See subject above. For description purposes and to reach that ephemeral word count, Death Mark has NEVER triggered for me, whether for my benefit or for my detriment. Most of the time it gets cleared up before the 10% stacking, and I just had a match today where it had a 1 in 3 chance to destroy my Terraxis but utterly FAILED in doing so. And this was in a PVP match. So please, for the love of Celestia, please buff it to where it can actually make troops cease to live. I shouldn’t be bitching about something that typically ends up as a net positive for me but I want here to be balance, and Death Mark is just too weak for my tastes.
3 Likes
I’ve lost one troop to death Mark, and it took me hours before I figured out wth had happened
guessing it is same as pc version. I tested this a fair amount when released. and only seen it trigger one time for Ai and never for myself, fairly useless IMO
Agree with this thread… I think Death Mark is there to scare new players, but has minimal effect on the game so far… few troops or spells that inflict it…
I have seen one troop die of a Death Mark in my 1000s of battles since the effect came to the game (and that was an enemy that was poisoned and on 2 Life anyway…)
I think the mechanic for Death mark in itself is broken. The impact is just too big if it triggers. Rather than % based, to have it killing the troop if it gets cast a second time (or third time) while the first one did not clear.
I thought some people did mention that if you cast it a second time, it resets the % to clear back to 0 but the stacking chances for dying keeps going
Dying chance does not accumulate. It is fixed at 10% per turn.
2 Likes
I tried a full dm team, and statistics speaking it goes off once around every 15 times you applied it. Other 14 times it gets cleansed. Its not that bad, its just that the troop that have it dont do much to compensate if dm fails to kill. And the huge down side is that you can’t kill immune troops. It’s like a very, very bad version of devour.
3 Likes
It need a some sort of a rework. For example after the first applied death mark was cleansed, every next death mark has doesn’t need the 2 turn wait to start having a chance to kill the troop. That would make it much more viable.
#Deathmark
How it is: A 10% chance to die each turn (after 2 turns).
There is a cumulative 10% chance to recover each turn.
How to fix: A cumulative 10% chance to die each turn (after 1 turn).
There is a cumulative 10% chance to recover each turn.
This would make it work like so:
Turn 1 - 10% chance to recover.
Turn 2 - 20% chance to recover, 10% chance to kill.
Turn 3 - 30% chance to recover, 20% chance to kill.
Reapply the effect, Turn 4 - 10% chance to recover. (Starts over, maybe start kill chance off at 10% too.)
Et cetera and so on.
Chance of recovery should always check first before kill chance. This is the only conceivable way I can imagine Deathmark having any impact. As it is, it’s not even a status worth noticing.
I really don’t even care if it’s ever changed, but I will say that adding it as an effect to any troop’s spell is akin to adding nothing. *shrugs*
8 Likes
I always thought deathmark should be reworked so that a second application on a target that already has a deathmark active should just kill the troop.
This would take the rng out of a potentially devastating effect and allow for actually playing and planning around the effect(application as well as cleansing), and would allow to properly balance this effect, manacost adjustment and all.
1 Like
Or the second application of the effect on an already affected troop coulde make the effect last like poison (every turn 10% chance to kill the troop and can be removed by cleansing affected troop, but won’t cleanse on its own).
1 Like
Some of the status effects could be reworked to be more interesting. Death mark is definitely one that i hate because of its stupidly swingy nature… Useless most of the times but can in some odd scenarios decide the game. Poison and burning seem to be mostly useless aside from troops/spells that deal extra damage to affected units.
I dont want to be the one that balances these for low and high level battles, but here are my suggestions:
Poison: can trigger on extra turns (only from the team of the affected unit). chance to trigger is (48+ 2×(lifepoints of affected unit))%.
Burning: deal damage equal to 10% of units current armor+lifepoints (min 3)
Deathmark: set health of affected unit to 1 if it has been deathmarked for at least 5 turns in the game
That sounds bloody terrifying. Are you a madman?
Is it really necessary to make a fully traited Jarl any more bleeding powerful?
I’m not even British! I just type like this when people speak of living nightmares!
4 Likes
I think burning and poison are perfectly fine and nicely represent the status they are mimicking. However, death mark doesn’t seem very effective. When I first saw it, it put the fear of god in me. I thought it would screw up my strategy because the troop could die at any moment. Now, I don’t even consider it because it has never activated in a single game that I’ve played.
I liked @DonBoba’s solution to get rid of the waiting period if the troop is hit with a second death mark or instant kill on the second death mark hit if it isn’t cleansed.
Would instant kill Gems of War. Just pick several troops able to Death Mark, synchronize their spell and win, no matter which stats your opponent has.
I’m not really a fan of random chances. I’d prefer if Death Mark would remove one random skill point each turn, like a traited Moloch does on 4+ matches.
2 Likes
I’ll give you the first point about the instant kill. If they did that, they would need to make it a one-shot spell like devour. However, I don’t agree about making it remove stats. It’s mechanic should fit the name, it should cause death unexpectedly. They just need to make its occurrence more of a threat or just not bother with it.
Aside from the Death Touch trait that applies death mark on skull damage, which might have to be reworked in some form, you can’t just fire Death mark multiple times in one turn. Every spell applying death mark gives the turn to the opponent. That and the build up to what you describe as synchronizing Death marks will leave opportunity to counter by cleansing, destroying key death marking troops or denying mana etc…
In any case you will cast two spells on one target, there are already plenty of troop combinations in the game that can destroy a troop or even more with two spell activations and team setups that can potentially wipe out the whole enemy team with similar effort one would have to synchronize Death marks.
But @DonBoba’s approach seems to be more elegant and inline with other status effects anyways, would take less rebalancing, and does not seem game breaking at all, so i’d go with this too. Though it too might need a rework of the Death Touch trait.
1 Like
It may be fairly useless now, but it’s mechanic was kind of a “new idea” so a re-balance is definitely in order
I can see Death Mark becoming more prominent in future Kingdoms.
1 Like
Not in such an efficient way. Take, for example, Succubus, two colors, 9 mana. First cast would drain all collected mana from target, making it harmless. Second cast would kill it. Negates difficulty levels, all kingdom upgrades, all troop ascensions. It doesn’t matter how tough the targeted troop is, you just need a few level 1 Succubi. I don’t think you can up with two spells that will do the same, at zero investment into game progress.
I said from the start that there was need mana cost adjustment if Death mark was buffed, currently Death mark comes at a very low cost as its effect is rarely useful and weak on average, when it is buffed obviously mana cost has to be adjusted as well…
As for killing a troop with two spells or even less, there are many of it actually, every skull generator/transformer spell potentially one shoots one or more troops, any devour spell kills a troop with just one activation and adds massive stats to the devourer, Prismatic Orb/Golden Cog+ Paladin can kill a troop, Rowanne devastates whole teams in tandem with an armor buffer, Shadow Hunter pretty much oneshoots a troop on her own on her first activation and there is surely much more.
1 Like