Sometimes, there are situations in the game when certain unlocked traits of troops may become more of an obstacle instead of a boon.
Here are some examples of those situations:
Example 1: The 3rd standard trait of a Sunspear Hero (Heatwave) gives a permanent Firestorm to your team whenever your Sunspear Hero is in battle.
Great for when you’re relying on Red Mana; not so great if you have a Pridelands or Raksha-team that doesn’t rely on Red Gems.
Example 2: If you’ve built a team that consists of 4 unique troops that all have the Stealthy trait unlocked, they will cancel each other’s stealth out, rendering the Stealthy trait useless (unless one of these troops gets stunned or when you only have 1 left).
In the current situation, once you have accidently unlocked a trait of a troop that will compromise the synergy of your due to one of those situations, there’s nothing you can do to revert it: you basically need to replace the compromising troop (in the case of the Sunspear Hero, that’s a more annoying solutions since you will either lose the full bonus [in case of making use of a full Raksha or Pridelands team] or the extra talent traits the Hero possesses).
The fact that you need to watch out for certain traits in some troops is also a bit frustrating since fully traiting troops is required whenever you want to increase your Tribute Income by raising Kingdom Power Levels.
My proposition to solve this problem is to implement a feature that makes it possible to the player to toggle unlocked traits of each unique troop (and Hero, but it may also work for Weapons) on or off outside of battle, just almost in the way it is possible to switch certain traits in the Talent Trees of each Hero Class.
It takes the worry away that you might accidently fully trait the “wrong” troop, and it also increases the tactical options for the player when dealing with certain situations ons his/her team.
I hope I made this post understandable for everyone (since I find this idea a bit challenging for me to translate into words) and I’m also interested how others think of this matter.
Unfortunately suggestions to be able to stop traits/ exploding gems/ other annoying things have been made in the past and met with a deafening roar of silence…
This has been brought up several times the past five or so years. We always received the answer that they consider this a band-aid fix that doesn’t really address the issue, and that they are working on a better solution that just needs a little bit more time. This is unfortunately a recurring pattern with just about anything broken in the game.
I worry about how many additional resources would be required for each player’s “troop database” if traits could be toggled like that. Even if it were as simple as “toggle everything at once” or a lesser “disable the 3rd trait / disable the 2nd and 3rd traits / disable all traits” as opposed to an individual toggle on each individual trait. And what that might mean for the server-side requirements or the programming to implement such.
And then there’s the issue of how many troops this really applies to. Outside of the Bandit, the only one that comes to (my) mind is the Void Wisp: I would have appreciated the ability to disable its’ Stealth trait while I was doing PF500 on the Umbral Nexus.
You’d really want the trait toggles to be team-specific though? Otherwise it’s medals all over again: you toggle off a trait for one very situational team, forget to turn it back on when you’re done, and oops: sabotaged yourself.
I too wonder how many real applications this would have. Would sometimes be handy to disable a few weapon affixes: inconvenient wrong-color storms, the transforms on EoE and TaT. But then again a big part of team building is making the best of what you have…
Considering the traits are unlocked sequentially, I imagine it could be stored as a simple index value (0 = untraited, 3 = fully traited, etc.) and thus a “trait toggle” could be a second value indexed the same way (0 = disable all traits, 3 = allow all traits, etc.). Even a single-byte field would have enough room to encode both values (and with error checking).
Which, in turn, would imply revisions (or worse, breaking changes) to the passcode system used to copy/paste teams. (Not like it’s difficult to deconstruct as is, but…)
Would gladly turn off Bone Storm traits on enemy death/ally death/start of battle unless I really wanted them on.
Fury in Hell’s Gate is another obnoxious troop for that reason. The Wild Queen/The Wild King are two more with that clause.
The Lord of Slaughter is another one I’d like to stick in the back of a team without having the Start the Battle with a Doomstorm overriding my mana filling Storm to get the team started.
The database already keeps track of a huge pile of data, like which orbs you used to upgrade troops. Storing trait toggles would be somewhat similar to adding a single raindrop to the ocean. Besides, you obviously want to store the toggle information as part of the team configuration, so it’s just for four troops times the number of team slots you own.
