I think the huge Death Mark backlash this week was due to a perfect storm of circumstances all hitting at once:
a) the potential RNG instant destruction of Death Mark, previously, was tempered in a few ways: Troops capable of Death Marking either could only DM 1-2 enemy troops at once, or the only troop that could DM a full team (Death) was both super hard to get and cost a ton of mana to cast so you could manage it.
b) Now suddenly we have a new Hero class - which suddenly gives everyone a troop with full team Death Mark capability, not just the relatively few with Death. It isn’t rare anymore.
c) Not only that, but having a Dark traitstone glory-purchase week allowed a ton of people to instantly trait up their Deathknight.
d) And the full-team Death Mark is basically free - in fact it’s guaranteed to happen unless you carefully build a Stun team (more on that later) full of compromises to deal with the hero.
e) Even worse, it’s not a spell so the usual mana drain approach just doesn’t work at all, making it even harder to avoid.
So basically we’re seeing a massive increase in automatic full-team Death Marks, which means a ton of frustration because overnight, victory suddenly now relies much less on strategy and much, much more on hoping the Random Number Gods don’t just kill a few of your troops for the heck of it.
But wait, there’s more!
Guild Wars cranks up the tension by making any GW losses at all incredibly punishing. Missing out on the last battle cuts your daily points fully in half. In PVP if you get defeated due to randomness no problem, just fight a few more and you’ll make up for it. But in Guild Wars… forget it. Those points are gone forever, and they’re huge.
Plus Guild Wars puts a premium on setting the strongest Defense team possible. So we’re not seeing easy defense teams built to get Revenge matches, we’re seeing teams built to win using the best way available given the defense AI: Hail Marys based on RNG. And the best troop in the game at that, which suddenly nearly everyone has and is suddenly incentivized to put on GW defense every single day? You guessed it. He’s everywhere.
And then on top of it all we only get max points by building single-color teams. This means compromises. This cuts way, way down in our available options for handling Mr. Deathknight: Mana Drain obviously is a no go. A full team immune to Death Mark will get creamed by the other 3 troops. Building a team able to Stun a specific enemy, plus do enough damage at the precise time when the Hero is Stunned, is difficult enough - but doing it with a single color team that’s _also able to win a match_is damn near impossible.
Cleanse isn’t a defense because of that first-turn free shot. Changing this might help.
But right now we’re left with the feeling that we’ve been set up to fail. It’s massively frustrating and discouraging. It isn’t fun. It doesn’t make me want to play any more. I’ve been playing for a long time and this week has easily been the single most frustrating and least fun week of all of them.
Last week at this time everything was different.
