The Future of The Dragon Soul

I figured that along the road we will be getting some legendary or mythic that will be able to review your dead troops. .

It would thematically be nice if TDS third trait was something like “On death, 25% chance to resurrect by replacing another dragon and 25% chance to summon Dragon Eggs”

If the position possession is done, it should definitely be to possess last slot. I do commonly use TDS as a 2nd slot that needs to stay in front of 3rd slot though, which is normally Shadow Dragon or Dragonian Assassin that would block TDS purple in last slot.

I wouldn’t mind TDS to stay the same trait as it is now and just change Infernal King to:

“40% chance to revive and place deathmark on self.”

If the previous effect were reinstated for Possession, I would prefer Possession target the first slot, where he can eat my summons if he gets killed by spell damage, instead of last slot, where I’d have to use entirely different teams or just forgo getting the trait at all. Personally, I’m not partial to the on-death traits in the first place, because you almost never see them. I’d especially hate on death effects that are detrimental to the other team, as this just encourages dumb stuff like stacking four of the same troop. I’d highly prefer something with the text “all dragon allies (something) when I (something)”. Eg., “all (other) dragon allies gain 1 magic when I cast a spell”.

As for the upcoming necromancy change, I really fail to see how it will in any way allow people more team variety over using valk. In essence:

  • One or two shot valk teams (eg., explore) will be earning less souls than before. Overall, it will take longer to farm souls with valk, since you need more casts, period.
  • The change to the trait affectign the cap makes valk better for protracted battles where you need multiple casts of valk or a loop. Those that used non-valk teams in PvP in favor of just exploring every once in a while will likely reconsider, since in PvP you might actually cast enough to take advantage of the change.
  • Lower levels that can’t hit the soul cap easily are especially effected by this, since this is pretty much a direct nerf unless you can consistently generate 28 (base) souls worth of valk casts (plus the four from kills).

The only group of people seeing a net gain here would be the people already use valk only in long battles and are high enough level to easily hit the current cap. So, basically, the same group of people using her in PvP that might have a better gameplay experience overall if they could, perhaps, use a different team without taking such a huge hit.

Is the data showing souls as being too easy to get? Are the guild tasks trying to be made more attractive by proxy? I really don’t understand the reasoning here. The scope of the change is also too small for any of us already past needing to farm souls to have to go back to farming souls, so it can’t be that, either. My soul hoard will continue to grow every week regardless of whether I farm with valk or not.

Soul generation as a whole really need to be reassessed. Starting with necromancy. Especially since it looks like we are going in the direction of adding more generation options rather than have a baseline increase. Personally, I think something something like +2 Souls Per Kill, while still being a nerf in many situations, would go a long way toward making the trait useful without needing a dedicated generator to back it up. Yes, that would also be a direct nerf to Valk using the trait, but really, the proposed change makes the whole Valk situation worse, not better. At least this way it could be used independently of Valk. Having it on a few more troops (instead of some “heart” or “bond” traits here and there) would also go a long way - the current troop pool with Necromancy leaves a lot to be desired. Ensoul is also laughable as a legendary trait, and should probably be at least +2 per 4/5 match.

Legendary soul generation traits that are worse than or require Valk kinda defeat the purpose here, so I really hope something similar isn’t in mind for the upcoming Legendary trait. Dragon Soul was pretty on point as far as soul generation goes - it loses nothing for the ability to generate souls, and is effective in its own right whether or not you need the souls, and its fun to use both in synergy teams and as just a one-off exploder. The fact that it is a legendary, though, means that people starting out now or didn’t get him during the Dragon’s Claw kingdom event are, again, stuck with valk. Having every other generator option released in the future be a legendary doesn’t do anything for allowing team variety for a large number of players through a large portion of the game.

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I like a lot of your thoughts, Mithran.


If we are spitballing replacement traits for TDS, how about “gain 1 (or 2) souls whenever an ally casts a spell”?

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A good reason to change Necromancy is that everybody at first simply misunderstands what it does - they all think it would increase the cap (once learning of such a cap). So in that sense it is a good change.
But I fully agree that all the other issues raised by @Mithran and also in the “Getting tired of Valkyrie” thread need to be addressed as well.

TDS already generates souls. It could be placed on a troop that does not such thing to have more options to farm soul then just the current 2 troops (tds and valk)

As a newer player, this all sounds rather frustrating.

There are a lot of teams I would love to try, and I would love to experiment. But I’m still at a point where I need souls just to level the troops that I would try in those teams. So it feels like a bad use of my time to play with any team that doesn’t have a soul generator on it. And now it’s going to become even more necessary and therefore limiting, and troops that do generate souls will generate fewer of them?

At least TDS dropped for me, and it’s great that it’s really fun. But none of the third traits that the Devs have suggested sound like they would do anything but make the troop worse. Build a team that’s badly constituted, to take advantage of the fact that if it dies (which I want to avoid), it doesn’t make it even weaker? And when it dies it replaces a member of the team that was likely chosen for its synergy anyway? Sure - I don’t have to trait it, and I won’t; but is there another troop out there where you want to actively avoid traiting it? (For the trait itself, not because the animations slow down farming.)

I do have a fair amount of time invested in the game, but not long-term, and I’m really enjoying it. There are lots of aspects of it that are really fun. But it’s disheartening that it sounds like it’s one more game where they slow down your progress by making it harder to progress.

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I think TDS soul generation is actually fine where it is, and Nim stated earlier that a legendary soul affecting trait will be coming on a different troop in the future so they probably wont be giving TDS soul trait. It reaches the cap in four casts, no matter what, and will be largely unaffected by the upcoming necromancy changes since nobody uses necromancy troops with TDS anyways. Using a full dragon team usually gets you less, and having TDS as the only dragon on your team usually caps you. Both are viable, and TDS is still useful either way.

Some kind of dragon buffing trait would be a great synergy addition to what Dragon Soul already has and would make sense (though the name Possession would no longer make sense). Theres also little worry about a passive dragon buffing trait being overpowered, since Dragon Cruncher exists and there are no impervious or indigestible dragons.

I’m not sure I’d be happy with any on-death trait that could actively have TDS ruin a team layout if it dies, even if it was predictable. If anything, maybe “30% chance to resurrect or summon a random dragon when I die”. As in, 15% chance to summon a Dragon Soul, and 15% chance to summon another, random dragon. That would distinguish it from IK, have a slightly higher chance of summoning something but having that something be generally worse.

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I’d prefer a rework of the 3rd trait. But please dont make it 50% necromancy. It would be a nice trait for those in need of souls, and a complete waste of traitstones for those who dont. A legendary trait should always be something that has an influence on the outcome of the match.

I like this idea a lot :slight_smile: that fits his name too. I hope they consider this rather than his on death trait (gosh I hate those)

That would be really cool!

Dragon Cry - 75%-100% chance, upon death, to summon a random dragon.

The idea behind this is when a dragon dies, there tends to be quite a lot of noise included. We could say that the dragon is crying out for help.

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OK, so just spitballing ideas as @DonBoba said:

TDS: 3rd Trait- Possession
On death, TDS gives all allies half mana.
Dragon Allies receive full mana.

It is TDS’ way of possessing his allies. His final parting gift. “I am dying but use this last bit of me to finish the battle and claim victory for Krystara!”

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25% chance to prevent an allied dragon from dying.
Essentially leaving said troop on 1 life.

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I love this idea, or some offshoot of it.

Giving TDS a soul trait would be such an overkill… Right now its possibly more powerful than Valkyrie - you dont have to build around blue color, it deals good aoe damage, and explodes buncha tiles for good looping. With necromancy supertrait there would be no reason to use Valkyrie whatsoever.

In my opinion TDS should get just a regular non-soul related trait, probably something to do with dragons ( I was thinking maybe something like - "Whenever friendly dragon casts a spell, TDS gets 3 mana… or the other way around - “Whenever TDS casts its spell, all friendly dragons get 3 mana” ).

Also, we should have more options then those two - so Iam looking forward to any new soul generating troops that would give us more flexibility and not force us to use just Valk or TDS.

While some of these sound neat, we have to consider their impact using 4x Dragon Soul on defense.

Have to kill the team twice. Assuming random dragon is every dragon in the game right now, 1/22 chance for the dragon to be another Dragon Soul, or about a 17% chance of this happening for four of them. Not overly difficult, but very annoying since stun doesn’t block death traits.

If you kill one, the rest of the team will be 3 board exploders that deal 17 damage each. The third explode will fill undoubtedly fill the first one, if you haven’t killed it yet, assuming they don’t cascade and fill themselves up with extra turns. Giving half mana to a Maw, Death, Famine, etc. just for getting killed is also pretty heavily exploitable. A small fixed amount of mana (say, 3 for non-dragons, 5 for dragons) would be much more balanced, and would hopefully dissuade people using him as a death battery but it would still be nice to have.

Assuming each one is checked individually, you have a < 32% chance of any given Dragon Soul dying if they actually take lethal damage. If specified “other than self”, you’d have about a 42% chance of them dying when they take lethal damage.

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I thought of something similar. Mine was more of a 25% chance to summon a random Legendary or higher dragon. Thematically this would be something like the troop returning to battle with a host that could contain it. Another idea would be Soul Explosion where when TDS dies deal damage equal to the number of souls collected so far to random enemies with a ratio that would make sense.

Here are a couple more suggestions for the 3rd trait:

Font of Power: TDS gains 2 mana each turn.

Reincarnation: When TDS dies, summon a dragon egg.

Wouldn’t it make most sense thematically to give the Keeper of Souls this trait?
Not like anyone’s using him for his current third trait as it is. (Which could also lead to replacing his current second trait with something more… desirable. Maybe a new trait that acts like Arcane, but with souls instead of magic.)

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