Revisiting Mini-Bean Changes

In the last patch, the mini beans were changed such that they have double their previous HP and are now immune to holy. The rationale for these changes are explained in this thread but I believe that these changes should be revisited.

If the goal of these changes were to "promote composition variety", then effectively relegating bishops to shield/res mules by making the mini beans holy immune in fact does the opposite. As it is now, a bishop mule provides pretty much the same value to the expedition as a bishop main, so there is less of a reason to bring an actual bishop main to pink bean.

Now, the aforementioned thread claims that removing Pink Bean holy immunity would make bishops "overtuned" without also making mini beans holy immune, but I disagree. Bishop damage to the bean itself is still mediocre when compared with proper ranged attackers and their damage to statues is comparatively even worse. From what I've observed, current bishops are mostly relegated to spamming mediocre big bang damage to help with the mini beans and dispel (as if the attackers couldn't just ACP themselves to more quickly resume attacking anyways). Reverting the holy immunity change to the mini beans would incentivize groups to actually bring bishop mains as bishops could notably help with clearing the mini beans.

In addition to reverting the mini bean holy immunity changes, mini beans could have their HP increased even further (while removing weapon cancels) such that cleavers could aid the mages/bishops in clearing them. By substantially increasing the mini bean HP and/or the frequency at which they are spawned, there would be a new reason to bring cleavers along, thereby increasing composition variety. As it is currently, there is little reason to bring cleavers to PB given their worse statue/body DPM. By having tankier (more HP) and increased spawn rates of mini beans in exchange for removing the mini beans' weapon cancels, cleavers could potentially serve a purpose as well.

 

Arch mages will continue to be more effective in terms of damage and that's fine. All I'm proposing is to make it such that bishops can contribute more to the run (and thus feel more rewarding to play/bring), and I'm further suggesting that the mini beans could even have their weapon cancels removed to make cleaving feel better too.

 

I don't disagree with the assessment that a mule bishop/arch mage is a better combo than a bishop main, but I'm really just advocating for an improvement in bishop performance. As you mentioned before, reducing the timer may necessitate taking actual bishops, but that's a discussion that could be had in a separate suggestion/thread.

Regarding your comparison between cleaves and arch mages, an end game cleave hitting 3 targets outperforms an end game mage casting their ultimate on 6 mini beans. Now, this doesn't take into account that the mage ultimate would probably hit pink bean as well but a normal cleave attacker should expect to outperform an archmage in clearing mini beans. Obviously dummy DPM isn't an ideal comparison, but assuming a mage does 3m DPM on a single target using their ultimate while a cleave does 9m on a single target, the comparison would be 27m DPM from the cleave versus 21 DPM from the mage (assuming the 6 mini beans and bean itself, so 3*7 versus 9*3). It's difficult to strictly compare mages and cleaves without empirically testing it out but one should expect cleaves to outperform mages in clearing the mini beans.

 

I haven't used monster magnet at bean ever since the monster magnet incident, but I'd imagine you could/should be able to monster magnet the mini beans. Like you imply, I don't think there's any one solution to helping cleaves at PB, but if the mini-beans were given significantly more HP and they were able to be aggro'd with monster magnet, I could perhaps see a case for cleaves being useful for clearing the mini-beans so the ranged attackers can more quickly resume attacking the bean.