More protective traits / status reworks needed

Gameplay Chat (PC/Mobile)
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Part 1 - protection from grief

The game in the last year has continued a gradual slide into a trollish hell of RNG-insta-kill and mana-drain stall defences (yeah, melodrama to start :smiley: )

Any troop or hero, spell or trait, added to the game, or reworked from old, largely goes one of two ways:

  • it offers an insta-kill, mana drain or empowered annoyance and features heavily in defences we must drudge against, as in the late game everyone knows the AI will lose every game unless some RNG cheese turns it against the player; or
  • it offers none of those features and is almost never seen again, being uncompetitive to use, and unable to troll attackers in the hands of the AIā€¦

So I may be exaggerating a little, but this is my strong feelingā€¦ and every new grieftroll addition opens new meta combo possibilitiesā€¦ which in PvP is annoying as the monotony gets increased (oh, another DeathKnight on defence? why you really shouldnā€™t haveā€¦) - in PvP we can skip them, or have enough options to deal with it, but GW is making this painfully apparent againā€¦ GW is far worse, as (1) players have an incentive to put the griefiest defences up, rather than their one-troop defences that half in top guilds use, and (2) we are seriously restricted in how we deal with the grief without losing a lot of pointsā€¦

Fixing this would both make life far more fun again for players, and potentially add greater variety to defences: no need to rely on grief RNG if you know the player can more easily counter it.

It seems a bit late to stop this happeningā€¦ doing so would mean nerfing a huge number of no doubt popular troopsā€¦

So the solution that strikes me is that we need more options to protect from griefing. Defensive traits that actually do something useful seems to be the way to go: we have hundreds of status immunity traits that prevent you suffering something of no consequence, but hardly any to block devour, and nothing can stop insta-kills like the Archer trait.

A partial solution would be to consolidate the current list of meaningless immunity traits into two or three that each block multiple statuses:

  • Life Ward: blocks poison, disease, entangle and stun
  • Magic Ward: blocks silence, web, mana drain and mana burn
  • Heat Ward: blocks burn and freeze
  • Soul Ward: blocks instant death and deathmark

ā€¦and delete the current single immunities (Sturdy, Immune, Alert etc etc)ā€¦

(nothing needed to block Hunterā€™s Mark as itā€™s hopeless anyway)

Next we could add Impervious to more troops, to make fully Impervious, or mostly Impervious teams more viable. Adding onto half-decent troops would allow us to build teams that sacrificed some speed and utility for the safety of not-being-trolled so much. Adding Impervious in too many places needs handling with care, mind, not to make status effects utterly irrelevant (more on that below).

Lastly, I would like to see the odd legendary or even Mythic unique trait appear that gives team blanket protection. These could go onto say a legendary whose spell was average-at-best, maybe some buffs or utility stuff, but could include the traits:

  • Protection - all allies are immune to instant kill and devour effects
  • Exaltation - all allies are immune to mana drain and mana burn effects

Ideally the solution would be an application of all of the above, to lesser or greater extents.

Part 2 - make status effects great again

I wonā€™t dwell on this too long, as this post is already getting too longā€¦ but I do not want the above to make it look like I want status effects eliminating from the game just by adding more and better protective traits.

Key thoughts on this from me:

  • many status effects have negligible effect on the end game
  • either because they do not scale into the end game at all (poison, burn damage, etc)
  • or they do not feature on enough troops, or on troops anyone actually uses
  • or their base effect is a nuisance at best and soon wears off
  • or often a blend of these issues
  • not enough synergies and interactions with spells and troops to make many of them interesting or strong

So to balance against the above push for more immunities, we also need to see status effects have more impact: damage that scales, effects that perhaps linger longer, and many more interactions.

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. Toodles.

14 Likes
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I like the idea of the immunity traits being consolidated, even just to two or three immunities per would be acceptable. Obvious this would require an overhaul on how theyā€™re distributed, since they wouldnā€™t be straight-up filler traits for lame gacha filler troops, but thatā€™s OK ā€¦ weā€™ve got things like Magic Heart and the rest of that set to serve as filler instead.

It would be a good idea to do that anyway, since we just saw a +2 Armor to Type trait show up in Stryx Shield and of course there are a few dozen others who would make more sense lore-wise to be gaining armor instead of health (cough Mechs much?). So yeah, a trait distribution overhaul might be good. Hell, as long as weā€™re talking filler, add a +1 Attack to Type set of traits too.

Oh and while weā€™re at it, a Magic Resistance trait maybe? Or two? Weā€™ve had Armored and Stoneskin since traits debuted, and now weā€™ve got a total of six different skull resistant traits - 25, 33, 40, 50, 75, 80. Even if the latter two are unique.

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The ā€œprotect all alliesā€ traits need to happen, like, yesterday. +1 to most every part of your post, but especially that.

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I understand where you are coming from, and i realize it is a view shared by several frequent forum posters these days and that i might be in the minority with my slightly different view on the issue. Iā€™d still like to share my view in a few sentences.

Personally in GW i relish what some refer to as grief defenses, the scummier the better, with maybe a few exceptions stemming from strictly overpowered troops.
As long as i am provided with the tools to defend against the grief and i am, i am not only ok with it, i love adapting my daily coloured core team for each fight by switching out troops, it is the whole fun for me.

With more passive traits allowing me to ignore many of the effects i currently have to actively counter, much of the fun of GW will just vanish for me. Both with increasing the amount of Impervious troops and introducing additional passive protect traits, it is not needed imho.

Anyways as i said upfront, i realize many respected long-time posters are very vocal about this issue and i am not trying to stand in the way of this campaign if it will just result in adding more tools to deal with the insta kill stuff.
But for the love of god, please donā€™t introduce more passive counters to basic status effects like poison or burn, it can already be bothersome to build strategies around these effects being present on multiple troops, and what use would it be to even buff those effects when the game will just be swamped with passives that counter them?

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Fair enough Gouki. I agree with you to some extent - introducing more counters just makes a more complicated meta. However, it still sucks to lose hard to rng. Personallyā€‹ I would like to see the following balance changes:

  • Entangle can protect against hero instakill trait (archer and assassin)
  • Any troop that can devour can only devour once.

I think that would be enough for me.

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How about a Legendary trait that applies Impervious to adjacent troops only? That would present more interesting team-building challenges than just blanket immunity.

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With this weekā€™s boost I was excited about using Queen Ysabelle. Made a quick build of QY, Valkyrie, QY, QY. Gaining 6 armor per round, gaining 25 attack and armor per cast, and each cast feeds Valkyrie which makes blue. QYā€™s attack gets huge making skull damage substantial and it is a nuke when cast so gets around gorgotha style skull defense. Awesome!

And 100% unplayable in Guild Wars since it has no way to deal with Deathknight in top slot. A potentially fun build using the weekā€™s bonus rendered useless because of a stupidly broken mechanic.

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i like them with one exception:

i dont want to put immunity to instakill in same trait that immunity to devour, so id exclude devour-immu from Soul Ward

i would put devour-umminity to Heat Ward instead, which doesnt ā€œfitā€ the ā€œheatā€ concept much but i think would balance the game more

i like it

again, id exclude immunity to devour from it, and id make 2 more traits:

  • Toxic Aura: all allies are immune devour
  • Sharpness Aura: : all allies are immune stun
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I agree here.
I think Disease should be permanent unless cleans (like poison). That would make it really powerful, which is much needed.

I think Poison should tic ever turn, and have a 50% chance to increase +1 damage per turn every turn.

I think Stunned troops should have a chance to regain each traits separately each turn.

As for Devourā€¦ What if every Devoured troop turned into a ā€œLeftoverā€ card, a basic troop, but with the following traits: 1- Cannot be devoured 2- Allied troops cannot be Devoured 3- Dies in 6 turns
This way, at least, weā€™d get a small break after a Devour :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like