Thanks for taking the time to write out an explanation.
It is situations like these where I miss having more direct interfacing the the designers. Not that I’d expect any of them to read what follows, or most anybody here for that matter. I decided to let this response sit overnight and proofread it without too much editing for content except for writing this preface, so it is mostly stream of consciousness and might come off a little rant-y. My frustration with the whole situation is that nobody, not even the dev team apparently, seems to be touching on why specifically these troops in their previous state were not a good thing to have in this game structured how it is for the foreseeable future, they never were, and how this is different from literally every other troop capable of looping or any team setup that can be literally infinite.
The official reason for the nerf being that “excessive looping” makes for poor player experience in PvP being why specifically these journey troops were targeted one that, well, does not inspire confidence.
For one, this point of feedback has been harped on since day one. Usually only the harshest outliers got the brunt of the nerfs, although some of them had entire game mechanics restructured around them. A great deal of “meta” defense teams seek to not let you play the game. Nearly every offense team does. The most egregious part about the 15 gem spawners was that they had to deal chip damage on the way out, whereas the good teams either kill you or enough of your troops that it isn’t worth continuing very quickly. All of them are “uninterruptible” once they start casting because thats how the game works, and if you introduce a way where it isn’t, then you have broken a fundamental aspect of the game. Goblins teams doing this is why we can even retreat during the opponents turn. For crying out loud, there is (or at least was) code in the game to negatively influence “random” spawners after 5 extra turns have been taken. People hate being on the receiving end of loops. You know. We know. They always have.
My feedback for this years ago was that you probably shouldn’t have looping teams the AI can effectively pilot, ie, troop that spawn so many gems they don’t need to worry about the board state, but that ship has long since sailed because this is now the baseline mechanic for a good chunk of the fastest teams, and diverse team combos can still take place even within restricted sets (but man does it feel bad when you don’t have access to any of this, which in and of itself could be viewed as problematic). The 15 gem single color self loopers established a new baseline and ran with it, and not seeing how this could go wrong means you just weren’t paying attention.
Signaling that you are willing to nerf this far out and for this reason in a game which is, long term, primarily about the acquisition of more varied and stronger tools and improving their effectiveness (stats, traits, etc.), any reversal of the dial is going to hurt for anybody used to using it, but if you hit something actually essential to how endgamers perceive their current overall baseline power? Well, lets just hope it doesn’t come to that.
So that begs the question, why now? What recent thing happened that could have factored in these troops being basically nuked into the point of uselessness?
Guess we’ll never know for sure.
I am in agreement on one point here - leaving these troops in the game, as they were, was probably not healthy in the long term. And not in the immediately doom and gloom they are going to kill the game because they can’t be countered line being passed around, nor the because they present such an apparently insurmountable obstacle on PvP defenses (which aren’t a thing anymore unless someone uses them to invade, at least, when its working properly). Its because every new mode or piece of content the primary way they are differentiated is the venn diagram of overlaps.
As a player with access to most of the relevant tools available in any given event, when I start playing an event, I would almost never touch any of these troops (pre-nerf). But nearly all of these have some sort of stat scaling component, where you have to make each turn do 2-4x as much as your opponent. When your highest damage legendary does only two times the damage of your pathfinder AND drops the turn, well, you aren’t giving me a lot of options to play with. And thats what it boils down to - options. Or lack thereof.
Many entire kingdoms and some entire troop types have a distinct lack of options. Events that restrict a troop type don’t (at least now) restrict weapon, which means you can generally have your win condition be related to playing around with the weapon. Except when you can’t, because the weapon is a compulsory pick. Some colors scale better (read: capable of taking out opponents of any level including invulnerable bosses, not necessarily scaling their own stats) than others if you have most the troops, but if you don’t, where are you going to reach?
From what I’ve seen this is/was generally in an argument against nerfing the pathfinder troops because they were one of the only ways players without diverse collections of obscure troops could compete in said events. But such a thing speaks way more to the event’s ruleset being broken if you have your players, the very midgame and early game players you profess to want to draw into the game, being hard walled for not having the collection.
At the same time, having auto-loop troops for every color and then every troop type gives such a cushy fallback as to completely homogenize every single event. Most troops are fundamentally incompatible with being used with said troops, because despite “looping” being a core mechanic most troops do poorly in looping teams. There is almost zero nuance in how to use a pathfinder team, which is not true of nearly any other looping team or even stuff that you can chain literally infinitely if you wanted. Its purely fire and forget. Any one of my teams capable of flipping through explore battles in < 30 seconds each always has some kind of microoptimization, some little thing I’m still engaging with to push my times low, be it how to deal with an edge case on RNG or when to fire spell A over spell B. Yes, even AI friendly goblins have a bit of nuance when it comes to optimizing your start and keeping your loop going, although it is often the case that a “bad move” and “good move” are a lot closer to each other.
So here is my hot take: pathfinders are boring, and pathfinders are easy. But, in the context of the general game as a whole, “overpowered” is the wrong way to look at it. It can certainly be argued that they are “overpowered”, but “overpowered” was never an a problem. Nor was looping - Treant, Alchemist, Valk, Banshee would have something to say about that. Nor was getting plinked to death by a defense team - various iterations of goblin teams have been doing this forever. The problem is they’re a crutch where early and consistent adoption into long term morphs what the game is into that game into something unrecognizable.
Forget your mid-level introduction into the game being facing pre-nerf pathfinders in PvP. Imagine there being one of these for nearly every troop type such that like 10% of epics are pathfinder troops, and imagine what that does to your overall perception of the game when you pull one early. Possibly early enough to not have even completed three kingdoms, but early enough to put three others of the same troop type out. You don’t need traitstones, you technically don’t even need levels. Its sure going to get you through the early game, maybe even some PvP battles until you start running into snap freeze. Eventually you’ll probably want to switch to something faster, and after having all these bright flashing lights and reward sounds spammed in your face constantly, how good is it going to feel to actually play the game? You’re probably still a while off leprechaun into instant death teams, so even objectively faster early game teams like Golden Cog/Rowanne are going to feel like molasses at this point. If you even seek them out - you’re “winning” in your mind, you have no idea the best ways to progress, how to progress, or why you should. Your brain has already totally and completely associated “Gems of War” with thougthless infinite gem spam, it isn’t just a means to an end, it is the game.
But, people are going to do it anyways. Either it gets them a bit more of that dopamine hits short term, or it is the quickest way to the rewards, or even because that is the game to them and there is no other way. But gameplay that is in service of an extrinsic reward is still bad gameplay. I know people have a lot of problems separating the two or may be at a point in their progression where the rewards are the only gameplay that matters but if that is the case I’m asking you to try and remember a time where you were excited to try out a new piece of a team that just barely didn’t work before and have it be still something you’d reasonably want to use without it being a direct escalation on your “best possible team” . The problem isn’t that you can loop, its that the game can reward you for doing the most boring way possible, and when that is also the optimal way then you have a major problem with your game, period.
Now, lets drop the early game perspective and move on to later stages of the game, where you are already established when these troops come around, in their pre-nerf state. Lets use last week as an example. Vulpacea’s options are pretty bad for dealing with a Raid Boss. We had a prior Raid event for this kingdom, where weapon wasn’t restricted but we didn’t have Todd to use, and we didn’t have to use the event troop for scoring, and we didn’t have a reward 15 to content with. In the last event, you probably picked one of your strong weapons in your arsenal and used the awful troops to support it, at least doing something in the vein of team building. In this event, how long before you slapped Todd in there and just dealt with looping everything to death while finding another distraction from the game you were already supposed to be playing? Which event has more potential to actually be fun? I know a lot of the forumgoers here are already well into the burnout stage for engaging with the event, but what makes for a better game?
Now, lets fast forward a bit to the next Vulpacea raid event. You have like, 6 more troops in the pool to choose from. None of them devour, scale off enemy stats, self scale quickly enough to matter, double converters that synergize with other troops in the kingdom even, because someone decided it wasn’t “on theme” for the kingdom. What of their underspire, or some random world event, or anything else? If nothing else, you’ve got Todd, so thats enough, right?
I hope it is readily apparent why this does not make for a good game long term. I can hear some of you thinking “well, better than without Todd dealing with level 500 opponents when my legendary does like 50 AoE” and yes, that is because the problem is twofold. Lack of ways to deal with stat scaled opponents is the other. Events are balanced to universally scale at a certain speed no matter how bad the tools in the kingdom are at scaling, or even keeping just keeping control of the board so you can always minimize the impact of enemy turns while maximizing your own. Lack of “punch up” tools seems to be partially intentional, by having each event have their own way to scale, but we are now at a point where even basic reward 12 completion sees nearly every one of these “captain” troops simply being a handicap you have to work around placing into your team rather than a powerful tool you want to spend big and make yourself more powerful. In addition, many events have alternate ways you are supposed to be brought up to deal with higher stat opponents, and Journeys is the worst of them here by far.
So… onto the nerf itself. The explanation in the original post claims that the nerfed pathfinder troops can refill themselves sometimes, which is technically true, but conveniently leaves off the two big reasons why it becomes essentially non-functional within its own event.
The first is that the event scale so quickly that even if it “can refill itself sometimes”, you generally won’t even have one troop dead before you drop the turn.
The second is how often casting a gem spawner that drops the turn leaves you in an awful situation. The thing that happens most of the time when you don’t refill yourself.
There is a reason why troops that spawn gem randomly are generally either amazing or awful with little in between. The good ones will leave their opponent completely dead or crippled, or be more “safe” because they have a higher chance of simply not refilling that not getting an extra turn. The bad ones aren’t consistent and can lead to catastrophic outcomes occasionally. The really bad ones don’t have enough of an impact when they cast such as the very act of spawning gems means you’ll be hit for more damage on average because you even made the attempt. Troops that do 50 damage (100 in the event) and spawn 10 gems without a status effect fall firmly into this category. We already know troops that spawn 10 gems of a color and do about 100 damage with status effects were capable of, you just released another mythic that was basically a clone of an old mythic. You’re generally better off using a better class (dropping the gem spawns down to 8) and shunting the troop to the rear of your team. That has been a theme with a lot of the event captains actually, even with stuff like Bounty.
Remember when the first round of spawn a mix of 6 of two colors per (troop type) weapon were first introduced (at spawn a mix of 4), as the weapon tier in raid events? These were awful at the time not just because 16 gems between 2 colors is a terrible amount to spawn even if it hit “sometimes”, but bricking a cast meant a full zuul and losing a troop. Which in turn made the weapon weaker, if it wasn’t just the target outright. It was buffed to 6/6, which is 24 gems on 2 colors, which is a lot better, and even met in certain PvP teams for a time, leading to some nerfs that stand to this day (which are also irrelevant nowadays but still stand) but… in a late stage raid event, it is still not a good weapon choice for the same reason.
What people may not remember is that with a handful of 4x spawners out, the dev team decided to run several new weapons, what I like to call the “manglikes” after the weapon of the same name, where they eliminate all enemy target’s armor and get a boost based on that armor. That was the difference between a “then” and “now” situation - they saw most everyone was just using Mang to get through events and, (while also adding enemies with Infernal Armor) leaned into it by giving tools that would actually help during said events. Only a handful of these were released before the remainder of the 6x (now buffed) weapons were rolled out, there wasn’t a clone for every kingdom or anything, but some of them remain actually useful.
So what was the point in me telling you all that? Well, the pathfinder troops really could use some innovation. If “create 10 gems” is the best this is going to get, and its going to remain an epic level single target striker and most of them won’t have a troop they can use a match trait to scale off of, then they don’t really fit well within their own event, do they? Why are they spawning gems of their own color at all, why do they need the amount boosted by their own team to the point their boost ratio maxes out at just barely past “do not cast this under any circumstances”? They absolutely 100% need a way to keep the turn if the event’s scoring scheme is to remain the same, but you don’t need to spawn random gems to do that. Extra turn/conditional extra turn chance is one way to do this, but if they don’t set up any other troop they are just as useless in and out of the event. Similar effects are already in the game for some of these.
This would have to be in addition to another effect - possibly just minor damage, in order to set up the other troops on the team to do their thing. So you can at least build around it.
Deal Magic + 2 damage to an enemy AND (one or more)
They could be generators and:
- Convert chosen color to (fixed color), then spawn (fixed color) boosted by (my type) allies.
- Create x (other color), boosted by (my type) allies, then convert (other color) to (my color) (deck hand) OR convert (other color) to (fixed color) (green slime)
- Other allies gain x mana, boosted by (my type) allies. 10% chance to gain an extra turn, boosted by (stat) of target
- Convert a chosen gem to (not my color), then create 7 more, boosted by (my type) allies, (then damage dealt is random). (eternal flame)
They could be scaling troops and:
- eliminate (magic) armor, with 10% chance of an extra turn, boosted by armor eliminated (then deal damage). (needs another troop to refill it)
- all (my type) allies gain (magic/2) to a random skill (then some extra turn conditional)
- gain (fixed) to all skills, boosted by (my type) allies. If any enemy has higher (stat), gain an extra turn.
Hopefully you get the idea here.
There are any number of support effects you could give in the pure support or generator role so long as 1) you can always be set up for an extra turn and 2) it actually feeds in to what other troops of this type and color can do. It doesn’t even need to have a boost ratio off its own troop type. In fact, it would probably be better if it didn’t. There isn’t really anything unique about the opponents teams journey to “counter”, in fact, it is probably the least unique event in that you just fight what essentially amount to explore teams from all over, which was probably contributory to this design disaster in the first place. A common deviation from PvP versus Journey is, of course, that every troop is above level 20 and so having a boost ratio of anything based off opponents level insulates it greatly from PvP, but as stated above, that isn’t actually the goal here. So many troops are unusable filler garbage even from a young account perspective that “usable”, as in, can meaningfully contribute to a win versus a higher stat opponent (not even necessarily quickly), which is a HUGE portion of the game now, has become an outlier.
My main fear here is that the devs are even more burnt out than a lot of the players here are, relegating to needing to template event tools so that we will be forever relegated to stuff that doesn’t even really function during the event it is supposed to be for.
Absent any significant changes to journey troops (and possibly in addition to, given the relative cost and length of these events), journey probably needs some scoring and/or rules changes.
- The amount of turns you are afforded before losing miles is increased as the event scales in level
- The speed at which enemy levels scaled is significantly decreased, or capped to an amount reasonable for the worst set of tools you’d need to play with during the event for the foreseeable future
- Stat buffs offered way more often and increased in magnitude
I hesitate to even suggest changing the number of point thresholds as such a request by a player generally comes off as a best a conflict of interest, but… well… you probably shouldn’t check just one event and call it a success because some hardcore players were doggedly determined to beat it. In particular, watch for a drop off not only for this event (where you nerfed what was technically not released yet but part of an established pattern where people may have already bought in, plus sunk costs for making it like 80% of the way) and the next one (where people will be wary even starting it).
I’ve been needing to get all this out for a while because all I’ve seen on each side of this discussion is lobbying their own position about why the implications of the nerf weren’t properly considered, why the game is now literally unplayable for them (exaggeration, but it at least feels a lot worse for reasons I already went over), or why they are glad they don’t have to deal with facing these troops anymore. But very few seem to have connected that the two fallbacks the devs seem to have to diversify and increase the difficulty of a given event or game mode is to increase troop and weapon restrictions or increase opponent levels and having these 15 spawners around for every troop type or kingdom that has awful tools instead of them having better tools that can work in concert with a team, or at the very least, a weapon you can use, is just not a recipe for longevity. And not the kind of explosive everybody rage quits because hypothetical goblin wildfolk thing is oo though to beat hyperbole that seems to be tossed around, but a slow bleed where every battle with a restricted troop set feels exactly the same starting very early on and all those cool toys you did all those boring battles to save up for don’t really even feel good to use (a lot of that also being a problem with said mythics).
Constructs could have kept Chalcedony and been fine if every construct continued to be terrible, but on top of that nearly every other 15 spawner was an escalation of the previous because of the other tools that could be used with it. Maybe the Knight one too, that I don’t even remember the name of because I can’t remember ever wanting to use it nor ever seeing it in PvP. Up until, of course, the new PvP regions get fixed, but even then there are strong options (well, a strong option) in Hellcrag, a few decent constructs, and some decent/faster options for knights while using a better hero class which effectively hard counters any team built around the loopers there.
Time will tell if they actually do put the time an effort into giving these kingdoms where you’d actually want to use these troops something actually fun and viable to use across the board and make journey troops more appropriate for the events they are actually intended to be used for, or if we are already past the point where each of the affected troop types will never be as strong (and in some cases, as strong OR as fast) as they were already.
TL;DR: Rant about how the stated reasoning behind the nerfs being kind of inexcusable or at the very least incomplete. Journey troops spawning 15 of their own color was bad design, shouldn’t have made it out of the planning phase. Journey troops spawning 10 of their own color is still bad design, but less harmful (probably, long term) even though it took a year to nerf it and continued being released (in an of itself harmful, signaling where everyone thinks the baseline is now may both be on shaky ground and already higher than where you meant it to ever be if you were paying attention). Re-Buffs or other significant buffs on other troops are unlikely, so these troops are effectively useless). Journey event was not even remotely proactively adjusted based on the milestones and tools given which were already readily apparent long before the event started. Journey troop design is bad period in overall context of journey event and/or journey event rules are bad in context of how they scale vs how many total rewards they are vs what you can use in the events (they don’t have to be self color gem spawners, this is going to be a design dead end). Overall troop design in certain restricted sets is outright painful to use coming off an unrestricted baseline, particularly when dealing with high level opponents. Lack of scaling or punch up tools in general on many kingdoms and entire troop types is wide open design space that should be used. Any non-journey battle where you have every available tool and pre-nerf journey troops were the fastest AND safest way to close them out is officially a problem not just with that one tool that you have given, which still makes the team slower and more tedious to use than you would in other restricted sets, but of the tools in that restricted set.