rule hmmm?? This is good enough for me to state that control personalities are in general weaker in power level than beatdown personalities.
The Removal of the DPR
It is no secret that the Double Power Rule being removed changed a lot about this game. Strong characters became so much more desirable because of not being a guaranteed second turn, while weaker characters like Master Roshi took a hit as they no longer had the first turn to prepare. So given that control characters are generally low in power level and beatdown characters are generally high, we can say that the removal of the DPR was a nerf to control and a buff to beatdown. There was a reason it was removed right? You bet there was.
The above graph is a histogram; a way to represent how data is distributed across a population. As you can see three groups inside the population emerge. Weak personalities making up 25% of the total population (TP) but going first against 75-95%, Medium personalities making up 13% and going first against 50-60%, and Strong Personalities making up 55% and going first against 0-20%.
See the problem? You have a select number of personalities that will be close to a guaranteed first turn against most of the total population while the majority is too strong to make use of the DPR. So even though many characters have personality powers that are unique, fun, and fuel useful decks, they become obsolete when considering personalities with a guaranteed first turn.
This separation of personalities comes from how power levels changed drastically over time in the series. Also, my population is defined as what could possibly be used in the current environment which didn’t exist until now. In staring at my data, I saw these groups emerge in terms of power level:
1- 30,000
200,000 – 800,000
1,400,000 – 1,800,000
Majin Buu
Interesting how the current PAT chart compares to this level one breakdown.
It’s Time to Go Wild!
So it has been decided that personalities in the D bracket will go second always. Right now, this is limited to Majin Buu and Janemba, translating to them going second against 97% of the population. Only the Kai’s and those two risk going second. But what alternatives do we have? A triple power rule?!? No. I’ve looked at the data for all the rules I could think of. Rules based on PL chart brackets, ten above to one above zero. It didn’t look pretty. Did Buu get what he deserved? I don’t know honestly, he is no longer a “sit on Evil Buu L1” personality that’s for sure.
A part of me feels the random first turn is a hard buff to beatdown. If stronger personalities gain the advantage of more damage (and taking less damage), it was okay because weak ones went first. I’m not saying this was fair, but there was a check and balance. Right now weak guys get nothing. Blizzard had an interesting solution in giving ‘The Coin’ to the second player. Does DBZ need a second turn advantage? Start with a card in your hand? Going back to our roots and redefining the PAT, then building a rule off that is another option. Doing this with a (semi-) stagnant game makes sense. But that’s crazy! Damn right it is. It’s so crazy, it just might work
I think a decent compromise would be thatthe play who goes first can not declare combat on their first turn, or making it so no player can declare combat on their first turn of the game.
Great Article. Would Read Again. I loves me some stats.
As far as “The Coin”, it actually doesn’t solve the problem in HS that it was intended to try and fix. In HS, it’s not who goes first, it’s who gets a tempo of X or above first. The Coin just allows the second player a chance to gain that tempo if the first player did not set his tempo on his turn before. It doesn’t actually solve the issue of tempo being super duper duper strong in HS.
Chippy
Handloc
I have all but completely stopped playing HS for this reason. It’s not that the game takes no skill, you need to command and keep a lead at all stages of the game in order to win, but the tempo you talk of is the core of this game and it’s such a basic idea that I couldn’t stand it anymore.
That being said, a part of me truly believes the second turn player needs something to compensate for ‘first turn blowup’. I’m not sure about Shannon’s suggestion, since it makes who goes first essentially useless. Was thinking either the second player starts with a card in their hand or starts at full power stages. Anything really just to lessen the impact of being entered on first turn.
It might not have changed the focus on tempo, but it did lower the impact of going first. Obviously stuff like this can change to at least some degree based on the current meta, but they posted before and after stats for either side of the introduction of the coin (note the whole time the second player had +1 card) and going first went from something like 70% win to 55% win. Though the coin might not be the solution dbz should use, I do think something besides (probably instead of?) the D power rule is needed, though it certainly fixes the evil buu problem handily.
Interesting, I didn’t know the coin introduction stats. My only problem with the coin is that it is more advantageous for some classes than others, namely Rouge. Otherwise I thought it was a great example on the way the format changes when you move from physical cards to digital ones. The tricks you can do are endless. Makes everyone want to make one 😛
It definitely did solve that Buu problem lol. Too much so in my opinion. With how powerful decks can be on the first turn, its easy to extrapolate how devastating always going second is. However, The 5 stages he lost on his Evil Buu power probably hurt the personality the most.
Itd be hard to come up with something for the 2nd player. Maybe some rule that if player 1 enters 1st turn player 2 gets to look at the top 6-10 cards and pick any 3 and then shuffle afterwards. Gives 2nd player a chance to defend themselves.
i agree about heartstone they gave too much adv to 2nd player, i always hated going 1st in that game.
I really like the idea of a second player “Roshi Rule.” I think 6 would be enough to balance it out, as opposed to an extra card, that may well just end up being another non-combat you can’t use.
I like this idea. Like you said, I would want to give the player the Roshi (6 is enough) rule only if entered into combat by the player who wins initiative on his first turn.
It’s not guaranteed and cannot be relied on so it has no impact on deck building. I would prefer this or something similar over anything that is added to the game’s core.
Make entering first turn a harder decision.
I agree it does need some balancing. It’s easy, for example Saiyan or Namekian beats, to go first and enter on the second player with a hand of 5 or more right off the bat and score a solid lead.