I remember back in the day folks could not wait to get updates. Now it’s like Oh no, not again!
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It’s kinda hard to exhibit creative team building without being clairvoyant.
My 1st round troops were understandably mediocre so I plumped for festival cow for te boost and who knows, maybe I get a summoner further down the line. 2nd round was a choice of converters or nightshade so that was a no brainer. 3rd pick was harpy eagle: damage at last plus some mana generation. 4th it was no bend bros. So basically my team had almost zero damage other than skulls. I lost the 1st 2 fights rapidly and then got a bit lucky with nobend. In hindsight I could have built something much better but in order to do so I would have needed knowledge of all 4 draft options from the start. It’s good that it’s different but I really wanted to have a situation where hero xp was on the table. Classes take so much grind to boost that I fear the new arena is already obsolete outside of campaign reqs and possibly the event. Another event! We didn’t need another event, believe me.
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This analysis is so amazingly detailed and spot on, it’s a real shame it will likely get ignored entirely. 
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Right - up to 4.2.5 most of the content was “good”, but this is 2 years ago. Since then each update feels like a risk.
What happend? Who killed the creativity?
It just seems that the devs neither understand their own game nor what the players want. No more grinding and boring events for sure…
They even dont need to be creative, just look at the request forum here, lots of good ideas - have they ever used a single one from there?
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Remember the Design-A-Troop contest that got delayed over and over again due to legal hassle? I got the impression that whenever an idea gets posted here it’s guaranteed to never get implemented, in order to avoid potential lawsuits in regards to stealing intellectual property.
Im sorry to say it, but if the next patch would be reversal of the arena changes it would have been a much better patch than anything I can possibly imagine at this stage. (Troop reworks/buffs doesnt exist anymore.)
I care for my guildmates that loved arena.
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I fought against Gluttony last night in Arena. It has a flat 20% chance to devour an enemy, no boosts. Because it explodes gems, it also gains back its mana quite easily. It was able to cast 3 times. It devoured 3 of my troops, back to back. Yeah, 20%.
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The one thing that would be useful is if you could click on any of the choices on the left and it would bring up the selections until the team choice was finalized. That would fix the team selection issues.
This game is addictive because of the sense of progress it gives you and the artificial urgency of things like tribute and pets. The game has consistently sped up gameplay to make things more exciting with 4x speed, enhanced abilities, weapons, classes, double converters, empowered troops, and Arena is the opposite of all that. You’re thrust into the slow lane.
As an end gamer, I literally think of this mode as suffering, which is the opposite of fun.
Let’s strip away all the stats you’ve worked years towards.
Let’s strip away your knowledge of how cards work by taking away their traits.
Let’s take away the feeling of progress with no class progress.
Playing arena is like an existential crisis that makes me question why I play this game. I wonder if the rewards in the arena based event will be able to overcome my distaste for this mode, especially when combined with diminishing returns.
There are an extra 3 daily offers if you play 3 arena games a day. Please, someone, tell me those offers can’t have imperial deeds or writs in them. If there are I might have to have “daily suffering” to see if I got one. If I end up following that carrot daily it was be a matter of time before I quit.
I think I will try to forget this mode exists so that I don’t have to look at this game and my life and ask harder questions. Then again, the devs like to force our hand, so it may not be a choice at all in the end.
13 Likes
My complaint about the old Arena was you play a completely stripped down version of the game, which doesn’t emulate what the other 99% of the game is, for bare minimum gain.
This does not change at all with this update. It’s like taking something for a test drive but the car can’t go above 25mph.
Somebody mentioned drafting the order backwards - that’s a great idea. Why not allow troops to be traited? Half of a troops effectiveness is rooted in their traits. They’re already neutered by not having any stats applied to them, what’s the harm in their traits being there?
BTW, my first fight I was lucky enough to face a summoning troop in the other teams 4th slot. SUPER FUN beating my head against the wall for 10 minutes doing 8 dmg a pop as troops continued to get summoned!
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Hate to break it to you, but I got writs in my very first bonus deal from Arena. So I share your thoughts and your pain.
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Particularly fond of the achievement being called “Are You Entertained”: coincidences are improbable. 
Sometimes, customers have to actually Hope that this company is doing the ‘lowball release with subsequent generously listening to feedback’ gimmick, to try and make sense of the absurdities being done to the product.
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This is the biggest bull shit.
Without a weapon to target the 20% stat boosts. It’s really difficult to take them down.
While knowing that it’s baked into the game and they just can’t easily remove the stat boosts.
And no I’m not going to waste thousands of gold trying to pull it on my team. So I don’t see it as equal opportunity. By any means.
I had it blocked from casting but a cascade allowed it to take 3 of my troops away. “Fun times”.
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Too bad the new Arena didn’t come with a smarter AI. Here’s the board the AI left for me:
Instead of matching the TWO DOOMSKULLS up top to kill my Enraged troop, it instead used:
And targeted my second troop, the Druid. You know, because Stunning a troop when they have no traits is somehow more important than killing a troop that will kill you instead.
Bad AI is bad.
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I got this guy last night, Thankfully. There were 2 summoners on the other team. Very good “balance.”
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Unfortunately, this company has repeatedly said their development pipeline is set in stone years ahead, with zero wiggle room. What you see is what you get, until the next rework in a couple of years, no matter how disliked it might be. I’m rather having some hopes they’ll spend a few minutes on Doomed Blade next, they’ve been putting off replacing the Watery upgrade with the Ruined upgrade for two years now, maybe it’s finally reaching a position on their backlog they are willing to work on.
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Three troops not capable of dealing damage with their spell? With this new format I’d immediately retire a run where I end up with more than one support troop.
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In another instance, I had one troop left, the enemy had one troop left. We were at 6 and 7 health each. There was a skull match on the board when my turn ended. Instead of matching the skulls and killing me, the AI instead decided it was best to cast its ability. The troop was Leprechaun. It attempted to explode as many Green gems as it could, except there were only 2 green gems on the board and they didn’t affect the skulls. When my turn came, I promptly matched the skulls and killed the enemy. The AI could have done that too and I would have lost.
And my Hero level is over 1500, so I don’t want to hear any “The AI gets smarter as you level up!” This is just bad AI and it doesn’t do any good for a new player to teach them “Well, sometimes the AI just ALLOWS you to win.”
This would require a degree of professionalism that would be at odds with the quality of documented QA, Communications, Localisations…
…so one can Hope.
Yet another criticism of this supposed fix - epic troops are flooded with lots of dumb-as-rocks event troops and troops that are only good if they have traits because they’re empowered.
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