As i said elswhere people ask this often and it always makes me laugh…
The reason we only see 5 out of 400 cards is because they nerf all the good cards to the point of uselessness to satisfy the complainers.
Famine is almost completely non-existent, kerby is only a memory, bone dragon is not even a thing, fizzy was wacked in 3 days, and now the head hunters are gunning for wisp and kraken…
Pretty soon the meta will be 4x centaur scout because everything else will be garbage.
People would be calling to nerf him too at that point but i wouldnt be around to see it.
Stop nerfing cards into the toilet and we will have more variety!
Or, change the incentives so that people play other cards that are almost as good. As mentioned in the other thread, if defensive PVP didn’t reward wins, but rather troop variety and damage dealt, you’d see a much larger spread of troops than the usual.
That said, the meta is more diverse than it’s ever been. However, all of the meta strategies seem to rely on troops or game effects that are extremely frustrating to play against.
That’s three or four different strategies, using eight or eleven different troops, all of which are part of the current meta. I’m sure there are other choices I’m forgetting.
Are teams i haven’t seen at all since i came back… In fact the only teams i ever see are wisps or troll/kraken in pvp or GW
Personally i dont much mind the meta. Would i like more variety? Sure but i know as long as they keep the nerf gun busy that will never happen.
How would troop variety be decided? If i use different troops than someone else? I have no control over that. Must i change my defense team every day? Every hour? Thats just not realistic to expect someone to do.
Can’t speak for the developers, but here’s how I would do it.
(1) Rewards for damage dealt over damage received, GW-style
(2) Rewards further boosted by X%, where X is the percentile of the troop (i.e. the 1% most common troops, the 2% most common, etc.). This would be limited to 15th percentile, so even if you used all peasants (or whatever troop is the 99th percentile), you’d still only get a bonus of 4*15%.
(3) No additional reward for victory. The goal is to make games interesting and tense without having players feel forced to use certain teams to earn wins.
Because Wisp and Kraken are more powerful than the other troops. Even if it was only a 10% difference in terms of win ratio, players will put only Wisp/Kraken just to have the best win ratio…
I don’t think if a troop is not in the META it means that this troop is not powerful. Before Bone Dragon, Maw was the META. ASAP Maw was nerfed, Bone Dragon became the new META. But BD wasn’t buffed for that, he was the same troop for the last 6 months. It’s just that nobody thought to do an OP team around him…
We all know how META is created: few players put an OP team and invaders find this OP team and then put it in their defense because it’s OP, etc.
We see in defense only 5 cards because these cards are able to play by themselves. They win the RNG without the participation of the player much more often than other cards.
I like the idea behind this but it would require an in-game accounting of what percentile each card is in and in the long run all its doing is kicking the can down the road. Every other week after everyone spent the previous week using “non-meta” troops the meta will be the new less-used cards thus giving the 15% to wisp and kraken. So we will still have no real variety.
So you are claiming famine and kerby and fizzy are still powerful cards? -___-
Vangor how many ranked PvP matches have you played since “you came back” because I usually play 500 to 1000 a week and I’ve seen those teams plenty.
Of course I’ve seen the other teams listed more frequently Grundulum listed but i’ve also seen a LOT of dragon teams and he has none listed although in my playing I see them just as frequently as the Wisp and Kraken meta teams.
Another Team I see a lot of is “Psion / Ragnagord / Famine / Spirit Fox” or variations of it like “Psion / Ragnagord / Abynissia and Famine” etc…
Are you playing on PC perhaps it’s different than PS4 but I play till I’m in the top 20 or 30 every week for the last month and there are about 20-25 cards in ‘play’ in my experience although about 12-15 of them are more dominent.
Famines cost is too high to make him useful. You basically need another card with him to even hope to get him filled. That makes him useless.
Kerby was useful because of his devour and summon. Now on the off chance he does devour he is ok but without devour he does such insignificant damage that it doesnt justify only 40% devour chance. And especially since he rarely summons now he is useless.
Fizzy is a joke. Yeah lets buff the armor of my 3rd troop over and over again…
The decks with Famine and Death are focused on passive killing, while the opponent is saving mana. In addition to the nerf of Famine , one should take into account the appearance of cards that allowed very quickly accumulate mana (Wisp and troll, ideally suited with kraken). The horsemen of the apocalypse simply can not stand this pace.
75% of them have always been weak to some degree but if famine still had jinx and cost 20 he would still be powerful enough that famine teams would be common
I wish every time I faced her on a defense team that was all she did. My experience against her is that the RNG strongly favors exploding gems and filling Nobend/Grapplepot.
If we don’t nerf the current Kraken / Forest Troll combo, we’d need to equilibrate by making the other troops as strong, but when these combo can litterally beat you in one turn, fights would just end up being coin tosses.
On the other hand, we mustn’t nerf everything to the ground, because no one would be amused by playing cards with a strength of a peasant every battle.
In an ideal world, cards and card combos would be as strong and satisfying to play, but this ideal can’t be attained.
We can never reach a perfect equilibrium, so there will always be stronger and weaker combos, and the 5-10 cards at the top will be the meta, no matter if it’s as strong as the current Kraken meta or as weak as the non existing Peasant meta, as long as it will be the strongest.
We can get much closer to this than we currently are though. In my opinion, the major problem GoW has is that everytime they want to equilibrate something, they nerf it drastically, from one day to the other, a meta is simply completely wiped out, while if they tried fine tuning the numbers, it would be much better imho.
They need to find a solution to the 1-turn decks, if we ever wish to find a more balanced state of gameplay. Right now, 99% of the cards are absolutely irrelevant against loop decks.
So either:
Find a solution to deny endless loops. (and yes I do enjoy playing such decks a lot).
Find a solution to make other cards survive against endless loops, like submerge tries to do.
Perhaps we need legendary traits that do damage/reduce stats against all/random opponents, when the opponent takes multiple turns…
The issue is clearly that a few cards are too strong relative to everything else and thus need to be nerfed so other cards will be played.
You either have to nerf about 10 cards, or buff about 350. The answer is pretty obvious.
(I’d also add that part of what makes a troop balanced is its damage relative to the average base stats of troops. So buffing everything to the point of the most powerful cards would make the game much more RNG-based as everything would be looping and one-shotting. I think it would be a great way to really run the game into the ground.)
Generally a win is much more satisfying when you are able to cope with opponent actions and manage to beat them down. A game where the opponent did not get to play, only stays fun for so long.