I called this a few weeks ago and have been using a Dragon’s Eye PvP defense team to help hasten its demise. People get mad when they have to face the defense a lot. It won’t change if people aren’t mad.
But it’s a tough change. It’s a beloved strategy vs. the current batch of “ridiculously scaled” enemies in Delve and even Tower of Doom. It’s a way for people who don’t yet have “all of the mythics/legendaries associated with this week’s event” to participate. I value that, even if I don’t use it. I like things that help midgamers get to keep pace with endgamers.
But the defense teams I’ve faced with DE can be extraordinarily frustrating to lose to. It’s not just that they shut you down, it’s that they don’t have much damage output so it’s a very slow loss. I’m going to explain the frustrating ones, feel free to use this as your defense. The more of these there are the sooner we’ll get a solution.
Slot 1 hero is possible. In this approach, “barrier on brown” along with the anti-magic whatever keeps it pretty healthy. We’re talking Titan class, so it starts with 50% mana and is often going to transform one of your guys on turn 2. Apothecary’s a good mana generator, though some Empowered troops like Siren are capable of fueling that very early hit. Bonus: all the brown generation keeps the hero perma-barriered. Slot 3 is a bit of a mixup, troops with 4/5 match effects are a pretty good deal there. Finally, you want Ubastet, who is good at assassinating baby dragons and will eat the brown mana you feed it.
I played this on offense in PvP for a couple of weeks and I feel like it was as consistent as Divines.
The Slot 2 approach for hero gives you a different entertaining option. For this, you want a class that summons Bandits and a way to auto-barrier. I don’t remember exactly what class that is, but I swear I’ve fought it. Here’s how that match went:
- I want to hit the hero and kill it ASAP so it can’t transform my troops. But it’s barriered, I’ll have to settle for killing slot 1 so I can add skull damage to my mix.
- I kill slot 1, and a bandit is summoned. I’ve got a transformed troop.
- I kill slot 1 again. A bandit is immediately summoned in its place.
- I kill slot 1 again and finally get some damage in. Then slot 3 dies by attrition and a bandit is summoned again…
These matches go on and on and on and on. They aren’t fun.
When I set one of these as my defense team when I first realized how stupid they were, I woke up to find out that, overnight, I had gone 0-23 on defense. I don’t know what the heck happened because that never happened again, but it was impressive. Since then, I’ve noticed it seems to run better-than-50% on defense and I’ve never seen that out of any defense team.
The main downside of the defense is it’s very reliant on your hero class having specific traits, if you’re thinking of leveling a different class its effectiveness will tank. I think this also makes it very hard to convince people the weapon is a menace: if I fight a DE team that doesn’t have the auto-barriers or heavy summons, I don’t even blink before I win.
I don’t know a good way to nerf it. I think it should stay as offensively powerful, but on defense have some kind of reduction in its rate. This was easier to imagine for “Dawnbringer in Arena” because that’s a pretty narrow context and people don’t even know if you fight their team. Doing it for “all game modes” is tricky because it heavily impacts PvP and even GW strategies.
There’ll be a ton of “I can beat it, it’s fine” arguments but it really comes down to a simple fact about GoW players: they are lazy and don’t like to have to rotate their PvP team between a couple of choices. This is always a big part of people hating very specific defense teams, they want to continuously grind PvP and lose “fairly” at a very small rate. Add a team that shows up about 30% of the time and beats them consistently, and they want a nerf even if there’s some specific counter.