I really enjoy delves for the most part. They’re fun, challenging, and it’s nice to see our troops be able to pseudo-level past 20 to match ever increasing difficulty levels.
But there’s two things that bother me about the entire format.
One is the chance-based instakills, the other is the encounters with units that can mess around your team’s order. With your team unable to change between encounters, these two things can instantly ruin your run.
Some are worse than others. The dust devil encounter isn’t particularly bad or difficult, but it is -annoying-. Effectively, since they start at full mana, you have to just sit around and wait for them to charge up their abilities enough times to rearrange your team to its original form. It just stretches the encounter out way too long for no particular reason.
On the other hand, there’s stuff like Kruarg the Dread, with a 5% chance to devour on skull damage, or the Bullettes, who both shuffle your team around and have a chance to devour.
It’s fine to have the final encounter do this, but not the ones inbetween. Sometimes, pure luck can end a run on the spot. I just had an encounter with the bullette lair, managed to kill one of the two, but then the AI got five turns in a row, ending with the bullette firing his attack, knocking my team around, and then devouring my most valuable team member. There was nothing I could have done to stop that. It was just purely bad luck.
So my suggestion is: Allow the team to return to its original formation after each battle, and remove all chance based one-shot mechanisms from delves. No more death mark or chance-based devours. It only serves to make an otherwise great gamemode frustrating.
you just don’t have good enough teams yet. i have never lost a delve so far. been transformed etc, just have to learn to target those guys first so it doesn’t happen.
if your team can’t kill them in 10 turns get stronger teams =)
My teams are plenty powerful, but if the entire board is devoid of the mana you need, or keeps setting up four or five matches for the enemy, there’s nothing you can do. It’s fine on normal encounters where you can tough it out. It’s not fine on encounters where a single ability cast will ruin your team.
The one thing that defines the challenge of delves? How about the fact that you’re limited to two colours and that eliminated troops don’t come back for the next encounter?
And just because it’s in the game doesn’t mean it has to stay. Something that has a negative impact on gameplay should be changed or removed.
Sure, but not all will agree that the mechanic you are criticising has a ‘negative impact’. I am fine with it, I think it’s all part of what defines the Delves mode. Welcome to forums, not everyone agrees.
Btw, I found your thread title misleading: streamlining sounds (to me) like something making them faster / better UI etc, whereas your request are for balance and difficulty changes.
Being transformed and shuffled around is part of the challenge of this mode. Compare it to your team being shuffled/transformed in ANY of the other modes. Do you care in PvP that your Megavore transformed into a Toad? Not really, in Delves these troops and effects finally have a purpose. I bet you’re Dragon Eye’ing the enemy, no? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
This is not the first time transfroming/shuffling/devouring troops in Delve make players hate them to the point ot requesting to remove all of them out of the mode. But as other players have said already, it’s a part of Delve’s challange.
If you insist on bringing the same PvP team to Delve, without coming up with any plans to counter them, then it’s your problem, not the game system’s.
Yeah, based on your team, it’s not your troops’ synergy that make the matches quick, it just that you’re still playing in low levels (Pre-Level 200).
If you happened to find a team that can beat Delve Level 500 in 10 turns, please let us know, as I don’t think it even existed (using Dragon’s Eye doesn’t count).
I mean… you could get insanely lucky with Tesla. Match reds and blues on the same turn, extra turn, cast Tesla, rinse and repeat four times and they’re way way dead. Maybe with a red or blue storm and Aurora for the link trait.
Yeah that doesn’t usually happen in ten turns for me. I can win without taking damage but it is not fast.
Going now, I don’t want to encourage this thread any further.
I don’t think Delves are too hard. I do think GoW does a bad job telling new players which modes are “safe” and which ones are “a challenge”.
PvP/Explore/Challenges/Arena are modes “for everyone”. Even though PvP can get hard, it is not designed to be unapproachable for players and the difference between level 10, 100, and 1,000 is what kind of win rate is possible. (I spent a long time in the 60% range, then suddenly 90% was achievable.)
Delve, Dungeons, Pet Rescue, GW, Raid, Invasion, Bounty Hunt, and Class events are intended to be challenging. Some players will not be able to beat them at all. However, they’re structured so that players who can’t “win” still get some % of the rewards via reward tiers. That was a rare nice gesture from the GoW devs.
I don’t think GoW makes it clear this is what it intends. There’s not even a level marker: there are just certain troops you probably won’t make it far in these events without. That was very hard for me to realize as a newbie.
Bold assumption. I dropped Dragon Eye the moment I got something that could actually reliably combat dungeons, and have never used it since. I try to avoid RNG based abilities, troops and strategies except for joke comps (Staff of Visions can be hilarious, if utterly useless) because they always backfire on me. I don’t even use trolls and ‘create X gems’ stuff because they never work out in my favour.
I would love to be able to use them, but I can’t rely on the RNG to work for me.
Even now, the biggest RNG factor I’ve got in any main team is Emperor Liang’s ‘Emperor’s Blessing’, and even that is messing up spectacularly by consistently prioritising full mana, enchanted allies to diminish its effectiveness.
The effect this RNG based stuff has on Delves isn’t ‘added challenge’, it just forces players to use cheese strategies or just forego strategies altogether because all troops need to have some middle-of-the-road design to them that allows them to counteract being shuffled around or losing team members.
Not to mention the plain feel-bad experience you get from losing a delve run to sheer luck on the AI’s part. If Dark Souls had a ‘feature’ where every twenty seconds, your character could just randomly suffer a heart attack and die instantly, you’d complain about that too.
Delves shouldn’t bank on lucky instagibs so much, nor should they have the ability to knock your team around for permanent composition damage.