While already being bad in Raids compared to the alternatives this weapon is completely useless outside of Raids, making it even worse than the pre buff gem spawners this mode used to offer.
The Raid troop is just the usual generic Godslayer with absolutely no use outside of Raids, and the weekly troop is just way too slow and has too weak anti-Divine attributes to ever actually be utilized against the current Divine meta. Too little too late.
A step back as a whole.
2 Likes
That’s my point. Removing the grace period allows Death Mark to actually achieve something, rather than being worthless. 
The problem is they can cleanse themself in 1 turn most of the time
I had a proposal on how to buff poison usefully that I posted on Discord.
Basically, currently, each turn you lose between 0 and 1 life, randomly selected (50% 0, 50% 1). That means an expected life loss of 0.5 per turn.
My proposed version makes only one change: each turn you lose between 0 and 2 life, randomly selected (33% 0, 33% 1, 33% 2). That doubles the expected life loss to 1 per turn.
Comments welcome.
Another way to have an expected life loss of 1 per turn, if people still want 50% chance of not losing life (as current):
- 50% chance of 0 life loss
- 25% chance of 1 life loss
- 12.5% chance of 2 life loss
- 6.25% chance of 3 life loss
- 3.125% chance of 4 life loss
and so on and so forth. According to WolframAlpha, this converges to an expected value of 1.
Sample code (in Unity) for implementing this second model:
int healthLoss = Mathf.FloorToInt(Mathf.Log(Random.value, 0.5));
New stuff. Looks cool. Very little use whatsoever…
Death mark is still potent, but a grace period was necessary to at least give a chance to cleanse. It is difficult to outright buff it as if the status works as intended, outright troop removal is potent. The problem is not enough works with dm. Doom on death was great, then they take it away but leave necromancy. Doom is practically nonexistent and poison even has instakill spells dealing with it. I’m not a fan of buffing the instakill chance or the grace removal as rng is already too strong of a driving force, but more troops like hellspawn that work with it. There is great potential in indirect buffs for this status, but based on track record, gem sinks are more vital to the game health than reworking outdated troops and statuses.
1 Like
If you want an average of one life loss by turn, it is simpler that a poisoned troop lose one point every turn, better than putting random stuff.
I will prefer that poison can be stacked on each troop.
2 Likes
That is too different in mechanic from how poison currently works. Part of the fun of poison is that the opponent sometimes does not lose any health.
How is it fun when a status that has minimal effect sometimes has zero effect? I can’t agree…
It’s not minimal effect if you use the second model I proposed. There is, very minutely, a chance of an instakill. Okay, maybe not instakill. But here’s a million runs:
[1] pry(main)> 1000000.times.map { Math.log(rand, 0.5).floor }.group_by(&:itself).map { |x, y| [x, y.size] }.sort_by(&:first)
=> [[0, 499004],
[1, 250866],
[2, 125052],
[3, 62546],
[4, 31248],
[5, 15664],
[6, 7877],
[7, 3885],
[8, 1983],
[9, 905],
[10, 490],
[11, 245],
[12, 118],
[13, 61],
[14, 33],
[15, 12],
[16, 7],
[17, 3],
[19, 1]]
(Each run will give a different set of results. Yay for Monte Carlo modelling!)
1 Like
Even at 1 damage per turn would still be completely meaningless. I’m sure 2 or 3 years ago maybe but now troops have so much health 1 damage is ridiculous. Not only that but with so many powerful troops battles are over in too few turns for poison’s damage to matter anyway. It’s only somewhat useful in conjunction with other spells that work on poisoned enemies.
1 Like
Your second model wasn’t there when I wrote my post.
My comment was on the current poison model.
Your second idea is more creative, yes - but I don’t think we need even more randomness.
I’ve always liked the idea of poison stacking, as @turintuor raises.
You can keep the 50% to do nothing if you want .
So it should be funnier to have a +5 poison which does 50% 0 life damage or 50% 5 life damage 
.
1 Like
Although I really like Carmella artwork, I feel like she doesn’t look much like an undead/vampire. Her fang is quite too small to be noticed, and while her hand/fingernail is quite scary, it’s also appear to be just a glove.
So while I find the ancient vampire lineage back story to be so interesting, I prefer to think she is just Gothic human princess who like to cosplay. 
1 Like
I try to think that she is half human/vampire, and that she got a little more of the human look.
1 Like
I love her art, shame I won’t use her at all other than this week’s raid event
3 Likes
My suggestion to how poison should work:
50% chance to lose 1/8th of max life each turn.
The game already tracks a troops max life value for healing mechanics. This system allows for poison to scale with stats and for poisoned troops to actually be hindered. Pokemon style.
That’s the depressing thing I find with most if not all the new Invasion/Raids Epic troops. So many of them has top notch art work, yet a very limited usage. I wish they planned that the troops was useful outside these events too.
2 Likes
It would scale with the stats of your opponent, which feels quite the wrong way around. It’s you who should be putting in effort to make your troops stronger, not the other players.
1 Like
As with any kind of illness, it is as powerful as the victim. A common cold can put children in bed as well as full grown men.