Do you like the Arena Revamp?

So you enjoyed Arena because you didn’t have to make any decisions? You just matched red/yellow/blue gems then fired away? I mean, I’m glad you enjoyed that, but yawn…

Runic Blade required 4 instances of killing enemy troops. Dawnbringer required, usually, one. Just one cast.

I would just pick 3 random yellow troops. Get DB full and win. That wasn’t fun at all.

I’ll preface this by saying that I enjoy the new arena.

That said, i seems that the majority of people were underwhelmed by the changes, seeing as the only real change was replacing hero with epic troops and adding the 3 daily offers. While I feel this was a step in the right direction, it’s still got a long way to go if they want people who never did arena to consider this an interesting mode.

The main complaints seem to fall into 2 main categories: Rewards and Gameplay.

Rewards
While this doesn’t affect me much since I still have a lot of troops to ascend to mythic, the revamp did re-emphasize the need to improve Daily Offer logic. The majority of complaints I’ve seen mentioned that the offers were useless so the “numbing and slow” arena is not worth wading through.

Then there’s also the actual rewards from playing and winning. Since there never was any class xp, I’m not sure why people were complaining that the new mode removed the hero and thus removed class xp. But the rewards we actually get are not outstanding. Better rewards or even a leaderboard of sorts might make it enjoyable. And that brings me to…

Gameplay
As said, the only change was that hero was removed in favor of epic troops. I do like this change. However, this needed to go further. If the purpose of the arena is to challenge players to make teams, use troops they don’t have/never use, and put them on equal footing, then all cards should be available fully traited. Want to show what a troop can do for those that don’t have it? Then show it in all it’s glory with all 3 traits. Then stun would mean something and not just a card to be skipped. Then immunities would mean something.

Another thing that was mentioned is troop selection order. I like the idea of having all 12 available and then select 1 from each rarity. This avoids issues of “that troop I picked is now useless” while still relying on player skill/strategy for crafting teams.

Conclusion
I never played arena before unless campaign required it since for me it was “pick anything that allows my runic blade to kill” and that wasn’t fun. Now at least there’s some strategy/luck involved and I find myself playing 1-3 times a day. However, “revamp” is a strong word. There’s still a lot that needs to be improved, and a lot that could be implemented to make this a viable mode. If you want more people to spend gems on Daily Offers, the solution is not to increase the number of offers but to make those offers more appealing.

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As a endgame player, without the hero and class in arena, I don’t have any reason to play arena other than to complete the occasional campaign task.

However, as a GM, I was expecting something more fun and useful from the arena “revamp” for my early and mid-game players as it does offer them a fair amount of resources they may be needing while they are working on their kingdoms and quests.

Things I Like About the New Arena:

  • Being able to see the full team as I’m picking my troops

  • Having to focus on the details of each troops abilities in order to build an effective arena team

Things I Think are Missing from the New Arena (and should be added):

TRAITS - Arena would be an ideal format for early and mid-game players to learn how troop traits can help/hurt teams on offense and defense. And this might even make it more fun for us late stage gamers.

BANNERS - Arena would also be an ideal format for early and mid-game players to learn how banners (mana +, ++, -) can help or hurt mana loading of troops on their team.

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:

  1. You see all drafts before you select any of them.
  2. 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)
Screenshot_471

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.

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Go back far enough, and it actually did. 2 Class XP per fight, if I recall correctly, since Arena was basically considered a subset of PVP.

XP got removed before the hero did sometime between the 3.0 update and now. Maybe I’ll find the time to track it down…

EDIT: Found it — 4.2.5 Patch Notes

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The rest of your post is reasonable and I can see your point.
I don’t believe mastery level applies to Arena. The number of mana surges is nowhere near 67%.

It might not seem like it due to the slower pace and all, but when your masteries look like this:

And then you can just be in a guild and they instantly turn into this:

Its kind of noticeable. And no, not just the numbers on the screen, but in practice, in the match, in Arena.

Most disparities I see on my main are in the realm of them having mid 50s surge chance versus my 64, but even that can matter quite a bit when “good” drafts tend to both sides having essentially glass cannons and losing a troop can mean losing 1 or 2 colors on your team (as well as the turns for the mana they gathered being “wasted”), things can snowball.

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By the time i got DB, Arena was long dead for me… so… I bothered to play few runs with DB to see if it will be fun. It wasn’t. It was even less fun than RB runs.

RB might require 4 casts to kill everything with casts, but after 1 or 2 killing casts, your hero is 1hitting anything with skulls, so… it might sound wierd but from my small bunch of data gathered it was more optimal for me, to get 12 mana for RB, wipe 1 common troop with it’s cast and usually, by the time i got mana for 2nd cast it was just one crippled enemy standing there or everything was dead… on comparision: DB still wouldn’t be charged, or hero would die to random skulls from the sky before casting.
But that’s just small data sample.

and as @Tresk pointed out - no need to talk about it anymore, since weapons are no longer on arena :wink:

Aha! Am “new” to the game, having joined at the end of March this year (so about 7 months ago). Although I’m at level 1200 now, I sometimes forget that this game has been around for a long time and that many things I’ve known from my Day 1 were many iterations beyond what might’ve existed before. Thanks for clearing that up.

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The biggest problem I have with the new setup is consistently drawing support troops only. You may say oh, well, RNG, you’re just having bad luck. At least when the hero was available you knew you would have at least one solid attacker. Having to retire and redraw your team multiple times is a waste of gold and a huge waste of my time.

I’ve been trying to like the new arena and I just can’t do it.

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I’m alright with the new Arena too. For the daily 3 runs. But for the event, it is such a passion to even considering playing that mode.

An idea though, would be to allow a weapon during arena events alone. That might please a lot of players.

Now there’s your problem…!

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Great posts above many logically pointing out what is wrong with the new arena.
In summary: We are basically agreeing; THEY GOT IT WRONG. Problem is they cant see they got it wrong like many other game changes. It actually makes you scared when you think what they will do to the poor old treasure maps when they turn their greedy eyes in that maligned direction.

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Unfortunately I think its closer to a case of they know they’ve got it wrong but they can’t or won’t actually do anything about it.

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It’ll probably all come down to data. Are we playing more arena since the revamp? Probably, since I’ve seen numerous posts from people saying they now play 3 daily runs when before they didn’t touch the mode unless the campaign told them to (like me). This has been mentioned, which means that if this continues, it’ll have been a “resounding success”. Are there people who stopped playing now that they can’t use heros? Likely, but again it comes down to data, which we don’t have access to. Maybe 5.3 will see a revamp v2, especially since we’ll have 2 more arena events this month, which generate more data which will either confirm that this has been a great move that gets people to play a mode they previously didn’t and spend more gems than they did before, or it will wake them up to the fact that we don’t like the arena event, the new arena or both.

Only time (and data) will tell. For now, we just avoid, play or grind as our tastes see fit.

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Game of thrones season 8 had more average viewers than any other season…

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Got me thinking; there is a 70’s film called The Arena; yeah preferable to this game arena ; though both on reflection are cliché ridden and exploitive; the film does have slaves girls; so film is plus 1; this arena rating 0.

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Yeah, definitely NOT a Fan of the supposed Arena rework. Must have been obvious to Devs that it would flop. But since Devs didn’t want to spend any money on improving it, they tried to re-work with the existing Arena assets. Poor design choice IMO.

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Slightly off topic but I wonder what they will do with the Treasure Hunt revamp which may be still in the works?

They have no previous model to revert to unlike Campaign tasks/Daily tasks or Arena.
I guess they will just update the UI a little/nerf the rewards and call it a ‘revamp’ again? :laughing:

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