Little Lars Nerf

[Phantom Rose]

With so many explosive cards in the game as of right now, and only 1 efficient counter card (out of the 25+ in each deck), the character Lars is almost a must have. In the range of players I face ATM between 20-50 the meta it seems is to bring an explosive-deck with anti-movement cards and suicide rush with explosives (like the sticky and bombs). With Lars taking only 2-6hp per explosion they can self detonate bombs at their own feet without any serious drawbacks. Making the match almost impossible to clutch for the (maybe) surviving teammate. And with how strong the NO JUMP card is ATM it feels impossible to counter, especially since the only real counter is to outrun them, but on maps like Truck, its impossible.

While I see the need for a character like Little Lars, I feel as though explosives thrown by Lars themselves or by their teammate should do near full damage to Lars, definitely not 100% damage, but somewhere in the range of 50-70% of the damage. This would still leave possibilities for bomb rushes, but it would allow players that survive the first explosion to kill Lars with the Basic Pistol rather than having to rely on card RNG every single round.

[Puru]

The issue is that there's not enough cards in the pool to make a deck that don't rely on explosives to a decent extent.

You could also argue that explosive cards are completely out of line in general. With air burst being a thing i don't believe most of them should do nearly as much as they currently do. And the suicide should definitly not be that strong. This lead to them being a near mandatory pick for any deck.

As a result, because the card pool is so small, and the explosives so strong, the character pretty much is on his own tier of broken. You will face him with an explosive deck and most likely lose, or you will have a deck with no explosives and... most likely lose because they are that strong and the other options that weak in comparison. And of course he also get to make better use of them, or even reverse swap a nade launcher into your hand for a potential free win. None of the other characters are that game defining. A few are hard countering Sable but that's more acceptable imo, there's still way for Sable to make use of the katana against them.

I'd still prefer for them to either change his passive to improve the power of explosions, and maybe their range too, rather than invalidating an entire family of (mandatory for now) cards by his mere existence. Or they could add a deck selection part before round start to react to a Little Lars pick (you will still most likely lose).

Overall i do agree with this, Lars as the game currently stands is an issue. It is not fun to fight Lars with the current state of the game.

[Detwand]

Just had the displeasure of encountering such a player.
Not fun.

[Stillwater Casey]

I agree too. Explosive resistance is fine, but Lars' resistance takes it way too far.

[Stillwater Casey]

Just played a match where I tested out the Punch-R against Lars, and it only did 2-4 damage per hit. I didn't stand a chance against him with it, even though the Punch-R is otherwise super overpowered. That really speaks to just how Lars' explosive resistance is way out of balance.

[janKana]

I was playing against a little lars and they swapped my boomstick with their punch-r and it does 4 damage??? That is some insane amount of damage reduction for one character

[BaeYeou]

Looking at the damage numbers from this thread and comparing it to my own tests, the Punch-R does somewhere around 30-60ish damage per shot. I'm going to assume the best case scenario in favour of Lars' explosive resistance being not insane, so I'm assuming the 30 damage normally maps onto the 4 damage stated here.

This means that Lars' explosive resistance is (30 - 4)/30 * 100% = 86.667%.
This is a passive ability that removes more than 85% of damage from Bomb, Bomb Belt, Landmine, Sticky Bomb, Ka-Boomber, the Punch-R, and Self-Destruct Device in the scenario in which it blocks the LEAST AMOUNT OF DAMAGE based on in-game damage numbers.

How is an 86.667% explosive reduction on all rounds without being needed to be played (and thus unable to be countered or mirrored) fair, when it's way better than the Thick Skin card, which can only be used on one round and blocks 50%?

Every other character ability mirrors a card which can be used to replicate it (equipping a weapon, double jump, speed up, damage up, HP up), except for Duck Anderson's unique 30 HP card per round. Even so, Duck Anderson's ability gives him an effective 180 HP per round, which isn't too far off from Donnie B.'s effective 175 HP per round.

If Lars' ability needs to be rebalanced in any way (which I strongly believe it does), it should be lowered to at least mirror Thick Skin's 50% explosive damage reduction, instead of being more than 85%.