Wall of text ahead, here goes. Many a thread currently bemoans the Metacore and Broken Dragon PvP end-game problems. Not re-opening that debate here, plenty of threads on those.
Let’s assume that for some illogical reason Metacore and Broken Dragon aren’t getting nerfed / fixed any time soon. So the trend is instead to contrive some counters, like we had Spirit Fox as a counter to Mercy, rather than just sensibly nerf Mercy, and some experiments with counter traits (upgrading Impervious even more, and the amazing Indigestible trait which is on one troop that no one uses) before The Great Maw was finally calmed down.
So we get hard counters. Can we at least please have counters that work?
Metacore / Mantibore
Apparently Wayfinder is a purpose-built counter? Hmm, no, not really. Mantibores aren’t that hard to kill. The problem isn’t killing them, the problem is them repeatedly draining your mana, starting Empowered, and with a daftly under-costed spell, and in particular stalling you long enough for a Broken Dragon to fill and one-shot half your team. Wayfinder doesn’t stop the mana drain - and halving attack doesn’t help a huge amount when the board fills with skulls. Plus Wayfinder isn’t even good at killing them in the end-game - I face Mantibores with 95+ total HP. My Wayfarer with every Magic stat gain there is deals 22 base damage, so will need three casts, or two plus something else dealing damage, to kill one. And they usually appear in pairs.
I’ve managed it a few times with Wayfarer/Mercy/GreenSeer - with a good starting board - but then if you can loop that you may as well loop Hellcat and Alchemist and just grind away that way - i.e. Wayfarer contributed nothing as a counter, the non-counter loop team still works better. I would be delighted if someone has a Wayfarer team that actually hard counters Mantibores. Without (1) getting stomped by Broken Dragon every second game and (2) taking three times as long to finish a match because the team itself isn’t that viable - video evidence in end-game PvP please, no theorycrafting from lower tier players, sorry. If someone can show me this masterpiece, I will (somehow) get the devs to give you 10 traitstones of your choice from my stocks.
So what to counter Mantibore instead?
- Wayfarer to deal true damage? Nope, those end-game Mantibores have 55+ Life (lower Armour) so a true damage snipe won’t work. Maybe do that plus a Spirit Fox?
- Wayfarer gains a status effect on spell? Nope, Mantibore has the best trait set in the game with Impervious too, remember.
- Wayfarer gains an extra turn? would help a little. Maybe gains a conditional one if the enemy is a Monster?
- Wayfarer damage gets boosted? Maybe double damage to yellow mana too? So quad damage to green/yellow Mantibores?
- Wayfarer gets a mana drain too? Not sure that improves anything… maybe a conditional one on Monsters? or on green troops?
…whatever we do, we end up with something way too strong for an Ultra Rare… and likely to be mana costed up higher, unless we accept even more powercreepery…
Ideas please, how to counter Mantibores? Spells or traits?
Broken Dragon
Hmm, no hard counters to this yet. And with high end legendary stats, they’re damned hard to kill off before they cast their only 14 mana to kill two troops spell (do see my previous post about cheese). But we can’t touch that - so how to counter it?
Avina might help? Give her Fast and a damage boost? Maybe true damage? I am looking at Broken Dragons with c. 45 Life and 55 Armour, so her 24 x 3 damage doesn’t cut it. Maybe switch to true damage and doubled to undead not tripled? Then teaming with Soothsayer and so on makes a good hard kill option (like the oddly-similarly-named Amira does so well with blue enemies).
Defence against the screen full of skulls? Not even a maxed Gorgotha survives often, especially against an Attack-boosted Mantibore, and especially if also stunned (did we mention Mantibore does that too in its little 9 mana package of joy?)…
So we need a trait like Ethereal: immune to skull damage but take double damage from spells. Maybe that works. Can’t have skull immunity with no downside… But even with such a downside - I suspect it might break the game, or lead to lots of rage-quits. Mind, so long as it wasn’t Impervious too, it could be stunned off and then smacked… so would be manageable on defence teams - but the AI wouldn’t cope… does that make the game too easy? well it’s not often hard anyway, and most players care more about (1) fun playing and (2) winning and farming quickly and not so much about (3) not losing, so far as we can tell from conversations here…
Thoughts about countering Broken Dragon? what would you add or design?
TLDR
- no viable counters yet to the two most often cited PvP unbalanced troops
- ideas welcome for making counters that work
- a prize in traitstones for anyone posting a video of a reliable team using Wayfarer to easily beat MMDBBD
Thanks for reading (if you did). Cheers