If you play without Valkyrie, you earn souls at something like 1/10th the rate per game. Souls in great numbers are so important for progression that this is just too high a tax to pay for exploring the design space of teams that don’t use her.
It’s cool to have a troop that boosts gain of a resource, so that a player can employ it if maxing that resource is top priority for them. But a 10x difference is over the top for the purpose. Vlakyrie could fill that role purely via her Necromancy trait (as could other troops with that trait), giving a 1.5x return instead. That’s more like what Alchemist delivers now. (Make Alchemist deliver 200g per cast with a ceiling that allowed that to 10x your gold return per battle and he’d be comparable to today’s Valk.)
And then of course boost the baseline souls-per battle to balance for Valkyrie’s skill being something that doesn’t generate souls. So you can hit your difficulty’s souls-per-battle max if you have, say, two Necromancy traits on your team, but still earn around half that in souls if you play a team without that trait.
I know you’re doing stuff with skills for 1.0.9 so maybe this is already in the works, but what do I know?
Player with no bonuses playing without Valk on Normal difficulty: 4 souls/battle.
Player with no bonuses playing with Valk on Normal difficulty: 40 souls/battle. (Correct me if I’m wrong!)
Me: 2x total soul bonuses playing without Valk on Warlord 1: 8 souls/battle.
Me: 2x total soul bonuses playing with Valk on Warlord 1: 80 souls/battle.
I think 10x is probably an overestimate. I generally try to use Valkyrie’s spell as often as makes sense while still winning the battle, but I don’t drag out battles just to make sure I hit the soul cap. Assuming the spell gets used a few times in battle, a ratio of around 5x-7x is probably more like my experience.
Regardless of the level of multiplier, this doesn’t invalidate your point at all. Without the massive soul boost, I would still use Valkyrie for mana boost and board control but a fair bit less than I do now.
After all, killing a goblin ascended to mythic is like killing that goblins + the 190 goblins used to ascend it to mythic, right? So we NEED 191 souls per mythic goblins killed.
Just kidding of course.
But, yeah, it’s not that Valkyrie makes you earn too much, it’s just that you don’t earn enough without her. 4 souls per battle is ridiculously low when you need… Around 6.000 to get a legendary (base rarity) to it’s maximum level… Around 150 battles to get a legendary to lvl 20? Sign me out.
Especially with the reduction to souls from arena, the only semi-decent way to get souls these days is with a valkyrie with the necromancy trait. It really cuts down on potential builds if you wanna be able to win AND level your troops. Since power levels have been added to kingdoms and it takes souls to level troops to level those kingdoms, the need for souls has become exponentially higher than what it used to be while ways to get them have been decreased. I hope they don’t read this as remove her ability to make souls but rather as increase OTHER ways to get souls from battle. On that note, does anybody actually do sorcery tasks? It seems like such a waste to spend so much gold to get a pitiful 100 souls. More souls per level of rarity seems like a pretty good deal to me. Then you really feel accomplished when you beat the mythic “goblageddon”
Fair enough, everyone plays differently. For me, 2 Valhalla casts against four opponents on Warlord 1 = 48 souls. 4 casts = 80 souls. It’s more time-efficient for me to stretch out one game a little to fit in two more casts.
Agreed that souls are a problem. With the latest expansion to level cap 20, we need more souls than ever, much more, and no additional means to get them. The only exception is kingdom star levels doubling the tribute amount, but that only really matters for kingdoms that give you enough souls to notice a difference. And how often does that actually produce? If you’ve got lots of high level kingdoms and the time to check in every hour, all day, every day, then maybe it will give you a nice boost given time. For the rest of us, who may not have lots of highly leveled kingdoms and a busier life, it doesn’t add up to much.
Even the treasure maps aren’t a help. They don’t often offer more souls than you could get from a well designed Valkyrie team, and no way to add multipliers. You may as well go farming on invades and earn the gold too.
I will +1 @Tacet’s idea. It gives some incentive again for having a go at one of those mythic goblin teams again, rather than tapping next with nope on your face.
One option I have been thinking of, which is kind of like what Arena sought after to fix, is to have a buy in of troops. Rather than make it permeate, have an option where any OWNED troop can be max ascended, level 20, and all 3 traits for 1 day, 3 days, or 1 week. Prices would be adjusted based on the base rarity of the card. it would be something like:
One common troop temporarily maxed:
1 day - 10 gems
3 days - 20 gems
7 days - 30 gems
One legend troop temporarily maxed:
1 day - 40 gems
3 days - 70 gems
7 days - 100 gems
Something along those lines, and adjusted in between for all rarities. Troops from the current event’s kingdom would have a 50% discount for that week to temporarily max them. Some kind of adjustment would have to happen to matchmaking to make sure lower levels just don’t spam them to destroy everyone. xD
TLDR version: I agree with OP that Valkyrie is too necessary… But there are worse problems the game should solve.
Are Souls a problem? Don’t know… They’re one of the game’s core mechanics for building the collection and making sure that takes time and investment to do… That feels necessary to me, in this free to play game, as something that’ll help incentivise the odd cash purchase…
Gathering souls has always been one of the largest chores in the game - which I think is fine - but has gotten much worse recently because of, inter alia:
needing to hang on to all troops for ascension rather than mass disenchanting them for extra souls
all chests now drop traitstones and other resources, reducing the number of troops for disenchanting
as the game has inevitably crept to bigger and bigger numbers for hp etc, battles can generally be taking longer so farming takes longer (not everyone will feel this, depends where you are on the difficulty curve)
Hence we all need souls… The problem with Valkyrie then is as the OP says, she is just too good at soul generation. That may be a good thing to help players, but it leads to most of us needing her (especially once traits are unlocked) as to not use her is to pledge to progress at one tenth the speed… The solution? Either (1) do nothing and one day when we have enough souls some variety will come in (in 2026 at this rate) or (2) nerf the soul generation and upset a lot of players or (3) introduce many other new troops with soul catching capabilities to match her…
Also part of why she is so popular is she’s the best (only?) blue generator in the game, which powers Green Slime, which powers the ubiquitous over-powered Skeleton…
In, er, summary… Is she a bit too good and therefore reducing variety? Yes… Is this a problem that needs solving? I don’t think it’s worth it.
