I think Duels is really fun and interesting.

Hullo, I've been playing SL since June last year but I dropped it in September until like a week ago, I really like duels (at least some aspects of it) and am sad that so many people find it so unfun, so this is my analysis of/attempt to fix the problem.

I don't think its particularly well balanced, or even well designed, but I do think it has something fun you can't get in any other mode. That thing to me is character expression, I feel like I can really use and master my character in a way that isn't really possible in other game modes where teamwork and specific objectives take priority over individual performance. If I'm I've just caught say, Parfait in my GAC as red, in duels I get to go through the full route of her versatile long ass combos, do I go for a simple and straightforward true combo or do I mix it up and go for something bigger that gives my opponent a chance to react, banking on them not being prepared, do I send them off the edge to try and get an early kill or knock them down in hopes of catching their roll? The variability and expression is much greater than say, dominion where I could try and land some kind of combo but there's a witch queen locked on to me prepping for an interrupt, and I could instead just GAC Parfait into one of Bricks walls which would redirect her conveniently into my ulting Kaiser. The team tactics are very fun and should be the main focus, don't get me wrong, but I do appreciate how much duels lets individual characters shine.

But I do think that there's a myriad of problems that keep duels from being able to consistently deliver this experience, with the two main ones imo being the meta prevalence of stalling out the clock and how much the characters being balanced around team gameplay breaks duels. I have a few Ideas for how to fix this though, so let me know what you think.

The first major problem, stalling, has so many ways to change it I'm kind of annoyed they haven't already.

• The easiest solution is just to increase the match timer, right now its so low that matches frequently go to time from cautious play or struggling to kill. I don't have an exact time in mind but it just needs to be long enough that if a player loses a life early they have time to be cautious in approaching instead of being forced to do a mad dash in the faint hopes that their opponent messes up.
• Another solution would be to implement some kind of storm or hp drain mechanic to force plyers together. This idea doesn't work all that well as a shrinking field of play in duels' already small maps benefits some characters far more than others, and a steady drain on hp past a certain time benefits the character in the lead more than the one falling behind, but both mechanics incentivize aggression.
• A sadness mechanic could also work, where not approaching or attacking for your opponent for too long causes a steady drain on some mix of your hp, ult charge, speed, or damage.
• One last idea is to have a reward for being aggressive/interactive as opposed to a punishment for being too defensive/passive I don't have any good ideas for what that reward could be though, do you?

The other major issue of characters being unbalanced is a lot more difficult to address as its basically impossible to do anything about without changing the characters themselves which would affect the other modes, unless there was specific balance for duels which would require far more resources to create/maintain than the game mode is worth. I do think I've found a good middle ground solution though, drawing from fighting games I think duels would work great with a mechanic called proration. Proration is part of a broader system in fighting games where moves do less damage the longer your combo is. Afaik, SL doesn't have anything like this and I think it'd be an excellent balancing tool for duels, most notably affecting assassins who typically have long extremely potent combos, but are balanced by their frailty and how your teammates have ample time to punish an assassin who isn't careful. In duels because there isn't anyone to save you from an assassin, they do a lot more damage off a successful hit compared to most of the other characters, but scaling damage reduction would curb that handily, a cast wide damage modifier that nerfs combos based on their strength and length, making shorter weaker combos better by proxy. This effectively brings everything closer together in terms of power.

But that's just a damage reducing mechanic, proration itself is a method of modifying and controlling that reduction even further. Basically each individual move has a set whole number value of proration, with the damage reductions increase being set back by 1 increment for each 1 proration that you have. So if I use a move with +3 proration it would mean that my next three hits in the combo wouldn't have their damage reduced, and the fourth hit's reduction will be what the second hits reduction should have been, its like starting a combo with -3 hits on the counter. what you would do with this is give fast safe attacks that lead into combos, like Javert's skill negative proration, meaning the damage scaling of their combo will be as if the combo counter started at +3. This gives even more control over reducing damage and such, allowing the devs to bring all the characters in line with one another and incentivize going for more committal moves as they'd have positive proration meaning reduced damage reduction.

I think duels is closer than it seems to being in a good spot, so I do hope the devs give it some love soon.

TLDR: increase the match timer and/or add sadness and implement proration.