After reading the troop usage thread and noodling on it a while, I wanted to post some ideas I have for both trimming the very large amount of points needed to ascend the weekly PVP ladder, and make defense count again. Please, add your own ideas, group ideation is awesome!
Make loosing on Offense HURT - currently when I lose an invasion, I am deducted ~7 (points?), that is a pittance. The issues lies in that the averages will win out, and are heavily weighted towards accruing more rank points than losing even with a mediocre team. The leader board seems to award those players that can spam through as many battles as possible, not necessarily the best players. It is already extremely unlikely that a decent player, with even a mediocre comp will lose. So, a mediocre player with a cookie-cutter, but extremely efficient comp, will dominate the rankings if they play a ridiculous amount of time.
Random Initiative - make initiative a coin-flip. Going first is a HUGE advantage, and having it granted by default makes offense even more likely to win the match. I understand that there is something to this being a PvE encounter, and forcing the player to take an action to initiate combat has its merits, but this is a massive advantage.
Defense Traits - these are mediocre at BEST, why not in lieu of 3 armor on defense, 6? Why not have a trait that provides a status effect on turn 0, but only on D.
i.e. Frozen Fortress - When defending against an invasion, a random opponent is Frozen. Preparation - When defending against an invasion, this character begins the game with full mana, .
I’ve thought about the first-turn advantage before, and it’s part of the reason why I keep harping on Mercy being OP, and on Empowered in general being undervalued. I think one solution for this issue in particular would be to allow for no extra turns on the first turn.
They already tried that when 2.0 appeared, it caused an apocalyptic meltdown on the forum. I doubt they’ll revisit that.
[ Edit: Ignore. I misread the OP. ]
It very much is, and a possible defensive trait could be - *Dampening Field - This troop emits an aura in which mana is disrupted. While on defense, all empowered troops are (Stunned, lose 5 mana, or Cannot activate their abilities for X turns).
My bad. I thought I saw “defense” when you wrote “offense”.
That’s an interesting idea. However, they did mention doing a lot of testing to arrive at the amounts they have currently. So, I’m curious if that change would really make a huge difference across the board. Except for some extreme examples like Sister, most people on the leaderboard have an extremely high win ratio on invades.
Very true, some options could include, blocks of time during which you can gain additional ranking points, or a narrower window for the event.
I had thought from the onset that there should be divisions, less rewards, but smaller clusters of players competing to win their Bracket. To expand on the bracket, the winners of the bracket could then contend with one another to claim the top prizes.
If this thread is actually about what it says it is… A very simple idea would be to give all defending troops +1 to all stats just for being on defense. An insignificant change to some meta lineups, such as those based on Maw, but it could make some alternative lineups enter the mix.
I don’t see how a +1 to all stats would help very much, if at all. The issues lie in the AI, and the reasons I listed above. Maw is gonna getcha even with 2 more points of meats and metal to burrow through, 8 for the group. Maybe a +5 would be a starting point, however, that would disproportionately aid Magic based teams than other types.
It is and will always continue to be average time per win as a function of how much time they have to spend. Making losses count more might change the playstyle of the top players, but the top players would still be the top. This game has an extremely low skill cap and implying that someone pouring 30+ hours a week wouldn’t grasp the concepts enough to be good at the game along the way doesn’t really make sense. If you are referencing the top players invade losses, I’m sure they just cut and run because time is more of a factor than lost points in the current system and I highly doubt they’d have any trouble adjusting when to cut their losses or stay if the system were changed.
Agency. It all boils down to agency. A starting board that allows a “free win” is not really a problem because the player still has to make the right moves in order to convert it to a win - the player has agency. And yes, these boards appear occasionally regardless of empowered board modifiers. Giving this over to the enemy, and worse, randomly is asking the player not only to occasionally randomly lose from the start of the match, but be forced to watch an unskippable cutscene of them losing. Yes, it would make things “more difficult” and probably bring the loss ratio, but in a way that is counter to player agency, and removing player agency is never a good thing. Judging from how much everyone hated fighting against the 15% devour Maw, I can only imagine how well something like this would go over.
It might be fun to see a mode where you start at some kind of fixed disadvantage and have to crawl your way back into the fight.
Yeah, the defender trait is pretty terrible, I’ll agree there. This is mainly because I as the player never see any benefit from defense traits because they are only active on defense. Consequently, no defense trait added would actually be “played” by a living human and essentially you’d be playing said troop with two traits for all intents and purposes. There are plenty of “xx heart” and even “xx bond” filler traits that may be replaced by such a trait, but I’d hate to lose even some of these for a trait that only works when I’m not playing. I’d love to see some traits possibly reworked to do different stuff on offense or defense, but I doubt that will happen.
Defender can’t change too much - otherwise it would be irritatingly strong at lower levels. That being said, traits are harder to get at lower levels…
I wonder if some of the traits would be more effective if they scale with player level? Let’s take Defender for instance: what if it was rewritten to “Gain 2 + (1 each 200 levels gained) Armor on Defense”.
That’s a great idea not just for defender but for pretty much any troop, primarily because it would balance things specific to player level, which seems to be the big issue right now (level 1000 players getting same OP matches over and over).
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