Can I just say that in addition to being the bearer of good news, you have the most fabulous avatar of the entire dev team?
3 Likes
Jotnar don’t say “thank you”. Can he have some compensation? 
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Hey! Every minute you spend replying to a forum post is a minute spent not playing your own game! Make every moment count!
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Any plans for rebalancing traits to fit this new paradigm? This kinda feels knee-jerk in the other direction, and a bandaid to cover the issue of blob matches. Match traits have always been able to resolve more than once per board, and this was never a problem until Unity blob matches allowed multiple match 5s to trigger from in a tight cluster sharing several gems between each match 5. It was really obvious on Kraken’s trait since it was an instant effect and has no way to cap out and have no effect, no other traits stacked with themselves quite this well. Where does this leave already medicore traits like “big”? What about Courage’s Virtue of Courage, which was already rebalanced (nerfed) to account for it getting multiple activations at the same time (at the same time taking away the biggest generator of said matches)? Maw and Drakkulis’ skull traits? Sekhma and Ketras (the latter who will have a much more difficult time reaching one-shot levels of damage, which is his primary function)? The biggest losers here stand to be Jotnar, and the recently released mythic Doomclaw (who are already both considered subpar), since they need a ton of trait activation for the trait to be even mediocre.
Is this going to be the final solution to the blob match issue? What about the tons of mana this is putting into the system from mostly random spawners (and occasionally converters) just because matches generate in certain small shapes?
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It will be fine. It was fine for a long time, before trolls and Guardian.
This will slow down the game for both sides, and thus remove frustration a lot.
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Yeah of course. But some traits are quite dependant of an high amount of 4+matches: effect on a random troop.
I don’t know if you used Jotnar, but you can have 10 4-matches and the trait can target the same troop…
They should add a buff for this mechanic, the randomness should prioritize non-affected troops.
So Give a random Ally a Barrier on 4 or 5 Gem matches.
→ Give a random Ally without Barrier a Barrier on 4 or 5 Gem matches.
Not sure if we want this buff for Mab 
.
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i don’t know what to feel. on fighting the enemy, i guess i will win 20 more out of my 40 loses? while on using affected troops, i have to make extra effort and play a longer game.
will this affect courage and humility too? if humility was hit by 2 kraken traits, will it count as 2 times hit or 1 time?
This affects more than trolls, though. This is basically a statement that “all match traits are too powerful, so they need to be dealt with in this manner”, destroying an established way the game has worked in favor of and at the same time tossing some match traits that were barely viable post-Unity blobs back into the toilet. Match traits have been around way before trolls and guardians and match traits themselves aren’t the problem here. All the while, they have said nothing about addressing the underlying blob match issue, which is the actual gameplay accelerator here. If they don’t address blobs directly, I can still generate 20+ mana from 7 gems with no banners and fill an entire team with an 8 or 9 match in a certain pattern. I can keep spamming my trolls, I just need to use something other than Kraken behind them. Or I can keep using Kraken, because he’d still be good having both gem spawns and a devour, just not as overwhelmingly dominant without the free 60+ nukes.
What I’m looking for is some indication of how the game is intended to work. I’d find it hard to believe it would be the half measure they settled on here. You can’t test a mechanic that pretty much defines a troop, go “yep, thats fine”, then lower its effect by an order of magnitude and go “yep, still fine”. If the former was way too good, why did it go live like that? If the latter was not good enough, why wouldn’t it be immediately addressed after the game-wide change? And again, not talking about Kraken here so much as everything else that got caught in the crossfire, including a few legendary and mythic traits that were barely mediocre pre-Unity, and this change makes them even worse.
Basically, I find this change very disappointing because it attacks the symptom and not the cause, and done in a way that alters long-established gameplay mechanics that were never an issue before Unity. As I said in once in a different thread, this does not seem like progress, but rather instability.
3 Likes
That’ll affect 30 out of my 300 PvP matches a week - what’s gonna help put variety into the rest?
Umm… as @mithran says, that might be a step too far the other way, and over-simplified… however it’s likely a cost worth paying: good not to get team-wiped from one troll cast and two krakens… and if it costs us a little speed in invades, people will just have to find a more interesting strategy and actually make some moves on the board…
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This will be good if it means Kraken/Troll will be used less but what happens when the next OP team takes over pvp? What we need instead of nerfs is a reason to use different defend teams.
If the META issue was Kraken’s 3rd trait just nerf the damn trait and not all the mechanic… Reduce to 2 damage or 1 if you want…
Or make the trait unstackable.
Or both.
And what about Wisp? Because apparently, the current nerf is to remove Magic Link which is not really enough…
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the main issue at the moment is a coding bug / oddity that causes this trait to trigger multiple times when gems cluster together in a blob… so it deals 30 damage instead of 6…
agree
1 Like
Another difference seems to be that even two 4-matches not connected (so no blob involved) will trigger the trait only once:
It’s funny because on the screenshot of @en9nhcet, you can see that one of his troop was devoured which seems also a big issue with Kraken: a troop who can devour and continue looping.
I dunno… there are a lot of troops immune to devour and kraken always tries to devour the bottom troop. If the blob matching means that kraken isn’t doing 20-40 AOE damage each time FT casts, I think that using an impervious/indigestible/fortitude troop on the bottom will pretty much stop kraken in its tracks.
We’ll see when 3.2 comes out!
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Is infernus not gonna burn all enemies? Since you say it’s one per turn or whatever?
As long as wisp can’t surge on 4 and krakens finally trait can only work once the game will be fine and dandy people 
Well explained sir.
On my part I will say that I still welcome the change.
I ll have to dig it up, but I once made a post about how gem-match trigger skills greatly devaluate the strategic aspect of the game by removing decision making.
These troop dominate the field and devalue others, so yeah, I’m happy.
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Found it:
Not a fan with this upcoming changes to kraken, especially not a fan if it will count towards all other troops with such traits that activates upon 4-5 matches. I hope the Devs will think this over. Still time.
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Did not see this change coming. As stated before, fixing the symptom and not the cause. Very disappointing.
3 Likes