Originally published at: https://gemsofwar.com/a-new-mythic-approaches-pharaoh-khafru/
New Mythic Troop: Pharaoh Khafru Pharaoh Khafru will be the only Mythic Troop available in Glory, Gem, Guild & VIP Chests for the next 7 days.
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“covert 3 skulls” quality 0 as always.
“skulls” vs “Skulls” XD, Do you guys OCR scan a photo of a fax?
“Show Full Post…” = empty post, nice
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If anyone is successful at getting Theo’s wish gem to trigger on turn 1, pls let me know what I’m doing wrong so I keep testing possibilities.
#GOWprogramming
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Sorry jumped to conclusion.
It seems to work for me. Theo does create a wish gem and I’ve seen it get exploded.
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Subsequent ones work, as long as they were on the board before turn starts.
Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t on my end: that it was just incorrect programming (based on existing game rules of precedence), which is likely to be dismissed as ‘working as intended’ or a feature request.
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They worked for me on the 1st turn as well, but not consistently.
This was first turn. One wish was exploded and the 2nd was left.
But then a few matches later with 1 Theo, I didn’t see any wish gem or get any wish gem effect.
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Will try different placements then
I was thinking that too. I’m getting a lot of misses result with 1 Theo, no matter where he seems to be.
Either I’ll get a wish gem that’s not exploded or none show up, and I don’t get any effect. I don’t think I’ve seen a 1st turn wish effect yet with 1 Theo. Maybe something to do with the 2 Pharoah’s explosions causing a bug?
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This is what is concerning indeed, for it beats the purpose when the gimmick is bugged.
One more mythic to the decoration shelf I guess
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If no one else gets to it first, I’ll record some videos tonight when I’m on my PC and submit a bug report
My best guess it’s a combination of having multiple Pharoah and 4x speed.
I tried 3x Pharoah and 1 Theo and was able to explode a Wish Gem first turn at 1x speed.
At 4x speed, you either get an unexploded wish gem or it seems to get eaten.
I tried with 1 Pharoah and 1 Theo but didn’t have enough time to keep restarting until it explodes a wish gem. RNG is against me.
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Doesnt matter tbh. It’s a garbage mythic with nobody will use.
A bug is a bug in my eyes . If it’s an issue with explosions at the start of turn, this could affect any troop with that mechanic. Current or future troop.
I also don’t think it’s garbage. I plan to use Pharoah over 2x Ironhawk for GaP because I think it should be marginally faster.
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… how its faster???
My 3x Ironhawk team gets slowed down everytime a high health gnome appears, so I run a 2x Ironhawk team. That’s 2 casts per battle.
I’m pretty sure you can get away with 1 cast with 3x Pharoah with high enough magic. Pharoah also has Accursed. -2 random stats x3 can make a huge difference at low levels.
It may even be able to handle higher level Explore GaP with Ruby Macabre or other combinations. I haven’t bothered testing those yet but I think others already have.
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Pharaoh Kafru seems a little off. Yes, exploding 2 gems at the start of each turn is fantastic because it promotes mindless gameplay with 1 click and forget team setups.
His spell is…well…hard to make use of because he fills his mana back up again with curse gems, and then you have to think too hard to make use of the Uber doom skulls and the death mark gems. Lord of slaughter works, but it can be hard to get mana back with the skull loop, and it’s because Kafru doesn’t generate extra skulls.
His traits are fine. (It would be nice if his final trait exploded 3 gems at the start of his turn to be more consistent, but that feels too greedy)
I would rework his spell like this:
Canopic jar: mana cost-24 yellow, purple, brown.
Convert all gems of a chosen color to cursed gems. Then, create 2 uber doom skulls boosted by cursed enemies. If an enemy dies, death mark a random enemy. (1:2)
This would feel much better because he would refill his mana and create up to 10 uber doom skulls if the whole enemy team was cursed. The death mark gems feel too random and can mess up alignments, so applying death mark when you kill enemies feels appropriate but can also be removed. The uber doom skull count could be reduced to 1:1 so you could have a maximum of 6 on the board, but it would be harder to get alignment.
The pharaoh’s spell just seems to refill his mana and then you need to find other ways to make use of it. He needs to act either as a skull generator or applying death mark easier. It just takes too much effort to make his spell on its own feel powerful…
Tried something like this in the past with single-gem exploders: the exploding animation overhead (and sporadic cascades) significantly lowered the overall number of battles per GaP.
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True, the cascades would be a major problem. Pharoah’s explosion animation seemed quick enough to me when I tested it in E1 this morning.
In the end, it doesn’t matter too much to me lol. I barely do 1 GaP per Vault Weekend nowadays. I continue to lose interest in GoW with each update.
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There would be howls from the usual suspects the first time this spell backfired on the player(s) in question. And it would, because the “practical implementation” of that spell would be to convert the gems first and then to create the skulls. Only there would be a real risk that the created skulls would overwrite some of the gems that had just been converted and therefore break up the 4+ matches just formed and hand the turn over to the A.I. with a catastrophic (for the player) board in place.
I believe that’s not a risk with the spell as currently constituted, although to be fair I haven’t played around with the new mythic just yet and therefore can’t speak from personal experience.
The current situation requires you to pair Khafru with something else to take advantage of the resulting board. But it’s also something that shouldn’t be a catastrophe for a player who doesn’t just randomly click on gems when casting the spell.
I think he’s fine as he is right now, but that your suggested change could lead to much larger problems.
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This is to my knowledge the ONLY way the game works and ever has. Even if reordered internally, ie., create then convert, the gems could still overwrite the color you targeted and ruin it.
Also, NO spell can do the matching step before the spell resolves, meaning:
If the spell has additional boosts off cursed enemies or curse gems, they would have had to have been on the board before the spell began. Creating 10 uber doomskulls (assuming 2x and not 2:1) is hugely prone to backfire already, since they can overwrite any slot on the board and creating 10 in this instance might not even be a 50/50 to land up a 3 match.
The “if an enemy dies” caveat would be also useless, because the spell would have resolved before any matches take place, and the spell does no damage.
The current iteration will never interrupt a match created by the curse gem convert because only skulls are ever converted to deathmark gems and you can’t target skulls with the spell. You’ll always get your extra turn. The annoying part is if you plan out cascades so you can get board clear from the skulls you essentially get a pile of stone blocks.
The intent of the mythic seems to be to have minimal scatter skulls around and then the beginning of turn explosion can hit either scattered droomskulls for more clear/curse, deathmark gems for deathmark, or both, but employing this strategy means playing rather slow and defensively and intentionally dropping your turn to set up death marks NEXT turn then have a chance of killing things the turn after. The skulls never seemed to be intended to be matched.
The improvement I would give him would be to nerf. He’d be a better mythic if he just… didn’t convert to deathmark gems at all. The gimmick is not really needed. You could use him to set up mass deathmarks, which is what it seems to be designed around, but it is not a good strategy, and is actually a huge anti-synergy with this mythics best qualities. He functions much better as mindless passive mana gain and brown mana battery + curse all.
If you have two, they can be used as a passive generator in teams capable of ~3.5 minute explore runs (all 6 battles + time in between, haven’t found a consistent sub-3 yet) while generally not ever needing or wanting to cast the mythics themselves. Its slightly slower, but hilarious, with a strong skull striker and bonestorm. Still almost impossible to find a spot to convert and get an extra turn but you could gamble on a cascade and ANY skull match here is going to be a board clear and a ton of damage, but sometimes you just win the fight without lifting a finger. Like triple eye of arges on steriods.
If you are using only one, it can still be a decent passive generator and brown mana battery and emergency curse all (which also turns off pesky sumberge for your favorite AoE setups).
I wouldn’t recommend using three, since they don’t have storm creation technology and two with a storm far far outgenerates three without, and most single slot super fast win conditions don’t have a (relevant) storm.
Overall, I’m very happy to have a mythic to at least play around with and limit test, even with the annoying anti-synergy deathmark angle (I’ve gotten a couple deathmark kills in dozens of battles). So many are just dead on arrival and this one at least does something different. To sometimes dubious overall effect, but still.
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I’d recommend not discounting this possibility. There’s always something in the future that can change that and if not the future, the hero with a brown storm + something like The Ruby Macaque can also likely benefit from extra cascade bounces.
There’s a reasonable argument not to get 3 just from Emberclaw and Takshaka existing, but… different functions.
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