So… I’ll try to keep it brief here since I already touched on it elsewhere. (whoops, or not)
The answer is likely always going to be “no” from me, but I think “Arena style” gameplay where nearly all “flow” from a team is taken out. Any mode I play for an extended period of time without a semblance of “flow” in my teams is going to be annoying, for me. It can be a nice change of pace to slow it down, but this is not ever where I want to spend a significant portion of my gameplay.
As for “overpowered” troops, I say that most of them are actually fine. If you run teams where no spell an your entire team can one-shot an opponent and you have no form of AoE or multi-target damage, the pacing slows to a crawl and is even worse than it was before. I think there is a bit of good here in being forced to deal with the drafting system entirely, even with a handful of outlier picks to act as win conditions. This fundamentally differs from the hero weapon situation, because not only was the weapon stronger, but the hero themself was defensively stronger and could take a few hits from any arena pick, so your win condition was always the hero weapon, and usually the same hero weapon over and over. You didn’t really “build around” the hero so much as cram the team full based on color or typing, so you weren’t exactly making choices trying to build a team. However, this wasn’t exactly fixed by removing the hero as a choice, since making blind choices is in most cases only marginally better than
The part we lose by taking the hero weapon off the table was not only being able to select a win condition to build around, but also, and possibly even more critically, color coverage. The AI may be dumb as rocks on their targeting decision making, but they do tend to match colors you both need over colors just you need.
As I said before, I think this mode would be massively improved by just bringing out the information horizon a bit. I’ve gone over others’ ideas, and my own, and I think the best way to encourage the kind of gameplay for people that actually enjoy this kind of thing is:
- You see all drafts before you select any of them.
- There is a button to redo drafts right there (for 1000 - no, 800 gold, same as retiring, collecting your pity gold for 1 or no wins, exiting to the map, reentering arena, and repicking, minus the necessity to deal with the interface). I’d say what feels like a significant portion of the time but in actuality is probably less than 20%, there is nothing on your drafts that can kill an enemy less than two shots with no AoE damage etc. or all possible troops are defensive or support types and while you can win with these drafts given just a bit of luck, it is a miserable experience all around.
(went 5-0 with this plus VIP win, would NOT recommend. I believe there was one spell damage draft even possible out of all 12 picks, and it was a single target 7 or 8 damage rare with no way to get boost ratio deal. Both other epics were “empowered” converters)
And… thats it. I don’t think we’ll ever get any kind of relevant counterplay to drafting in this mode, it is just too simple and would require too much of a revamp (like seeing 8 possible opponents before even drafting and picking the ones you want to fight to get your 6 wins after drafting, allowing sideboards, etc.). It would be nice, but its not realistic. Honestly, even the two changes above are probably “asking too much” because of the interface changes required, but they change nothing about the gameplay flow of the mode itself except allowing the player to make more informed choices. Color coverage is less of an issue when all your picks are laid out ahead of time as well. Way too many of my teams had the only way to get a troop that could do anything covering only four colors, and I really dislike how those play.
So… as for the all the talk of rewards and whatnot… I think the whole concept of an “Arena Event” completely misses the mark. Putting aside my own personal feelings on the matter, this does not seem like the kind of thing you want to even encourage people to grind. The fact that it has “bad rewards” now isn’t really the issue, its the whole concept that repeating arenas over and over again has the kind of gameplay that gets stale quickly for most people that actually enjoy the main game long enough to consider dropping an hour or more of their day to participate in an in-game event.
On the flipside, giving extra offers for a few wins daily was a brilliant way to get people to dip their toes in and engage with the mode as the “change of pace” it works the best as. Or it would be, if the offers system was a bit better about giving offers that made sense. I see endgamers here being “annoyed” that they have to play the mode to “keep up” on the off chance the offers are imperial deeds offers, but I personally think this is a bit overblown, but again the issue here is having this mode being the only way of (potentially) getting (imperial) deeds once you have exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and its random. Slot 2 offers contain most of the enticing offers for most of the playerbase since they offer progress for gems, which is an additional gem sink. If the slot 2 offers properly removed themselves (ie., power 20+ bug is fixed, medal requirement doesn’t generate troop copies offer, no offers ever generated for “not possible yet” tasks), it would make sense most of these defaulting to slot 2. A lot of the slot 1 offers, I’m not sure who these offers are targeting besides those that are ignorant of how the game works. Thats a problem with the whole offers system as much as it is an arena problem, but see, properly balanced offers have people chasing these offers, which are just opportunities to spend gems in a sub-optimal way but to get something that they want quicker (usually ‘progress’). You get to have a people actively chasing a carrot that is in-fact a gem sink, and being (more or less) happy to do so, incentivizing a mode that gives less resources per unit time otherwise. Thats a game economy WIN-WIN. If only the underlying system worked just a little bit better, and without any “who is this for?” offers.
As one final side note, the whole “equal playing field” gimmick is still massively skewed, way more than people will admit, by the presence of using the player’s full mastery levels. But taking them out wold slow the pace even more, which would cause more problem than it would solve. Just a small note for some people having a much easier time in arena because they double-surged their troop that could take out the almost-full opponent troop in one shot when otherwise there wasn’t even enough mana of that color on the board to even fill it for another five turns - this is not a universal experience. A true lower level here is going to struggle a lot more due to mana masteries, even if they can get good drafts.