Journey Event Scoring and Pathfinder Troop Rebalance information

Official News
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Going by what happened with the Labyrinth banner, it’s rather that someone not familiar with the game stumbled over some ancient feedback about Chalcedony and decided to act on it, without thinking in any way about side effects. This caught the Customer Experience Team by surprise as well, they initially hand-waved it away when the community predicted it a week ago, they are now slowly beginning to realize that players feel there’s a whole lot of side effects, all of them bad. The Customer Experience Team doesn’t have the power to change anything, they are still busy compiling our feedback, they have no idea when and to which extent it will even get read once it reaches the powers in charge.

The official post above is an attempt to buy time, by making up a story how this was all planned, while trying to give the impression that something may eventually somehow still get tweaked, just definitely not in the near future.

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Okay, I did not know that. I still hold that other teams are way more annoying and that journey teams are pretty much the only way, besides Beetrix or Gobtruffle new players have any chance to win against any annoying teams, be it in pvp or otherwise, and nerfing them won’t achieve anything - not even in PvP, as people will just set up other annoying defences.

Edited to add:

Isn’t Central the only place currently where you actually fight the teams people used?

Who’s going to be using pathfinders in PvP other than:
People who are relatively low level themselves and have no better options
People who last fought a looping team and found using one themselves to be the best option
Dead accounts

So they have been nerfed so that low level players have to fight with crappy teams against crappy teams as well as being stuck with crappy teams for everything else?

What’s next, nerfing truffle and beetrix as they will be the next most used troops?

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@ 4.21: That’s the kind of posting, that deserves to be printed and physically mailed to their offices.

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I wonder how many will buy the Heroic Booster now :rofl:

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Way too many, because the nerf information isn’t really communicated within the game, you have to be a frequent visitor on external sites. See also Loss of Gem generation bonus for similar troops.

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47

I really don’t see the issue with the looping teams. Historically we can go back through the entire history of troops in this game, and there’s always been ‘better’ or ‘meta’ team builds that players have dealt with.

If I am honest the only thing that was an issue was Dragon’s Eye. Even now we’d have a Monk Eye and no way to curtail it without curse/stun so drain could work. Even then, with +2 on brown and a brown storm often, you’ll see it refill next turn.

L&D maybe because a lack of stuff, but Finesse/Axe/Shahbanu/Mercy (now it would be Bane of Mercy) albeit slow always countered it. Literally no losses vs it unless really unlucky or blind casting.

Goblins say hello. You just have to work a bit harder and sometimes shrug that RNG has you.

I really don’t see this as the argument that new players are struggling. As has been said, a new player with access to Wargares will beat many teams in PvP, just take longer. Especially with Fenix blessing random allies, you can mostly or at least have a counter to snap freeze.

I’m in the camp of just let the players play, rather than coming up with a complete change. It smacks of trying to extract even more, we have evidence that this is the plan with all of the extra gem costs to play to a reasonable level and progress.

I’m looking at my troop collection, 800 troops gold medalled and end of end game and there is actually now no point in even levelling any new troop, bar summoning them if an applicable troop is there. Unless we play forever and forever like the odd few lucky enough, we cannot progress kingdoms to 18 when we get new troops.

So it’s like we are stuck, and it’s hurting the playerbase, as player after player finds no way of gaining momentum and we lose players left right and centre across our guilds. Sure the hardcore may remain.

We are not seeing progress. We are seeing situational moves to curtail and increase cost.

I really don’t give much of a damn about Journey or collections, but as we play as 30 and not 1, then increasing the participation costs is a real negative at this juncture in the game’s overall life cycle imo. We dropped our reqs 2 years ago. Our players are our lifeblood and I’d give up 1,000,000 events to retain my guildees for Guild Wars.

I look at my Journey team and the pathfinder sits at the bottom and never casts… when it does it’s useless, so it’s utterly pointless.

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48

you’re a wizzard, my friend !

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Thank you for an official explanation post, I guess.
But I’d like to see some reduction of journey points required for the guild rewards, honestly, at this point. To be fair with all changes.

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Thats because of the new horrible PVP mode they introduced. Before that there was not much reason to use those troops because you didn’t need many different teams (if you played the old one at all besides GW) and you had the choice between ranked and casual. Now it is only Guild Wars difficulty ranked.

In the new mode, especially in the outer regions, these troops were for many, which don’t play 24/7 or pay real money and have everything on maximum, the only viable teams under some of those restrictions.

Now that they are gone the new PVP mode feels like 24/7 Guild Wars because you have to fight with struggling teams against endless high powered teams (since all three choices are nearly always around 20k strength) in combination with all the cheating bonuses the AI gets against the player. Guild Wars is only 35 battles a month but now you have the high end frustration all the time.

Until now I got to the 6500 points while only playing the silver bonus regions but that is now more of a struggle. If they nerf even more troops like this then I will play the ranked PVP as often as before the change: not at all. And since casual is gone it is time to dust off Arena for future pet gnomes.

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51

The problem isn’t that the troop loops, it’s that

  1. It’s too easy to start the loop. At 12 mana (2 colors) you could easily get this with 1 match if starting at 50%, or one empowered converter cast.
  2. The looping is too reliable. Even if you have a terrible board, you’d still get a loop on most casts.
    Getting 20-30 turn runs on Seekra, Bell was not uncommon.

Compare to:
Goblin looping: Gobtruffle got nerfed. It usually takes a little time to setup. These loops often break after 10 or so turns.
Doomed doomskull Weapons: Not only is there a mild cost involved in creating/tempering the weapon, the cost is 18 mana, single color, and leads to an extra turn less than half the time.

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On another note, I reckon way more people RQ the game due to epic trials … just a hunch though.

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I’m finding this iteration of Journey to not be as terrible as expected. However, we have some useful insta-kill mythics available in the card pool (Amarok and Scoprio) and a fantastic mana generator (Bork). There’s also Kerberos available for lower level players who might not have Amarok. Without an insta-kill mythic this event would be much worse…

Which brings me to the future of Journey events. Not every restriction troop pool (color AND type) has insta-kill mythics or fantastic generators. I bought T6 and I’m 88 battles in and my next battle is against level 398 opponents. Battles are going to become even more treacherous (enemy casts and skull hits will become outright lethal). The only other event that ramps this quickly (Tower of Doom) has a bigger troop pool (color restriction only) bigger stat boosts (boons) and most importantly a hard difficulty cap (doesn’t get harder after floor 25). The old Journey events guaranteed us a winning looper (even if it was a little boring to use).

I think the difficulty ramp needs to be cut by 30-50% or it needs to have a hard cap. Double magic on a Pathfinder troop that still takes 8+ casts to kill a single opponent and doesn’t reliably loop just is not enough. Siegebreakers and Godslayers do 5x damage in their events so if the Pathfinder is supposed to be the new troop that makes the event possible each time it’s going to have to do much more damage if it doesn’t loop.

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“This game has no ban-script. All bans on cheaters are checked manually.”
→
“We are awfully sorry, that our ban-script wreaked havoc over the holidays.”

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It’s not hard to avoid playing against teams that make the game unpleasant in PvP. There are three freaking options. And you can see them after a certain point. Are newer players playing that much PvP where that experience would turn them off? There’s so much more to do. I didn’t get into PvP until I finished all the kingdoms and started doing the underworld. I think it’s stupid you made this change for newer players because it’s annoying to get wrecked. There are other troops that are just as bad. As someone who still doesn’t even have the first six (or seven, I guess…) dragons, I avoid diamantina or whatever its name is. You learn to avoid teams you aren’t good against until you have better odds. I’m sure the players you get the most money from is your already established player base. This is why I don’t recommend your game to people who see me playing it. It feels like pay to win more times than not and it’s a long grind. I think people are more likely to get turned off by how complex the game is than getting shit on by journey troops in PvP.

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If it puts your mind at ease, there is zero chance that this has anything to do with retaining newer players. Think about it. Picture large numbers of low level accounts submitting tickets that say something like “I have to quit because of these journey troops!” Didn’t happen. And in the absence of these ‘newbie-quitter’s’ explicitly stated reasons for quitting, how would anyone be able to know what made them leave the game?

I’m not saying that no low level players have ever been annoyed by a journey troop. I’m just saying they (devs) would have absolutely no idea whether those troops are hurting retention or even helping it.

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I did not find that the journey looping troops were a PvP problem in the period between the PvP change and the journey troop rebalancing, because I never fought in Central Spire, so I never fought them.

But, before the PvP rebalance, I did find the journey troops more annoying. Not because they were the hardest teams – I did not think they were. They didn’t play Elementalist. They were vulnerable to everything that froze. It’s just that they just took a lot of turns to kill you if they were going to win; even longer than the goblin teams.

I feel confident that I had a worse record against the Great Wyrm style of team. But, when I lost against those, I lost very quickly. And that, at least to me, felt better.

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Still radio silence???

Perfect approach!

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wont hear anything for at least another 6-8 hours its only 6am there

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Another point to consider is how the AI handles defensive teams. That is why we see so many looping defense teams - because the AI can actually use them effectively. We all have tons of examples of killer offense teams that the AI just can’t play correctly. So if anyone in development is concerned about defense teams (which has never seemed to be the case - maybe except for the books for GW, which was before my time) - they should look at improving the AI.

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sorry @Kafka, but that is purely a lie, like others stated here already:
the looping pathfinders were an advantage for newer players, not a disadvantage, cause we endgamers use other stuff in pvp (except egris maybe for stryx or suncrest restrictions).
we use diamantina, stellarix, wand or some specific mythics with mana generators like thrall/leprechaun/bog and so on.
stuff that newer players have no access to, cause it takes a lot of time to get that soulforge exclusive stuff, even spending real money won’t help them that much to make the conditions for dia or wand or ruby macaque etc.
and the mana generators for newer players are also not that useful due to their lower magic stats.
and right now the pvp defence teams are also random, so that’s another proof that loopers were in favor for the attacker, not defender.
and last but not least:
the next set of doomed weapons will generate 16! gems of one color in color restricted pvp kingdoms, so that is just the next looper (besides books).
sorry, but you are fooling the whole community!
this nerf to pathfinders was about game economy/monetization and nothing else!

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