Two costumes in Costume Brawl have stuck out to me as being exceptionally powerful, so powerful that my desire to play CB dries up immediately upon seeing anyone using them. These are the Mad King’s outfit and Boxing Gloves. The reason I can’t stand playing against these is because it is next to impossible to do anything to these players due to the skills they possess.
The Mad King’s Outfit gives a player a toy which has two skills in particular on it that cause trouble. One skill deals one point of damage and inflicts fear upon all other players near the user. The other skill dazes and deals a point of damage each second to nearby players for a few seconds. These skills on their own are probably not that lethal. However, my experience is that the cooldowns of these skills are so low that they can be chained together with little downtime. The result is that anybody close enough to the user will be prevented from doing anything. Other players will spend most of their time either being dazed or having fear, both cases not allowing the player to use skills. Fighting this costume at close range is near impossible. Fighting at range is not much easier either, because few (if any) costumes have good ranged attacks. If the Mad King player closes the gap between themselves and the ranged user, they chain their fear and daze skills and shut down the ranged user completely again. While not having a totally impenetrable defense, this costume offers a great deal of control and combines it with a lot of damage as well.
The Boxing Gloves take a slightly different approach of being impossible to defeat. Instead of controlling other players with fear and daze, the Boxing Gloves offer skills that allow the player to permanently maintain Brawler Protection. With this buff, others players are unable to do any damage to a player with that buff. Boxing Gloves allow this buff to be on the user all the time. While this buff is in place, the boxer can still use skills to damage other players, such as their knockdown ability or their rapid punches. Their protection skill alone makes them impossible to defeat, but having these great damage skills on top of it all makes every boxer a complete bully to every other brawler around them.
While Costume Brawl is likely intended to just be a casual and fun format, that doesn’t mean it should be devoid of balance. I can not imagine that there are many players in the game who would appreciate playing CB or find it fun if they understood just how much stronger these two costumes are than anything else in the game. For me, I can say that there is nothing fun about playing CB when I face these players against whom I can do nothing. Each of these costumes need to be toned down so that they at least offer some window of opportunity for players to attack them.
The daze and fear skills on the Mad King’s scepter need to have their recharges increased by about two to five seconds each. The daze skill in particular should be toned down in an additional way, such as only dealing daze on the initial hit.
The Boxing Gloves should not be able to maintain Brawler Protection indefinitely. Good ratios of protection to recharge would be anywhere between 1:2 and 1:3. Alternatively, use of this skill could daze the user for as long as the protection lasts, effectively preventing the user from both blocking all damage and dealing some damage at the same time.
In the future, I would hope that new costumes and toys do not offer the same levels of control, protection, and damage as demonstrated by these two costumes.
