2 Likes
Dont know if youve noticed but the games always been about luck since yano the board drops random gems for you/ai to match for mana be it at times where cascades gets stupid but there you go
The king is cool but don’t miss your shot cause AI will also destroy you easy 
Great post, Slypenslyde.
I’d argue that the logic of your post is rock solid all the way to the very end, except that final sentence where I strongly disagree with one of your conclusions and here’s why:
The devs are very aware of the player experience because the systems that were put in place in 3.3 and reinforced in 3.4 are explicitly designed to frustrate players. The casual everyday player doesn’t give a care about leaderboards and completing events usually. For them, Salty’s on-screen performance works perfectly fine here. Pew, pew, pew and look at the doomskulls explode is bright and shiny and looks cool.
On the flip side, for the competitive player, their concern is reaching the prizes at the end of each event or placing highly on a leaderboard. All of the Difficulty changes were made to prevent reliable wins. Yes, skill is still a factor. But, at any time RNG can now cause the most reliable match to turn into sudden losses. But, hey, that’s what buying sigils are for… as mulligans to redo those sudden instant losses (can’t wait for the PvP revamp…). Doomskulls increase those chances quite considerably. Players are not supposed to be able to reach the carrot at the end of the stick reliably and consistantly. That’s what microtransactions are for, to make up for that clutch RNG moment that leaves the player just short of a desired prize.
Remember, intentional frustration leads to bad decisions, illogical thinking, and ultimately (by design) gem-based purchases are the answer to all these woes.
6 Likes
What’s the bug deal. Use any of the constructs that will make a color and X… Use two together and you can non stop flood the board with them
Just commenting that I was surprised at how strong doomskulls are even in the hands of a low level CPU troop…one troop with 21 attack at 9 HP basically destroyed my entire team (plus 1 summon) on cascades… doomskulls are pretty darn strong, even the CPU can’t mess it up. Not sure how I feel about it yet, gonna give it some more time.
3 Likes
Ya The two new legendary are so Overpower it’s just insane. The doomskull cascade do upward to 100 DMG and refill every single troops while most often than not giving an extra turn.
Just watch Tacet streams, he finish every single battle with 2 maps lmao!!!
The main thing that D-skulls do is disrupting stable patterns. Stable pattern recognition is one of the key aspects of GoW gameplay, that is how human brain works strategically. Move time is essentially unlimited in GoW barring some last minute pet rescue, so these patterns have been the core component almost for everyone. Otherwise, those player who are bad at pattern recognition or like to rely on twitching subconscious reflexes, prefer to play Bejeweled or something that requires fast action with less complex patterns.
D-skulls disrupt that mechanics and require some adjustments because consequences of a simple skull match become more complex and increase the randomness of a move due to some additional drops from the top as more tiles are cleared out.
So, those players who rely on slowly and painfully built patterns and have slow or non-existent twitching, are surely frustrated. On the other hand, those players who generally like to explode things and don’t heavily rely on patterns, are quite comfortable. IMHO, hence the controversy. Still, even those who rely on patterns do occasionally use Gorgotha or TDS, and there are some occasional boards where patterns are of minor importance. Still, human brain can deal with these things quite efficiently in most cases.
Now, the new D-skull king is clearly overpowered and might be nerfed in the near future and everyone will adjust to new patterns. So, the issue might settle down within a few weeks. But in general, this D-skull feature strongly caters to twitching player category who might be very pleased with them. While slower, less reactive players will have to rebuild some of their patterns which is not necessarily a bad thing IMO.
2 Likes
Not really, not to vast majority and maybe, developers do not want to seriously encourage this aspect. There are some leaderboards but they are all seriously tweaked towards spending more time/effort and making this time more efficient. The only slight exception is guild wars and ranking of players within the guild. IMO, at least in our guild, there are 4 or maybe 5 players who rotate between Paragon-Champion ranks depending on some minor fortune/misfortune in their matches. So, it is largely irrelevant. I presume in some really advanced guild, you can probably drop to Vanguard due to a single crazy AI cascade.
If developers really wanted to advance in this direction, they should have introduced real time PvP ladder or at least a lounge with this feature. It can be based on the arena model, for example. Now, that might be different but still, more geared towards backgammon than chess which might be fine for most players who are potentially interested.
You guys are making me mad because you are disagreeing with me in ways I find both agreeable and valid. I don’t know if I fully agree with your rebuttals but I do acknowledge I can’t find anything to say against them I care enough to write paragraphs about. Hmm.
I like it better when people disagree with me using fallacious logic or bad analogies that I can tear apart and/or mock. 
3 Likes
Why do you suggest it will be worse at Monday? If that is what you’re implying 
Monday is the Troll which does put more blues out which I guess is what you’re referring to to have them converted to Doomskulls, however I’d leave untraited if using with Bloodhammer as I’m not sure which storm would remain as they’re triggered on the same condition.
I think it’ll just be over kill anyways as in all teams I’ve tried so far you only need one or two matches on the board to begin the cascade fest.
Fun Undead team:
Draakulis
Necromancer with Mountain Crusher
King Bloodhammer
Xathenos
On Monday many more players will Have those Legendaries with the Event Keys that’s why It is going to be worse on Monday
True, there is that 
Exactly. Besides the power leap (can’t even call it creep at this point), doomskulls are the great equalizer between those whose strategically manipulate the board versus casual players who lack those skills. Simply blowing up the board with doomskull spam will achieve similar devastating effects, as Salty demonstrated on the last stream.
Although those who can strategically manipulate the board to leverage doomskull spam will still have an advantage, that advantage will be much smaller than it is now.
The PvP revamp doesn’t need to be real-time to be competitive. I’m not going to invite Daemons into this thread that would destroy all of Krystara by discussing similar systems already in place in other mobile games.
But, it’s not a stretch at all to think that the whatever the revamped PvP system will be, will be contain the newer-style Leaderboards that in Raid/Invasion mode at the barest minimum.