Death Mark Activating too Often..?

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

So this is my first post ever (I’m level 1300, I’ve been around the game for a while), and it’s a complaint/request.

It could just be me having extremely horrible luck, but I’ve noticed a drastic increase in how often Death Mark activates. In the past several months Death Mark feels like it has gone from a 10% chance of death on consecutive turns to 50% chance of death on the first possible turn, and 90% chance on the second. This has been annoying me for some time, but today I finally cracked because I performed the worst in Guild Wars than I have in the past year.

My opponents almost all were using some variation of a Life & Death team, and thus death mark was a given, so I equipped 3 Orpheus medals. In every fight my troops were death marked, and my last troop instantly died in 4/5 fights. Annoying, but I have learned to expect this, so I don’t mind that part on its own. The problem comes when that happens to the rest of my team.

In each fight on this day, with exception of the first, I lost half of my team to death mark activating on the first possible turn. The final fight was the most egregious though, my entire team died same way. Now, one could say I’m at fault for not having a troop that cleanses on my team, well, I did. I had a cleanser and 3 Orpheus medals.

You can not possibly convince me that a 10% chance occurred on the first possible turn 10 times between 4 fights. Something is wrong, Personally, I would just prefer if this mechanic was removed from the game entirely, because literally dying to RNG is pretty dumb. But since that obviously won’t happen I’d like to advocate for a decrease in the chance of death, to 5% preferably. And if that won’t happen either, hopefully this will at least garner enough attention that the developers will take a look at the coding.

I realize this was only from a sample of 4 battles, but that’s only because this post doesn’t need to be any longer. But this scenario occurs constantly in PvP as well.

But hey, there’s always still the chance that I just have the worst luck ever.

2 Likes
2

You got super unlucky in your guild war battles, that stuff happens and it does suck.

Before several months ago, I almost never saw death mark triggered. it seemed like 1% instead of 10% to me. Now I see death mark occasionally killing things instead of almost never.

So I think death mark was previously broken and almost never worked and was ninja fixed to the 10% it is supposed to be.

2 Likes
3

Players have probably thought at some point that the AI death mark is loaded. Without any proper analysis, it feels to me that first cast of things such as death mark, lethal and devour yield a much higher success rate than advertised, especially so in delves. In fact from recent experience in Fang Moor, all of those factors (including transform) all occurred on the very first cast, with very low odds to do so, Gorbil 16% for example. You’d never use Irongut (unless forced) with 16 attack. I’ve felt the same in other delve attempts too.

However you try and explain it, it will always come back with ’it’s the RNG’ unless it’s thoroughly benchtested by the 1000s.

It’s this part of the game that I dislike, it’s Casino esque and permanent when it occurs. I do feel however that there’s probably a little too much of it in the game right now maybe.

2 Likes
4

Well, I’d say you’re wrong.

Historically, there have never been complaints about death mark since they eliminated first turn death possibility years ago. And that’s significant since it’s an instant kill.

5

You forgot to quote the next paragraph where I said ‘it’s the RNG’ :slight_smile:

6

I didn’t forget because I don’t think it is RNG. I think the frequency of death mark killing has increased.

7

It sort of feels that way yep. Maybe it’s feeling it more too because more teams are using it, couple of metas of sorts with L&D and Drowned Sailor in the ZG team. Not sure what is common on different platforms, on PC, the ZG team is generally common. Literally in faction 500 delves if I’m deathmarked I close my eyes :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Death mark is horrible mechanics overal. Like we don’t have enough luck based factors in the game already.

This is especially frustrating, because AI is behaving like it was actually cheating with chances. You can observe this with dodge change (in theory 20%, in reality looks like 40% on units controlled by AI), resurrection on death (in theory 25%, in reality looks like closer to 50%), mentioned by you death mark, and all other mechanics based on % chance.

As far as I understand Death Mark mechanics, chances for unit to be killed by it should be: 0% in first turn, 10% second turn, 10% in third turn and so on. Same time, chances to cleanse, even without Orpheus medals should be 10% in first turn, 20% in second turn, then 30%, 40% and so on. So in theory, you shouldn’t see many units dying from Death Mark at all! Chance to cleanse should be 2x higher than chance for that unit to die in 2nd turn alone, 3x higher in 3rd turn alone and so on. Unfortunatelly, in reality I don’t see this. In fact, without Medals of Orpheus, my units are dying from death mark almost as often as cleanse themselves!

And this again bring us to cheating AI. Let’s say AI has double the chances of Death Mark kill. That would mean, chance for deathmarked unit to die in 2nd turn would be 20%, same as the chance for unit to cleanse! Chance to die in 3rd turn would be still 20%, with chances of cleanse a bit higher, at 30%. That would fit my observations about death mark kills - my units are usually dying from it in 2nd or 3rd turn, where combined chances to cleanse would be just slightly higher than chance to die from deathmark.

It does feel annoying, frustrating and totally broken. Especially if such powerful weapons like Life & Death puts 2 free death marks on your units. Also units which use death mark mechanics you can’t prevent to be casted, like empowered Drowned Sailor (which in theory has just 20% chance + 1% for every yellow gems on board to put death mark on 2 of your units, in reality it feels like he is putting that Death Mark 50% of the time!). And now we have Doomsayer class, which creates a lot of death marks as well. All this causes the game to be more and more random and less enjoyable for me.

I would personally love to see death mark mechanics changed and instead of killing unit straight on, it could decrease unit’s armor to 0 and hp to 1. So it would literally put that unit at the edge of dying, but still give you a chance to recover (eg. using units/weapons, which increase unit’s HP or armor). That would actually add another strategy element to the game, especially when we talk about surviving in delve.
If you lose unit straight on, you can do nothing about it, it’s just pure frustration. If you have unit on 1 HP, it’s a huge problem obviously, but we already have mechanics in game, which could help that unit to survive the battle.

3 Likes
9

Everything pointless to a reasonable gaming experience activities in GoW.