Wha~
There’s no WEAPONS anymore? I just crafted the DB like 5 weeks ago cause I didn’t want to use gems to skip that annoying task. I feel like I wasted my precious celestial traitstones now.
5 Likes
You still have the weapon, don’t you? It still deals damage to all enemies, with a boost of 2-16 damage, and barriers all allies, right? That didn’t change just because Arena changed.
Neither did the 1.3 million soul pricetag, not to mention all the other resources that ONLY Dawnbringer costs.
I don’t use that weapon. I prefer Essence of Evil, Life and Death and Rope Dart as my weapon. I crafted it DB just to make my life in arena easier when that annoying win 8 arena battle task comes along.
3 Likes
Players who can afford to craft Dawnbringer should be players who don’t need to upgrade 72 troops @ 18k souls each. If you are that far behind in upgrading troops, Dawnbringer should be the last thing you’re worrying about crafting.
Players crafted dawnbringer SPECIFICALLY for arena. It’s exactly why the crafting cost was so high. So, I’m not surprised that someone who recently crafted it feels cheated now that the game mode it was designed for has been pulled out from under them.
I don’t feel cheated because I crafted it a long time ago, and I feel I got my time out of it.
Would I craft it now? Absolutely not.
And if Duskbringer follows the same overpriced recipe, I won’t be crafting that either.
3 Likes
You have something better to do with millions of souls? I don’t.
So how about you give away 350 gems, 12 celestials, 400 sapphires, 400 topazes & 400 rubies to anyone who asks for them? Do you have anything better to do with them?
Some players recently crafted DB for that purpose alone. (3 conditions)
A trip down nostalgia lane, when Dawnbringer was released. It was the first Mythic weapon, and predates class weapons as well as Doomed weapons. So it was hardly designed for (only) Arena.
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It may not have been released specifically for arena, but it took maybe 5 minutes for those who had it to say “Boy, this thing KILLS in Arena. Matches are sooooo much faster”.
I also remember that they had to pull DB from the arena, because if the AI had it, and you did’nt, it was too difficult to win.
I’ve just been waiting for one of the community managers to come in and explain how most people like the changes, and try convincing us that they actually did a good job, and we are wrong for thinking otherwise.
3 Likes
I farmed into the wee hours for weeks to get Dawnbringer for use in Arena. Then I enjoyed dozens of hours of Arena before it got tiresome. I feel bad for newer players who are robbed of this experience.
Dawnbringer was amazing in arena. You drafted every team around it. Now you have no idea what troops to pick. How can you make a time have synergy if you have no idea what the best troop is going to be?
Arena is like having to pick your sides without knowing what food you are ordering.
“Do you want chocolate sauce, mayo, or ketchup?”. … On what?
“You’ll find out soon. So you want a slice of cheese or chocolate chips?” Umm can I change my mind later?
“No. So did you want whipped cream, onions, or lettuce?” Isn’t this a burger joint?
“It used to be, but everyone kept ordering cheeseburgers, so we took them off the menu.”
25 Likes
that’s RNG, troops offered to me during Event were slightly better than they used to be before Event - this probably means i was getting crap before Event and something mediocre during it,
for you it was probably otherwise
1 Like
I never used DB on arena(well maybe used it once or twice to test in, not sure). Since the day I used Runic Blade in Arena, that was #1 weapon for it. Nothing else was so good at scaling…
Runic blade was a very solid arena weapon. There were a few others, also. No point in mentioning them since it no longer matters. 
. Dawnbringer was really good for speed, especially with a compatible team. But you are right, imho, as someone who did way more arena than sane people should do, runic blade was pretty much all you needed.
2 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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:
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Being able to see the full team as I’m picking my troops
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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:
- 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.
9 Likes