A suggested change to Doomskulls

Feature Requests and Game feedback
21

I believe the thinking is that they make the game much too prone to RNG. Exploders were already heavily favored for their ability to generate mana and (especially when a storm is present) extra turns. Having gems fall that can cause more explosions skews the game even more towards this very swingy mechanic.

Yes, attacking the engine (to borrow a concept from MtG) would mean looking at explosions rather than doomskulls. Mana generation by explosions seems the natural place to start. But since all it takes is one 4- or 5-match to gain an extra turn, more explosions (and more steps in the cascade) means greater ability to chain these kinds of things together. So we circle back to having an additional kind of gem that is capable of causing explosions without a spell being used.

22

Where I’m coming from is the opinion “I play with Doomskulls a lot, but when I compare them to a Divines team they don’t feel much different.” I do think you’re right in saying exploders are more likely the root.

When I play with Doomskulls, my goal is to engineer the death of an opponent so I can unleash an explosion or one of my converters to begin a cascade of death.

When I play with Divines, my goal is to loop consistently, slowly grooming the board until I can engineer a massive hit from Ishbaala. I usually don’t pass the turn often, and if I get “stuck” then Infernus deals damage and “resets” the board so I can try again, with moderately high likelihood of cascades. Thus: an exploder.

Goblins uses an exploder. Psion relies on Ragnagord, an exploder. The only meta I can think of that doesn’t use an exploder is Nyxbringer, which instead relies on converters.

I feel like there are two different games people want out of Gems of War. One is what we have: an endgame that is relatively fast and revolves around engineering a single catastrophic turn for your enemy. The other is a slower, more strategic game much like what you play in the lower levels, where no troops can easily set up such a catastrophic turn.

I feel like a lot of Doomskull complaints come from people that want that slower game. Maybe they’re lower-level and GoW is already a slower game for them. Now they’re cresting the hill of the later game where it’s faster, and Doomskulls seem to be the cause. I don’t think they are.

If we want to steer the game back in their direction, then we need to severely nerf exploders. It’s probably safe to say a troop like Gorgotha should cap at 3-5 gems exploded, maybe less. I could still have fun in that game, but pushing GoW slower would have to mean a lot of rewards need to be adjusted upwards to compensate for the inability to finish a lot of games in a short time.

Personally, I prefer the faster game. I feel like Doomskulls are extremely biased to give an advantage to offense. Since you used an MtG reference, I want to use another: Doomskulls feel very analogous to when the first red Aggro decks appeared in MtG. The community hated them. They were called cheating. There were calls for bans. But it led to the Aggro-Control-Midrange dynamic that is core to deckbuilding today.

Exploders are Aggro. Generators are control. I feel like Divines work a bit like a midrange team, which is why I suspect I should use them if I want “better PvP win rate” as opposed to “faster PvP”.

23

So, I am NOT calling for a “nerf to doomskulls” - I don’t think they are “too strong” or overwhelming the meta, or anything of the sort.

Rather, I’m concerned that doomskulls, as they are now, are too tightly entwined to exploders. Such that any future changes to exploders will affect doomskulls, and vice versa. They interact so much that they effectively become one system. That’s hard to change / balance / improve as new things continue to come out in the game.

So my proposal is to keep doomskulls just as strong, but reduce their amount of interaction with exploders. That allows future exploder troops / nerfs / systesm to operate independently of how doomskulls operate.

It’s a preventative. I see that someone is stacking gasoline next to the matches, and I’m suggesting we move them further apart. It’s all potential, not a current fire.

4 Likes
24

I had a look at the current known spoilers. Until August, there are only two upcoming exploders: one explodes 4, the other explodes red gems and is thus a variant of Azura.

I feel like we already have the “worst cases” of exploders in the game. So there’s not a future threat of exploders to design against, or if there is it isn’t obvious what form it would take. That makes adjusting Doomskulls kind of silly. I don’t like the notion of making something less powerful because we’re afraid of some future threat. I’d rather wait to see that problem arise, then choose the appropriate nerf.

That’s where I sit, I don’t want to take over the thread, but what I’ve learned in my programming career is decisions made against an uncertain future almost always end up needing to be undone when the future reveals itself.

25

Funny that people want to nerf doomskulls when they are put as GW DEF they rarely get a win. If you Nerf them the 2 legends will be put on bench. Can you lose to them with bad board? Yes but you can also lose to mercy with a bad board with the great Maw team. I think people need to stop complaining every 3 minutes. You are supposed to lose every once and a while. I once went 33 days in guild wars without loss in bracket1 and it was nice but honestly also kind of boring. I like the challenge of new meta because psion ragn is quite boring after a year of it.

3 Likes
26

Guys relax, noone is after your Bayhammer squads. The proposed changes to Doomskulls will not touch their effectiveness too much because you know they actually match Doomskulls…
Also playing such a squad myself i think i could live with my Bayhammer trait activation maybe killing one less troop, it will barely make a dent in this teams performance.

This OP is about the side effect of Doomskulls (Doomskulls in general, not just the ones your dwarfy, daemonic new best buddies smash on the board) making exploders even stronger, a boost they really didn’t need. It made Divines even stronger than before, made Infernus, one of the strongest mythics before DS even better now with a higher chance for extraturns, even more damage and a higher amount of generated mana on average.

Personally i would highly welcome the proposed change to DS(only exploding when matched) for several reasons, not just the exploder issue, but also because it would eliminate the detrimental effect DS now have on other more tactical/strategical plays around board manipulations.

2 Likes
27

maybe you want to slow down game and make matches last longer…I want matches over quickly so I can move to the next one. Win or lose, I also work for a living and the quicker the battle is over the better.

1 Like
28

Well you played the game before Doomskulls, so you’ll be alright.

2 Likes
29

Most of us played the game before doomskulls. Some people are happier with them than they were before 3.4. It’s dismissive to write off their opinions as “you’ll adjust, so full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes”.

1 Like
30

The only thing i am dismissive about is the hyperbole of the suggested change (DS only exploding when matched) making the game unbearably slow. As a matter of fact that won’t slow the game down that much at all, speedwise the game will still be much closer to where it is now than where it was before Doomskulls disregarding Doomstorm which in itself is broken af.

31

The reason Doomskulls is making every match quicker is also because it’s unintentionally buff all the troops that use board configuration.

It happens directly with every troop that explode or destroy gems. One single action can result in whole board exploded with 50+ damage, given the right board setup. (yes, even Pleasant, the weakest troop, can explode whole board now)

It also happen indirectly with all the converters, because cascade that result in Doomskull match can happan.

For now, the best use for gem exploder/destroyer is to aim at Doomskulls for maxium damage/mana gain. Exploding/Destroying single gems/row/column can be use to aiming for 4/5 match extra turn as well. That’s now harder when doomskull is involved. And for troop like Dragonian Monk/Rogue, that X-shape can explode so much gems it’s very hard to tell the end result of board.

So… look like the old day of playing carefully is pretty much gone now. It’s all about exploding as much as possible to gain more mana, which is now even possible without using exploding spell. It’s faster for sure, but I’m not sure if it’s more fun. Maybe this is all encouraged and intended all along…

2 Likes
32

I think Doomskulls themselves are probably okay as is, for now. I agree that the steady rise in exploder prominence leaves a game with reduced time or need for patience or skill. I’m not entirely happy with that gradual slide.

I think the tweaks needed to slow exploder and also lessen the (clearly broken) impact of the Doomexplodestorm one-turn cascade-wipe are:

  • cut explosions to gathering 50% mana from the gems that they destroy
  • revise the drop rates of Doomskulls under the Doomstorm so that they cascade less
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33

If anything, nerf divines :sleepy:

34

Could always trim the mana gained from dumbskulls specifically. Or negate it entirely.

1 Like
35

What I feel is more likely happening is people don’t agree Doomskulls are broken, but they aren’t happy with how the game plays now that they exist. These people care less about Glaycion and King Bloodhammer and more about “let’s take Doomskulls back out of the game”. I don’t agree with that, but I admit they have a stronger point and can rally behind it. It makes more sense than “remove 5-10% of the damage dealt by a team that already overkills by a factor of 2 or 3.”

Again, I don’t agree with a speculative nerf to a mechanic when even the person who proposed the change agrees it’s to combat a hypothetical future problem, not a current one.

My priority queue right now is more about “It’s really frustrating to deal with scaling opponents AND skull spam AND skull reflect AND freeze in a Raid Boss and I wish I was smart enough to quit.”

1 Like
36

I don’t know about other platforms but i can tell you this on xbox this last GW was the most competitive ever. I’m going to assume its because of doomskulls and the luck factor which to me is good for game…I would say that no one is going to go 33 days without a loss like i have done in the past in B1 and I’m not complaining that I lose every once and a while. My controller is taking a beating but Microsoft will be glad to sell me a new one if needed.

37

Was that due to Doomskulls or the enormous amount of wins counting as errors GW week in all Guilds? We don’t know. If it was the later, do would you propose keeping all bugs errors to balance things out more?

38

If all guilds had errors then the law of averages would say that the scores of all guilds were impacted. I took a loss indirectly because of doomskulls but I’m not going to cry about it because I know that all players deal with them. If I were the only one dealing with them then yes that would be a problem. I have a much bigger problem when I’m not frozen and I match 4 and the AI ignores that fact and takes next turn. Also goblin AI all frozen take 10 turns while I just sit back and watch. These are real problems but lets all just focus on a non problem which is doomskulls.

39

The Divine Infernus Team is faster in offense then Doomskull team.

Doomskull team is horrible in Defense.

Doomskull is amazing in pet battle and that shouldn’t bother any player.

Either nerf the Doomstorm to 1.5 instead of 2 times the chance or The OP idea of only doing 5 damage when match and not explode seems a good enough nerf.

2 Likes
40

I disagree, i might agree saying it is a wash between the two, but if any of the two teams is in front it’s Doomies.
Also comparing something allegedly broken to the allegedly other most broken thing doesn’t really make a point.

2 Likes