I have been throwing around the idea for a while, but I think this game really needs a trait that counters true damage. It would instantly rebalance all true damage teams without the need to nerf.
Trait: Holy Armor Effect: Causes true damage to hit armor first for the troop with the trait.
Troops to get the effect:
Scared Guardian in place of Armored.
Valor in place of Armored.
Zephyros in place of Giant Bond and moved to the last trait.
For devour, simply make big, large, and immense troops incapable of being devoured.
To be honest imho all of the troops you suggested would be weakened by this, well with the exception of Zephyros who is very weak currently to begin with.
I personally don’t really feel the need for a defense against true damage, while true damage is extremely good for invading, i never felt it to be much of a balance problem in defense teams.
Edit: just so i don’t get misunderstood, i think your suggested trait sounds like a fun addition to the pool of traits, i just wouldn’t exchange it for the skull damage defense trait on any of my troops if i had the choice.
Normal armored doesn’t do much to begin with. There are 4 traits in this game that manipulate skull damage (armored, stoneskin, granite skin, evasion). Of them, armored is the weakest. All of those troops would benefit more from Holy Armor than Armored. Zephyros probably doesn’t need it since it and giants tend to have low armor to begin with, but Sacred guardian and Valor could really utilize it well. Sword’s Edge gets +10 armor for 4 Sword’s Edge troops and Sacred Guardian gets armor from Whitehelm, 3x/4x divines, and ability. It is also common that kingdoms have counters within their own kingdom. Valor having Holy Armor counters Shadow Dragon and Wolf Knight. Scared Guardian having Holy Armor counters Moloch and Lady Sapphira.
Well numerically on average armored is better than agile. Also your proposed trait doesn’t actually prevent any damage it only distributes health damage to armor damage, if there still is armor that is.
Don’t know about Valor, but Sacred Guardian is mostly used as a tank and its chances of going down to true damage before his armor is used up are rather low in that position, even more so if we assume he doesn’t have the armored trait anymore.
Agile can skip a whole series of skulls. For example, match 3 4x skulls all at once vs 1 evasion will be 0 damage. That is 3 negates for the price of 1. Armored would just reduce it by 25%. Agile can theoretically be better than Granite Skin if a person gets ridiculously unlucky with skull spam troops. This is why Agile was reduced from 30% chance to 20% chance.
So it is just one roll on a whole batch of skull matches? it stays the same statistically still, it might as well miss the roll and not evade any of the skull matches in the whole batch.
The strategical advantage of agile compared to 25% armored is that agile is all or nothing. Agile is better at negating extremely powerful attacks. Agile can also dodge troops that do things like freeze, burn, or poison from skull damage if they evade it. On average, their order would be Armored, Agile, Stone Skin, Granite Skin. Agile can do things that the other 3 can’t. It’s percent being lower than the others doesn’t make it weaker.
I think this borders on the age old rpg debate whether dodge/evade or armor/mitigation is better, in the end it doesn’t matter, statistically the Armored trait prevents more damage than Agile does, ignoring on skull damage effects.
I am with @Machiknight though regarding the huge gap between Armored and Stone Skin and while i don’t think Armored is useless, the existence of the vastly superior Stoneskin trait, makes it feel like a waste of a trait, similar to Haste and Empowered.
I feel as if Large, Huge, and Immense are good traits on their own. While it would make thematic sense to add to them an immunity to bring devoured, I think it may make them too good. Consider it doublr-dipping, as it were - two traits for the price of one. However, while immunity to Devour sounds like a good trait to have on its own, in reality it may feel just as underwhelming as the other immunity traits: useful in some situations, but possibly not worth the price. Along with that, unless sweeping trait changes are made to swap out existing traits for this new immunity, this new trait won’t appear with more than a couple of troops. Personally, I dislike the idea of being forced to use one or two troops to counter such a specific, and ubiquitous, problem as Devour has become. (I don’t often mention it, but I also dislike how Valkyrie is almost the only reliable way to generate useful amounts of souls.)
I’m not sure what the best solution should be, but I think it should not involve changing existing traits.
I have to completely disagree with you here. I DON’T think large, huge, immense, are good enough on their own. In sorry but when unite getting hit for 20+ damage, those traits become minor inconveniences at best. Matching them up with anti-devour seems like a great fit honestly. It gives those units that are supposed to be tanks but aren’t a chance to be used again.
While i tend to agree with you again @Machiknight it is kind of odd discussing the state of these three traits as if they were one item when they so massively vary in power, with Huge being twice and Immense even being 4 times as strong as Big.
It seems to be very useful for Dust Devil and Mercy to me.