I have not run into frozen much, but in every instance I have it has absolutely cost me the match. Most have been against bone dragons in the first position with their trait in play. The most destructive hits have come when using my slime team which is completely dependent on extra turns from both skulls and blue both of which shut down when the reactive frozen hits. Since it was refreshed every time I matched skulls against the bone dragon I was forced to either leave skulls on the board to be killed with, or allow frozen to refresh constantly. I have never had it expire in any instance, it always either refreshes before expiring, or the troop it is on dies (and the next skull match just puts it right back on the next troop).
The only thing stopping it from being a bigger pain right now is that few people that I am matched against have that third trait on their bone dragon. As to the mobs that utilize the frozen troops, I haven’t seen many uses but the ones that do use it have been equally devastating. The main difference is I can sometimes wait out the effect, though the slow down it costs is usually still a death sentence.
With my slime team a successful game is over in roughly 15 or so of my turns (counting extra turns from 4 of a kind transforms as separate turns) with about 5 to 6 turns on the enemy’s side while I ramp up. Frozen forces way more handovers of the turn and thus costs me the game. My goblin team fairs slightly better, but since it relies on generic 4 of a kinds a lot less it is less impacted. The slowdown is still brutal, but I can at least see a path to victory even if I have not yet realized one.
So yes, Frozen does exactly what I thought it would, it is incredibly powerful against teams that rely on skull 4 of a kinds or whose front mob shares an important transformation color. If not changed from its original form it would absolutely be everything we thought it would. In its current form it destroys certain types of teams pretty much utterly (especially since it was added as a reactive to bone dragon) and hinders others.
Once people begin unlocking it more on bone dragon and once teams are built around it a little better, it still has the potential to become a major factor in flavor of the month teams. As a specific team counter I wouldn’t say it is overpowered in its new revised form (and I never said it was going to be post revision). Powerful yes, but not overpowered. In its original form it would have been completely ridiculous. And powerful vs overpowered aside, it makes the game suck exactly as I thought it would. No strategy, no intelligence, just make horrible matches that you know are going to power up your opponent with nothing you can do about it. You know you are going to lose, but you can’t do anything about it, you just have to keep playing. Thanks to it being reactionary on bone dragon, you can’t even stall waiting for it to expire. The absolute worst kind of debuff in any game. The kind that removes a player’s ability to play the game. I am glad it was changed, but I still think it was a horrible move to include it in the first place.
Do you really believe it was ever going to be on only three troops? You think all the legendary traits were reworked in the 3 weeks before release? I seriously doubt it. Those traits were in the works long before we were shown the frozen effect. Just because it was initially discussed with 3 troops never meant it was going to stay there. Seems clear to me the legendary rework was still secret at the time which is why the bone dragon wasn’t mentioned. I would say with the benefit of hindsight the plan was never to leave it only on 3 troops.
[quote=“Jainus, post:4, topic:4703”]
By a very noisy minority… [/quote]
You know better than this Jainus and shame on you for acting like you don’t. The devs have never caved to a “vocal minority” not on this or on any other issue. They listen, they investigate and they make decisions. If they caved to every vocal minority we would have a very different game. They took our discussion, our examples, our concerns. They ran new tests and they got answers they didn’t like as much as they thought they would. This caused them to change the way it worked. Does that mean we presented scenarios they hadn’t thought of? Did we show combinations they didn’t forsee? Maybe so. Maybe our scenarios and combinations were exactly what they thought of, but focused testing yielded different results. Either way the decision was made after they dug into it more. Yes, they noted that they weren’t sure it would cause a problem, but clearly they were also not sure it wouldn’t. You can assign whatever secret motives you want, but lets not insult the devs by insinuating that they lack the spine to make the game they want the way they want. There are plenty of examples of this not being true. I expect better of you especially based on past behavior and support of the devs.
-Razlath