Thank you! I do sorta agree with you. I find myself fishing for the panda every match, because I want to use rooster or octopus late game. But that means my matches will basically come down to "Do I get a lvl 2 panda by the end of turn 3"
I don't think anyone said that rat can't be good. It is just so incredibly situational. It is usually only good if you have camel, hippo, rhino (kinda?), aardvark, peacock, and blowfish. Also boar I suppose.
Panda is a bit busted, but I don't think it is busted in a bad way. Panda is only good due to pet abilities.
*Pretend all pets beside panda have 2/2 stats, unless otherwise stated
If you put a 20/30 lvl 2 panda in front of a chicken), it is going to be beaten by a 20/30 ox with an otter in front of it. If you however put a 20/30 panda in front of a gorilla, it will beat a 20/30 ox with an otter in front of it. Panda enables the abilities of late game pets, who used to be bad aside from rare scenarios where you get a cheetah on turn 9 with 2 chocolates in the shop and a lvl 3 monkey already. It makes it so that you can just build up a panda, then experiment with units' abilities rather than having to worry "Oh do I replace my 20/26 peacock with an 8/8 octopus?" because you just stick an octopus in front of a lvl 3 30/30 panda and boom you have a 50/50 octopus that can do some shit, purely because it now doesn't have to be held back by only appearing late game when your pets are going to have better stats than shop pets. If Panda didn't exist, Rooster, Octopus, Gorilla, Cheetah, Triceratops, Hippo, Rhino, Sabertooh, Boar, etc, wouldn't be even close to as viable as Bison Monkey Butterfly Butterfly Butterfly or Turkey Turkey Fly Deer Deer. Hell, even ox meta is a bit worse! If you get lucky and get a lvl 2 panda within the first 2-3 turns, you can build it up and then put it behind a Raccoon which can now invalidate toucan, turtle, and ox builds. Late game stats are no longer an issue, and instead of games coming down to which bison is bigger or who has a lvl 3 turkey and who has a lvl 2 turkey, games can come down to the abilities of pets themselves, rather than their stats. It is the same reason I love the white tiger, because now you're able to use the effect of lvl 3 abilities for tier 6 pets, which were normally unattainable in most games. Sure, getting a lvl 3 Panda early on can pretty much guarantee a victory, but that was always the case. Getting a lvl 3 mosquito by round 4 and then getting a bison round 5 was basically gg. All you had left to get was a caterpillar, which can soon replace the mosquito, and maybe a 9/12 hippo with garlic to counter any spawning builds.
Overall, I think that panda can be pretty busted, but it doesn't automatically guarantee victory now in a world where double fox and lionfish exists, which can give insane wide scaling and invalidate enemy held food. It is an unbalanced pet but in the greatest way. It is like facing a really good doctor mario in ultimate. Doc has some broken power, but his recovery and speed give him heavy drawbacks (like running a 4 squad when you use panda), but when you face one and lose, you don't really feel cheated as if you lost against brawl meta knight or smash 4 bayo. It is just "Dang, I got outshmooved'", because using a panda late game requires legitimate skill of knowing pet abilities and their strengths. Sure, early game it is basically gg easy get owned by a 2/3 toucan with an 8/15 panda behind it, which now means your team of 5/5's is gonna get nearly solo'd by the 10/18 toucan, but there are still counters to panda, like an ox and a honeybadger, which can completely take out a 20/20 unit on like round 4 if you have the stats and a pill for early melon on the ox. Late game though, if you only had a strong panda and practically nothing else, it is gonna lose to the team that had one strong ox with the same stats after you apply the panda buff, just with one extra unit. I've now written way too much on this game, but hey for anyone who reads this, I admire your attention span, and please yell at me in the replies for not focusing on my assignments and instead writing a pseudo essay about a black and white bear that nukes itself but turns another unit into a tank. It is like if you had a child that could kill anything with a single touch, but was so frail and lacked range that it got killed instantly. But ooh here comes a giant guard from the palace and holy shit he just swallowed 30 fireworks and now somehow his armor and weapons got fused with the child and make the child a killing machine at the age of 7.
PLEASE READ TILL THE END. It starts out negative, but it ends positively.
No offense but this is a pretty bad custom pack. It lacks any synergy or scaling. You have no panda for early stats that can be transferred to a unit with a good ability (ie peacock, octopus, gorilla, lion). There's no monkey, giraffe, hatching chick, or stegasaurus, meaning your only scalers are shrimp scampy, koala, and starfish until you get penguin. There's ox and buffalo and llama, which is good because it means you have units that can get beefy and or carry without needing lots of food or an additional scaler unit. However, after that you sorta just picked the unique animals, which is fair in its own right! Playing this game purely so you can use fun abilities is valid. Although considering there isn't much synergy or late game potential, you're going to have a harder time really pushing those abilities to their limits, which in my opinion is the most fun. Having an octopus just solo a team or using a raccoon to completely invalidate an ox or toucan or turtle is glorious to me. But you're going to have a hard time doing anything with this, as it is all over the place. I've played countless hours of this game, and watched even more of it, and so if you have any specific animals that you want to build a custom pack around, just lemme know! I'd be happy to help ya, since creating builds that perfectly support a cool and fun animal is really enjoyable.
Just quit. No one likes you. You have a negative like to dislike ratio. If you want to get big, have good content. Don't just spam and hope that some 12 year old watches you for all of 5 minutes.
Yeah but does that work against any other builds? Sure, it may have a few counters, but if tapir butterfly beats 95% of teams, it doesn't matter that it loses to 5% of em. I don't think Iguana Dolphin Mosquito is going to be able to beat most other teams. So it isn't so useful of a counter.
Yeah I have genuinely no clue what cockroach is used for. I looked through the pets, and found zero animals that would synergize with it. It is a useless pet.
If you use a tapir in the front, and you have a tapir in the back, you'll have an endless cycle of tapirs. If you have a bacta in front of the first tapir, then the team is literally unbeatable, as long as your back tapir has more than 20 health (enough to withstand 4 attacks from a level 3 bus since it'd take 4 turns to kill a bus using only a 4/3 tapir. But if you do all this, the game will say you lose even though you won. Also, porcupine doesn't work at all, orca doesn't spawn anything, and popcorn doesn't work.
Finally did it. Sub 4, but also sub 3:30. Next up is sub 3. With a bunch of optimization someone could theoretically get sub 2:20, but it would be very difficult. A tas could probably do sub 2.
