I want to suggest you improvement to class system.
There are many classes, that have useless 100th lvl Talents. For example Archer class makes your hero Elf troop type, but 100th lvl talent recuires Wargare, Stryx or Rouge hero troop type. So it’s useless for Elf and make this class less attractive for players. And this is not the only one case.
Please make appropriate hero troop type for each Kingdom. Thus players will be able to change their Hero’s troop type by setting home kingdom.
Possible counter-argument: talents that benefit other races add flexibility to a hero class.
For example, suppose in 2019 some hot new troop makes a team with 3 Wargare very good. In that case, the Archer’s Forest Moon talent might be more valuable than a 4th Wargare.
One problem is there aren’t a lot of cases where that’s true currently, so it doesn’t stick out as a possible reason.
In this case if your hero is 4th Wargare it will be better than 3 Wargare and 1 Elf (at least your hero will get +2 life every turn).
btw now it’s impossible to get 4 Stryx team to boost new Stryx weapon, or become a Rogue to get 1 magic with 4-5 gem matches (I haven’t seen anyone playing Rogues for the last 6 months). I bet nobody picks 100th cuning talent.
Of course one day will be new class that make your hero Stryx (or Rogue) troop type. But why players should be so limited in classes to chose (to get 4 Stryx troops including hero)? And why other classes should have unusable talents?
I think this change will bring more flexibility for choosing a class.
Posted simple solution to the RNG scatter shot Hero Class design 6+ months ago after watching Nim and Sirrian on stream discuss their design planning. @Nimhain was on the right track, but perhaps overzealous in originally suggesting 3 unique column trees for every single class. @Sirrian must never look at the final product because he said something like “give the players choices”. But there are ZERO real choices for 99% of all the rows across every class. Yes you can “pick” but seriously there are usually none to one choice that players would use.
Jist of the old idea.
The developers don’t use RNG to design troops yet that is what they did for Classes (and Weapon perks). Its a real shame and my major issue with the game currently. FYI this weeks Necromancer Class has 1 total undead perk out of 30 “choices”, and that is the unfortunate norm for most classes.
I feel like my main disappointment with the class trees is some seemed to give little consideration to making talents proportional to their level. Or, alternately, it was decided some talents would “pay off” earlier, but since you get 3 to pick from that adds a ton of variance to the power of each class.
For example, I’m leveling Thief right now. I find Level 5 to be somewhat “balanced”. Let’s keep in mind that to reach level 5 requires 15 XP, or winning 7-15 battles. It lets you choose between:
These are all small and conditional perks. While “gain 1 armor every turn” feels more valuable than getting a static +2 magic, it only applies if the hero is with a Naga team, so all of these choices are roughly as strong. A “problem” is we can imagine many teams where none of these perks apply, but that’s OK! It only cost us about 10 minutes to unlock this so it seems reasonable that it’s not stunning.
Now let’s turn our attention to level 100, which requires more than 5,000 champion XP or between 2500 and 5000 battles to achieve:
What. The. Heck? “Do this on a 4 or 5 match” is neat, but we gained one of those way back at level 1 that required 1 combat. “All {race} gain 1 {stat} every turn” was available at level 5. So the only talent here that feels worth playing literally thousands of matches is the unconditional chance to kill an enemy. The other two talents will literally do nothing in most team compositions, and aren’t very powerful in their narrow best case!
But I think this happened because all three of the trees have comparatively powerful abilities at 70 (~2500 XP):
While there’s one I think players consider the strongest here, these are all fairly powerful skills in a broad context. The summon is the “weakest”, but considering some other talents in the tree there’s evidence Thief can be a very summon-heavy build if that is desirable.
What I’m getting at: in 2 of the 3 skill trees, level 70 has a better skill than level 100. 70 is half the effort of 100. I think the story for those trees is “It got a comparatively powerful level 70 skill because its level 100 skill is lackluster.”
But that leaves our Thief class with only one viable level 100 talent. Worse, it opens the door to a class that gets 3 trees topping out at level 70, meaning it gets a garbage level 100.
I think players would be much happier if every tree’s skills at level n were at least arguably comparable to each other. If we’re going to put “gain 1 stat point at each turn” at level 5 for some tree, it’s somewhat ludicrous to put it at level 100 on another. No class should have 2 lackluster talents at 100, considering it takes twice as much effort to get there as level 70. I think level 100 talents should be roughly equivalent to legendary/mythic third traits.
The imbalance, particularly at 70/100, is a big part of why the Lightning Strike classes are so powerful. They don’t have to give up anything to take this powerful trait, and there’s almost no comparison even at level 100 amongst other classes. If we’re to have “interesting choices”, there should be some sacrifice involved. Imagine if Rock Solid were a level 70 talent. Which is better, “barrier on brown” or “explode a random gem on 4/5 matches”? That’s a hard question. We never have to ask it, because nobody ever has to choose between those two exceptionally powerful traits with dramatically different costs.
It’d probably be much smarter if each tree had a “theme” per level, something like:
That would make for more flexibility and actual tradeoffs between abilities. It gives out weak but relevant bonuses for small amounts of leveling effort. And it doles out powerful abilities at the final stages, where each level requires roughly twice as much effort as the last.
Agree.
I have 3 classes 70+ lvl (Sorcerer, Orbweaver, Thief) and I don’t think they wil be any stronger with 100 lvl talent.
Agree with you: