PvP Troop Usage Graphs

Sure, not everyone is, but when it comes to balancing decisions they should be based on the min-maxers majority and not on the “I like to try interesting comps” minority.

It seems pretty clear to me that Mythics need to be buffed befitting their rarity. Only one is ever used with regularity, and that’s strictly on Defense b/c the 3rd trait is annoying. I suspect Plague will tick up b/c he’s Impervious, but again that’s not a great use-case.

Another option would be to simply Double the specific Event Kingdom bounds for the week. So you would get a buff based on the number of troops used in your lineup based on the Event Kingdom: 2, 3, or 4 troops. For example if it was a Sword’s Edge week and you had 4 troops then “King of Blades” would give +20 Armor to all troops for the week instead of +10 Armor.

At least each week you would probably see different lineups than the “Standard Defend Set” week in week out.

The Souls problem sill needs to be examined…

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I believe, apart from your info, that many people first and foremost still need to get a/the mythic (they want) and on top of that trait it, which is sometimes, in the wake of traiting one of your pvp attacking legendaries (for example), difficult.

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Marilith has a huge amount of her power at level 1. She has the +6 attack and the 6 true damage to all enemies. She also isn’t incredibly reliant on traits to function. This makes her crazy strong for lower-level players.

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Hey Guys,

This is John, the one Sirrian mention from 505 Games.
I noticed a lot of you wanted a breakdown of the data by the level groups, so here are separate charts with the top 40 most used troops for Offense and Defense for yesterday (Aug 4th).

Offense on the left and defense on the right.

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Another topic I had hoped to write about in a thread, but thank you for offering it here. I also feel that while on Defense a couple of other adjustments could help.

  1. Make loosing on Offense HURT - currently when I lose an invasion, I am deducted ~7 (points?), that is a pittance. The issues lies in the averages will win out, and are heavily weighted towards accruing more rank points that losing even with a mediocre team. The leader board seems to award those players that can spam through as many battles as possible, not necessarily the best players. It is already extremely unlikely that a decent player, with even a mediocre comp will lose. So, a mediocre player with a cookie-cutter, but extremely efficient comp, will dominate the rankings if they play a ridiculous amount of time.

  2. Random Initiative - make a initiative a coin-flip. Going first is a HUGE advantage, and having it granted by default makes offense even more likely to win the match. I understand that there is something to this being a PvE encounter, and forcing the player to take an action to initiate combat has its merits, but this is a massive advantage.

  3. Defense Traits - these are mediocre at BEST, why not in lieu of 3 armor on defense, 6? Why not have a trait that provides a status effect on turn 0, but only on D. i.e. Frozen Fortress - When defending against invasion, a random opponent is Frozen. Preparation - This character begins the game with full mana, when defending against an invasion.

I think i might make a feature request post, just for visibility sake for these.

I work in Analytics and Data Visualization, and I am bleeding from the mouth and ears with the formatting of the graph. Why not remove the ALL category, and have the stacked bars represent themselves? The light blue section appears to be completely superfluous.

Thanks! That is exactly what I needed. :slight_smile:

Change from an environment that only rewards AI wins (and “punishes” losses) to ones that rewards wins only and more with underused troops and compositions. Sadly, the extra effort of actual team building would take coupled with the already relatively low rewards gained from winning defense battles would still leave a lot of people up with the cookie cutter teams unless there were some kind of significant reward.

If we ever nerfed to the point where there stopped being any significant outliers, our gameplay experience would be as flat as the usage graphs they produce. And sadly, I’m convinced that not even this would encourage people putting up unique defense teams, as even 1% better is still “better”. If the average player thinks they will have even a slight advantage with their copy paste defense teams, they will do it.

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Seems to me ALL of the troops being targeted by complaints are being used by players over lvl 500. How many are there in terms of the percentage of the player base?

It seems to me the problem isn’t with the cards, it’s with the PLAYERS. Something about the economy at high levels is accentuating the problem.

It simply isn’t fair to alter troops for everyone when the real issues only affect 10-15% of the player base.

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Well said sir. Amen.

At higher levels, you have the resources to take on all comers. I’m a little under level 300, and I routinely take down level 1000 players. In other words, it’s much harder to get defense wins the higher you go up levels. The only way a level 1000 person is going to lose a battle is through pure horrible bad luck with RNG… miraculous cascades, never-ending AI loops and some crazy devours. There is a small list of, well, overused defense teams that can make that bad RNG occur around ~33% of the time for end gamers.

I’d say the sweet spot is under level 200. I remember that PVP choices were far more varied then. It wasn’t perfect. There were tons of goblin teams. But, it was more varied than higher levels. More defense options have the capability of defeating a player at level 100 than at level 500.

That said, I think it makes no sense for the devs to nerf balanced troops just because they are popular solutions to the simplistic AI problem. I think the devs will ultimately need to find a new way to incentivize changing up defenses weekly. If they gave players a good enough incentive to change up defense teams, there would be an end to copypasta defenses.

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I’m level 442 and I actually see a lot of variety. Sure there’s a few troops that appear more frequently, namely BD, Maw, Mab, Mercy, and Valk, but overall even these troops I’m seeing combined in all kinds of different configurations. If I decide I don’t want to face Maw or BD, I just select the easy or medium battle instead of the hard one.

The issue to me is that once you get to a certain power level, all of your invades are going to be against that same power level because it’s capped. So level 1000 players don’t have easy or hard battles, they have Maw, Maw, and Maw to choose from.

I agree variety has improved over the last month. It’s not great in my opinion. But, I’m certainly not as bored with PVP as I was. However, my level 800+ friend has even less variety. I can only assume it’s worse for level 1000 people.

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I think the process is more organic/natural. There are a few ways to pick a defense team. Maybe we pick a team that’s hard to play against; maybe we come up with it from scratch, thinking only about how the AI uses troops.

But another way to pick a defense team is to move an offense team into the defense slot. If you play a team and it seems effective, if you’re confident that the AI could handle it, you’re likely to at least give it a try on defense.

And if most of your offense teams contain Valkyrie, it stands to reason that some of those teams will make the move to defense.

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Can we also get team usage data? Pretty please? I really think that’s the more telling data.

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I totally agree. It’s all about the combos.

I made a similar comment in another thread. At higher levels there should not be a meta, there should heavy experimentation and variety do to the high level of resources that should have been gotten at lower levels.

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Whoa. Valkyrie is actually ahead of Mercy even for 501+. Obviously the Mab teams need her, but … clearly something has to be done about souls in this game.

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