Sorry for the late post, but I mentioned that I would review the top 100 defenses. I captured the data Thursday night, just didn’t have time to analyze it and put together a post until now. Anyway, here’s what I found:
- Only 4 event defenses, and another 6 which are likely leftover event defenses from previous weeks (also 1 single-troop defense remained)
- 15 Famine-based (
- 16 Kerberos-based (all used FG, 10 used GS)
- 17 EK-based (8 using a combination of Valk, Mercy, Justice, and/or Mab)
- 14 Kraken-based (8 using GS, 4 using Lady Anariel and Mab)
- 10 Dragon-based
- 7 Draakulis (6 using Humility/Mercy)
- 11 other random teams
For comparison, the results of my last review are at Welcome to Nimhain's Lair: May 21st - #189 by beanie42 . Overall, my hypothesis about event-based defense teams was correct. A 25% boost simply isn’t enough to make weak troops viable or encourage anybody to use them, so as expected event defenses are down drastically from previous weeks. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of defensive teams. The meta is still a bit narrow, but it’s almost doubled from the previous “Big 3” to 5 or 6 (a good start), which indicates some of the changes (like nerfing Famine, make DM wait a turn, and eliminating single-troop defenses) has helped. Unfortunately I think part of the increase is also due to the problems with cascades between the 2 platforms, and some of the defenses are simply taking advantage of this issue.
The other downside is that there are still very few troops being used on defense. For the top 100 defenses I looked at there were 397 troops. However only 10 troops accounted for 189 of those spots (48%), and expanding to the 20 most used troops jumped that up to 282 (71%). With a troop catalog now containing 375 troops, having 5% of the troops account for over two thirds of the defense is rather ridiculous.