At least in the PC/mobile version, a few months ago they made it so it doesn’t expire.
I think the devs have to be really careful with mechanics like that. Already it’s quite frustrating that some troops (mostly Bone Dragon, but to a lesser extent devouring troops and Shadow Hunter) can use your own stats against you. I don’t think @Tacet is necessarily wrong here, but adding more such mechanics must be done with eyes open.
6 Likes
Well… wouldn’t it be more “realistic” if fire damage would scale inversely with remaining armor (so the less you’re protected the more it hurts)?
Example: Deal 3 dmg if the enemy is at full armor, and percentually increase the damage to somewhere like 5 or 6 dmg when armor is gone.
Now, I KNOW this probably is not a good idea because balance but it just came to my mind and i thought I could share it with you, because it would be interesting to see what you guys think.
How about a gem count icon on the outside border, solution for all spells/abilities you need to count 
2 Likes
i want his damage boost to be 3x. Not sure if too strong though.
All the “Do X Damage, double when AFFIX, apply AFFIX” could all stand to be looked at I think. Maybe each could create 5 of it’s gem type on cast?
I guess you could boost it by magic when magic is at end game level. End game being level 20 mythic, kingdoms at level 10 and 5 starred.
I’m with @lyya that any changes to the damage here need to be handled very carefully, to work in both early and late game. I do like the idea of a rework though as these effects are meaningless in the late game…
Poison: I think @tacet’s idea of 10% of Life works fine, and scales nicely. I disagree that there’s a thematic problem with stouter troops taking more damage. Assume @tacet meant 10% of current Life, not 10% of original (maximum) Life (the latter would be too strong).
Burn: the burn damage each turn could be set and scaled by the troop / spell that casts it, perhaps Magic/4 (or 3 or 5, could vary with each spell). Trickier to code as the effect needs to ‘remember’ this number when cast, but that’d create scaling that doesn’t break Arena.
As a bonus thought, I think Burn (and definitely Disease) should have a chance to spread to an adjacent troop each turn.
4 Likes
if its 10% of current sound fine (i was originally thinking he meant the max hp)
i like
1 Like
Burning with magic scaling sounds good, but I think a minimum of 3/ maximum of 8 would keep burning useful, without it becoming over/underpowered. This would make War a better pick than before, I imagine. Then all four horsemen would be good picks.
100% With this whole post suggestion
I really like this too and thematically it fits. The only issue I see is the Burn/Disease continually spreading and refreshing itself on the same troops, so that one iteration could keep reinfecting indefinitely. But if the chance to spread is low enough it may not be a problem.
We could just set it where the cast version has a chance to apply its effect on adjacent targets, but the effects that triggered of the cast version don’t spread.
Or think of it as a wildfire spreading and burning itself out, it won’t head back to the original location
The problem i see with it is:
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10% of current life means that an “almost beat to death troop” will take less damage than a “healthy” troop, it doesn’t fits the theme that the poison progress and gets worse with time, more like the opposite. But yeah i understand the concern with the balance, but a troop with 50 of life will lose 5 (10% of 50), then 4(10% of 45 = 4,5), and 4( 10% of 41 = 4,1) again, then 3 ( 10% of 39 = 3,9)… And it doesn’t sits well for me…
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My take would be a lesser value based on the staring maximum health of the victim, 7% maybe, or scaled on the magic of the caster. Not sure if the first option would be very complicated to code and the second would be preferable in my opinion. Because it does not punishes the victim for being healthier or better in statuses. As @Lyya pointed if we start to have >>>too much stuff<<< “punishing” the stronger players it leads to a state where getting better at the game is not very desirable or important. It’s ok to have a few effects like Charm and others, and maybe get a few others here and there to add strategic solutions, but not a whole lot of things twisting the benefits of making progress changing an old mechanic (poison) that could maybe get out of hand. We already had that with Scale Guard back then…
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Another thing that could be tried would be increasing poison with the passage of turns and it doesn’t auto-cleanses. You starting losing 1 life, then 2, 3, 4, 5… If you don’t have a way to cleanse it you still can still “outrace” the poison with healing effects, but it works just for a while… If new aplications of poison would “speed up the clock” increasing the progress of the poison we could maybe see Venoxia and Shadow Dragon in the field again.
Well, nothing to say about Burning so far, no idea to share at the moment, but i also hope that Regeneration, Invigorated, Life Steal and such also get some better scaling based on level tiers of the hero or troop status.
2 Likes
I really like this idea, how about making poison “layer”, so first poison iteration is 1 dmg per turn, second is 3, third is 5 and so on (ofc there can be other progressions, maybe make the dmg go exponential instead of linear, to make focused poison more rewarding?) Plus, I’d keep the auto cleansing (without the stacking likeliness of cleanse happening), and I’d even venture as far as to say that an auto cleanse should remove ALL stacks, so the attacker is forced to be quick with poisoning his target to a high level, before it heals itself and the whole work is gone.
While that woud ofc be (fairly) difficult to implement and even harder to balance properly, I really like the idea to be able to have a “poison an enemy” troop on your team and having the ability to decide wether to go AoE or rather just get this strong enemy troop dead sooner.
1 Like
Poison doesn’t cleanse for me. I’m on console, and it stays on the unit until they die.
yeah sounds even better
it could just have a 10% chance each turn to ‘get worse’? 
1 2 3 4 5 , the +1 sounds reasonable to me
My guess as to why they don’t do anything variable or “stacking” with their status effects is that they don’t have enough room to show the stack count (especially on small form factors like phones) and trying to remember just how much that next tick of Poison will cost you mid-match – especially one you had to take a small pause from – is more mental load than they want to place upon the player.
The game is really quite elegant in the simplicity of its information presentation (sometimes to a fault). They clearly learned a lot since Puzzle Quest 1, which was almost impossible to parse on a mobile device.
3 Likes
there is a room - when you click the unit to read details, the poison description can contain stack (i think its not more mental load then the calculation required for player to do to see how spells scale with a ratio to anything)