Naughty & Nice: Troop Balance

Official News
103

Recently with Orbweaver weekly boost, at top end of scoring in PvP there were a few teams with 129/130+ True Damage combined from L&D and Weaver. When you consider they could fill from 1 purple surge and use empowered purple converters, the win condition is basically if that or those empowered converters start, you have lost. The change to a further 3 mana is basically no change, especially when they get magic link from Spider spawns, they can get 11/12 mana from a surge.

It has the most power creep there is and requires the least from other troops to get going. You don’t need an Anu medal in the classic team, you get empowered and half start for the damage dealers, so you get +12 magic. You can get +3 magic from Elfs too. You don’t need Seasons medals, you just need root trap, purple storm and stealthy. Anything else, like +1 purple, Rising Shadows is gravy.

With status immunity also in my view being broken, it can suppress the top troop unless running impervious up there, or Monk. Countless battles you never lose entangle if you don’t have purification on a hero for example.

Wind back pre medals, the average L&D/Weaver team would do less than 70 True Damage combined at optimum levels. Now, with kingdom boosts/medals I’ve seen a none weekly boosted L&D with 56 Life Steal and Weaver with 68 True Damage.

They should have been more creative with other troops. Give some slippery to other troops, make Impervious better than it is. Most Impervious troops come at high mana cost, those that do anything, yet we have curse and death mark in abundance.

Troops that need a slight boost

Xathenos - Impervious (at the very least)
Ishtara - Reverted to the orginal bless mechanic, plus the +1 gem
Abynissia - Impervious, Queens Grace to include magic
Death - Aspect of Death changed to 5 life
Flame of Anu - Impervious
Draakulis - Steal xx Life, and 2 Magic
Gaards Avatar - Invention trait, gain armour rather than recover armour
Fallen Valdis - Reveal all enemies, reveals stealth and dispels. Spell component boosted by all enemies, if enemies are stealthed deal 1.5x damage and stun them.
Gargantaur - change Huge to ‘Sanctuary’ - gain 12 life when taking damage and bless myself and 1 other ally.
Infernus - Lower mana cost, increase damage by 10%
Ketras - Barksin
King Bloodwood - Insulated
Mambasira - Spell Armour 60%
Mother of Darkness - Insulated
Pharoah Nefertani, scatter damage instead of single target, +15 boost damage, steal souls
Shade of Zorn - Impervious
Queen Aurora - Life component to self as well, create 12 gems
Stonehammer gain xx life, plus 5 attack.
Suna - Impervious
Worldbreaker - mana cost 27, Impervious
Will of Nysha - steal 3 magic boosted by armour 1:35, helps it start a bit better
Wulfgarok - If does not devour reveal all enemies and reduce magic by 25%
Zilo - Impervious (might make it usable as first troop, glass cannon effect)

New traits

Stolen Shroud - Dispel and Reveal 2 enemies
Smiling Assassins - Dispel, Stun and Reveal all enemies
Drown - cause submerged enemies to drown if at full mana, boosted by enemies submerged (50% + boosts x 3)
Planetary Shield - Barrier all allies and drain mana proportionate to damage caused (i.e anti goblins counter) Could also be a castable spell, with the trait that drains something like 5% of damage inflicted, i.e Gobtruffle hits for 40 damage, drain 2 mana etc. :slight_smile:
Nifty - drain 2 mana from 2 random enemies at 75% or greater mana at the start of my turn
Boiling Fissure - remove frozen if hit by an enemy, provide bless for 1 turn after.
Antidote - immune to web and death mark on all colours except purple matches

:slight_smile:

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104

Laziness, more likely. Difficult/expensive? That’s silly. They crap out a new weapon every week. It’s likely a drag/drop to add affixes to a weapon.

One could argue that time spent fixing stuff is a cost in and of itself, as it takes away from new content - but given that new content is broken too…well.

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Since weapon affixes were brought on relatively late in the game cycle and one of them literally broke the game for android users ( and a recent one made it laggy for some devices). I have reason to suspect that the affixes are contracted out like the ads are or the mobile alerts are. So yes augmenting the contracts to include changes to certain weapons would probably be costly.

As far as I can recall, they have never changed an individual weapon affix before. They’ve changed only a weapon affix before so that multiple weapons changed at once.

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106

Personally I’d be quite happy with a global change. Replacing all destroy, create or remove a gem affixes with something like gain 2 mana. Or gain 1 mana. Or actually just doing nothing would be better than the current situation!

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107

Wish I could say the game as a whole was NICE - the increasing pay to win format & ignoring addressing bugs approach is shamefully NAUGHTY.

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108

I can confirm that it is much more difficult to change weapon affixes and trees than it is to change mana cost or make alterations to amount of gems spawned, percentage chances, etc. This is the main reason that doomed weapons were not included in this round of balance changes. We didn’t have much time and the community has been asking for balance changes for a long while, so we did some in the capacity that we could before Christmas holidays. (We didn’t have much time to get these out the door before the team would be away, and didn’t want to risk changing anything too much that could result in bugs while our programmers were unavailable.)

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109

I’m beginning to wonder just how much time is needed to change these couple doom weapons affixes. Must be monumental seeing as 2 years isn’t enough.

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^ Yeah, honestly. It has literally been years now.

“Long while” = “had lots of time”, right??

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111

We didn’t have much time as we have been working on updates, and the balance changes were done one top of our usual hours.

If we had held off to also do the weapon update it could have easily been another month or two, especially with people being on leave over the Christmas holidays. Lots of people take time off during these months which does impact our ability to work on extra things outside of our pre determined core updates. I hope this helps shed some light on why we did this balance change in the capacity seen here. It’s a delicate balancing act and I pushed hard for our team to do what they could.

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112

Thank you for giving some insights, but…

I won’t delve into ‘let’s-make-it-so-that-we-must-tear-the-house-down-to-change-a-lightbulb’ outlook here, there must’ve been reasons for choosing such route so we’re stuck with it for now.

But that begs the question, though, - if you know perfectly well that changing weapon affixes are nigh impossible once released, wouldn’t it make some amount of sense to give them more before-thought when designing so that you wouldn’t have to listen to players whining, name-calling, nagging, and (hopefully) forcing you to tear that house down and rebuild?

Are you trying to say that it took players five minutes of gameplay to see that affixes in question on Doomed Blade and Doomed Club are stupid debatable but not a single developer saw it during design and testing phases? Or - still my favourite example - that players simply read Darkshot’s spell description create purple part, read Umbral affix destroy purple part and instantly see, without even trying the weapon out in battle, how ridiculous counterproductive that is but developers notice none of this during creation stages?

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113

This is a really good point to emphasize. If the statement from the developers is that these affixes are difficult to change after implementation, that makes it all the more important to get them right the first time. They should be taking the difficulty of changing them after the fact into consideration in the design (or re-design) process.

That also means that if they’re going to go through the process of ‘tearing the house down’ to change some like Doomed Blade and Doomed Club, they should really fix all of those similar problems at once so as not to have any reason to go through that rebuild a second time.

I would suggest scrubbing all weapons to correct any violations of these two basic rules:

For weapons that create or convert gems, the affixes should only ever create more gems of the same color, or destroy different types of gems. That seems very simple and I think the vast majority of players would agree with that because it removes the counterproductive aspects.

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114

Thank you very much for the balance changes! Easily one of the best - if not the best - patches of 2020 for me! Showing goodwill with patches like these goes a long way to re-building trust with the player base. :slight_smile:

How about following up each content patch with bugfixes and 1-3 troop changes a bit later?

If we had held off to also do the weapon update…

THE weapon update? Is that you confirming that a weapon update is, in fact, being worked on?

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115

A weapon affix should be a field in the database and should be easy to change.
If it is not then cause it has a very wrong design. Instead of the stupid shrines a major refactor could have been your savior.

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@Saltypatra is it possible to code the weapons so we have options for the weapon upgrades to turn on/off storms on them?

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@Eika unfortunately this would likely take longer as it would also include changes to the UI. Sorry. :frowning:

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Does this mean that a such change will most probably never arrive?

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I couldn’t tell you. We may make changes by toggling on and off storms, but I’d say it’s more likely that it will be altered a different way that wouldn’t mean more UI elements or adjustments. I would hazard a guess to say it’s more likely to happen through reworking or balance changes.

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120

This was NOT fixed.

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121

This balance pass has made Carnex unbearable. I see him in every single defense team now.

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123

so here’s a funny bug I just found: Venoxia still shows up in the troop filter list if you select “increase skill points” from the drop-down, even though she hasn’t had that ability for nearly two years! Obviously not a super-high priority, but @Jeto if you want to pass this on to the devs, they might want to audit/update any other troops that have been totally revamped, and improve their process for checking those values in the future :roll_eyes:

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