I did. That’s the battle I lost. The AI skull spammed 4 of my troops down in mere seconds even though I had barrier …
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mang, and focusing on skulls in general, is always going to have some risk involved at the higher level fights. It’s pretty safe as long as the class you use has skull reduction/barrier start/barrier on brown match though. However, it doesn’t always help with the needing to finish in under 10 turns. It still spends multiple turns filling, then casting, then hoping you get enough skull matches.
Ive been using amarok/wand of stars/pan/chum and its been working pretty well, really only losing miles if i cant fill wand fast enough or if i fail an 80% devour 
47 fights in and im not losing TOO many miles per fight. I can see quite a few of my guildmates are struggling though, with more fights, but a couple hundred less miles than me. Judging by my guildmates who are doing pretty well, theyve made the 10,500 miles in around 85 fights. I forget what tier that means, but about half of my guild would probably need to buy at least tier 5 to reach it at this rate.
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I had Mang and barrier, probably also skull reduction. But the AI was skull looping me down before my first cast in way less than 10 turns. With a team score of 20.000 …
Sounds about right lol. The occasionaly match you lose to shenanagans like that is why i stay away from skull teams unless they are the only real option. Hope it picks up a bit for ya.
In my opinion, the best solution is adjusting the scoring so we don’t need as many points to get all the event rewards.
The only issue is I’m far from the first person to suggest this and the devs don’t seem to be a fan. They actually decided it was more desirable to increase the score thresholds instead.
No amount of money I spend is going to make me any better at Journey. I’m only as far as I am in the event because of my guild’s assistance, which I’ve been asking for more often since the recent update for guild events as a whole.
Remember the days when you only needed to purchase 4 tiers and that was more than enough to help get all the rewards for your guild? I don’t think “use more gems” is going to be effective if I’m only losing battles. The devs should hear about players at far lower levels than I am and how opening their wallets won’t help them either. There is no financial incentive to keep Journey like this.
It could be argued the stat boosts are supposed to help with the battles, but it usually costs you miles to go for those. I noticed my score was more on par with my guild members only when I stopped going for the stat boosts.
The devs have statistics to reference when they’re making decisions. I’ve seen a few guildmates quit the game since the last update. One or two quit since the recent nerf, but correlation doesn’t equal causation in this context.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the “correlation doesn’t equal causation” mindset is why the devs aren’t listening to us. It’s possible they don’t agree that their decisions are actually bad for the game simply because there’s not enough evidence to suggest this is the case. At least, according to their data.
For some reason, I’m more now hyperaware of the score penalties for Journey. I think the update for PvP has something to do with this, because being penalized never bothered me before this point. Oh. There was this recent nerf for journey troops. That definitely helps with my awareness as well as the recency bias.
The score thresholds are why I feel the need to bring this up. Why do we lose miles just for passing a certain number of turns anyway? What’s the point of wanting us to go faster when the troops that helped with this just got nerfed?
The problem isn’t necessarily that the troops were nerfed. The problem is players are supposed to adjust to this recent change and new players have it much worse than I do. We had something that helped with completing Journey. Now we don’t and we’re back to needing a solution.
Overall, I think the devs are at least trying. Nerfing the Journey troops without understanding the problem that required their use wasn’t a good idea, but the devs haven’t messed up so badly that we’ve all quit. I’m not the only player still playing Journey anyway, for example.
In regards to the current Journey event:
“Use Mang” isn’t the solution people think it is. Does it help? Yes, but the risk involved with using it increases in the higher levels and I stopped using it as a strategy largely because of this risk. I almost lost a few battles due to overreliance on Mang. I’ve been lucky to not lose any Valravens for the same reason. This said, I understand the recommendation. Like I said before, it is useful, just risky.
I’m not sure Wand of Stars is much better since it carries a similar level of risk but in other ways. The cleanse is nice. Your opponent’s troops gaining mana instead of you is not.
Considering the Journey event is otherwise a complete disaster, Mang is a good way to at least somewhat compensate for what has been lost. At least, until your hero dies. I think in some cases, my hero has died due to my own decisions, but I will see how the rest of the week goes.
The enemy troops are now past level 400 and I’m planning to change my event team soon. I’ve gone back to the Mang strategy so I hope it doesn’t cost me.
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The best solution is, was and always will be to revert the horrific pathfinder changes.
You don’t want to battle against them in PvP? Fine, pick one of the other 35ish battles available all the time. Not all of them are full of pathfinders.
You have a problem with them in Guild Wars? Very unlikely. I’ve been in every bracket and met less pathfinder troops overall than books, goblin teams or tower/kurandara teams each and every time.
And last but not least, use freeze or a similar status effect to avoid them. Especially since you’re the first to make a move in every game mode …
Currently I don’t play Arena, because it sucks.
Soon I won’t be playing Journey and PvP anymore, because they’re worse than Arena now. And I loved both modes. PVP as well before and after the change. Soon after the rework I finished top 10 (or 12) in global. Now I struggle to finish all 20 tasks just because it is no fun anymore even though I might 1-shot every battle.
What’s next? ToD, Pet Rescue and Explore? After they’re gone, all the players will be gone as well …
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Yes, I’m resurrecting this (thanks to having an involuntary timeout) - we didn’t finish journey and I’m not going to push it. It was always a mess and it’s only gotten way worse.
We didn’t finish last time because for what? There aren’t exactly very many troops that are worth getting shiny now that the journey troops are basically useless.
At least fix the event scoring.
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The point is that, if the pathfinder loopers were never invented, Journey scoring would never have point deductions (for taking over 10 turns), too.
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Those deductions existed for the first two Journey events, neither of which had one of the infamously-looping Pathfinders.
The problematic troop was a sloppy solution to a problem the developers brought upon themselves, but the problem still exists even if that troop paradigm had never been initiated.
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Those deductions didn’t really matter for those first two Journey events. We only had 12 rewards back then, which you could reach without having to fight significantly overscaled opponents, at full score penalty.
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Hey all. Guess what they still haven’t fixed but are rolling out again next week!
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Dead event
Hi folks,
We have another small change to Journey difficulty for next week’s event.
The details will be included in the weekly event blog.
As always we’ll be monitoring the feedback and the game data to see how things go.
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Any chances you’re going to REVERT ALL RECENT JOURNEY CHANGES before the next event starts?
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We’ll see if the changes actually makes it possible to clear all reward tiers with a reasonable amount of effort and spending of Gems.
Our guild easily clears all 16 reward tiers in other events, but Journey hasn’t been possible since the nerf and I’ve changed our Journey reqs to just be “No 0s” for guild member scores.
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@Kafka why are the changes not being advised prior to the event so you can get an idea of whether the players actually think it is of benefit and not just lip service which doesn’t do any real good.
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Small change means probably irrelevant, low expectations
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Hope it is going to help as I have been getting HALF my usual score with the same amount of time and gem input as before…
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We are never getting OP pathfinders back bro.