Everyone who has played Gem of War even a little bit knows about status effects. To quote the official Gems of War game guide
“Frozen prevents any Troop with the Mana colors frozen from having extra turns with four and five gem matches and from any Spells cast.”
So, what is a player to do when faced with a looping team in PVP? Using a troop to inflict freeze through some mechanism works well. Using any class with the Water talent tree and the level 1 talent Snap Freeze guarantees freezing a troop at the start of battle. The Elementalist class freezes on 4+ matches and has Snap Freeze. Simply freeze a troop and no more looping. Problem solved.
It’s as if the developers don’t even play their own game and don’t know about the simplest of strategies to employ. The solution to looping in PVP has been in the game since forever. Why try to solve a problem that never existed? What about other troops and team combinations that loop just as well or better than Journey troops? Will all troops that can result in looping be nerfed also? Why not just remove the extra turn on 4+ matches entirely? That would solve looping (saying sarcastically).
Here are the outcomes of nerfing Journey troops:
All players are harmed
Looping continues in PVP and is not stopped
Looping in PVP can still be mitigated with freeze
The Journey event is once again completely broken and unplayable
Since Journey only worked as an event because of the Journey troops, which are now nerfed, Journey does not work. There are simply too many issues with the Journey event to get into here. If you are going to nerf Journey troops, just remove the Journey event from the game entirely and solve that problem too.
Nothing positive has occurred here, only many negative things. Also, what about addressing actual issues like account sharing? Freeze can’t mitigate issues of account sharing in PVP. The only thing I see here is fixing something that wasn’t broken to the detriment of all players and ignoring other things that are broken.
Why do something so hostile, unnecessary, and harmful to all players? It is an unforced error and is going to trigger another quit wave. If you don’t care about how it affects the community, you should care how it affects the health, and therefore income, of the game.
That may be a bit too harsh. Journey has good rewards.
But they could just get rid of the penalties.
Or like someone suggested, give a base of miles and then extra miles for achieving certain things.
Players should never be punished for fighting harder battles.
This was absolutely not thought through, ad I wish that devs would actually have a look at community feedback and use it, especially before they plan any changes and not after.
I’ve already heard from friends that players quit today.
The enemy team could sacrifice 1 slot for the ability to never stay Frozen again (to say nothing of the potential for a future Wildfolk or Mystic typed Pathfinder), suddenly your counter is itself countered.
Double empowered that removes the colors that fill your imaginary journey troop, Zuul/Cthar → cast on Beetrix → win because Journey troop isn’t going to recover from Elementalist + only having 3 troops of the same troop type. Bonus points if one of the two Empowered troops is Inari.
Other potential substitutes: Essence of Evil, King of Ravens, The Great Maw etc.
For the hocus pocus the imaginary Wildfolk or Mystic journey troop is in your imagination, we already had Seekra + The Turquoise Emperor to basically do the same thing and it wasn’t an issue.
Oh yes, because literally everybody can “just” go put a new Mythic on their team. (A Mythic with a trait half as powerful as QB’s.)
Otherwise (aside from the word “imaginary” getting saddled with negative connotations) … yeah, that was actually a good response.
But I still like to argue “prevention is not counterplay.” From the design perspective, if you get a bad board and they’re ready to loop in 2 turns, what do you do? (Other than just forfeit/lose the battle)
Journey troops are the tame version of that non-sense.
and for references to people who haven’t fought Doomed Books, other players use 2-3 Empowered Troops on defense to fill Doomed Books in 1 turn, which typically loops 3-4 troops to death at that point unless its the Brown one, which has an unfortunate Affix mistake of Stone: Destroy a random Brown Gem instead of Dust: Create a Duststorm.
… so anyone and everyone that has played Bracket 1-2 Guild Wars on most platforms for the longest times has experienced, there’s a big difference between immediate 0 turn you lose and up to 2 turns to move before losing with most Journey troops.
You know that it’s not mandatory to have a mystic/wildfolk journey troop, right?
What happens if we ever get Goblins as a journey troop? Do they make it a Goblin without extra turn, or will they nerf all Goblins because looping is suddenly a problem somehow?
Or do they just not give us a goblin pathfinder? That’s what I’d do.
You know, prevention. Just like goblins should never get a 50% mana start.
If the develoeprs weren’t too often locked into a mindset where new troops have to be more powerful than their predecessors as to justify them and ensure their use? I’d suggest a Pathfinder like Hellcackle (godslayer) rather than Toadsqueezer or Slughoarder (siegebreaker).
That is, make it a simple “Deal X damage” spell without a secondary effect like gem creation other than the “typical” Goblin extra turn.
That’s a trap that’s really NOT easy to avoid. On one hand, if the devs release crappy or meh troops, they get tons of complaints that the game is getting destroyed, people would use old troops and never try anything new, and get bored, and leave the game altogether. But on the other, if they keep releasing troops that are better and more powerful than the old troops, we end up with power creep, making old troops and weapons unusable, and new stuff overpowered and/or over-used. It’s not easy to strike a balance in a game that is already 9 years old and counting - which is why sometimes re-balancing is necessary.
If someone rage-quits over a balancing change of 7 troops out of nearly 1400, which are not key troops by far, then it means they were ready to let the game go anyway, they just needed an excuse to hit the “uninstall” button.
Exactly this! There are way more annoying opponents than journey loopers. The only reason they are annoying is because you might have to change up your team, which with the new pvp system is actually a pain in the rear, but the same applies to any other opponent that requires a specific strategy. You can also counter journey loopers with your own journey loopers.
Other than that, idk why it’s such a big deal to lose in PvP anyway. This whole thing is way worse in Guild Wars, but there too, the same applies to any obnoxious teams/troops.
It is an option. I also made other suggestions, as did others. Maybe you are the one with the reading problem?
You can counter a Zuul team with a Zuul team too. So I guess since I also wrote that, in your opinion I wrote that’s the ONLY way to counter a Zuul team, and everyone has to do it that way.
I wonder how far you are in the current journey. Seems weird to complain about journey teams yet think this event is somehow ok, when it’s much harder.
Maybe give the journey troops 2 spells, like the vulpecia troops.
One for in journey, and one for outside journey.
Reward ten my guild on, but the mostly USA guys haven’t come on today yet.
Honestly I understand, the issue with the journey event points, and hopefully we will all get a resolution.
But I’m sorry, any guild members that woke up every day or week, and thought ok is there a journey troop I can use in this event.
Or any guild member that continually used them in PvP.
Or any guild member that thought of rewards before the bigger picture, and advised low levels to continually use journey troops, when the lower levels should be having fun and using lots of troops.
There to blame, and everyone can live with it now.
As I play the game for fun, I grind . Every class is 100 I’m at level 1569 in just over 2 years.
But I don’t need to finish every event, I don’t have fomo.
The nerf was done, it’s happened. Now we move on.
And let’s get the journey points fixed .
Certainly, it would have to NOT follow the looping archetype (or forfeit the Extra Turn signature to ALL Goblin spells). Remember, Princess Fizzbang got nerfed for less.
Ah, yes, the classic Mewtwo argument. If the only viable counterplay is to just fight fire with fire, you’ve got a salient example of “game-breaking” on your hands.
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