I think it’s a problem with how rarity impacts utility, and the solution is staring us in the face.
Normally a Common troop is nothing special. It’s not until Epic that we start to see abilities we can build around. Legendary is where we see more troops that are “self-sufficient” like Khorvash in that they don’t really have many weaknesses. Good Mythics deliver so much value in one card they can carry a weak team to victory. This makes sense: the cards that are the most powerful are the hardest to get.
Bounty Hunters are given to us and for 1k gems you can fully ascend/trait them. That’s arguably better than the deal we often get with Glory troops. So especially given the last paragraph, it makes a little sense that they represent more of a Common troop set of abilities.
That aligns really poorly with a mode that encourages you to field a 4x team of Bounty Hunters vs. scaling stats. 4x Common-balanced troops are never going to get very far unless we start allowing Commons to have at least Epic-balanced abilities and traits.
I promised a solution, and again, it’s staring us in the face.
We can give these troops abilities that scale via their ascension if and only if they are within the context of a Bounty Hunt event. Thus, we could have a The Dragon Soul-patterned troop that is fabulous on bounty hunts but piddling outside:
Explode 1 (x2-x6) random gem(s). Deal 2 (x2-x6) random damage to all enemies, boosted by the number of Bounty Hunter allies. (Multiplier is x1 if outside of a Bounty Hunt.)
We can imagine that with almost any powerful legendary or mythic. A “bounty Khorvash” might only deal 2-3 true damage outside of Bounty Hunts. A “bounty Nyx” might only create gems equal to 1/6 of the mana drained. And so on and so on.
This makes the bounty troops:
Better than normal legendaries/mythics within bounty hunts…
…but only if you’ve ascended them…
…and as useful as any other common if outside of bounty hunts.
I don’t know. It tells me that people have to concede that they can no longer get everything. They have to choose how far they want to go into each event or mode and which ones are worth completing to themselves personally.
Unless you have very few real life commitments outside of GoW and have oodles of time on your hands to grind away at it all, you can’t achieve it all every week. People need to accept that. Choose the path that rewards you how best you want to be rewarded and take it.
Honestly bounties are the “most fair” of the modes in terms of the drain on your resources.
The math is complex, but I feel like it’s telling me, “If you don’t have at least some mythic bounty hunters, you aren’t going to reach the end.” This is the same thing as when the Dungeon told me, “Your team of Common troops is not enough, come back when you’ve invested more time or money into the game.” It’s a wall. They’re supposed to be there.
The very first bounty is one I’d expect to require you to spend A TON of resources to reach the end. Some people did. They paid enough to make sure they had all-mythic bounty hunters. Good for them. That’s part of F2P: you get further if you pay further. The rest of us probably ended up with some badly-ascended troops and made it to some tier we found to be at the point where we’d rather stop fighting.
This second bounty isn’t much different: unless you saved up a boatload of keys, you’re only getting everything to mythic if you spend a ton of resources. We’ve had one round of chests, so everyone probably did at least marginally better on this round than the last.
Next bounty, IMO, will be much more interesting. 3 weeks worth of chests ought to get me at least two bounty hunters to Legendary. There’ll be another, new bounty hunter to try out. I’ll have a few more troops traited and ready to face it.
I think by the 4th or 5th bounty, anyone who’s been here from the start ought to have enough mythic bounty hunters for it to be realistic, but challenging, to reach the end. It will always be “easiest” to buy a lot of sigils so you can afford to lose some matches. But so long as it is “realistic” for a free player to get there, I don’t mind. I won’t know how “realistic” it feels until I have those mythic ascensions.
So that structure doesn’t bug me. What bugs me is nothing about the super-special “bounty hunter” troops is designed to deal with scaling opponents at all.
The troops are not even designed to have some basic utility balancing out the random generation of gems and skulls as we can see in P. Hound and Scavenger…
I’m simply using whatever team I want and getting as far as I can get with it. I’m not going to get the special troops from the chests or the shop. The rewards are insignificant to me so by doing the minimum, I can be a +1 on the “didn’t spend shit on this garbage” statistic.
This is one of those yes but no situations.
I’ll cut to the chase.
In Raid and Invasions, you get kingdom troops/troop types with your purchase of different tiers, essentially containing different content for each Raid/Invasion.
In Bounty, you only get Bounty Troops. So going by your example of 4th or 5th bounty when/if people start getting 2-3 mythic Bounty Troops, every future purchase containing Bounty Troops is a complete waste of time/resources.
What’s stopping people from using Mythic Pharoah Hound, Mythic Ice Wraith, and a Mythic version of the next Bounty troop as their team of 3? (I guess they’ll need a 4th for the early stages). Some people may opt to farm with 2 Troops/2 Bounty Troops. New Troop + favorite Bounty troop will already be more than enough…
These Bounty troops could really use the Guild Guardian Mythic +4 treatment, then give something else when capped out.
I don’t think that’s nitpicking, I think it’s a totally legitimate question. I’ve been wondering the same thing. Surely somebody on the development team would have picked up on that?
Add me to whichever list holds people grumbling about Bounty troops getting event bonuses. Especially Wall of Death, which has a double event bonus this week for over 200 life+armor and 38 attack.
I think it’s also silly that Wall of Bones’s attack gets buffed at high levels, since it has zero base attack. But that is minor compared to the irritation of seeing buffed troops that were level 80+ before the event bonus kicked in.
Btw… Say what you want about the AI needing luck in PvP. There’s absolutely zero reason for it to apply in Raids. Just experienced the “unlucky” side of RNG… Quick 4 and out. Cause that’s fun.
Only bought Tier 2, smashed gold chests to ascend Bounty troops, got Ice Wraith (x6), Rift (x5), Parrot (x5).
First few battles 4 bounty troops (x20), after that replaced Hound with Hyndla (x16). This is enough to get Reward 15 (Orb of Chaos), and I’m satisified with that.
Next Bounty event all my Bounty troops will be at Mythic, so it will be easier from there on.
More or less what i did and planned, but i still bought the Shop Tier IV to be sure i would reach Reward 15 since the scores are higher in this second event, and just today i finished the 17th reward tier with some spare sigils that i won’t even use as i can’t reach the next reward. My calculations were off because i wasn’t sure about how ascended my Bounty Troops would be, so i still used more gems than i needed. Reward 15 is an optimal goal.
I guess that devs have reduced the Valraven appearance ratio…
According to my data, the ratio was between 25% and 30%, but this week with just my small data it’s closer to 20%…
EDIT: I’m talking about my Invade ratio.
If that is so, I will get to test @Mithran’s calculations. I have been stomping Rank 20 repeatedly with a x18 multiplier, having bought Tier VI to start. If I wind up multiple thousands short of Reward 20, I can say with certainty that the Valraven drop rate was reduced. I’ve missed one Valraven and dropped two other battles, so I am already borderline, unfortunately. If I end up way short then I can look at ’Raven rates.
Edit: I’m fresh out of sigils. With tonorrow’s batch of 4, and assuming I catch all possible Valravens, I should wind up about 7,000 short of Reward 20. That is close enough that I think Mithran’s calculations were correct. Ravens appear once every four battles, not every five; I would be much further from 250,000 points otherwise.
I don’t think it’s probable to get the 20th reward without doing tier 7. I only did tier 5 this time and will complete 19 rewards. Been using only 2 bounty troops since the reward 14. Faster matches makes it more worth my time and less of a grind.
