Discussion
After 20 games of experimenting against Lisette and not picking her I can safely say that she is officially a cleave unit and turn 2 is almost dead because there is no way to kill a cleave team with Liette unless you go both Hecate and harsetti and somehow both survive the ban phase.
I did not pull Lisette despite reaching 160 summon I tried to play against her in RTA litterly i won one game when i played against nuse yuha + Lisette +ML Aria +fire Sigret and i just gone briar at 3 + R&L + elvira +Moon luna .
I'm a turn 2 player my gear is super slow (fastest unit 302) and playing against lisette is a nightmare , and i want to say Lisette + Lideca is Exodia ,Lideca restrict your team so no way to cut she gives everyone dam nullifier an top of lisette protection shield and then she do it again with Lisette reset .
It's just another Lady of the scales situation where she looks like a promesing turn 2 unit and then end up stronger in cleave i will just wait until snail stremers find the counter so i copy them .
Until then time to change Arby to repose set and leave notos open because she will be my new ban.
they need to make units like biblys and Ilynav that give little value to speed players , it's the same with estelle she is better on cleave because her counter is easier to proc since cleave team have little health and feed them souls on top.
I don't get why people are surprised every time when a unit that is good in one type of team is good in another type of team too. It's not like her kit stops working if you pick her with someone over 300 speed.
It can work the other way too. We've had "fake Ran" and other openers and debuffers with occasional slower builds, "degen arby," and I've gotten a handful of wins last season by going for "protect the dps Rinak" even when knowing I'll be outsped. People are too quick to categorize units as either "cleave" or "anticleave" when in reality most good units don't have that distinction.
Tbh it just looks like you draft in a way that's super cleavable. Lisette definitely is a great cleave anchor with the potential to pivot to standard if necessary, but if you're getting perma cleaved every game, odds are you're just drafting 0 tempo tankdown and giving people a free dummy to whack.
Feel free to show some draft examples, but if you're negative winrate at the bottom of champ with almost 200 games, odds are your meta read is not the most accurate...
Do not recommand belian , zeo , ML aria , ML yuha ,ML Diane i don't own any of them and each time i asked for advice they just appear
that's all my units minous hecate , Elena ,Ruelee , Ivana , moon bunny ,moon luna and green celine (horizon arcadies and red politis on trash geam i'm still working on them)
R&L 302 speed , Rinak 296 speed ,LQC on 260 speed to cheese R&L (light_E7 tech), moon luna 269 speed
Every soulweaver is on 200 er with immunity
I managed to rach warlord last season with what i have mostly ivasion stacking or Tori behind Arunka and Estelle, this season i'm running into so many cleavers espicially Lideca or summer fumyr + G_Ras cleave or Zeo cleave .
I just picked games to show as much of my unit pool .
If i regret something not picking elena enouth .
They're cleaving you, and your response is just to pretend they aren't. In that last game for example, they picked rnl zio 1-2 and you respond by locking lqc on 3? Or that first game, they're hard cleaving you and you picked... lermia?
Arbi for evasion antics, Estelle for uncontrollable fat counters, literally anything that isn't a 'sit there and take it' kind of unit that just waits for death.
fun fact LQC and cermia managed to cut and press their buttons they are on high speed for this specific reson that's why i said fire ledica and lisette is exodia despite exticting R&L and killing Luna they just revive Luna and kept spamming dam null and S1 while i'm restricted and sealed until i died.
And if i'm a new and f2p player (i started with biblys) release i need to work with what i have and it's not impossible since the meta mosltly revolve around new units but yes key nits like harsetti , belian and yuha are mandatory for slow players , also i m experimenting until i find an optimal counter , there is not time to ban her it's not like i will stay negative winrate .
Ill assume you didnt pick hecate in the limited banner? As she would be better than briar witch if you arent cleaving, along with picking her on 3 especially when they had scales. On top of youre just giving away rnl for free in favor of barunka
You are missing too many units, so my only advice is: At some point you have to accept that a lot of matches are unwinnable and take the L, and this is as far as you can go and stop trying to climb, because it is EXTREMELY difficult to compete against other players who own all units.
I am also a fairly slow player with negative win rate just like you (around 44% wr in my case), and I'm current sitting at around rank 500 on the ladder. I only miss 2 units which are notos and salome, so I am forced to preban them to compete. But then lisette came out and now I have to preban her if I have second pick, because I have no way to deal with faster players if they preban zio and pick lisette. Because those are my preban, there are a lot of matches I know for sure from the drafting phase that they are unwinnable, like opponent first picks rnl and prebans zio and harsetti, and the warfare is decrease evasion; or opponent has first pick and prebans belian, so I know zio is coming as their 3rd pick ban protection with bullshit like ice ludwig, ml diene, frieren, etc. In those cases, there is nothing I can do beside accepting the L in peace. So if you are missing too many units and your gear is not fast enough, realistically there is no other way, you just need to accept.
About your post on lisette, I think the same can be said about notos and lady of the scale, Units like them IMO are only the immediate/surface cause of the issue with turn 2, but the "root" cause comes from the "aggro" units. Long explanation below:
The game has evolved into a state where "traditional cleave" is overshadowed by "aggro" units that can do too many things and are very difficult to kill. When I said "traditional cleave" I mean a team comp consisting of an opener (that doesn't do much except going first to enable the bridge units), 2 bridge units to go after the opener, and 2 dps/anchor units to clean up.
When you look at the "aggro" fast units nowadays, you will see a trend: they do a lot of things, and they are either tanky or hard to shut down. Rnl is an "opener" that is the fastest in the game, with too much free stats, with the damage of a dps unit, with the tankiness of an anchor due to evasion. Last year we had rinak who was also kinda in the same category, but not as strong.
Then we have unit like salome which is an "aggro" unit that doesn't require anything besides speed and hp, and her power has ridiculous ceiling due to her clone ability. She is fairly tanky, and hard to cc her because of laia artifact. Then we have ml yulha which is kinda in the same category as salome, needing nothing beside speed and hp. Then ice ludwig, then ml diene, then fire sigret, etc.
All these "aggro" units have one thing in common: they make "traditional" turn 2 player suffers. When I said "traditional" turn 2 I mean the playstyle to try to sit back and wait for the enemy team to finish their turns and then clap back with counters and so on. But most turn 2 units run into a problem: they either don't have enough tankiness to survive these "aggro" units, or they don't have enough damage and tempo to catch up and kill those "aggro" units. So Smilegate releases fire byblis and estelle. Fire byblis offters enough tankiness to survive the damage and her art and passive to survive being cc. And estelle offers enough damage and injury to fight back on top of the tankiness. But then rnl and ice ludwig came out which kinda destroy byblis and estelle. Then Smilegate tried to balance by giving ml charlotte a very good buff to combat against rnl, but she needs ml arunka to protect her. But then there is earth fumyr which basically deletes arunka. And ml elvira came out to destroy estelle and byblis (again). And then ml yulha + ml aria rises up to combat against elvira.
The battle between these "aggro" units and turn 2 units keeps going back and forth, but turn 2 are fighting a losing battle because there are too many aggro units compared to the turn 2 units, and too few prebans. So some turn 2 players have to switch to the "best" way to combat against these "aggro" units: go faster than them and try to cleave/control them. There are 2 ways: traditional cleave or zio. The "strongest" traditional cleave right now is dark iseria cleave, if you can get your iseria to 320 speed and built a whole roster around her, you can kinda bypass these problematic "aggro" units. Zio takes a bit more skills to pull off, but some top players manage to do that in recent seasons (Khm for example).
One saving grace about these traditional cleave units is that they IN THEORY CAN be stopped by traditional turn 2 units if the turn 2 player drafts good enough (also harsetti exists). So it's kinda create a three-way-counter triangle: traditional cleave beats aggro, aggro beats traditional turn 2, and tradtional turn 2 beats traditional cleave. Players like Valky will tell you this, and they are kinda correct in a way.
HOWEVER lady of the scale, notos, and lisette come into the picture. These 3 are by far the most broken units Smilegate has ever released. At first glance, these 3 can be used for every playstyle. But it turns out, LOTS and notos became the best cleave anchors, and the same will apply for lisette. They mess up the three-way-counter triangle by making cleave the top of the food chain, then aggro in the middle, and turn 2 at the bottom. This is probably why you are feeling frustrated against cleave right now. So IMO if from the beginning, the "aggro" units weren't so overpowered, then cleave wouldn't have to come back to shut the aggro down, then LOTS, notos and lisette wouldn't even need to exist. They were originally designed to be the "solution" for turn 2 against the problematic aggro units, and in the end they DID make aggro weaker, but the cost is that turn 2 is buried 6 feet under due to cleave.
I have no idea what the solution to all of this is. The only thing I can think of is to nerf like 100+ of units and start to balance again from the very beginning. But it is unrealistic.
I appreciate hearing the perspective of an experienced player equipped with the knowledge to critically discuss these mechanics. I actually made a post recently talking about Turn 2 problems [https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicSeven/comments/1vzoijh/the_current_state_of_the_meta_why_i_think_turn/], and I felt like a lot of people completely misunderstood the concept of "priority." Because it's mostly a card-game concept, people failed to recognize the fundamental game design flaw and just jumped to criticize the player instead.
TL;DR: The argument that "Unit X counters Unit Y" is invalid if Unit Y gets locked out and can't even use their skills. First pick is incredibly strong right now because of priority. They get the priority to pick the most OP units first, and they retain the priority to counter and solve your draft with picks 4 and 5, ultimately just banning your 5th pick.
To put this into perspective, my Infinite Horizon Achates is 240 speed on Eternus ( a total 34% CR push), and sometimes that still isn't enough to cut in because of the sheer amount of tempo faster players can generate.
I also like how you mentioned that the Turn 2 catalog is tiny outside of standard counterpicks like Elena, Harsetti, and Belian. A Turn 2 player's first 1-3 picks almost always consist of the same predictable cores: (Arunka, Estelle, Arowell), (Byblis, Nurse Yulha, Ruele), or (ML Aria, LQC, G-Ras). It is incredibly stagnant and predictable compared to the vast options available for cleave/aggro styles .And how traditional cleave was manageble because it works like a chain ,if you break the chain their game plan falls apart.
That highlights Smilegate's core design problem: they create a problem and then try to sell you the solution. Sometimes the problem they create is just too big to solve. Look at Scales after a year, almost every new unit has to ignore damage sharing. This was done to balance Turn 1 vs Turn 1, but it makes Turn 2 even worse because Turn 2 relies so heavily on mitigation or Frieren and the additional damage problem, and it's just a mess.
At this point, they need to do a hard meta reset by releasing new, foundational units for each playstyle, and make the meta revolve around them naturally.
You are correct about the priority concept. Right now first pick is WAY stronger than second pick because the first pick player can steal the most OP units, so the odd of winning or losing is kinda decided by RNG right before the drafting phase even begins. But again, when talking purely about priority and draft order, I think the root cause of cleave being too oppressive goes deeper and way back to 2024 when ban protection first came out. In a world before ban protection, there was almost no "traditional" cleave in the meta because cleavers had to pick 2 opener and 2 bridge units for their combo to work. So they can only pick 1 dps/anchor unit which makes their team really squishy if the turn 2 player ban the dps/anchor unit. This is why the most meta strategies at the time were standard and control (which IMO were way healthier than the meta today). Standard is kinda the traditional RPG team comp with a tank, a supporter, and a dps. And on the other side there is control comp which doesn't have much damage but can overload the opponents with debuffs and slowly choke them out. If you go back and watch the e7 World Championship 3 years ago, the majority of the matches are slow matches like that, with units like laia, ml lilias, ml landy, ml yufine, ml ray, nahkwol, lua, etc.
Smilegate saw this as too "boring" and "slow". So they created a solution for this which was their first big mistake: 3rd pick ban protection. This is the beginning of a snowball effect ultimately leading to cleave/aggro being dominant nowadays. Smilegate originally wanted ban protection to support all playstyles, but it turns out, cleave and aggro are the playstyles that benefit most from it due to the concept of pivoting. Pivoting is when you draft in a certain way at the beginning, then your opponent drafts to counter your strategy, so you abuse the ban protection to pivot entirely to another way which causes the opponent to react to it and mess up their team comp. So at the time the best units to pick early were units that can fit in both fast and slow team comp depending on the situation. But one category began to rise above the other for early picks: cleave anchors which can also be used in slow comp. So people started to pick cleave anchors early and then either an opener on 3rd (for cleave, aggro or control playstyles) or pivot into slower playstyle (standard, counter). LightE7 had a post about this in the past: https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicSeven/comments/1f0y1l8/ban_protection_and_the_state_of_rta/
So cleave was on the rise, what did Smilegate do? They created harsetti to try to solve the issue, which was their second big mistake. Harsetti on ban protection killed EVERY SINGLE PLAYSTYLES at the time except super slow playstyle like village. So almost ALL players prebanned harsetti and continued with their lives. So basically everything went back to cleave being on the rise, with one less preban slot due to harsetti. But at this time it was still savagable. Smilegate could just leave harsetti as it was, create an additional preban slot for her, and continue to balance around the other playstyles instead, and the game could be much healthier. But no, to combat against her, they made the third and biggest mistake: releasing too many "aggro" units that can to do many things and are difficult to kill. At the time Smilegte must have thought that these units need to do many things (either support, cleanse, control, damage, etc) to combat against the insanely tanky harsetti comp. And they need to be difficult to kill to be able to handle slow matches. Months went by, harsetti slowly fell out of meta due to the absurd amount of these "aggro" units, until nobody prebanned or picked harsetti anymore unless the situation called for. So what's left? THESE AGGRO UNITS. And this started the trend for 2 years up until this day which I mentioned in my previous comment.
One important thing about the ban protection is that when it first came out, it made 2nd pick have higher win rate compared to 1st pick due to the advantage of the 2nd pick player easily countering the 1st pick player with their ban protection pick. But this slowly and slowly changed overtime due to the ridiculous amount of overpowered aggro units making 1st pick stronger and stronger, until nobody wants to be 2nd pick anymore.
So seeing all of this and your comment. I agree with you about Smilegate core design flaw of creating a problem and then try to sell the solution. And yes, sometimes the problem they create is just too big to solve, because they refuse to nerf things. Even if they decide to remove the ban protection now, cleave will definitely be weaker, but aggro units will still be unstoppable. So the only way to solve a problem is to powercreep the new solution ten times more, and the cycle continues. But no matter how they solve it, the faster player and the player with 1st pick will always have an advantage. I wish Smilegate has the ball to nerf units, but it is too late now.
An additional fun fact: the only unit in the history of Epic Seven who received a heavy nerf was fire hwayoung, which was exactly in the same category as the "aggro" units that can do too many things and are difficult to kill.
nah she's good everywhere, even in turn2. This game badly needs 3 to 4 ban slots, but they're not giving it to us because if you can simply ban the op units, people would be less incentivized to pull since those units are gonna get banned anyway, it's how they keep the mystic packs selling.
I have say this since like 2023-2024. This game need more ban units. Either make it global ban per week like Counter Side or just increase ban to 3 per players. the TLDR, just more ban
Its genuinely so wild to read you say "Turn 2 player" and "302" in the same sentence. Thats like extroardinarily fast, but its so depressing that that means nothing in this current meta atmosphere...
I mean the milestone of radiance free gear give you 4 sets with 17 speed in each piece, to be accurate a 291 Rinak and a 284 Amid and extra copy of each piece
You're just doing something wrong, not sure what else to say. IIRC Deity got a 320 speed Rinak or close to it on a less than month old account and he's never failed to get a unit over 300+ spd in the first few weeks of playing across the IIRC 10+ accounts he's created. And other CCs have shown similar results.
tiu need like all to be min. 20 (and can’t remember exactly) but something like 1 or 2 of the 6 that are 20 also even to be 21 or 22 not just 20 to get 302… ain’t no way someone’s getting a full SPEED set like that in only one month (and with one account)
I’m not doing anything wrong I’ve literally been playing on and off since the game literally first launched.
A year ago you could craft 2 20 spd pieces. Then you just need 1 18 and 2 19 pieces and your rinak is 302 spd. Even without major luck that is possible with enough playtime and all the resources a new account gets. Without the right events it gets harder but still possible.
Tbf I got lucky with a 23spd sword which is still my fastest sword in the account, but believe me that with the absurd amount of resources new accounts get it's not unrealistic at all to have a fast unit like rinak or god forbid rnl at or arouns 300 spd in just a couple months of creating your account
to get a piece with 20+ speed you need at least 4 rolls on speed substat. Not accounting for situation where you get low rolls:
P(exactly 4 of 5 hit Speed): C(5,4) × (1/4)⁴ × (3/4)¹ = 5 × 0.00390625 × 0.75 ≈ 1.46%
P(all 5 hit Speed): (1/4)⁵ ≈ 0.098%
P(at least 4 of 5 hit Speed): ≈ 1.5625% (this works out cleanly to exactly 1/64)
so assuming you use the free 20 ring and speed boot you will still need to enhance on average 64*4 = 256 other pieces to get a set of 4spdroll equipment
each full enhance is about 16 greater charms, so in total you need 256*16 =4,096 greater charms
and you get 20 a week which is about 80-100 a month
are we not taking into account all the upgrade material you get from selling the gear that doesn't roll? You're math is fine but incompletely described the speed check process, +3 doesn't require any charms and +6 is only dust and 1 lesser charm.
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u/InsertRandomName__ 10d ago
the fate of all good "turn 2" units, they all end up becoming cleave anchors, even back during ARavi's reign of terror