Feature Request

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

Some Quality Of Life Updates that people may appreciate:

#1. The ability to back out of a spell cast.

If your characters have full mana and click “Cast” on an ability and you see a few skulls or gems lined up that you overlooked, you’re kinda boned. You’re stuck in the cast window till you click confirm. You can’t back out of that. And if you’ve been playing a while you’re probably starting to go cross eyed so overlooking a few gems/skulls that could match up is a really easy thing to do. And being unable to cancel your cast and go back to the gem board is just punishing for no reason.

#2. FORCED gem placement mechanic removal.

You’re forced to only move gems in a way that causes a match. Quite often benefitting your enemy team more than yourself. It would be nice to be able to move any gem you want, not just the ones the game wants you to. There’s been literally hundreds of times where it’s forced me to match 3 gems that don’t benefit me in any way. And as soon as I do , it perfectly lines up an entire row 4-6 of a gem (usually a skull) to let the enemy smack me with, explode gems and get more skulls to smack me with. At that point it feels like I am matching gems more for my opponents than me.

For example, if I see a few gems in roughly the same area, and I see how I can move a random gem so that when it explodes, I get an additional gem match (or get to use the skulls) the game won’t let me. because the 1 gem I want to move isn’t being matched with anything. However, because it’s forcing me to place gems where it wants me to, I get 3 little gems of a color I can’t even use (because that’s the only 3 gems that can be matched) and as soon as I do that, it drops a bunch of skulls or other gems for the enemy team and I get completely stomped with multiple skull dmg hits back to back, or the team gets half their mana full in one go. That’s not a fun or interesting mechanic, and all I can think is “I’m so glad I could give you skulls or gems to wipe my characters with”. Good times…

#3. Team Management. Let us delete, or remove the class from a team.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I’m not the only person that has made a team with a class, and then later (after getting more troops that possibly synergize better with the team) decide to take your hero out of there so that you can have a perfect “Specialty team”. Like one that’s full of enemies that curb stomp demons or dwarves or gnomes (same thing) or Undead.
Sure, you can take your hero out… but your team is forever going to say the name of the class. Which is irrelevant now that your hero is out of it. And now you potentially have multiple teams that have classes tied to them that your hero isn’t even in. That’s confusing!

Let us remove the class from the team. or better yet just delete it and re make it without the class being linked to it. So we can have a fresh start, put the team in that we want and name it something easily identifiable that isn’t a recurring name in our teams (like seeing assassin or titan 4x or whatever)

There’s no reason to have it hard coded to have a class permanently linked to a team. You can already remove the troops, change the banners and names. You’re just stuck having a non-applicable class tied to the team for all eternity. And since your hero isn’t suppose to be in every team, just fill in teams that need something your hero can provide… it makes even less sense to have them conjoined like a circus attraction.

So I guess, gem placement, team and troop management and the ability to cancel spell casts is pretty much it.

~Thank you

2 Likes
2

I don’t know if this is still true—but it used to be that, even if hero was not in the team, wins still counted towards the 250 victories for unlocking the class weapon. So not necessarily irrelevant if that is still true

1 Like
3

1 & 3 are QoL improvements - 3 is visual only (although there IS an almost imperceptible difference in initial board load with no hero & no class, only really tangible over the course of an entire Vault Weekend with 3xIHDD). Best practice is to save any new team slots obtained from being “forever uncleeeeean!!!” - at least we can name them pretty much whatever we want.
1 is an “oopsie” which as you said mainly happens when we’re playing brain dead. You prolly pay attention to the battles that matter as I do. Would be cool to have but I’m ok with L’s sometimes during mindless grinding.

2 would make this a different game tho. There are a few “match-3s” that allow any random gem swap but most (including this one) require moves to make matches. Only having a single match on the board and having that match perfectly set up the opponent is like David S Pumpkins’s skeletons. It’s part of it.

3 Likes
4

This has been a common suggestion for a LONG time, but … it’s actually a lot more complicated internally than it sounds on the surface:

  • First, observe how any “on cast” traits (Arcane, etc) activate upon clicking the “Cast” button, even before selecting a target. This means the game needs to cache its gamestate before the Cast button is even pressed, otherwise you don’t actually have a valid gamestate to cancel back to. Can’t allow a player to repeatedly cast → cancel if it triggers Arcane every time, right?
  • Of course, there’s a simple alternative to the above: “on cast” abilities don’t trigger until the target is selected and the spell proceeds to actually cast. But this has its own problems, keep reading…
  • Some “on cast” abilities are randomized, like how Spiritwalker drains 2 Mana from a random foe upon ally cast. Even if the first point is resolved, you now have enabled a player to repeatedly cast → cancel just to “check” if a randomized trait yields a specific desirable effect, like waiting for “Bad Tarot” to Stun a Stealthy enemy so you can target it with the spell you are trying to cast (or alternatively, to target it with a spell on next turn). The only possible fix for this is for the gamestate to also include its current RNG seed, to ensure that if you try to cast → cancel → cast then the randomized traits will still roll the same way.
  • But even if that’s resolved, it still leaves an open question of design philosophy, because observing any “on cast” effects while attempting (but canceling) a spellcast is still technically leaking unwarranted information to the player. Now it is unlikely to affect anything but extremely close battles (which may overlap with high-stakes battles generally), but again, we’re kinda entering the realm of design philosophy here…

Nope. That would be a fundamentally different game:

  • Ever play Pokemon Shuffle? It is also a match-3 puzzle game based around an 8x8 board where you are allowed to swap a tile from any point on the board to any other, so long as the result forms some match in either location.
  • Or have you played Puzzles & Dragons? It’s also a match-3 puzzle game that lets you swap a tile from anywhere on the board to any other tile, except that as you draw a path from tile A to B it swaps the picked tile with every tile along that path, allowing you to shuffle and disrupt the board on a large scale (limited only by a short time interval) just as part of its standard design, and it actively encourages you to sort tiles into the highest number of the largest matches possible.

Notably, both of those games are assymetric: you are the only participant playing the board. Allowing it in a symmetric game like GoW would create a SUPER obvious problem of enabling a player to match Skulls from basically anywhere on the board (much like casting Aziris, but as a standard move not a spellcast). If you think the cpu gets more lucky matches than you now, wait until it starts spamming Skulls every time any 2 skulls land within 2 tiles of each other.

And … yeah. While there is a lot of longstanding popular belief about the cpu player receiving suspicious amounts of lucky board layouts (and especially Extra Turns), what we are lacking is actual, concrete DATA from testing to evaluate whether or not this popular myth has any basis in facts. (Until that happens, stop telling me that pressing B in time with a shaking Poke Ball doesn’t actually increase the capture rate, because Everybody™ Knows™ That’s a Lie! My beliefs are immune to your facts! :stuck_out_tongue: )

Another game worth mentioning is one of the big names in early match-3 puzzlers, Bejeweled:

  • Most rounds of Bejeweled ended either on a timer, or if the board was left with no viable moves (unlike GoW, the board never shuffled).
  • “Bejeweled Twist” tweaked the format so you clicked between a 2x2 group of tiles and rotated them 90 degrees. But unlike the normal version, Twist did not require a move to actually make a match, completely avoiding the possibility of a dead board with no moves. This fundamental difference was by design, of course, but the difference was felt all the same.

Idea #3 sounds good, though – only display the Class name on a team that actually includes the Hero in it.

5

Absolutely not. Notwithstanding all the technical complications and intricacies, you (generic) made the decision to cast, you (generic) live with the consequences. Period. If you (generic) find it punishing for no reason, then think back a little - it was not some out of the blue thing that just happened, you (generic) were dumb enough to push the button without assessing possibilities or missing stuff, so you (generic) get punished, if you will, for your (generic) dumbness. I’ve happened to lose games because of this (even guild wars paragon battles)…so what? Suck it up like one should and get better next time.

Or maybe the other guy should ask for taking an entire move back, then two moves, then three, then ability to infinitely replay the same match over and over and over again until some satisfactory result?