Good point but…
These quotes provided by @Ashasekayi seem pretty clear to me…
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Yeah there has been a lot of them lately and I disagree with them I think Kraken is ok the way he is even though I do lose a bit to him in GW.
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I must admit… This is just goddamn depressing…
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So The Soft Club(TSC) wins again, I guess? 
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IMHO, fixing blob match recognition is not so easy as it might require to re-code the whole pattern code tables and rules of their triggers. This is apparently the core part of the unity build and things can get really messy if it is not done carefully as the code is executed in real time. So, basically, IMO, Sirian’s solution is reasonable and it might work and it is relatively easy to apply and it does not require complete rewriting of large parts of the code. On a plus side, it should not introduce new bad glitches/bugs unlike “complete” solution.
IDK how it turns out, but it should not affect looping teams significantly at all but would discourage blob exploit from being widely used and abused which is very good. Yes, you can no longer do 50 damage to all enemy cards in a single cast of Forest troll while simultaneously freezing or burning or stunning everything. Is it necessarily a bad thing? I just fail to see why. Other cards with other traits, well, you would have to be a bit creative to start using them efficiently. 
This would make player thinking about it and creating some other viable not-so-silly strategies. Which is again a good thing. Although simple looping should still work well.
So, overall, IMO, it might put another strategic layer down there and encourage creativity instead of simple button mashing. Obviously, there might be some people who won’t like that but I’m sure with time it has a chance of working out.
They might have been better taking one hp off the tentacles trait.
That would make Humility and maybe some other card(s) (not sure) immortal. It has to be 3, 2 makes no sense.
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1 It needs 11 or 12 mana cost
2 Lose the extra turn
3 Lose fast or Stealthy
Chose only one and the troop is still good. Devs just dont play their game.
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His a mythic, hence all troops are a burned.
What if this backfires? What if the devs play the endgame, and it turns out they actually get a kick out of the chaos of loops and don’t care about winning if it made them laugh, so they make more teams like it?
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Not sure about this nerf but it has upset vangor so that makes me happy!
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What’s humility got to do with it?
I assume he means that Tentacles needs to be strictly stronger than Virtue of Humility, which is an odd assertion. Tentacles being weaker than or equal to the Armor gain from Humility would indeed make Kraken unable to kill the enemy with Tentacles. Luckily, you still have:
- Kraken’s spell damage
- Kraken’s Devour chance
- Skull damage
- Three other troops
I’m not sure if I’d define that as “immortal.”
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With the change proposed …
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I’d like to mention Plague and Dracos 1337. Will we see any compensation? Those two are pretty weak anyway - nerfing them indirectly by the change doesn’t help the cause.
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Or use two kraken like most people. Or three with a troll.
So b/c Trolls make too many gems relative to their cost the solution is to count all blobs as one match?
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Even make him just charm 1 troop instead of 2 would also help a lot.
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Maybe it’s not a knee jerk reaction.
Maybe they do indeed play the game.
These traits are strong. Because they happen by themselves.
You play the game, get the extra-turn, and wham, a free effect to boost.
They know what cards are played, and what wins defense. I am pretty sure the side-effect nerd to Mab, Khorvash and others are still intentional.
And those cards will still be good.
So, on initial cast, you get the effect once. Then it resolves, and you get a cascade for maybe another.
Then it’s still your turn so you probably can do a few more free matches.
So i’m pretty sure anyone with thumbs and half a brain will be able to keep a team frozen, stunned, and even tentaculed to death.
But in 10 turns instead of 2. So you’ll sadly have to play the game.
As for other cards (Ketras, Behemoth, etc…) they never reliably used those trait to perform. It’s just gravy. Some might think their trait need help for some reason, but the impact of this change as nothing to do with it. Or did someone try to fill Ketras with a non-existing troll?
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Humility’s trait fires once for each instance of Tentacles. I wonder if that will be changed also, given this move towards “multiple procs of a trait in a single game action is too powerful”. If it were, that would at least resolve the issue of Kraken not being able to Tentacle Humility to death.
Not really. Humility needs to take damage for the trait to fire. Getting his armor stripped does not count as damage. A Tentacles that deals 2 damage would kill a currently 2 armor humility almost exactly as fast in a hard loop - 2 life damage every other trait fire. Tentacles could still kill humility eventually even if it did one damage, but it would be much more of a liability (though arguably it already is versus humility teams unless you are hard looping them to death, and having it be lower damage would make this harder regardless). Certainly post-change, it will be pretty much impossible for Kraken to kill humility with just tentacles, as you would need to loop for about 80 casts to accomplish this.
Ketras, Jotnar, Doomclaw, Yasmine’s Chosen and Sekhma are the biggest things I’m concerned about. While Sekhma is pretty much a “bonus”, these mythics really need these traits to be effective. While Ketras isn’t generally filled with a troll, I have filled him with Fire Giant and I mostly fill him with a big convert. He loses a ton of effectiveness if he can’t be boosted to high enough damage to eliminate one troop, which generally requires three to five trait fires if he is unscathed. The difference between a troop you can set up to one-shot and a troop you need to waste a bunch of additional turns to do so is staggering. The only way I’ve made Doomclaw reliable enough to be functional right now is as an enrage bot in a skull spam team, but that certainly won’t be viable after this patch. Jotnar finally felt like he could actually do something if you him with a troll and got a good number of your party barrired when they cast. Yasmine’s Chosen’s damage is really low without the entangle, and it isn’t reliable enough at hitting the first troop to perform entangles actual function (similar problem as Doomclaw). When any time you cast her you could be handing over a game-ending board, you need to get her average damage per troop above webspinner levels asap. Elemaugrim, Mab, Khorvash, Kraken, Plauge, Moloch, Dracos - they are what this change is intended to target - some of them will be fine, others traits will suffer but they will still have a role.
What I am finding hard to deal with is that this is basically just another smiley face sticker slapped over a completely glaring engine that was not an issue before the port to Unity.
If you want an example of blob matches calculation as it is on Unity, just take this interaction:
Note the “I” shaped match in the upper left hand corner, and the vertical 4 match to the right. I have a +2 red banner and +1 from fire link on fire giant. But watch what happens immediately after I cast.
The gems are still falling, but note that Ketras now has 15 mana, meaning this board event gave me 33 mana. The vertical matches did not surge, so that is 7 mana. Also note the two mana surge graphics in the upper left hand corner. There were no other reds on the board, so the upper left match 7 generated 26 mana. Incidentally, this is the exact amount two distinct match 5s would give under these banners and links. Also notice that Ketras’ trait fired three times, and Big fired three times, indicating 3 red matches, and 3 4+ matches. Similar conditions are trivially repeatable, and it is obvious that the pattern on the upper left is resolving as two seperate 5 matches, a “T” and an “inverted T”, each giving credit for a full 5 match while both matches share 3 gems.
While I completely understand this position, this is not the position I’m hearing from the devs. I asked the question if the match trait change was intended to be the “solution” to the blob match problem, but there was no response given. If it is, its a pretty poor solution, but I guess it “fixes” some big complaints now, in the immediate very short term. If it isn’t, then why are is the symptom being addressed when the underlying cause is what needs to be addressed. Most importantly, this does not necessarily increase the number of viable options to deal with a given situation and actually takes a few off the table. We will settle into a new meta soon enough (or more likely probably just go back to wisps, and if not that, mana drain). And I can go back to shelving several mythics that I put into rotation in an attempt to prevent the game from becoming stale on offense while still spamming my way to victory with a complement of few teams.
I must reiterate that Adobe allowed multiple trait fires per board event and all of these traits were fine because overlapping match 5s did not resolve as completely new matches. Blobs were actually broken in the other direction where they did were removed and did not give you credit at all. And while I couldn’t get 60+ damage from krakens in a single board, I could get what felt much more closely appropriate 2 or 3 trait fires from a big convert on Jotnar or Ketras, etc.
If blob matches are here to stay, then this solution I will begrudgingly accept as a compromise. What needs to happen next is that every trait that got steamrolled by this change in an effort to nerf basically one trait (with probably a soft aim at a handful of them, like Elemaugrim and Queen Mab), and thats the part that I’m afraid won’t happen ever, and certainly not soon, since this game has one of the worst cycles for addressing things like this that I’ve ever been a part of. The affected traits would ideally be addressed in the same patch as the one that changes entirely how they work, since their median effectiveness is lowered far more than their initial design. Either way, I’d like the devs to address the existence that blob matches either are or are not a problem directly. It doesn’t make sense to completely neuter match traits if blob matches are going to be addressed later, when they are the entire reason some of them are considered “overpowered” in the first place.
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