I really do not like bumping threads that pour vitriol and anathematize the tiny, friendly, and peace-loving goblins as they gambol throughout the lands of Kyrstara, but someone mentioned a build that is close to my heart so I wanted to agree that it is quite capable of partying with the noble, chivalrous, yet gentle goblins of the realms.
@Machiknight Your Khetarian team is quite similar to one of my favorites. I had posted it for my guild, but no one seemed to care much for it. Philistines! It is a little different from yours, but close enough for government work.
I consider it a staple and lots of fun.
First, I confess that although I really like the idea of Alastair, he usually causes logjams and stoppages during my games because I depend so highly on Magic gems. I use Revenant in the second position and concentrate on buffing him (and Jack Skellington in the first position) to the stratosphere while replacing Alastair with Aziris; thus, Skeleton, Revenant, Aziris, and Keeper of Souls. I run with the Dark Banner +1 Brown to give the Keeper a little much needed momentum and just +1 purple.
You also mentioned Wight as a possible stand-in. I drafted him in the past, before the team bonuses were implemented. He works quite well. But now, my OCD proclivities do not allow me to drop the delicious Master of Magic bonus that exits the building–along with Elvis–when Wight hits the stage.
I am really looking to kit this team out with more traits.
In conclusion,
Even Kanye is happy for goblins and is going to let them finish, but … Beyonce …
As a Goblin user myself, I think it would be a lot more useful if people declared what level they are and what level their opponent’s are (like that level 1000 guy). I’m 150 and last week, I faced a range of 50-200 level players and from those, maybe 4-5 Goblin teams out of the whole PvP run (no losses, so whatever that works out to be) and from those, maybe one team had one goblin at 2 traits. Of the other teams, there were maybe two that had a goblin at one trait. THAT WAS IT.
Right now, I’ve fought 6 PvP and faced one Goblin team with one of them at two traits.
So clearly, for me, goblins are “not everywhere”, nor are they powered up with 3 traits per four goblins.
So from everyone’s comments, are higher level players facing gobbos everywhere and fully decked out with traits? Lower level players? 'Cause frankly I don’t see what the fuss is about… or is this a case of “player match recall bias”, where people think they’re facing more goblin teams than they actually are?
I had about 25 battles this morning. Out of that, approximately half were goblin teams, some fully traited, some not. I’m at level 697, but most of my opponents were at least 100 levels lower. I have no idea what that means for the statistics.
I finally figured out what Goblins remind me of… the infamous Zone Defense in basketball.
I don’t know anything else about that sport, really. But the Zone Defense made matches so boring that it was basically outlawed by the NBA in order to improve the audiences’ enjoyment (to improve ticket sales), let alone the players’!
So we just need to do what they did, and ban Goblins for OVER FIFTY YEARS until ways can be found to make those teams less unreasonable.
Either that, or nerf their magic by two, EACH, because they were designed for lvl10 when that missing one damage was made up for by having another turn. And now its things like 10 instead of 11, compared to 5 instead of 6, and the difference doesn’t mean much anymore. And Goblins ascended way farther than a lot of other competitive teams and gained more magic doing so.
Given that Goblin teams regularly deal around 20 damage with skull attacks, I doubt anybody would really notice. I just had to deal with a 28 damage Hobgoblin …
I’d also like to see the Goblins nerfed (balanced?) a bit, but for me the balance issues are different:
Goblins were always fast and could cast lots of spells, but they were squishy - now their Zaejin bonus and all the L10 kingdom bonuses cancel that, as they turn up with more hit points than legendary dragons
spells which give an extra turn are widely under-costed - especially those that change the board - an extra turn is worth a minimum of 3 mana, and often more with bonuses - if it changes the board, it’s likely to hand you a 4 or 5 match, and gift you an attack (20+ damage) or 10+ mana
I don’t want to see Magic stats go down anywhere much as spells already have a limited effect in this meta - if the Goblins were balanced otherwise, I wouldn’t mind their Magic stat going up with everything else’s.
Hence I’d suggest:
all Goblins - lose a few face stat points, e.g. -1 Attack, Armour and Life
change Boar Rider type to Beast to mix up the type bonus
Goblin and Hobgoblin, increase spell cost by 2-3 mana
Boar Rider, increase cost by 3 mana, and drop base spell damage by 1
Shaman, increase cost by 3 mana
change the Zaejin set bonus to +1 Attack, +3 Armour, +3 Life (or whatever math works) instead of +10 Life
The above changes wouldn’t be needed as much if there were many viable alternative teams (other than Khetar/undead which is the only other one appearing a lot now) - but some balance changes for fairness I think would still help, especially on spell costs.
I’ve been keeping some stats since 108 hit - and currently 45% of teams I’ve faced (or skipped after scouting) are goblins (3+ zaejin troops), 18% are dragons, 18% are skeletons / undead… that only leaves 19% of the meta (that I’ve seen, obviously it’ll differ for others and differ by level). It is getting a little boring… sigh…
I’ve seen the number of goblin teams dropping in frequency as traits have resulted in a variety of team builds appearing which include traits such as ‘True Shot’ as well as traits which have a chance of avoiding/weakening skull damage. I suspect the variety will continue to appear organically as people accrue the necessary traitstones.
That means I have something to look forward to when I start facing 500+ level teams
I finished my PvP run, lost one fight against a good legendary team who I forget what was in it so I had to fight 2 extra fights, but out of the 25 or so teams and up to 250 level, I faced only two more full goblin teams, none of them traited. Maybe up to five others? had a goblin troop or so.
Is everyone who is facing goblin teams actually losing to them, and “all the time” at that? Because frankly, merely facing such teams but winning against them doesn’t seem to be a need to nerf/modify them. Then it just seems to be a call to make them less attractive to play so you just don’t face them.
I agree with you. Goblin spells are fine (more or less). They just get way too much for the mana cost. The extra turn is basically a free goodie cost-wise. That should not be the case. Otherwise I’ll order some free extra turns for the troops of my choice
There is also a psychological factor at work here. Extra turns means more time spent waiting for the enemy, which is a) boring and b) feels like we’re less in control.
But its mostly that every second fight has them and we’re sick of them.
I find this incredibly amusing since I suggested a change to the matchmaking to prevent this exact thing and was alternately flamed and then ignored into non-existence by several of the people making similar statements in this thread. You weren’t one of them Shimrra, you just happened to put it the most succinctly. I can’t help but find the irony incredibly amusing.
I think I remember Razlath, and I think people saying that’s what the Scout function is for. And I think you were saying you just wanted a “filter” before you even get to the Scout part…
Of course I’m biased, but honestly, to me, the cards are there for people to use and if they come up, it’s up to you whether to pay more to Scout and to change or simply face them. It’s not that much on the PC and I have one of the slowest connection on my iPhone due to it being one of the oldest supported models (4 with ios 7.1.2) so even getting to each screen takes a while, let alone even getting in the game - takes multiple tries. So really, you have the tools to avoid facing goblin teams if you don’t want to - use the extra clicks/taps.
I actually don’t disagree, yet we have all these requests for nerfs of the goblins and constant complaining people are seeing them all the time. That is primarily fueling the nerf calls (or people are losing a LOT more than they are willing to admit). So once again nerf calls are abounding on teams that people claim they always beat, but just are tired of seeing. It amounts to “I don’t want to see this team anymore, make it suck so people stop playing it.” Which is funny because that was pretty much exactly what I was trying to avoid with my suggestion and certain “big names” said nerf calls had nothing to do with popularity. And yet, here we are.
I have no problem with a couple of tweaks to the goblins, but frankly the sweeping changes some are discussing are overboard. Their aim is to make the goblins suck so people stop playing them. Probably largely irrelevant since one of the devs already said they don’t have any plans for sweeping goblin changes. However I want to make sure there is at least some level of dissent so the devs don’t get the impression that everyone is ok with these kind of changes. There was a point where the suggestions were reasonable. Now the suggestions are to basically completely destroy their set bonus and jack up their mana costs. They seem to get more ridiculous every day as they pick up bits from other disgruntled people.
I would renew the call for no goblin nerf, but instead a kingdom by kingdom review by the devs (and community) of changes that would make each kingdom have good teams. I would also once again caution though that a good invade team does not make a good defense team. One of the big things about the goblins is the AI plays them well. They actually win some defense battles. There are a lot of very effective invasion teams that the AI simply can’t play. The most obvious that comes to mind is the Paladin Armor crush teams. Brutally effective against the AI, ridiculously silly when piloted by it. That doesn’t mean Whitehelm can’t field a good team, they are just too complicated for the AI to pilot in defense mode.
Full PvP haul, level 276: 3 gob teams to rank 3 then 2 more in the last leg. 2 of them traits-packes, the rest had 3, 1, 0 traits. Most other teams I met looked like abandonware, no ascension or noticable kingdom bonuses.
So I don’t see geddon even with zero scouting in this area.
That’s what I’m kind of trying to nail down, get some hard numbers (as well as can be expected from the active forum posters calling for a change) because like pasa just posted above, I’m certainly not seeing goblin teams as the vast majority. And I’m not going back and sweep the thread for unique names, but I’m guessing around 20 players have posted out of… x total players doing PvP? Certainly not the majority and while I’m sure some of the non-post players share the sentiment, I’m also sure that there’s others on the opposite side.
I face goblins more often than other teams, but not by much. Not enough to be annoyed like three old webspinner days.
It’s probably because it’s the best created team out there in terms of them having great synergy and team bonuses. Every other city should aspire to that type of synergy.
I also have NO PROBLEM beating them and if they were to be adjusted, the best adjustment would be a slight increase in mana, just enough so it would take either another match, or good surge luck. I say that even while I occasionally run a goblin team.
While I do think that a couple of relatively minor changes to the goblins will be a good part of the solution (mostly upping mana costs by a little and changing boar rider’s troop type), I also think that being able to craft good counter teams is useful as well. And fun.
I have an anti-goblin team that works well and is fun to play, though it’s not foolproof against fully traited and ascended goblins (but what team would be?). Hero with goblinhammer, cthyryzyx, green slime, and green seer. The hero is there to make a few heavy hits while cthyryzyx and slime buff up, and off they go. There are other teams one might build with a similar principle.
My point is that it would create a better balanced feel to the game, and happier players, if they felt there were ways to counter these popular (and probably OP - see every other discussion thread, I’m not getting into it here) teams. The devs have done a good job of introducing some good counters recently to the goblins, two of which are present in my team, and are instrumental in its success. Without them I would feel much more frustrated about it.
I realize that as a longtime player that is a bit above average level I have access to such troops like cthyryzyx which may be unavailable to others except through chests, though like I said, other teams can be crafted. Perhaps the current fad skeleton might be a good replacement to use all that purple?
At any rate, I would really like to see more discussion about how to counter the goblin teams, instead of just discussion about nerfs. While that may ultimately be part of the solution, in the meantime we still have to deal with them as they are, and offering possible ways to get around them might prove to be more productive and effective for those who are struggling.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Having good counter teams is a better solution than constantly adjusting troops. It;s obvious the devs attempted that with the Goblin Crusher weapon, and with troops that do more damage to specific colors etc. I have an antii-Jarl team that can destroy those 3x and 4x jarls, and makes it FUN to play against them. (side note, havent seen too many of those around lately…)
