Jotnar buff needs

How does your Spirit Fox deal 50 TD? Mine would have to remove about 60 yellow gems to do that.

My red team, for example, is Carnex / Dark Maiden / Garuda / Jotnar… it’s one of my favorite single-color teams. It’s not that hard to fill him up with that team. Garuda is the main damage dealer there, but Carnex skull damage is also nice.

But Jotnar’s more like the Barrier guy who can also hit hard, but shouldn’t be your main damage dealer (unless maybe you use two, but I didn’t like any of the double Jotnar teams that I’ve tried). You can save him to snipe just the right troop at the right time.

Again, Jotnar is not a troop for fast matches, but for safer matches.

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He means as td poke and drain

He actually said Fox does the same damage.

I can’t comment on that team since i don’t have Garuda. IMO Jotnar needs a mana cost reduction as at max level he gains 7 magic. Plus 12 from kingdom and Guild. That’s 24 damage base. At each cast he’s dealing 29 damage (Not considering his traits or any of them. In my team I can only get 34 TD out as a damage source. Even considering the barriers he’s capable of a max 54 damage. He can oneshot a few troops out but for 22 mana being able to cast a base TD of 29 seems kinda weak

I think he means it at lower levels

I still doubt it.

Again, as I said, should not be your main damage dealer. Just like Plague shouldn’t be either. Jotnar is unique and useful, maybe he just doesn’t have the use you wanted for him.

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Maybe. I mainly want a extra turn buff to him. Like War. So i don’t have to waste a turn in casting him and getting something like a daemonic pact or Possession or Immortal

thats the thing, if it was always it might be fine
since you dont have him, you dont know the struggle of trying to get more shields on you allies while having him full mana and turns keep passing… if you fire him and “almost kill” sosmething, all that mana will be wasted, but hey the enemy is charging up by that time! silly skull drop and your top troop is shield-less again, or he shields an already shielded ally
with kraken you dont have that problem as it is cheaper you can just charge again and fire him twice, maybe you wont devour but damage will be better or the same, or maybe it will devour and in that case you win in the comparison

More damage per mana, not in one cast.

I’ve not got him, but on ps4 when he was first available there was a team of 4 of him! Anyway, he doesn’t seem very good imo, doesn’t do much damage and dragonian monk can barrier the whole team easily anyway, and is immune to dm and starts fast. I’ve been pretty disappointed with the mythics and most need to be reworked imo. Death, his traits costs loads of resources and they’re terrible. Famine is evil and should require 25 mana, plague is just crap and his disease should actually be a plague that’s far worse than disease and lose 3 health every turn as well until it wears off. War has recently had a bit of a buff so maybe he’s a bit better, not sure. Aby, got 4! Maybe I’ll see what this crafting thing is because what am I supposed to do with 4? Lol
Got gard’s too, he’s good. Leave him. Works well with humility, honour, gard’s, mab.
Yea, not got jotty stormshite but sounds like I’m not missing anything. Ketras the Bull, he’s not looking like much either!
Anyway just a bit of a moan/throwing a few thoughts/humour etc.
Regards
Daniel

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Like most mythics, he suffers from being a huge mana dead-end. When you are a huge mana dead-end and your cast is only threatening in super specific conditions that take a ton of fussing about to create, the spell ends up being kinda bad. Ketras and Jotnar both suffer from this. Wulfgarok, while having a condition that can be at times more difficult to set up, also gets a much bigger reward out of it. He also has a saving grace in Forest Guardian to support him, plus Impervious, while none of the hero weapons directly support Jotnar all that well and he has no status resistance at all. War did have this problem, then he got a buff where he got an extra turn on kill, which made him much better in my book. Others have board mod or are threatening in different ways, some of them more useful than others.

The biggest problem with Jotnar is the unreliability to set up the conditions for his spell to be able to one-shot. You can loop through two full boards and still fail to barrier every troop on your team. Two teams with full bonuses facing each other are not likely to be able to get him to one-shot a troop with even moderate life without both barriers AND giants. Giants are mostly bad and mostly have bad synergy with him. If he is the only giant in the team, even if he barriers everyone, he does 49 true damage with maxed out kingdoms and guild statues. That perfect storm of conditions can kill about 45% of troops in the game (if they also have maxed out bonuses). This number goes down in guild wars, where there is the potential to gain 2 life for every 1 magic via sentinels. Things like Famine are among this, but Famine can also steal your barrier just by passing a turn, putting him out of one-shot range for guild wars unless you loop and loop and loop and then go for the kill. Every giant you add ups this cap a bit, but makes your team have worse mana flow or clunky and overall harder to reach that four-barrier limit.

Outside of guild wars, if you can charge him fast enough to take down a threat, chances are he won’t be ready just because you haven’t fulfilled the conditions for your boost ratio. If you have, then you’ve basically already won the fight, and Jotnar is just slowing you down.

Basically, for his spell to be more usable, the conditions for it to be an actual threat need to be more reliable to set up. One way to do this would be to have him barrier a different ally on each 4 or 5 gem match, but I think the spell could stand to have a slightly better boost ratio as well (x7 from giants, x5 from barrier), so if you do achieve the perfect storm of conditions, then you are awarded with a kill. Or, in lieu of boosting the giant boost ratio, the problem could be solved by having giants with better board mod options so he has some actual synergy. He’d still be unable to one-shot a few of the highest life troops in a four giant, four barrier team with his current boosts (and pretty much any double-event boosted troop). I’d also propose Thick Head or Insulated instead of the utterly useless Giant Bond. He needs too much support to be as vulnerable as he is to getting frozen or stunned or mana drained or devoured or basically anything that encompasses your basic PvP match if you aren’t in complete and total control, because if you are, then what good are barriers, really? Especially when they keep hitting the same troop over and over and over.

All that being said, hes decent in guild wars. I went with Khorvash/Abynissia/Mercy/Jotnar on blue day and it pretty well stops most threats if you set the banner and order according to their main threat, swapping for their main threat as necessary. If he can snipe the first or second troop after a Khorvash spell, which isn’t all that difficult, then you can drain the third troop before they get a spell off with Khorvash as well. And of course down to two troops, you pretty much can’t lose because Khorvash. Of course, for a standard PvP using Khorv/valk/mercy/bat or mab or tesla is every bit as safe and three times as fast.

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It’s funny how troops that are utter garbage in PvP can be great in guild wars. Jotnar and Aby are perfect examples.

I do think Jotnar needs something better though. An extra turn condition like War would turn him into a total badass. Or he could lose the boost from giant allies and get a double boost for barriered allies instead. Or gain half his mana back on a condition. He definitely needs something else to make him more formidable.

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Just dropping by again to say that it can proc a second time on the same troop from the same application. Back to back turns even. So Jotnar is still not all that reliable of a deathmark counter.

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thanks for clarifying that, useful information
as long as we have something that would buff +1 armor to all troops - with the shield - it would still protect from the deathmark then :slight_smile:

The deathmark activation eats the barrier though. Not sure if having armor is required to stop the deathmark activation when you have barrier up or not, but a deathmark can eat the barrier (and your armor with it) and then the next turn kill you anyways.

i meant if you re-apply barrier and any armor to it - it will last again

my guess why it takes armor is very simple:

game checks how much life and armor unit has - then deals appropriate damage in two numbers one for armor and one for life
shield takes one of the numbers and armor takes another therefore life survives :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Speaking of barrier, if I recall correctly, it also can protect your troops from another instakill mechanic like Archer’s Bull’s-eye or Assassin’s Assassinate. Not devour though. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

PS: @Mithran can you test if it protect from Bull’s-eye and Assassinate? I’d love to test it myself but my hero is on defensive job at the moment. :grin:

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Confirmed barrier blocks a single lethal hit from Bullseye (it shows a damage number equal to your total life/armor remaining, but it eats the barrier and you take no damage). Because of the way skull spam resolves versus barrier, I’m not sure if it would block more. It also blocks a single proc from Assassinate (takes barrier, armor remains intact). I would have thought they patched all these out when they patched out barrier blocking self-sacrifice instakills like Sacrificial Priest, but I guess not.

As far as Jotnar goes, thats a fairly fringe interaction, since its such a pain to get him to barrier the correct troops already, but its something.

The armor interaction for deathmark still bothers me. They have no reason to reduce armor to zero separately for an instakill.

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Does anyone else feel like Jotnar is more hesitant to barrier the top troop than the others? Or is this just based on a personal feud between my Jotnar and my top troop ?

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