Hello FS,
First of all, great start to the Versus mode. There’s definitely a lot of potential here with a bit of fine-tuning!
I’ll add to the chorus that the U5 either has too much access to healing, or alternatively the rats don’t deal enough damage.
In a nutshell, chip damage is close to meaningless because of THP mechanics and healing, so there’s much more emphasis on the rats either exploiting a mistake or creating an opening to fully kill a U5 player. You could lean into that and lower the time-to-kill for rats by making shorter-term grabs/pounces more deadly. Alternatively, chip damage could be made significant again by reducing the availability of healing. This latter option would also make globadiers much better, since right now most players seem to have landed on the calculation that it’s better to take poison chip damage and stay in formation than it is to actually separate. With less healing, the choices about globe clouds would become more meaningful. Right now it seems like the tight U5 teams always stick together and heal off the chip damage.
I also feel like the rats don’t have enough tools to make openings. The hookrat is both slow and squishy, and makes noise to boot, so he feels like a grossly inadequate substitute for something like L4D’s Smoker, which was both tankier at hooked at range. The Gutter Runner is also a glass cannon, so he’s really only good at sealing the death of a player who already made a positioning mistake and is out on his own. So the two deadliest rats basically need the U5 to have made a mistake on their own since the other specials don’t have strong enough tools to simply create openings.
I would also like it if knockdowns could be brought in as a tiebreaker statistic in games where both teams complete both maps without U5 eliminations. This would make knockdowns a little more meaningful without taking away from the intended emphasis on eliminations.
All in all I think the seeds are there, they just need a little cultivating. Thanks for all your work on this so far.