What is wrong with the original Splatoon?
I still prefer it in some ways because of the Gamepad map. Don't get me wrong, Splatoon 2 is an upgrade in most respects, but nothing so extravagant to make the old game feel antiquated.
Well... the biggest problem (to me anyway) is the existence of two specials that have existed for the entirety of Splatoon's life, but their abusiveness wasn't immediately apparent. Certain abilities are also fairly abusive but they're not quite as egregious. This is also all coupled with some fundamental design decisions, some of which are addressed in Splatoon 2.
Bubbler is a very powerful special that instantly gives you (and nearby teammates!) invincibility and refills your ink tank. It's probably meant to be a defensive special that saves you and your allies, but what happens in practice is that Bubbler ends up allowing the player to push very aggressively. Normally in Splatoon, players have to worry about having correct spacing and engaging enemies at angles at a skirmish level, and they also have to worry about possibly overextending or being revenge killed beyond that. But Bubbler negates risks entirely. There's no meaningful counter-play to Bubbler, unless either you're near out of bounds and push them off (which isn't an option available to every map), or you kill them before they can activate Bubbler. It also doesn't help that Bubbler doesn't require all that many points to build up, so it tends to be very easy to build up to as well.
The abusiveness of Bubbler only became much more apparent later in the life of Splatoon due to certain kits existing.
The Splattershot Jr. is balanced by the main weapon having incredibly wide spread and bad damage output, but even that got used a lot due to Splat Bombs and Bubbler being in the same kit. Classic Squiffer is a very short range charger without a damaging sub weapon that takes a lot of discipline to use. Rapid Blaster is a long range light blaster that had the worst killing speed out of all weapons in the early life of Splatoon. Both the Classic Squiffer and the Rapid Blaster are also very poor at turfing, which meant they were not good at securing territory and they were not good at building Bubbler. These were kits with Bubbler early on in Splatoon's life that were not difficult to play around, mainly due to the rest of the kit not exactly being super great.
Zink Mini Splatling is an incredibly mobile and fast killing weapon that also has slightly longer range than common shooters. It has Disruptors, which don't deal damage, but do inflict a very devastating debuff that is hard to play around. Mini Splatlings are also ink efficient and good at turfing, so Zink Mini Splatlings can charge Bubbler fairly effortlessly. Custom Hydra Splatling is slow and takes quite awhile to spin up a full charge, but when it does, it gains the fastest kill speed in the game, fires at a range nearly equal to that of an E-Liter, and fires for a while. Normally a Hydra would have difficulty building Bubble, runs out of ink often, and is fairly vulnerable to being flanked due to the long spin up. But Custom Hydra Splatling comes with Sprinkler, which helps with building special, and Bubbler negates the close range weakness and keeps the ink tank topped off. And possibly the most egregious Bubbler abuser of all, the Cherry Nozzlenose H3 is strong at turfing, is very ink efficient, is long range, hits very very hard, doesn't have much delay between bursts, and doesn't have to worry about charging or spinning up. It even comes with Splash Walls to keep it alive and wall off would be rushers or flankers. The three kits I mention here have main weapons and sub weapons that are already pretty good, and are all capable of building Bubbler very easily.
Kraken is basically in the same boat as Bubbler; the biggest problem is that it provides invincibility, and the next problem after that is it provides a melee attack which can kill instantly at no cost (outside of pressing jump and the frames to do a kraken jump). Kraken takes more points to build than Bubbler and doesn't spread to allies, but there's similarly no counter-play against Kraken when it's activated. A curious design decision is that Kraken tends to show up on kits with long range main weapons. Long range weapons are normally balanced by having poor damage output and/or poor ink efficiency, which means they can be caught off guard by close range rushers or flankers. But Kraken ruins this by giving those long range weapons the option to retaliate instantly at close range while invincible.
What players started doing eventually in response was putting on lots of Quick Respawn. If they were guaranteed to die, then at least the impact could be lessened with QR. The thing about QR is that it would reduce the respawn time by quite a bit when stacked. The consequence of this would be that players would play in mind numbingly aggressive ways. At first, mass QR was applied so that players could suicide and force players to use bubblers and krakens at less opportune moments, but eventually QR players started playing like this all the time. Being able to force trades was always incredibly advantageous to the QR user, and if the QR user died... well they were going to come back nearly instantly anyway. Players started realizing that stacking tons of QR had very little risk to it as well. To add to this, players started combining large amounts of QR with Stealth Jump, which meant players that died could often jump back into the field with little meaningful warning, furthering their chances of trading (or even getting a kill). QRSJ became a very common build, and this was known derisively as the "zombie" build.
Due to the incredible impact of invicibility, along with QRSJ, high end Splatoon was defined by intense aggression with very little nuance. Build meter, push, or suicide and suprise jump constantly. I personally was not fond of this result, but it is what it is.
So... Splatoon 2 does quite a bit to address these issues. Here are some examples:
1. No specials give invulnerability. This is the most important change. Certain specials such as Baller and Ink Armor give an HP shield, but not outright invincibility, and not for a very long time.
2. QR only triggers if the user dies more than once without killing anyone. This is the second most important change. This means QR can't be used aggressively, but it's still helpful for players that have trouble killing (or are pursuing a strategy that revolves around not killing at all).
3. Adjustable special cost per kit. This is a necessary decision, given what else they want to maintain. One of the nice things about individual weapons and specials in Splatoon is that they all have the same parameters and they all work the same way. The Splattershot main weapon is the same, regardless if you're using the Splattershot kit or the Tentatek Splattershot kit. The Hydra Splatling main weapon is similarly always the same regardless if you're using the Hydra Splatling kit or the Custom Hydra Splatling kit. This meant that learning and transitioning between kits is less difficult since you can apply previous experience from other kits. But no matter how balanced the individual items of a kit may be, the synergy of the kit itself may be incredibly devastating. Nerfing the individual item and maintaining its parameters across the board will impact other kits that don't deserve to be nerfed. What was needed was a way to address a kit specifically. And well, the Splatoon team played around with a kit-specific parameter called special depletion, which had 3 levels (Light, Medium, Heavy). Special depletion was a good start, but it didn't have very much granularity to it and it relied on the user to die for the penalty to have any real impact. Having adjustable special cost is better; it's a numeric value instead of specific levels, and the penalty is front loaded. Adjusting special cost also doesn't impact the way a player plays as much as, say, reducing the range of a weapon. Varied special cost is then a valve that the devs can use to adjust how strong a particular kit is without affecting the individual items, which is honestly great.
