We’ve been doing a lot of testing here for the last 48 hours, as you might imagine. @Nimhain has been on the various Maugrim Woods issues pretty much full time since release.
Here’s what we’ve discovered, & our plans moving forward.
#What we found…#
It’s REALLY hard for us to reproduce many of these issues (we’re talking bugs here, not the 4-Kerberos issue… I’ll deal with that separately). We’re playing dozens & dozens of high-end games on level 1000+ accounts, and for the most part we’re just not seeing the problems. THAT’S how they sneak past us in the first place!
We understand the problems are real though, but it looks like there may be timing-related problems here, and they can be devilishly difficult to find.
4x Kerberos is a pain in the butt, we agree! Whack-a-Warg is fun a few times, then it gets old. The reduction of his trait to 25% from 50% made it a little more palatable, but doesn’t fix the problem. Not testing 4x Kerberos was an oversight on our part - we normally DO test 4x of troops (especially since the Astral Spirit issue a while back), but Kerberos seems to have skipped that part of the process.
#THE PLAN!#
We’re going to revert Kerberos’ trait to “on enemy death” for now (instead of “on ally death”).
We’re going to look at adding “UNIQUE TRAITS” in a future update, to work around these issues of doubling/tripling/quadrupling up on troops to stack trait bonuses. A “Unique Trait” would fire only once per event, even if you had it on multiple troops. That way we can introduce new traits that add cool features which are not as easily exploitable. Kerberos’ trait is fun if it remains at 25%, but in order to make it viable we have to reduce it down to 5-10% range which is ONLY good with 3-4 Kerberos… ie you get an all-or-nothing choice, which isn’t great. We’re sad that we didn’t limit troops in a team to x1 on initial release - it was certainly something I fought for - but for various reasons, it was decided to allow multiples. Note to self: argue harder next time!
Warg’s trait is going to be changed to summon a Dire Wolf, and moved back up to 25%. That’s nice thematically, and should also help with the never-ending wargs issue, giving the summoning chain a hard endpoint.
To compensate Kerberos for his lack of Warginess, we’re going to switch out Pyromania (nobody much fights with him up front anyway) for Necromancy.
As far as future content is concerned, we’re going to put a halt on any forthcoming on-death effects until we sort through some of these issues… they’re neither simple to repro, nor simple to fix, else we would have solved them already.
We’re going to double-down our efforts to find and fix some of the current death-related bugs for 2.2. We’ve already fixed a couple of them (Kraken for example). I’m sure we can catch a bunch more!
Changes should go live in the next few hours I hope.
Yes (though not the Infernal King trait firing when stunned - that one we CAN repro).
Also it refers to “ghost” troops being returned to battle after a troop is summoned over them, and a few otehr related issues involving effects that move the troop order.
Odd that you guys can’t get that to trigger since it is an exceedingly common occurrence.
As for ghosts returning, that is a combination bug. The troop isn’t actually there, it can’t be targeted by spells, it doesn’t take skull damage or gain mana, just visually in the slot. Yet the traits are there and passive ones such as “On 4+ matches” keep firing.
If I were to try and trigger, I’d make a troop (call him Foo) with a spell along the lines “Sacrifice an Ally. Summon a Foo” and give him a “On 4+ matches” trait and an “On ally death” trait. That way you can just keep blowing it up and replacing it till it happens.
(Not trying to tell you guys how to do your job, just as a coder and former QA test tool dev, my mind is always going down these roads)
Nothing sinister… mainly it was because we only released with 96 troops (a relatively small number for a game like this), and there was some concern that we didn’t have enough troops to deny people using multiples.
I figure the uproar wouldn’t be too bad considering the complaints about mantibore teams (and the like). Although I don’t think any troops need to be nerfed or ‘rebalanced’ (referring to BD here), I do think that this game is about collecting troops, and has an effort to encourage players to try different combos, I think they’d get over it pretty quickly. Perhaps a suitable work-around could be that ALL PVP matches are restricted to one of any troop type in a team, and allow the use for multiple of a type in Quests, Explore and Arena?
Awesome! Thank you. These changes and improvements make sense to me and will definitely improve gameplay and thematic value as well.
I really liked the idea of boosting Kerberos and Warg creating a Feeding Frenzy upon Ally death however strongly agree it needs to be strictly limited to 1 to a few times per match.
As always, thank you Devs for working around the clock to find the issues and make this better.
