Death Curse needs to go... at least from guild wars

The problem is obviously “mass Death Mark”. Single Mark existed, and aside from Wraith, never got played. Even Mortani’s Scythe, marking 2 opponents, didn’t see much play (probably because Manacles are better for purple).
With “Mass” marks (Death and DeathKnight), the stats are too stacked, and the problem arrives.

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Not arguing what you said, but you mean Creeping Death :wink:

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Yes, my bad :fearful:

I think I’m the only person around here who likes a challenge xD

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Thanks for the education…love learning new stuff…

The change the Death Mark will be in our next big update. We wish we could release it asap, but it will have to wait.

So if I randomly cut off 1-4 of your limbs you’d be happy with the challenge? :innocent:

@AngryMidget would it be you performing the amputating or RNGsus?

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This is so sad. The mass death marks on DK’s death makes GW very frustrating in that tons are using it as a cheese defense. It took far to long to do something about Bone Dragon and now we have the new Bone Dragon cheese and you are going to take just as long to do something about that as well? Have you read the threads about people quitting the game due to GW and ignored them? GW is fun and exhilarating or it can be the opposite in every way, add in cheese like the DK’s third trait skews it GW rapidly and consistently in the wrong direction.

Don’t wait for another major update to fix this, listen to the player base and do something sooner rather then later.

Of course I have read them. I regularly pop into threads, even if it’s just to let people know I’m collecting their feedback in order to show it to the team.

We are moving on nerfing Death Mark a lot faster than we moved on Bone Dragon. We have committed to a fix and will implement it when we are able too. There have been a lot of players being very vocal about not changing Death Mark, but it was decided that to balance the game it needed to be changed.

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I do sigh now and then, as the regular pattern in developer finetuning repeats… not to sound harsh (trying)… but we see…

  1. A exists in game and works okay
  2. B appears, and the combination of A and B breaks things
  3. developers resolve by changing A

All seems a bit unfair on poor A, when it was B’s fault.

Moral of this generalised fable: Deathmark was just fine until Death Curse appeared. Obvious solution? fix Deathmark apparently…

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No Deathmark it’s not okay and Death Curse make it clear that DM is unbalanced because DC triggers automatically (ie more players face to all their troops deathmarked). Before Death Curse, only Death can DM all troops and as you know one can easily shut down Death (Silent, Mana Drain, fast kill, etc.). So it wasn’t obvious that DM was so much powerful. Aside DC, you can find some players complaining about loosing 2 troops after Death’s cast.

But else I agree with your pattern (just not for DC & DM). Another example is Manticore who had Drain all + Empowered. Devs firstly nerfed it to Drain only 7 mana but that wasn’t enough so they changed Empowered to Fast without putting back the Drain all… Did you try to drain Famine with a Manticore?

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Bolding in @Jainus’s post by me. This is exactly the issue.

Deathmark isn’t broken. DeathCurse is the problem. Even Death’s spell (Danse Macabre) is fairly easy to avoid, so it’s not really the mechanic (as silly as an RNG based instant kill mechanic is) that’s the issue, it’s the third trait on Deathknight that’s causing the problems. If you just change that to “Put deathmark on 1 (or 2) enemy troops on my death” instead of all enemy troops, then the entire issue is solved. Period. Changing deathmark isn’t neccessary, changing Deathcurse is very neccessary…

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if i could replenish them like nothing happens after every fight! and didnt feel any actual pain :laughing:

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Agree also, Deathcurse is the issue, not mark.
After the change, i will STILL put a Deathknight on defense because most players won’t be able to mass heal under a turn.

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Maybe it wasn’t actually A or B, but rather mode C. DM was complained about back with Wraith and Bone Dragon, but because BD was clearly so much more to blame, the complaints about DM got lost in the noise. Then when Death Curse was first released, many didn’t like it due to the increased RnG factor, but the crowd that was vocal about it was pretty small. Personally I didn’t say anything because even though I didn’t like it, because I either just avoided those teams or powered through them despite losing a few troops. However, with the release of Guild Wars, for the first time losing troops actually mattered, and that’s when large groups with pitchforks started to gather to complain about DM.

TLDR: Guild Wars was the catalyst for the Death Mark nerf, not Death Curse.

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Definitely, before GW people just took the loss of a troop to DM and continued to win the battle anyways and not care.

Maybe if the Devs made the remaining troop point bonus additive (which seemed to be the first intent anyway judging by them describing it as a “little bonus”) instead of multiplicative, people could relax about this issue again.

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Just poking in here to say that my level 126 account that has somewhere around half a collection has the ability to trivially trait Deathknight and three spirit foxes, but I have access to almost nothing that can appropriately deal with that same combination, even post deathmark change. Death Curse is really the problem here. Or, I should say was. By “fixing” deathmark in this way we have now opened the door for deathmark to be even easier to apply in the future, because now there is an option to “counter” it after the fact, even though the pool of “counter” troops is very small and even smaller if you don’t have the ability to heavily invest in traits.

I’m in minor agreement that Deathmark maybe should have “always been one turn” because it brings the pool of counters from a very small pool to a slightly less small pool, but strongly opposed to the future implications of it moving to one turn now as a “fix” for the reasons stated. I’d also submit that deathmark was fine how it was so long as it is not physically impossible to prevent your troops from being deathmarked, which it was in most situations prior to Death Curse, even in guild wars. Thats the problem with Death Curse, really - you have to stun it, or you will get deathmarked, unless you use an otherwise extremely ineffective team. I’m also opposed to any trait that basically has to be stunned to be countered, because stun already counters every trait except thick head/impervious already and by no means needed to be more valuable or prevalent.

In the end, Death Curse is here to stay, and it is already wearing on my patience. In guild wars, its another hurdle you have to contend with, but it is often this same hurdle every time - I don’t mind it that much in guild wars, because the intent was to have you fight a battle where you weren’t at such a strong advantage starting out, but even at a few battles a day, it does get kinda old. Only now, when I see it normal PvP (which is up to about a third of the time for me) instead of “just use Khorvash”, I can “just use Khorvash or Mercy”. Not a huge improvement. And if we increase the number of “counters” there, we are countering way way more than just death curse, so that isn’t a smart idea, either.

I use mercy to counter death mark, just keep it empowered and ready to go when death mark goes off.

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This just isn’t so. Even if it were 1 troop it would still be something that’s totally unavoidable, would catch some people, and the griping would continue. It’s both the fact that it’s triggered on death and that it can proc before you can do anything about it. It’s the lack of counter-play that frustrates people and giving a grace period is the better solution. Death is okay because it has a high mana cost and you can drain it (has counter-play), not b/c DM isn’t broken.

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