I think a type of unending endurance match could be amusing. Start with a “normal” difficulty Explore, when the last enemy is defeated a “hard” difficulty Explore team spawns and you keep whatever stats you have. Defeat them and “Warlord I” spawns and so on going beyond Warlord IV, so you get x3 stats, then x4, x5, x6, etc…
Rewards would need to scale well to be worth the time investment.
Would be interesting to see what types of builds would function well. Black Manacles would be amazing with lots of targets to devour. Building up Rowanne to massive armor would help to knock out troops when they start spawning with hundreds of health. Having a way to mitigate massive attack would be very important, so perhaps either Sylvan dragon for entangle or giant spider spawning lots of fodder.
Maw only gets 1 devour now. And while it would boost up from skulls, when you get to the point of troops spawning with x5 stats, all it takes is one good skull hit and down goes the worm
Maw devouring one very large enemy gives Maw the stats of that level of difficulty. Its not so much that its exploitable, more like its the only thing that’s viable.
Bone Dragon is a close second but needs Maw to really make it work I think.
I thought about it too, but it’d end up boring and tedious as you milk the lower levels to build up ridiculous stats. The meta game would be summon and boost stat ability only.
There is a troop about 100 times better for this proposed mode than any of these. I’m surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
Really, though, most my teams are momentum based already. I’d actually enjoy something like this, seeing how long I can play whack-a-mole with the enemy team before they get a lucky shot in. My record for Infernal Kings is 6 so far. I’m just not sure about giving huge rewards for it to encourage stall-looping to buff before getting to the higher level.
It wouldn’t be too hard to get to the higher reward tiers with this proposed mode no matter what the stat scaling was, so they couldn’t have big enough rewards that just reaching a high battle count gave you some big reward. The point would be doing it fast like everything else). Maybe rewards for each progressive battle equal to the amount of battles you actually cleared, with a very very slight modifier for each successive difficulty? Enough to make it viable as a means of gaining stuff, but not too viable to encourage boring play. If you want to buff stall for 15 minutes, you better be able to run through 30+ teams in the next 15 minutes, or it just isn’t going to be worth your while over using speed teams. One-time milestone rewards could also be a thing in addition to this. Using Guardians to buff up to ridiculous levels every once in a while is fun, but doing it all the time isn’t.
Even if it isn’t strictly worth it rewards wise, I think it would be a fun diversion, since it actually has you playing the core game, using your troop collection and skill bonuses, unlike Arena which removes most of these but still has you actually playing the game, and Treasure Hunt which makes all of it irrelevant. I’d rather see more modes like this proposed one than anything else like those two.
I was thinking about something similar the other day. It was more the opponent replaces each team member and goes until you die. Rewards X amount per opponent killed. Anyway you want to work it would be fun.
I’d really like to see that mode… but as for the rewards, you’d really have to see to them being viable (unlike weekly ranking giving a few traitstones at best, for a VERY hard competition imho), yet not OP or unbalanced… (as an example, i’d like to see how keys as reward would work out, like starting with 5 gold keys, glory keys up to a few gem or event keys)
Since I would picture this being a kingdom based encounter (like explore/challenge) how about the rewards being tied to that kingdom? So first win is a minor stone from kingdom, second is 2 commons, third is a rare and a major stone, fourth is 3 commons and 3 minors, etc… If you get to the 10th cycle you start getting epic/legendary/arcanes.
The problem that has been brought up though is people could stall the early levels with cards like Brian the Lucky to the point where they max out all stats and then basically be indestructible and get a CONSTANT flow of good rewards.
Because of the possibility of exploiting this mode, the rewards would have to be minimal.
While there are certainly issues to iron out, I would really love to see something like this in the game. Personally, I play for the challenge and the fun, and new ideas and modes are what keeps it going.
For the record, I actually really want something like this, it would would have to be solely for the challenge and minor rewards. It just couldn’t give things out like traitstones unless it did very rarely.
Why not put a turn cap on that mode? 15 turns to start out with, and if you manage to kill the enemy in the timeframe, it gets extended by another 15. sure, loopers could get around that to a certain extent, but there are VERY few troops atm (afaik?) that can boost all of the stats, while also converting stones, so you’d be forced to move on eventually and couldn’t play forever (if the enemies health scales up faster than your attack, you’ll sooner or later loose time on killing them, so it should be valuable to save as many turns as possible early on to have the time for high-health enemies)
Edit:
I’d rather see this in a fashion similar to treasure hunt and arena, so based in a single kingdom. (Karakoth would be nice, giving you the opportunity for a “They opened a gate to hell”-survival-scenario… ;P)
I would very much like to see a ‘survival’ / ‘endurance’ / ‘gauntlet’ mode - it’s an idea that’s been suggested here a few times… but I’d really like to see more done to spice up the matches than just bigger and bigger numbers…
