So you’re saying that your team is so dependent on Mercy being exactly the way she is that the loss of a single point would make her completely worthless and destroy your team?
I’m not convinced that Mercy needs to be nerfed, but I’m getting tired of the litany of people claiming that the most powerful and useful troops are just teetering on the edge, and the slightest push will make them utterly and completely useless.
Or maybe people just won’t admit that they don’t want to settle for anything less than 100% guaranteed victory, no thought required.
I actually agree with you. And it’s not just 100% guaranteed victory, it’s also matches that don’t last longer than 90 seconds, because that’s the only way to progress the ranked ladder to the top.
For me, I don’t want either of those things. What I want is to be able to put together teams that can compete with any other team if they’re constructed carefully and thoughtfully. Mercy isn’t essential by herself in this particular team. Mercy feeds Valk. Valk feeds Templar. Templar feeds Mercy and buffs Paladin. It’s a real strategy, that nerfing Mercy would do significant damage to, just because people can’t exercise a little self-control and not use her with Maw or IK or some other OP crap.
The problem players voice in regard to Mercy is that she is an Epic with Empowered when the (formally) apparent balance was to give Epics and higher Fast.
All these nerfs are counterproductive in the long run (yes, even Maw’s nerf) because people are going to stop spending for stuff when there’s no guarantee that thing they paid real money for isn’t useless 2 or 3 weeks later…
There it is again: the suggestion that any and all nerfs make something completely useless, rather than fairly balanced against other options.
What would nerfing Mercy mean? It apparently means something to you, and if I were to guess, it would be the Empowered trait being replaced. But that’s not the only way they could change Mercy. Like Maw, they could change something about the troop that resolves whatever problem it causes, but doesn’t necessarily make it less useful or powerful in other respects.
I can only speak from my own experience. Removing Empowered from Mercy would likely cripple my Divine team that I’ve built. It wouldn’t make Mercy useless, it would make the WHOLE TEAM useless because it wouldn’t be able to compete with the latest OP meta.
There are ways to balance that don’t involve neutering cards that some people might enjoy or build teams around.
I personally am not in favor of nerfs at all (not even to Maw). I think the cycle the Devs have started with introducing new abilities as counters is much, much better.
The empowered trait allows me to charge Valk on the first turn in many cases, even without giving me a free turn. This starts a cycle that buffs my damage dealer (Paladin) and loops through, denying the enemy turns and mana. It’s a slow, deliberate process.
Without that initial charge, it’s simply too slow to compete. Templar ends up mana starved and dies from lack of buffs, disabling the ability to buff Paladin further.
Again, I’m not winning 100% and I’m not buzzing through matches 2 minutes a pop, either. My team was carefully constructed over time and with quite a lot of thinking and effort. I’ve never used Maw with Mercy. I’ve never used IK with Mercy. Killing legitimate, synergistic teams because some people can’t control themselves from gaming the system is downright absurd.
Particularly, I think wrong nerfing something unless it breaks the game.
I could only get Maw last month and fully traited him after the explore mode … and it did not stop me enjoy the game. I just thought weird create new troops and traits to counter Maw and Mab and a week later rewrite Maw.
People do not like to lose.
Maw is still strong … but I would prefer it to be balanced instead nerfed. Now the knife is pointed at mercy … sad.
By the way, I proposed a solution to this last week that would work for everybody. I really hope @Sirrian and the Devs will look at this, even though it’s complicated.
I would further improve team synergies myself, either around Kingdom or Type bonuses (or both). For example, when paired with Maw or IK, Mercy would only have “fast”. The only way to get her “empowered” would be to pair her with other Divines or such.
Give MORE incentive to build thematic teams, rather than the jumble of over-powered (and in some cases completely illogical) combinations we see now.
The “counters not nerfs” approach actually demonstrated that the method doesn’t work. They introduced multiple Maw counters, then a whole Kingdom full of counters, and Mercy/Maw was still OP. In the mean time, we saw like 10 troops that were useful for one situation instead of a variety of troops that opened new, interesting team comps. It’s the nature of any game that some cards will be OP due to design oversights and we, fortunately, are playing an online game where the devs can correct those mistakes. Virtually every online game has nerfs and buffs, so I don’t really understand the resistance. It should come as no surprise, and is actually healthy for a game.
What we need is an environment where a variety of teams are “on meta” (i.e., very viable). What we’ve had is an environment where 2-3 are. You get away from the latter situation and to the former by buffing and nerfing cards so there’s a more even playing field across team comps. The only alternative is power creep, which I don’t think benefits anyone but the dev team (b/c it forces on-going monetization).
I can agree with that, as long as it includes buffing AND nerfing, not just nerfing, which seems to be the overwhelming cry from the community most of the time.
Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the game, for me, is the team synergies. They have Kingdom and Type bonuses for a reason. The problem is that they’re just not powerful enough. Most players just ignore them because a few points of life or armor isn’t worth the trade off for using the latest and greatest “fast win” build.
Reward players for creativity. Reward players for NOT using whatever the latest OP card is. Me personally, I never used Maw and have no plans to in the near future. I also didn’t mind facing him in PvP. Sometimes I got beat but more often than not, I won. The ONLY complaint I had about Maw was facing him 9 battles out of 10.
There are literally dozens of highly viable compositions but they are either; not known by many, or “slow to use” (in other words, requires too much thought)
PERFECT EXAMPLE is Goblins. They can beat ANY team, but they require too much board analysis and time for the 99+% of players who only want an Easy Button.
I was just about to say this. It always makes me chuckle when people claim there are only 2 or 3 viable decks. There are many other decks that work well because of good synergy. They just aren’t always the fastest, “easy button click” teams.
