It’s fun, but it seldom happens to me. I’m using him with Gorgotha on front and then TDS. Fourth troop according to the circumstance. Since I’m using Abyss banner I’m not feeding Gorgotha yellow, so Pharos usually has a good deal of permutations to do. TDS feeds him and he feeds TDS and himself, and both feed the fourth fellow if it happens to be Kraken. If not, Gorgotha and TDS are enough to fill basically everything.
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I use Pharos at the front, then Aziris and then two other unimportant dudes just there for having Necromancy. Meaning I don’t take yellow, ever. But that doesn’t seem to help, all it does is enabling a LOT of purple 4-matches for the opponents once I cast Pharos. I dunno, maybe I’m just super-unlucky. And I guess since I have no exploders and take only Pharos’ three colors (plus red; after casting Pharos twice I use Aziris for cleaning up), the board is seriously messed by the time I’m ready to cast.
Thing is, I use the recommended battle in Divinion Challenge 1 for soul grinding. Meaning I’m up against a yellow, a red, a green/purple and a yellow/green troop. Green/purple is a goblin and cannot be killed on Warlord II with Pharos’ first cast unless I skull the yellow troop first. If I can’t get a skull match (or the stupid Centaur dodges, Agile sucks often) before Pharos fills I have to kill the yellow troop first. Meaning: Full board of green and purple. The goblin is VERY happy. It’s annoying. I hate that damn Boar Rider so, so much.
Grinding for Dawnbringer: The Struggle Is Real.
That’s for soul-farming, right? I use Elspeth-TDS-Pharos-Zombie. Not the fastest, true, but it can be used on PVP too.
The Gorgotha-TDS-Pharos-(Mab/else) is for 3-trophies PVP. If not Pharos, then Krystenax can be substituted.
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Yeah, that’s a pure soul-farming team. It’s not good at anything in general besides picking off weak enemies for their souls. 
I haven’t used Pharos in PVP yet simply because he’s so much of a doofus in soul-farming, handing out free turns to the enemy left and right. I’m cool with the two PVP teams I have and neither includes the big chicken.
(I still love him, he’s my MVP - thanks to him, I’ve got all my troops leveled and have been able to at least craft the three weapons needed for Dawnbringer already; the last of the three just a few hours ago. Now the real grinding starts.)
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One of those weaposn is really good. That one, and Soul of Xathenos. Once I’ve levelled the incoming Kingdom I’m going to get them.
Answering Ricky’s question: No.
It’s always time to see more reworks of old troops and effects to diversify teams and strategies. Hopefully we will see some reworks soon.
Personally i also hate facing Psion/Ragnagord/Something/Something, but it’s clearly a matter of repetition instead of unbalaced mechanics.
I share the same experience, but instead of losing i try the one trophy battles, even if it’s one of the same Meta Teams, for a while and usually i get some change in the three trophies battles.
But from a certain logic it makes sense that the game tries to challenge you with some reliable/competent defense teams. That’s if we assume those players are being attacked over and over and having a fair share of victories…
Okay, wait a minute, here’s what I don’t get … what is all this talk of giving away extra turns via purple when casting Pharos? Its a transform. Wait until you have a guaranteed extra turn on cast… that should be easy…
If you’re aiming for speed in explores or something, don’t even use Pharos himself and just fire TDS until they melt. *shrug* … I mean, TDS was always gonna be the faster choice there.
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Well, TDS is the breadwinner and Pharos the multiplier, while Exploring. But then I noticed that TDS filled Pharos and Pharos filled TDS back, and Pharos is a killer… so I’m easing the couple in a PVP routine.
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Yeah, my assumption is the game at some point starts trying to match people with similar win streaks? It’s not documented but makes sense.
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Yes, PSION is extremely annoying. It’s not that Psion, per se, is broken. But when you combine Psion with the crap RNG (IE Psion AI always gets Skulls), it’s time to Nerf PSION as Devs probably cannot fix the AI RNG.
NowayJoe2Go
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I think this is an overall thing that keeps coming up in GoW balance and it’s tough to decide how to handle it. It comes down to comments like “Eh I just use The Silent One”.
If this were a normal RPG or a game like Dark Souls, that makes sense. Challenges have solutions, and if you want the solution you go get it. In GoW, though, if I don’t have The Silent One, this is a frustrating answer. The only way to get The Silent One is keep using keys and hoping. Hell, the only reason I have Mab is I decided to craft her when she was in Soulforge.
So we have players in many phases of the game, and a lot of these teams most strongly affect people somewhere in the middle. If I may make some maybe controversial definitions:
- “Early game” players have very few legendaries and no real top-tier teams.
- “Mid game” players have a scattering of good cards and a few competent teams, but can’t really dominate all matches because they lack important things here and there.
- “Late game” players are only missing a few of the best teams, or maybe a few dozen traitstones, or maybe that one last sweet mythic, etc.
- “End game” players are raising commons to mythic for fun because they don’t have much else to do.
We can’t make life good for early game players who manage to talk PvP into tossing them at Psion. They’re going to be sad.
I think we hear the most complaints from “mid” and “late” game players, because they don’t really have options or choices for dealing with all of the teams they will face. GoW will matchmake them vs. very hard teams, but they’re not 100% ready. We can tell them what they’re missing, but it can take weeks and luck for them to acquire those things.
“End” players are the ones who I think most don’t want nerfs, because they have the tools to handle all of the challenges.
But: even “early game” players can get lucky and field one of the crazy teams people want to have nerfed. Weird.
I don’t know what the solution is. “It’s hard to get certain troops” needs to remain. End-game players don’t really want nerfs. Maybe more choices? Cheaper refresh has been mentioned, but that’d get “abused” at all levels. None of the solutions I can think of feel right for all phases.
I think it’s safe to say “free turns” are a big part of what makes it so hard to balance, but that’s a pretty hot take.
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Nerf that damn Dust Devil is what they ought to do. He keeps using his spell to move Psion to the back where he cant steal any mana. The nerve of that guy!
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Its unlikely a nerf would fix any issues. Given the recent state of how troops are created. GoW introduces many troops that could use better balancing to seemingly cancel out other troops being in the same way. In the end all this does is enables an even wider spectrum of unbalanced troops. And as the game lives on and new troops come into the fold, this will only increase. To the point GoW will have to finally address its balancing issues. I mentioned this a few times before even marking some of the developers into those posts. While its impossible to balance everything down to a minimal, addressing troops that are far superior over others is a preferable intervention. The humor to this seems to be they nerf a troop here or there as its played out, but I do wonder on their creative method. Since this happens all the time. As if they are more consumed in making these unbalanced troops if they are new to generate interests in them. Examine the timeline of GoW and troops that were OP then saw a nerf, notice who came after, and who later also needed/got a nerf. Its just the GoW dynamic. IE : 1) Nerf troop(s) 2) Create new troop(s) that are unbalanced 3) Rinse, repeat. Until people actually care and ask for better balancing. It seems the developers are content in this approach. As I mentioned in the aforementioned texts eventually this negation to balancing will catch up to GoW. No matter if they flood the troop market with every conceivable OP troop. One of the many needs to balancing are troops who consume, generate or destroy x amount. (some can do too many right now). Which just makes it more likely you’ll just sit and just watch your team die. Another is how many extra turns you can have. I think 3 turns per side is sufficient. A friend noted the goblins extra turned on him 12 times in their turn and killed him. I think that’s far too giving. And also why people like using those teams now as well.
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I think I want all the turns I can get. I’m not playing basketball.
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I agree with a limitation of extra turns considering the overall ramifications in the game balance.
Maybe a limit of four turns would be better, because we can bring four troops in each team and that would seem fitting in a sense that it would behave like each troop took an action.
But! I fear this approach would be too drastic and generate too much disatisfaction among players.
Broken Guard? The other two seem mediocre at best.
Given how I sit in PVP with Valkyrie - where I can even pick a color - so often and am cursing because there’s nothing to pick to get a four-match, I have no idea how you find it easy to wait for a guaranteed extra turn on a forced transform. For me, that never seems to happen.
Are you guys having a different TDS than I do?
Because mine has no Necromancy and also only has damage scaling with dragons and not undead chickens. TDS would severly lower my soul output per battle while not making it faster thanks to low damage output.
Leviathan, who can do the same and dodge with his Submerge, is maybe even more rude. 
I’m not sure if this is the best or worst idea ever. It sure would stop Goblins and some other loopers/skull spammers. Which is not a bad thing. On the other hand, I feel it would shift too much. A lot of troops are designed to stop loops by freezing (Mab, Borealis).
Basically, I feel like looping and freezing counteract each other really, really well, so that there is no real imbalance between the two. A Mab can completely wreck a Goblin team with a single four-match, after all.
And limiting loops would not get rid of the use of freezing since even non-loopers can get easily crippled by it (hence the overuse of Mab). By disturbing the loopers/freezers balance by limiting loops, I feel like freezing troops would become even more powerful in comparision. And that idea bothers me.
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To be clear, it’s the AI RNG for Psion in GW that makes Psion need a Nerf. Dust devil does not work for 4 days of GW. Silent One does not work for 4 days in GW.
NowayJoe2Go
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Psion is immune to silence so how does the silent one help at all?
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All good points, but we shouldn’t ignore the immunities placed in some troops currently, so i have the opnion that Freeze is sort of underhanded when we see Explosions and Storms together which sometimes will give an extra turn by cheer luck. Like in some situations where you have a Fire Storm, and you will not get the extra turn from 4~5 red matches, (you still get all the mana so there is little loss depending of the situation) but as those gems are replaced again you may get lucky with another color making a 4~5match.
It’s a “two sides of a coin” situation, we have more freedom to make (mostly) monocolored teams with great sinergy to use on GW, but for Mab’s case she is clearly losing ground¹ and maybe she will lose even more strenght with new “packed immunities” related to some races and/or classes…
¹: I would suggest to the devs that Impervious shouldn’t protect from Mana Burn, but on the other hand maybe Mab would need to lose Arcane, or have her Magic reduced, to remain balanced… But i was poletely informed they don’t have proper time to appreciate my suggestions. 
So, i guess we need to wait and see how things unfold.
Good point. Someone made a comment about TSO above, but since Psion IS immune, It just makes Psion even more annoying, especially in GW where RNG is totally jacked up!
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