Reworking Frozen
When we previewed Frozen last week, we'd been playing with it quite a bit, and were definitely enjoying it.
It became very clear though, that some of our players were opposed to the idea of a single Frozen troop affecting an entire team.
We understand! Thematically it does feel a little weird to have a single frozen Goblin slow down your Behemoth, although we have to say that mechanically it DID work quite well and was both easy to explain and understand. We tried countless teams, with combinations and duplicates of troops wielding Frozen, and it never felt like we were ever against anything game-breaking.
BUT… we heard what you were saying, and we asked ourselves: could we improve Frozen? And the answer was yes.
By decreasing the power of the Frozen Effect to work as shown below, we can lower associated spell costs, and give Frozen to more troops (in both Traits & spells & weapons) without fear of creating a killer combo. We’ll keep our eye on that of course, but I believe the way Frozen now works, a Legendary Ice Dragon with a group freeze might even be viable some time in the future when we open up the Kingdoms in the far north!
New Status Effect: Frozen 2.0
Details, details, details...
So what does all that mean?
Well, basically now Frozen is affecting only the single troop it is targeted at, not the entire group.
There are 3 rules to the new Frozen effect:
You will not get an extra turn for mana colors if you have a frozen troop on your team with a matching color.
You will not get an extra turn for skulls if your front troop is frozen.
You will not get an extra turn from a spell if the troop casting that spell is Frozen
We’ve also reworked the AI to know when it’s frozen and adjust its matches accordingly
Please note, this is not an actual preview for the 1.0.9 Mobile/PC update. We typically release those 1-2 weeks before the update goes live. We just have some exciting “little” additions for 1.0.9 that we are excited to share with you earlier than usual, and “Sneak Peeks” are a great way to do that!
This is quite an interesting twist. I think I’ll come to like the way color matches are handled, it’s not what I expected but it seems to fit in well with the other game mechanics. Skulls feel a bit like the odd one out, due to the special front troop rule. Maybe it would be more consistent if either skull matches never get affected by Frozen or Frozen affects the troop colors as well as skulls.
Corner case, what happens if a frozen Goblin Shaman activates its spell and spawns a green 4-match? My expectation would be that the extra turn from the spell is voided, you still get an extra turn due to the 4-match not being brown or purple. Is that correct?
Thanks for putting in the extra effort, it’s appreciated.
That feels right. Make’s mono-color teams more susceptible, like rock worms Brown. Adds strategy, do I hit the shaman to try and shut down the generation or the hobgoblin to shut down green and red?
Hoping it gets more widespread use than just 2 or 3 troops. Maybe a “Freeze Ray” weapon for hero, bunch of blue mana cost, freezes target, 50% chance to freeze another random target, 25% to freeze self (backfire).
If I have a massive cascade, and say all the colors hit match 4’s to generate extra turns, but one color is locked out, does the team get an extra turn?
Right now, it seems more confusing than it was, and not strong enough for me to want to lose any stat points on the troops that will gain it. They’ll become like Dimetraxia, where the points lost into the conditional burn make what should be a cool dragon too far below the power curve to be worth playing.
So far it seems like a lot of extra code time for an ability that is now not worth that development time.
So the way I’m reading it, the ruling on cascades is that they will still give extra turns even if they’re coming from a frozen troop’s ability - i.e. a transformer makes a match that lets another 4-match happen. In fact, all transformers that don’t fuel themselves, apparently. Shadow Dragon won’t work because it is purple, but Slime will work because it isn’t purple.
I definitely like the concept of its lower power allowing it to be more common and less expensive. For that matter, if that happens, it also allows for some stronger extra-turn troops to come in. But a major point is that we might avoid the relative uselessness of the burn effect and its counter, Fireproof. Nobody cares about Fireproof because there are only a handful of troops that burn and nobody runs them - but if Frozen is easier to get, then the counter trait will be nice.
Not useless, just more situational (which is generally a good thing; one-size-fits-all is bad design in my mind). He’d still be a very cheap counter to a goblin or rock worm team where there’s only one color they’re trying match and any troop will do.
Yes, Ice Witch will likely be stronger but Sirrian also mentioned that it would now be rolled out to more units, so others might become more viable even if Frost Giant isn’t as viable as you had hoped.
I’m sure that there are a few kinks that will crop up/need ironing out but having it effect(affect?) a single troop seems much more refined and manageable to me.
Having another strategy to countering Goblins - without unecessarily nerfing them or changing large game mechanics is also much more positive.
[quote=“Studs, post:11, topic:3612, full:true”]
Not useless, just more situational (which is generally a good thing; one-size-fits-all is bad design in my mind). He’d still be a very cheap counter to a goblin or rock worm team where there’s only one color they’re trying match and any troop will do.
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How is he a counter to goblin Teams though, not that goblin teams would even need just another counter? Goblin teams use 5 colours, in any case you are rolling the dice(25%) and even if you get lucky and hit the hobgoblin(to stop green and red match extraturns and the extra turns of 2 of their 4 troops spells) it is a mere inconvenience with the goblin team still being able to chain with 3 of five coulours 4-matches and 2 troop spell extra turns.
And i used the term useless in the sense of the opportunity cost by using the Frost giant over a troop that just guarantees a beneficial effect, keeps chaining your turns, deals significantly more damage etc.
Edit: With all that being said while being significantly less potent, this frozen version is more deep and interesting than the previous one which was mainly ‘fire as soon as ready’ but it is clearly not an ability that should be on random target spells.
Personally I’m seeing this as an anti-climax… This revised effect feels pretty ineffective - it restricts getting extra turns from one or two colours and only lasts a few turns until it wears off? Feels to me the status was relegated before it even had a game… The new Frozen effect feels like it’ll only be a curiosity with this design…
Maybe if the effect extended to cascades from abilities. Like a frozen Gorgotha can’t randomly get an extra turn, or a transformer can’t get an extra turn just because it isn’t blue itself. Coding that would be annoying I think though.
I like the idea of a freeze-all dragon, sounds cool! (Puns)
But if it’s anything like Dimetraxia (percentile statuses suck T~T, please buff thx) it will not see any play.
Now I’ll continue patiently awaiting it’s implementation. :folds hands: :whistles:
