Effects should scale

If I’m in Arena and I use Fiend Fire to burn all enemies, enemies are going to be taking 10-20% of their combined health+armor in damage every turn from the burn. That’s a huge amount of damage. Poison as well is pretty nasty, a 50% chance to lose 1 health – when you only have 10-20 health and poison never falls off?

But the more health and armor the enemies have, the worse burn, poison, and bleed are. These are the three damage negative effects, and they don’t scale. Everything else scales or is absolute value. For instance, Faerie Fire scales because it’s 50% more of the spell damage. Death Mark scales because it’s absolute (death) on a chance. Disease? 50% lesss mana. Entangle? Attack set to 0. All of the effects work like this except for the damage ones.

What if instead of Entangle setting your attack to 0, it just reduced your attack by 10? Well, for beginners, losing 10 attack would be pretty bad, but it would be pretty good against enemies. For end gamers, 10 attack wouldn’t matter, and against enemies, it also wouldn’t matter. What if Faerie Fire instead just added some flat bonus damage amount to every spell, instead of increasing it by 50%?

The damage component of burn and poison is so bad in fact that the only reason they matter is for checks of traits and talents like Fireblade dealing triple skull damage against a burning target, or Scorpius dealing lethal damage if the target is poisoned, or abilities like Phoenica and Elemaugrim who deal slightly boosted damage from number of burning enemies or create more gems.

Instead, Burning, Poison, and Bleed should scale on the troops. How would I do it?

A burning troop takes 10% of their health and armor in damage every turn, up to a maximum of If you have 10 Life and 10 Armor, you’d take 2 damage per turn. If you only had 10 Life, you’d take 1 damage. If you had 50 Life and 100 Armor, you’d take 15 damage.

A poisoned troop would have a 50% chance to lose 5% of their life every turn. Much lower than burn because Poison can’t fall off (it has to be cleansed) and it’s true damage.

Bleed is very interesting because it’s a combination of burning and poisoned. There’s a cumulative recovery chance, but that gets reset when a new stack is applied, and it does true damage like poison, but while there are a ton of troops immune to poison (from Sturdy or Fortitude), there are none except Impervious that are immune to bleed. For that reason, I think it could stay the way it is without scaling, because it already kind of scales with the stacks (up to 10 true damage per turn), and without a lot of immunities, it can be pretty devastating, and we’re also just now seeing more things come out that check for bleeding.

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Yeah but…

I see Poison, Bleed, and Burn as a special ‘Hunters Mark’ for troops that do double or triple dmg vs that type of effect. In addition, that dmg is sufficient enough to remove random barriers spawned from enemy buffs.

Your suggestion has its merits, but I fear it is too complicated for a F2P game.

Bleed does 10 true damage per turn? Can you explain that please.

Bleed stacks the more times you apply it. If you stack it 4 times (e.g. hit the same troop with bleed 4 different times), it will do 10 damage to life per turn. With Mother of Darkness, this is not particularly difficulty anymore (subject to Medal of Cedric/Orpheus cleansing it before activation).

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Each stack does 1 more damage than the last. So the first stack does 1 damage, then 2 damage, then 3 then 4 so combined each stack does 1 damage, then 3 damage, then 6 damage, them 10 damage.

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On the merits, I like this idea a lot. Burn and especially poison are pretty garbage status effects right now, other than the niche uses you mentioned. This is especially a problem for poison, as the Mist of Scales kingdom is generally built around the poison status effect, and as a result, most of its troops are useless. Making the effects scale would instantly make these troops more usable without becoming broken.

Balance-wise, I actually think poison should do a higher percentage than burn, for several reasons. First, burn’s damage is guaranteed every turn, as opposed to being a crapshoot. Also, the bit about not recovering naturally is far less relevant with the cleanse options we have now (especially Cedric Medals). Lastly, as I mentioned above, there seem to be more troops relying on poison than burn (which also seems to have fewer troops that can capitalize on the status).

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Thanks @igniteice. I honestly thought it was just a single increment per stack. That’s food for thought indeed with builds. Right Bloodwood let’s see what ya got.