Not a new complaint: I started out loving Guild Wars. Especially with the new boosted troops every week, I love to try to put some thought into the new troop combos. On Whitehelm week, I can heartily apologize for my Grand Inquisitor team being frustrating from the win/loss numbers I had in PVP defense, that week.
But the problem is in the “Attack” screen. 5 games that are pretty much the same every time. You have to counter Devour. You have to counter Famine. I’m bringing Famine to my attack team 3x/week to drain mana from Kerberos and Krakken. Sprit Fox 2x/week. Succubus 2x/week. Notice a trend? My favorite counter tends to be mana drain because Kerb seems to devour the first time 95% of the time. I suppose if the second time is 5% of the time, that’s 50%?
These games are now amazingly tedious. “Oh, they have 2x Kerberos and a Forest Guardian. How original.” Or, “Gee, double Famine. My favorite.” The problem isn’t so much what the teams are, it is that Guild Wars only presents a few opportunities to win. You have 5 games, so they are all “must win.” That means that if everyone is fielding the same defense, we must field the same counter-defense every game, as well.
It just makes the whole thing a chore. It is “doing my time” every day for my guild: Play my 5 games, and then move on to what I want to do. Totally the opposite of fun.
If I was going to suggest a change, perhaps half the devour percentage after each success. So, Kerberos starts at 50% chance, but after one Devour, it drops to 25% chance. After 2 devours, it drops to 12%. Kraken would be 40/20/10.
The problem for me is that there is a random element to the game that sometimes gives the other team an unfair start. Which is fine. For most teams, you can battle back, and some of those are the games I find most fun to win. But with Devour, it just feels like the gems fall and a screen comes up that says, “You lose.” You never had a chance at all. I had a game last week where Kerb devoured on the AI’s first turn, then again on the second. So, already, I’m down two troops in two turns with jack squat I could do about it. I was able to kill the other three members of the team, but the Giant Kerberos got a 3rd chance to Devour: A success. Then a 4th: Success. Really? 4-for-4 in a game that started with me back on my heels in the first place? And that is with a mana-stealing counter deck. Kerb’s first devour was my Famine.
In theory, decreasing the success rate of devour progressively through the game would make those kinds games a lot more rare, but not impossible. At least if it was 1 in 200 games, I could shrug it off as unlucky. Right now, it is 1 in 16, theoretically, but it feels a whole lot more often.
I guess I should also address the second-most overused meta, which is stacked Famine and Death. For those folks lucky enough to have 3 Famines fully traited, it almost feels like an exploit. Like you are in a different kind of game and see this player running a “bot.” I have tried a variety of “summoner” teams to get past it, but my favorite is the Keeper of Souls and a mega-damage troop that can take them out after 2-3 hits. Keeper’s last trait often summons a Wight, and then he takes the brunt of Famine until I can kill the next one. Lately, my counter has been stacked healers because I got super lucky with 2x Queen Aurora’s. So, Lady Anariel, Jarl, Queen Aurora, Queen Aurora. I don’t have Aurora fully traited, yet, but I’m definitely working on it.
If I had to suggest a change, here, it would simply be only 1x Death or Famine aspect per turn. So, people could still put Death and Famine together for a challenging base, but extra stacking would not be beneficial.
I like the challenge in GW to fight 5 battles with a team that is not one of my two normal PVP teams (Mercy-Alchemist-Hellcat-Gard’s or Maw-Mercy-Sheggra-IK). It’s a very nice change of pace to use other troops.
What’s not nice is that the majority of the fights is against the same opponent troops. In the higher brackets it’s 80-90% of the time one of these 2:
X - Kerberos - FG - GS (in some order, with X mostly being a second Kerberos or DeathKnight with either Black Manacles, Crypt keeper or Serpentine Dagger)
Psion - Famine - X - Famine (with X being mostly Death or Crimson Bat)
I don’t know where the “higher brackets” start, but it is this way around bracket 50, also. Last week, we fought a guild that literally had 5 fights of Kerberos, Kerberos, Forest Guardian, Giant Spider. At least a few of them changed the order … ?
Your points address the meta issues rather than GW itself.
I agree a couple of meta points would help matters:
make Kerberos not a Beast, to break that RNG meta
add a few more mana drain counters to help combat Famine
If these are dealt with… there will always be some meta… there will always be a top set of defences… would be nice if that was picked from 5-6 rather than 1-2 sets…
You’ve not addressed the GW system/environment. Thoughts? Maybe the colour per day should go. Maybe it should stay but affect defenders more than attackers.
I am a contributor to many of the other hate threads for GW.
My suggestions are:
Make GW special, do it only occasionally. The relentless grind makes it so you have to quit your guild if you want to take a two week family vacation where you’re not daily glued to the device for 1+ hours, as these fights are often very long, especially the ones you lose and you hang on to the bitter end for those few extra GW points.
As many others have suggested, make colors for defense, but this is going to make Famine appear three days a week and other metas that will pop up.
MAKE POINTS BASED ON HOW FAR FROM THE META YOUR TEAM IS. (Which might mean we do defending points rather than a successful defend detracts points from the other team)
I would also love points for things like finishing the match in one turn or something similar.
How about we come up with multiple sets of GW rules? Each week is a different set. For instance, one week, instead of fighting the actual guildies in PvP battles, the guild sets up a single defense based on a theme(its cat week or something) and then we’re attacking the ‘sentinels’ or ‘vanguard’ or whatever we call the ‘wall’ that we’re attacking. I’m basing this on other guild war systems where the guild has to build a castle and the other guilds have to attack it so maybe someone can run with this idea. But other ideas could be something like guild leader vs guild leader with the rest of the guild somehow playing a support role, like they do some kind of battle and for every positive outcome the leader gets a bonus.
I think we have a creative group here and we should be coming up with more ideas to help the devs turn this from a lemon into lemonade.
That would indeed help.
Ideally they could also think about other challenges: win within x rounds, have only 3 troops, etc…
To me, as long as you ask players to set the defense, they will always use the meta. You want to block attackers as much as possible. If you want variety, then defending troops cannot be chosen by players.
But my main issue with GW and that forces me out of the game: to play everyday (while you could wait til the last day) and especially on Sunday. GW matches require more focus than other games and with very active kids, having 20 minutes completely free on weekends is a luxury I can’t afford anymore. Why can’t we play the GW games anytime before the deadline?
Can really GW be fun in a 3-match game? That’s my issue.
Devs decided “let’s do Guild Wars like all the other games with a guild system” but is it really feasible?
Today we have to do 5 PVP battles. Devs were clever and put 2 rules to increase the possible number of GW points forcing us to use specific troops and to try to keep 4 troops alive at the end of the fight. Without that, we get a standard PVP mode… And even with color/survivor rules, it’s quite light for a feature that we wait for 6 months…
And PVP has only the name. It’s not PVP at all as we’re fighting an AI and I don’t think it’s a good idea to focus on features related to pseudo-PVP.
GW was nice for communication between guildmembers… at the beggining. Now, thanks to the META, our guild knows the good counters against all the META teams so on, there is not so much discussion… I talk about that because it was one of the good point of the GW (which is gone now).
Low level players have a tough life in the higer bracket (at least I don’t know the lower to bracket 2…). I just imagine how unpleasant it could be for them to be destroyed every day when the solution is to use that they don’t have.
In overall, GW didn’t bring a feature that you could play with your guildmates but aside them (like trophy leaderboard or GW). What I want is a boss battle with enormous stats and every member could fight him reducing his stats until someone kills him. Something where we can see that we progress together better than a leaderboard based on points…
Agreed. The first 6 weeks I was in bracket 1, this week I am in bracket 2. I’ve seen more variation in GW defenses in the last 3 days than in the last 3 weeks combined. Consequently, I am having much more fun in GW this week.
Yeah, after 7 weeks of Guild Wars it is starting to become a daily chore. I look forward to Mondays as a day off from it, lol.
On the bright side, it is ridiculously easy to make video content for it.
Biggest issue I have with GW is lack of variation between battles. Everyone will always just run the 3-ish strongest most annoying teams at any given time. It has even less variation than PvP, which was already lacking.
I would love some kind of incentive to not play a double famine defence. As it stands, why should I change it when all my opponents do it? Plus, I don’t want to give the enemy extra points and potentially lose out on rewards.
Guild Wars has given an incredible boost to the usage of troops that would never have been given a look in previously. Creating teams that wouldn’t have been thought of prior. Taking this into account with the extra gameplay and rewards, is it really boring?
As to mentioning that it is a chore and a grind; 30 battles (that are capped to avoid anyone having to grind an amount higher than others) over the space of six days?
Lastly, not everyone can field a defence team with multiple Famine, let alone one. You can’t say that the defence people use is any different to what you’d see in PVP battles, it’s just more likely that you will face tougher opponents more often. They’re creating a defence team that you have to beat, made up from their available troops. It’s not like their holding back cards from their normal PVP defence.
I find GW so refreshing; the greater points for 100% wins without troop loss beats hands down the true boring grind - ‘win or lose, must play thousands of battles’ thought process that is in the current PVP system.
I keep repeating myself (turning old probably): Guild wars should be the guild versus some super team. Guild vs guild results in what we have today and you will always have a meta.
give us a dragon troop with 5k life and 99 dmg (strength could vary based on bracket) but damage would be cumulative for the guild. And you score guilds based on their results.
This would be a true guild effort: 1 player could not bring it down alone.
Some work could happen as to design the best troop lineup
Would in itself offer diversity (as the big boss could change every x weeks)
They do some special maps in Fire Emblem heroes and it is a challenge. This would work perfectly well in GOW.
You could also have chained fights: troops keep their stats at the end of the round.
x 1500
guild wars.