A New Mythic Approaches - Plague

Ouch, sorry to hear about that.

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@Sirrian - The spell seemed really underpowered to me after failing to ever randomly kill with it in a few dozen tries, but then I noticed the spell will never lower life. Occasionally the spell will occasionally “hit” life (redraw the life number as the same number, no broken heart or other animation) but have no effect at all, regardless of whether or not the spell would have brought their life below 0. Not sure where the traits stand because I’m still a few short of traiting him.

I don’t know exactly, but I’m sure I spent at least 10-12k gems and 5k Glory keys (probably much more of the latter) since Mythics were introduced and still got none at all :frowning:. So no, the drop rates are very very far from being too high…

You have to be an outlier, that is simply awful. Sorry to see that.

6k Glory Keys and 12k Gems, still no Plague :frowning:

Open ALL the keys! :laughing:

I assume Plague + Famine + green generators will make for maximum fun.

Plague felt underpowered for me for 3 reasons:

  • His spell doesn’t seem to able to decrease Health of enemies
  • Aspect of Plague (and Moloch’s 3rd) trait doesn’t scale in the same way as the Huge trait of let’s say Sheggra.
  • Continues to choose to lower a certain Stat, even if that Stat is already zero (0)

2nd point is the important one. The Huge trait seems to scale a lot better as when you make a lot of 4-5 gem matches, the troop gains like 20 health sometimes.
This is not the case with the Aspect of Plague trait. Even if you happen to make a lot of 4-5 gem matches with one move, it only seems to count them as one 4/5 match. At least it feels like that’s the case, because it can target 4 different stats to lower.

We’ve just tracked down the issue with Plague’s spell not decreasing health… it’s being prevented from doing that by another bug-fix that went in for something a few months back.

Fixing that is NOT trivial, as it turns out, so we’re left with a couple of options:

  1. To change the wording of the spell for clarity, maybe increase the numbers slightly to compensate
  2. To have the spell continue to Disease all enemies, and THEN do one of 2 things (50/50 chance). An all-enemy true damage AoE OR the current effect of decreasing one of Attack, Armor or Magic.
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Hmm @sirrian, option 2 is much better, but to compensate for the randomness, suggest it shouldn’t hit Armour…

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Yeah, I’m testing it, and currently leaning towards option 2, though I might just buff the numbers by +1 to compensate for the slightly decreased chance of getting Magic or Attack over what was expected (removing armor from the possible outcomes isn’t something we can actually do)

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How about him not targeting a stat that is already zero? For example,neither his Spell or Trait target Magic if that particular stat is already zero (0).

Or would that be overpowered?

How about disease all enemies, and reduce Magic and Attack, but scaling with half x magic stat…?

Realistically speaking, it should be a 25% chance for true damage and a 75% chance for Armor/Attack/Magic debuff. That’s what its supposed to be doing, right? Don’t see why it has to be 50/50 there. Unless we’re talking about rebalancing him at the same time. I reckon he’d be fine as is, provided things worked as intended.

And the text doesn’t have to be changed for that to make sense. True damage == reducing health.

I’m still having a blast with him in his current state so I’m kind of cautious about buffs.


I’d also like to see a solution to that pestilent problem I brought up the other day … but priorities.

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In a perfect world where Apple would allow us to make a properly scripted spell system, this would be easy to fix, however their rules mean that we have to create a trimmed-down version of such a system, with a lot more limitations than a proper scripting system allows.

What that actually means is that we have lots of hidden limitations on how we do things with spell effects. We’re pretty good at dancing around them most of the time, so you folks never see the limitations :wink: but we don’t have any means of creating exactly 25% chances of these things happening given our current constraints. Hence my original suggestions… the two closest options to the original intent of the spell which don’t trip up our system in some way.

For the record - in case anyone thinks I’m taking a shot at Apple above - that wasn’t entirely my intent. Although I wish they would relax some of their requirements (it would sure make our lives easier here), they do actually have good reasons for the restrictions. The exact restriction states that a developer can’t include scripting code that is downloaded into an app from an external server. That stops people’s servers getting hacked and downloading malicious code into all their customers’ apps - pretty sensible! However it DOES actually stop us writing our spell systems the “proper” way with scripts, for ultimate flexibility.

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So basicly you are not free to make the game as you want it to be due to conflicts, however you are able to dodge well enough so as not to make it seem like a problem. You are doing an amazing job so far.

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About a thousand keys used, and Plague seems to be avoiding me like the… like something that should be avoided, can’t think of the right word…

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like the apricot?

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I like the true damage… :slight_smile:
Only cause i worship the Crimson Bat. …
Wu@Haaaaaaaaa

Magic and attack is what most of us are after when we fire off Plauge’s spell. A 50% chance to deal true damage instead makes it a high cost Crimson Bat if this happens to fire. I haven’t been happy with a single troop that has that random OR in their spell effect, even less so with debuffs that affect a “random stat” on top of that. Lowering its attack and magic chance to 16% from 25% almost seems worse in a way than the current state of having a 25% chance to do nothing.

Would it be possible to do one of the following instead (in addition to disease all enemies)?
debuff attack AND magic on all troops but at a lower rate (may be too powerful)
debuff attack, magic, or armor on all troops (randomized like now) and deal (magic /2) + 2 true damage to all enemy troops
debuff attack, magic, or armor on all troops (randomized like now) and deal (magic +2) damage to a random (or target) enemy
debuff attack, magic, AND armor, and deal true damage to a SINGLE troop - basically cripple a high value target

The last three choices would at least allow it to kill enemies that have wasted away to almost nothing, since that is basically what you’d want to use the troop for.