this Video WTF
These are always such interesting threads. You could build an army with how many Straw Men they conjure.
No matter what, when someone says, “I think this thing should be nerfed”, there are a lot of people who show up to say, “Ah, but you can counter it with THIS.” That’s good. I like it.
But it’s not always “end of discussion” that there exists a counter. I felt like there were counters for the Ubastet divines team and that it was fine. Part of that was I enjoyed how fast it was on offense. But it got nerfed, and we moved on. Now I have fast offensive teams and I agree, it’s nice that Divines is “oh, this team” instead of “not again”.
Divines were nerfed because the people who wanted it nerfed made the argument that always justifies a nerf well. The logical counters for this team are still so heavily influenced by luck they need something else to be viable. You can’t prove that on paper very often. The counter-team often looks really effective, but when you play the game you find out it just doesn’t get there for whatever reason.
So if you’re walking in here to say “Stun and Dispel, problem solved”, let us see the bottom of your feet and your cute little cheeks as you turn around and walk back out. We already know that. Our argument is far beyond “L&D has no counter”, you’re just late to the party and don’t know what we were doing before you arrived with your wisdom.
My argument rests on a lot but it comes down to, in my experience:
- Khorvash-focused teams don’t perform well unless you have a little luck. If the L&D hero is back in slot 3 and you can’t engineer enough lucky 4/5 matches to stun it, you’re hosed.
- Obsidius-focused teams with Doomskulls are don’t perform well unless you have a little luck. You can apply the stun and dispel more regularly here, but if the RNG dictates the skulls won’t play in your favor you’re hosed.
Anyone who says, “Well MY Obsidius team is winning 99%” without posting their team is a liar. Want to change my mind? Post your team. That’s an argument, in the sense of “some facts intended to support a conclusion”.
Want to insinuate I’m some kind of loser because I’m not going to go devote extra time to building and testing the team myself? Buddy, that’s ad hominem territory. Think long and hard about your, “I spend more time on video games than you” argument before you start inching towards your conclusion, OK?
That’s where I sit. If you aren’t arguing against, “The Counters to Life and Death are too few and too inconsistent to be satisfying for proper game balance.”, you’re the participant in a discussion that ended more than a week ago. Present consistent counters or you’re a parrot spamming up the thread. Or present proposals for the kinds of troops that might counter it. Or present nerf proposals. Or go find a thread that makes you happy and post in that instead!
1 Like
I’m just in the camp of “ask for a nerf—careful what you wish for.”
Is Life and Death too strong? Yeah, l think so. Just like spider/bandit/and-other spawn-on-death defenses are too strong.
BUT l don’t think l want that to mean the things get nerfed, because it might mean l get an overcorrection that makes the troop worthless—Dragon’s Eye is pretty terrible nowadays.
What l’d rather do is wait a while to see if the problem persists, and counter it as best l can for now. If the problem doesn’t persist, it’s probably because appropriate counters have shown up—if we had more troops who were effective dispellers or curse-appliers, for instance, l think L+D would be less of a problem, especially if paired with a stunner. So too would we be in a better place if we had more troops like Divinia to play around with—cleanse is powerful, but few troops who can do it can be as versatile as a divine/dragon-board-exploding-healer.
Then again, if l could trust that a nerf were done well, l’d be all for it. I just don’t know if l would agree with what the devs definition of “well” is, nor am l sure that what l would prefer (less life stolen, because this is, to me, what really makes the weapon such s tank-y threat) would be a solution that would please everyone else in the playerbase (like the people who want the death marks or the bless removed, for instance).
4 Likes
I agree with your take on nerfing. As has been mentioned, the primary issue with weapons like Life and Death and Rope Dart comes from PvP grief and, specifically, Guild Wars. In my experience, PvP does have more diversity now than in the past. Yes, teams using Rope Dart and L+D are both quite common but so are a few other teams. An argument can be made that these weapons are a blight because of the teams surrounding them. However, the same argument can be made for Essence of Evil, Orb of Winter, some of the Doomed weapons and even Flammifer. When placed on the correct team, with the plethora of Empowered gem changers, many of these weapons fall into the grief category. The beauty of PvP is they can be avoided if you really don’t want to face them. I would even support a mechanism by the developers to curtail how often these teams show up in you PvP opponent choice. I would much rather see that than an outright nerf.
That leads to a conversation where they cannot be avoided - GW. I despise seeing them in GW as much as anyone but I hate to see nerfing due to frustrations over an event that happens once every four weeks. Some of these weapons are really useful (and enjoyable) to use in other facets of the game like Delves, ToD, Raid, and Invasion. I agree some of them are overpowered but Dragons Eye is a template of how a nerf can go totally sideways.
Again, I would rather see a solution where these weapons can be more easily avoided rather than see them nerfed.
Now if you want to talk about those Empowered gem converters…
3 Likes
I’m gonna call this argument “United States healthcare” because it goes something like this.
“Yes, I agree {thing} is bad. But I’m doing OK for myself. When things change, they might get better, or they might get worse. {Thing} is complicated and we don’t fully understand the consequences of the change. So let’s just leave it alone and be proud we have {thing} at all, because if we try to make it better I might lose what I have.”
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I think that’s a pretty gross mischaracterization of my argument, and l think you’re smart enough to know it.
(I also don’t appreciate the implied ad hominem that would paint me as the heartless brute who would be ruled by the mantra “l’ve got mine, so screw the rest,” because l don’t think it’s a fair characterization. But I’ll let it Slyde, even though I’d be lying of l didn’t admit that it hurt my feelings 
)
To be on topic—
We DO have assessments and accurate means of prognostication to pretty well establish what changes to healthcare (or even good ol’ L+D) would do. We could be wrong, sure—but that’s not a reason not to implement a good plan, which is what you’re erroneously suggesting l’m saying.
The reason l’m not saying what you say I’m saying is: What we don’t know in the event of a change to L+D is what the change would be before it’s made. If we did, we could, with a reasonable amount of certainty, know what the change would lead to, and at that point quibble about whether the planned change is a good one or not.
The healthcare argument is fallacious because it’s not analagous—we WOULD know what the proposal is before any changes were made, and then debate the finer points before voting for implementation. A change to L+D would have no such process, and we would be stuck with the result regardless of whether we liked it, or the hidden process taken to achieve it.
I’m concerned about asking for a nerf of L+D (or any other card, really) because I don’t know what I’d be asking for. I can’t read the bill while it’s in committee or on the floor for debate like l can with healthcare. I can’t call my congressperson if l don’t like the bill like l can with healthcare.
In other words: I know what I’m getting when it comes to proposed changes to healthcare well enough to give it a shot, but l don’t in the case of nerfs, and this is true even if we want to squabble about my not being omniscient enough to foresee every possible consequence of any plan. Because, with healthcare, l voted for the person who’s plan l liked, which l considered to the best of my ability and, with a nerf, l got a shot in the dark.
/rant
Personal, off-topic stuff:
And l know you’d have no way to know this, so I’ll forgive what l assume to be unintentional callousness, but l’m a cancer survivor with a very high chance of recurrence (I have MEN-1, with an incredibly rare occurrence of medullary cancer in my immediate family history, meaning it’s well within the realm of possibility that l inherited good odds of someday growing a pretty deadly tumor). I have already lost family members, my spleen, my thymus, three-and-a-half of my four parathyroids, and three quarters of my pancreas to the disease.
I’ll be off my parents’ insurance in 6 months, and l’ve been unable to secure my own thus far, despite trying. I am intimately aware that our current healthcare system in this country is deeply flawed, and I consistently vote for people l hope will change the system to benefit those currently being failed.
It didn’t feel good to witness a very real plight to so many used as a ploy to score points in an argument over a video game.
4 Likes
Nerf them all… let God sort them out.
(God is probably OP too… Better nerf him or her as well.)
I’ll steer clear of stretching the analogy because it’s obviously painful to you. I’m sorry about that, I didn’t anticipate that outcome, and if I’d have known it’d be hurtful rather than “approaching hyperbolic” I’d have avoided the reference entirely.
But I still see doing nothing as a choice. We saw this once in GoW history, and there are some weird human things going on here.
Once, Divines were the only meta team. You were around, right? There was a lot of strong discussion about nerfing them. But since they were the only meta, people worried the game would be too boring without it. So they were left alone.
Now let’s think about that. We knew what the game was like before Divines. It was successful, and everyone liked it. But after they existed, people behaved as if they forgot that and considered “going back” to be a negative thing. People are not rational beings.
Anyway, Ubastet was an obvious bad idea in this scenario but arrived anyway. Everyone pointed out how if practically any of the proposed Divine nerfs had been made, Ubastet would have been fine. Instead he made it worse, and Divines ascended from not just “the only meta team” to “the only point of the game”. And in this environment we still kept getting more stuff like Divine Protector and Flammifer that made it even stronger.
Ubastet was bad because we did nothing about Divines. The parts of “do nothing” we couldn’t see turned out to be very problematic. In response, many troops and mechanics were nerfed. We got the “scary decision” anyway, after all!
I think this is a weird psychological inversion gamers have. You wrote a large post about the potential scary consequences of nerfing L&D. But those consequences are well-known: think about the game before L&D. Was GoW fun then? If not, was it because you weren’t fighting L&D, or was it due to something else?
You argue for the safety of leaving L&D as-is. But we’ve played this game before. If GoW were not scheduled to get new troops and mechanics constantly, then “do nothing” would be safe. But any update and any patch could potentially introduce things that make L&D even worse. And by and large, since updates trend towards adding power to the game, it’s historically likely this will happen. And when it does happen, the nerfs will be of the “fast, knee-jerk, far-reaching change” variety, not the “careful, contemplative” variety.
Really the best assault on my analogy is also an argument against your stance: people’s lives aren’t on the line in GoW, so it’s not as risky to make changes and see what happens. It’s also “easy”, compared to my analogy, to change a thing multiple times in GoW to watch the impact.
So I think the worst outcome of a nerf is L&D becomes less prominent and the world goes back to “Double Lust is the most annoying team, also sometimes Guardian Crown”. That’s not terrible. But I think the worst outcome of doing nothing is, “Something else that interacts with this L&D team makes it more powerful and we shift to a single-team meta until it’s so bad the devs see it in their metrics, panic, and make a large-scale nerf to deal with it decisively.”
Historical facts:
- The sky did not fall when Dragon’s Eye was nerfed amid protests.
- The sky fell when Ubastet was released amid protests.
- I hurt your feelings and I’m sorry.
2 Likes
I do think “Nerf now to avoid a worse nerf later” would be a good reason to give it a shot. 
I think all these empowered troops gets people out of their comfort zone and forces them to use troops they are not comfortable with. Me included but I have accepted it in wars. In pvp I just retreat. No skin off my back. 9 out of every 10 battles on switch is Flam Yao so at least on Xbox we have hard Def but it’s not same one every time
It’s really about getting creative 
When a copy-paste player uses an OP meta with no effort towards strategy and knowledge of the game mechanics, this takes something away from the game itself. I’m not bothered by Rope Dart, but Life and Death is a gift to mediocre and lazy players imo.