Here Be Dragons

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22

My opinion of potions is kind of tilted, I think they have a different impact at different phases of the game.

For a newbie/midgamer who lacks the “best” troops for the event, the potions seem spaced just far apart to be tantalizing reasons to buy higher tiers when these players would otherwise feel unmotivated to bother getting that many sigils.

For an endgamer, I’m just going to have to play with the potions and see if I notice the impact. Right now, I’m saving gems and a Crypt Keepers event is not how I intend to splurge, so I’ll have to find out later. They’re definitely effects that have an impact.

23

Not sure if related to potions, but noticed something odd. While doing the delve event on my first move of each match if I make a match-3 I get an extra turn. Maybe a match-4 that triggers during the potion generated explosions is storing a free turn?

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24

I’m going to by cynical for a bit, but in Gems of War, things like this always have a cost. Obviously they want to incentive buying these tiers, which is great… unless they go about incentivizing purchases in a certain way.

The enchant potion is the very first two potions, which is nice. This may entice me to spend 30 gems on events I might not have even participated in otherwise. This helps certain restriction sets that haven’t quite gotten what they need with generation needs but can still chain spells a bit to not feel as miserable to play. Hopefully, this won’t prevent them from also getting filled out with the generators and heavy hitters they need overall.

Explode potion is where I start to get a bad feeling. I probably won’t buy it this event, but I have a bad feeling about it. My prevailing theory is that it will simply add one explode to each of your team members at the start of the battle. This is an important distinction from “4 gems exploded” in that each explode rounds mana and you get zero mana for each individually resolved explode that only hit one of a given color. Without a storm active, this could very well hand you a worse board… but I guess at least you have enchant as sort of a counterbalance. But keep in mind initial boards have a lower skull distribution that the amount that skyfalls, intentionally, which of course can make things even worse from you if you aren’t using a storm and don’t have starting barriers or entangle (say, faction team runs). Also, exploding gems at the start of battle (like Omen traits) is at least one source of errant extra turns that has not been fixed as of 4.3 - but at least so far in this version, I’ve only seen it in my favor. On the other side, I’m pretty sure this will allow me to zip through early rounds of an event while using a storm setup and I’m going to get the weapon anyway, so this will probably land in my favor for now.

Regen and armor will be of little use unless they coincide with a break point to save you from an otherwise lethal hit. They aren’t likely to change how anything is played. Regen is a filler potion for sure, and since this is the level you get the weapon at in most event shops, it doesn’t matter. Armor does at least something to counterbalance an increased incidence in early skulls caused by things exploding - if you want to spend to get it. If we see more empowered skull converters in raid and invasion (or, ugh, delve rooms), we know why.

Bless is only significant in certain situations, notably things like Spirit Fox room at levels where it won’t one-shot you or where you can get a barrier on its intended target otherwise. If they start piling on empowered status effect and mana drain rooms in delves or annoying troops in Raid/Invasion, we’ll know why.

Starting barrier will also helps in certain events and removes a lot of the pain during the setup phase of certain events (hi Spirit Fox room again), but I’m not going out of my way to purchase this high on any given event and it the intent behind this in particularly irks me a bit. I know there is some counterplay here, but the prevailing counterplay shouldn’t be “buy a potion lol”. If we see more rooms or raid troops with empowered one-shots, we know why.

In before the request comes that potions be toggleable. I might be making it myself…

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25

Thats what i figured in this thread

With the addition of explosion potion, the bug should be easier to reproduce. And we can expect it to be fixed soon, especially because it benefits the players

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26

My take is it’s very hard to intuitively evaluate these potions and I’m going to have to play with them to have an opinion.

On the explosion, the game has no preference to giving you a good or bad board at the start. An unknown board plus four explosions is merely an unknown board with extra starting mana. This changes with storms, as you pointed out, I haven’t paid attention to the order this happens.

The Enchant is objectively good, and I feel the same on the other potions. The boosts aren’t enough to make me buy a tier I wasn’t going to buy anyway, but it’s a nice little something extra for the ones I was going to buy. Tiers I and II are more interesting than they used to be.

27

It should be a dragon type due to the event being here be dragons

28

Your starting board has a lower distribution of skulls than the average number of skulls that skyfall. This was confirmed by a dev a while back. Might be difficult to find the post, but I’ll look later. This, in particular, makes it less likely that there will be a random 4/5 match available at the start and less initial mana matches given you don’t start with a storm.

29

Hmm.

I still want to play a few with potions before I make an opinion there.

My Crypt Keepers team is pretty explodey, and I start with 50% mana, so my first move is to explode a lot of gems in a lot of games now. I’m already churning the heck out of the board, so it’s possible in this context I simply don’t notice any negative effects.

But a team that requires board control might fare more poorly, you’re right.

30

At this point, the potions can only help everything they’re attached to. They actually do quite a bit.

In the one area I care about, which is also the one area its not the direct answer for, it seems like its helping the people trying for the faction team in Crypt Keepers.

31

I ran to level 120 today using various teams with a t2 purchase. Enchant is hugely helpful and can fundamentally change the way you play battles.

Explosion is generally helpful, with some caveats:

  • You explode one gem at the start of battle, per troop that you have on your team when the battle starts. Each of these explosions resolve separately.
  • Explode at the start of game is currently bugged so that if you get a 4+ match as a cascade during this turn 0 processing, you will get another extra turn after your first match 3. This is likely to be fixed in the future (should really be now because of how impactful it is, but who knows when).
  • Exploding, as I had stated, heavily favors the use of starting with storms.

In my tests with explode potion active:

  • Using an exploder as my a primary accelerator without a storm present generally yielded board I would have dropped anyway. Without accounting for the extra turn bug, there was still the chance of cascades on initial explode, and you still got some mana even if it might be less than some might have expected, and you have enchant to fall back on if not, so this was generally helpful.
  • Using an empowered converter as my primary accelerator without a storm present found me, on multiple occasions, ruining a first turn setup that could have set up a win condition and giving me a messy board again, while not once in 27 battles setting up the converter to make a match 4. However, it would occasionally cascade something that I could use to feed other troops, or give the extra turn bug. I didn’t feel so much like the explode was hurting my chances of winning any, I just felt like I was definitely using the wrong kind of setup based on the relative speed. Which makes sense, because I almost always use a storm of some kind.
  • Using an empowered explorer as my primary accelerator with a relevant storm present found the exploder almost superflous most of the time, with the storm and cascades just setting up what I needed right out of the gate (eg., multi yao guai). I didn’t try with no accelerator, but I’m betting you could get away with it as long as the rest of your troops can chain spells in some way.
  • Using an empowered converter as my primary accelerator with a relevant storm present found me often getting the setup I needed to get a win condition (eg., hero/qilin/ishbaala/moon rabbit) through the cascades caused by the explosion falling in alignment. Like, a ridiculous amount of the time. On many occasions, the initial accelerator was not even needed.
  • Using a team with no relevant mana generator (the faction team), the explodes were generally all that helpful, nor did they really hurt that much. They often ruined the alignment of purples to convert for a free turn, but since I already have enchant on everybody, I’d only cast this troop so the enemy didn’t get an extra turn anyways. I wasn’t able to tell if the Spectral Knight still counted enchant as a “status effect”. Different factions might get more out of this, but others might have a more dangerous level 500. Maybe.

So potions are all generally helpful and some greatly affect what setup you will use in events such as these. The main hazard seems to be maybe to faction teams (which you can just run outside the event if they really are “worse”) and certain very specific (unoptomized) setups. I’ll welcome them in Tower of Doom, Raid, and Invasion, and I might actually dive into these a bit more on weeks I wouldn’t have otherwise if I don’t have to slog through early match because the kingdom doesn’t have good mana generators OR non-boss heavy hitters.

However, my earlier point stands that this could very well just be setting the baseline for putting in more obnoxious empowered setups in stat scaled content so that you are punished for not buying potions rather than rewarded for buying them. I hope I’m wrong, but this is generally how they “incentivize” purchases and potions are basically another purchase incentive. I’d like to think the main intent was to allow shop purchases to reduce the range of time commitment required to get the basic rewards to a much more reasonable level and pave the way for more content without straight overwhelming players with the amount of daily “expected” time commitment and burning them out, but they’ve also shown in the past they have no problem with this, either. We will see which direction this goes.

4 Likes
32

Here be dragons, indeed.

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33

I purchased to tier 2 - I noticed the extra turn thing and had no idea what was going on.

I ran Winter’s Orb, Mab, Skadi, Possessed King for most of my event, got to 120.

The enchant is good under all circumstances and the explosions are mostly good. The only downside I was detecting was that there were many times I noticed a good match to make before the explosions and they took it away from me. However, the thing doing that with Skadi’s Icestorm in play is pretty ridiculous.

I do not think the “3 healing” potion at the next tier is satisfactory, by comparison. Not incentivizing at any rate. Armored and blessed, maybe.

1 Like