I still insist it’s only the first Ubastet cast that hurts me if I’m doing poorly. The second hurts.
Maybe if you’re abusing the same broken Divine team that you’re facing. A “regular” attack team for those who may have been playing a while but don’t blow money on loot boxes - say, the Maw team - will have around 80-90 health. IK might be the highest at 31 attack. The rest is under 30.
Keep in mind that is with leveled kingdoms. I am in a casual guild, so I don’t have those massive benefits. I do not have a full team of matching classes, so I also do not have those matching benefits. The constant barrage of +X Divine Protector, Ubastet, Infernus, and Ishbaala is bad enough. The only variety is the placement of Ubastet and, rarely, the choice of weapon. That’s a team of two clearly broken troops, one borderline broken troop, and one very powerful troop with a trait that breaks everything. The average health on this team is probably 110, and the average attack is probably in the high 30s. Ishbaala gives them 40 or more free mana to start. Nothing even comes close to that. The fact that you can beat it is irrelevant - the deck is very heavily stacked against you. I have survived an Ubastet attack exactly once with my team, and I’m at 1075 or so.
The current meta is cancerous and rather clearly represents an all-time low for this game. The dev team has made it quite clear that they don’t care.
This is EXACTLY the problem with the F2P/P2W model - it severely damages the enjoyment and fairness of the game for the sake of money. I’d rather pay 30 bucks for a game with balance and fair progression than spend any money on a game that would rather create new currencies than address glaring problems.
Sometimes the weapon is not a matter of choice, many people skip the tier shops in general and missed the Divine Protector. The Raid/Invasion weapons were all lackluster and boring, one of the reasons why i gave up on the game a month ago, so "no one"¹ was expecting Divine Protector.
¹:By “no one” i mean that considering the number of users of this forums checking on the spoilers woldn’t be a reasonable number of people aware of Divine Protector’s release and impact.
I went through the numbers further up and we figured out, with endgame bonuses, Divines can reasonably tank an early Ubastet and probably many other mythic teams.
Last week I was trying new things for variety and had about the same win rate with Doomskulls, non-Ubastet Divines, and even my old TDS-based team (especially if I upgraded it to use Divinia.) Keep in mind “about the same win rate” means I’m happy with 75%-85%. I think, in a healthy game, you shouldn’t expect much higher win rate.
Some of the things you say are true. Ubastet/Divines are too prominent. This isn’t a very healthy meta. I think Ubastet’s Divine teams are too consistent at winning, but admit that makes farming ingots and a handful of other things like pet rescue less tedious.
Other things you say aren’t quite so true and come from a place of anger. Such as “the dev team has made it quite clear that they don’t care”. Divines were part of the Q&A last night, and the devs said they were “looking into it”, particularly the 50% start from Ishbaala.
Yes, that is non-committal and not a promise of any particular fix. But I also respect that this is a very difficult situation for them to fix.
Divines is at least some players’ favorite team. Infernus has been “the best mythic” for as long as I’ve played. Ishbaala/Infernus has been “the ideal combo” since Ishbaala released. We were griping about Divines a little before Ubastet, but it definitely acted as the straw that broke the camel’s back. But one thing of note: when the straw breaks the camel’s back sometimes it’s not the fault of that one straw. The problem is that someone let so much straw accumulate BEFORE, and didn’t do something with it.
What I mean is no matter what the devs do to nerf Divines, there is likely to be a violent player reaction. It sounds like they don’t want to nerf it at all, and hope to address it by making “more Ishbaalas”. Even if that widens the field, it’s going to tick a lot of people off. Anything they do is going to make a lot of people mad.
So I think, right now, they’re content to let “releasing Ubastet” be what people are mad at. They want to carefully choose how they are going to address Ubastet, so they have a measure of how mad they make how many people before they do it. That means slow, careful thought. I welcome forethought. This game has a lack of it.
I’m not angry. I’m frustrated. What I don’t understand is how the devs continue to make if not the exact same then very similar mistakes over and over if it’s not intentional.
The issue has largely been ignored, and when it’s not the proposed “solutions” are either exacerbating the problem or doing nothing to address this. You acknowledge this.
They’ve created a monster. Lots of people paid for their easy buttons, and they’ll get upset if they are taken away. The solution is NOT to add more easy buttons - that’s how the game got continually dumbed down to the point of being a chain of broken troops and mechanics. If they truly had forethought, they’d avoid making this mistake over and over.
My contention for quite a while now has been that they DO have forethought, and they use it primarily to drive profits. The ability to spend lots of money on troops directly (or through that most evil of inventions, the loot box) is what drives this. It is not (or should not) be a part of any game that spending money - real money - confers a significant in-game advantage. That is an enormous black mark on the gaming industry.
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I mean, this is a gatcha game. People who spend money will have advantages over those who don’t by the very nature of the genre. Lootboxes are more of a problem when they enter a genre they do not belong in.
I do think Ubastet is a problem though. Slypenslyde’s math does not convince me otherwise, as all it seems to prove is that all but end-game players face instant death. It is not a balanced troop if you need end-game stats before just being able to survive.
I would compare him to Wulfgarok as their spells are fairly similar.
WulfGarok: Wargare/Beast
Deal [Magic+2] damage to an enemy, boosted by Wargare allies [x4], if the enemy dies, devour a random enemy.
Ubastet: Divine/Raksha
Deal [Magic+2] damage to the two weakest enemies, boosted by all ally and enemy atk [4:1], if one of the enemies dies, kill the other.
The main differences between these two are the raw damage inflicted, and the insta-kill effect. Both of these guys are double-killers if you cannot survive the hit from them. But Wulfgarok is technically better as he can kill your strongest unit at random rather than your weakest, and gains their stats; but can be countered by any team immune to devour.
Let’s put a pin on that though because we really need to go over how likely each is to make their kill, before we can decide which double-kill effect is truly better.
So, who has better optimal damage output? Using Slypenslyde’s numbers for mid-game with guild bonuses we get…
Wulfgarok: 4 Wargare for x4 bonus, and 15 magic, +5 magic for his trait comes out to… 36 Damage.
Ubastet: 127 total attack 4:1, x2 for both teams, 14 magic, +1 magic and attack per turn from it’s trait. 81 Damage x 2 targets, for a turn 2 cast, if no other ally units are Raska. (My numbers came out a bit differently from Slypenslyde’s. I assume he did not count the +1 magic per turn from Ubastet’s trait)
Mana Cost:
Wulfgarok: 22
Ubastet: 11 (first cast, with Ishbaala) 22 after
Coming back to the auto-kill then, if you are a player who can be double-killed by Wulfgarok, even just raw damage output from Ubastet would double-kill you.
If you are strong enough to survive either, then Wulfgarok does 36 total damage, while Ubastet does 162 total damage. That is 4.5x the damage, at half the cost for the first cast and for the same mana cost by default. There is just no way to look at those numbers and think that is at all balanced.
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This is a valid analysis and I think Ubastet, more than any troop, scales very badly the more endgamier you get. I think we’re all more used to troops that get deadiler as you get stronger, not vice versa.
And yes, I didn’t count the +1 magic per turn because that makes things get very complicated very fast. Baked into my analysis is my experience that if I’m not “decisively winning” with an Ubastet team by about turn 8, I’m probably not going to win. I didn’t consider an all-Raksha team because I think mana acceleration via Infernus/Ishbaala makes Ubastet so fast there is no comparison.
Something I found out the hard way: Nobend can significantly derail Ubastet by dropping your team’s attack to 0. I’ve also had some bad encounters with Entangle teams. Anything that saps Attack away causes major problems for Ubastet. He also gets weaker as the match goes on. One of my saddest losses was that Goblins team: I had a choice between Ubastet and Dawnbringer and decided Ubastet would be lethal without doing the math. The opponent had one goblin and my attack was 0. Ubastet did less than Dawnbringer and I lost.
That statement is just false. All damage dealing troops get outscaled by hp/armor in the same sense Ubastet is. Attack and Magic gains are comparable and mostly get outperformed by hp/armor gains.
He basically scales with the attack stat similar to how basic AoE damage dealers(best scaling basic damage type) scale with the magic stat, and he also scales with the magic stat at the same time. He also happens to have a huge headstart from the absurd amount of damage he starts with and focusing that damage on two targets compared to AoE damage dealers makes it even more potent.
Technically he scales by 4 x average attack(2 x average attack x 2 targets), and in addition with 2 x Magic with huge focused damage to boot no AoE troop has to offer. AoE troops for the most part only scale by 4 x Magic. So if anything Ubastet is among the few if not the single best scaling damage dealing troop in the game.
wow all that and he still doesnt one shot my troops most the time…i think he needs to be buffed!
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As i said previously, every troop or effect that preys on progress (or buffs of sort) is dangerous for balance.
But the difference is easy to be surpassed, a single skull hit, or even some random splash damage usually leaves any troop in the “danger zone”. @Jainus already pointed this out. I don’t have Divine Protector for example, but using a simple Elder Bow is “usually” enough to mark a troop to die and drag a friend into the grave, even if Attack is outscaled by Armor and Health during the course of a battle “Ubs” boost remains until some troop is killed, and if it was an enemy, or two, you already have a huge advantage.
Health and Armor have this “insufferable tendency” to get reduced, (
) while attack tends to remain the same outside some very specific situations. Basicaly 90% of what usually happens in a battle helps “Ubs”.
Dunno why you quote me, i wasn’t arguing against your position.
While i personally don’t think a Ubastet nerf on its own will solve anything at this point, i do think he is significantly stronger than he should be.
I was merely pointing out that Ubastet is not scaling worse than other damage dealers at all, but the opposite if anything.
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Ubastet does get stronger as you do, and scales upwards with both your team’s strength and the enemy’s team’s strength. It’s not so much that Ubastet doesn’t scale upwards, but that Armor/Life combined scale up faster than ATK does, so there ends up eventually being a point where they do finally catch up with Ubastet’s damage output, and that point appears to be approaching end-game content.
The question on whether it is overpowered should not be “Is it possible for the top players in the game to survive a single turn-two cast of this spell?” but rather “Should a single troop be able to cast a spell on turn two which is guaranteed to instantly double-kill for 80% of players?”
I feel like the whole idea of whether or not the incredible damage output for minimal mana cost is fair keeps being put aside in favor of a discussion on whether it’s possible to survive it at max bonuses, when in actuality the fact that it requires you to get close to maximum bonuses just to survive is the problem.
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I was just trying to build my point a little more, i would have quoted Jainus too, but his post was waaaaay upwards so i just mentioned him.
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I don’t really care to bicker the nuance, I’d rather grind PvP.
You don’t need to nerf anything! Instead create counter troops! Take a look at these troops that can counter Mythics or goblins.
New Imp Elemental troops:
ICY Will shoot an arrow to freeze an enemy troop for 1 + MS (Magic Skill) turns.
During this time, the troop can do nothing. Will gain no
mana, cannot cast its spell, will do no damage with skull matches.
FIERY Will shoot an arrow to do 1 + MS TRUE damage for 1 + MS turns.
WINDY Will create a Tornado over the top troop for 1 + MS turns. Will do 1 + MS TRUE damage and drain 1 + MS mana to the top troop and then push it to the bottom spot. The next troop will then be taken into the tornado.
SANDY Will create a sandstone for a troop for 1 + MS turns. The sandstone will do no damage to the troop. However, there is a 100 % chance that if this troop does skull damage it will hit itself. And spells cast has a 100% chance to hit itself or an ally. Any trait ability has a 100% chance to hit its own team. Requires 24 mana to cast.
THUNDERBOLT Will throw a thunderbolt to disintegrate a troop.
A trait of this Mythic troop will reduce ALL starting mana of the enemy team to 1 mana.
AIRY Will shoot an arrow to hit a troop and will reduce all mana this troop will gain from ANY gem matches to 1 for 1 + MS turns.
THUNDERCLOUD Will cast a thunderstorm over the enemy troops doing 1 + MS damage to all troops for 1 + MS/2 turns.
MAGIC Will cast a magic shield against spells for 1 + MS turns. The Shield will reflect all spells back at the troop that cast it. The Shield goes down after being hit by a spell for the intended targets. (Acts exactly like a barrier for spells instead.)
WATERY Will cast a whirlpool at a target troop which will do 1+ MS damage for 1 + MS turns. Has a 10% chance to migrate to another troop per turn.
These NEW Imps are the perfect counter to any troop. Ubastet giving you too many problems, bring ICY along and freeze him. Too many Pesky goblins, counter with a sandstorm or a tornado or ICY. Don’t nerf troops, create counters to them instead.
9 new troops to take care of your pesky problems.
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adding more overpowered units will not fix the problem, presto. An overpowered “Counter” would just end up becoming the new meta, while an underpowered “Counter” would be so niche as to be useless. Also, a lot of the spell effects you suggest do not fit into the design of the game; ignoring the established rules of how debuffs even work (Status effects have a cumulative 10% chance to be removed each turn. They do not last a set number of turns. Having some status effects which ignore this and last a set number of turns based on the caster’s stats would be confusing), are named confusingly because there are other status effects or conditions with similar names, or are so overwhelmingly overpowered that they would become the new meta on their own.
Seriously, Sandy would dominate the game 100%. You would NEVER not use Sandy, because disabling all forms of damage from the enemy team would be a guaranteed win. So, every defense team would also use Sandy, and then no fights are ever winnable because you are both spamming sandy, avoiding casting any spells and avoiding skulls because neither of you can do anything but damage yourself.
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You have a lot of ideas, but i think you need to get more used to the game to be able to get the best out of your creativity.
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In advance, i also don’t think introducing more broken stuff to fix broken stuff is the right way.
But just as a thought experiment and to put it in perspective; the spell in question is not true but regular damage, making it deal 80ish normal damage (equally spread over 4 troops)per turn, so it would have to tick 3 turns just to surpass Ubastet’s instant activation damage while not gaining anything from further activations until it runs out. In my Divine team i could cast a yellow mythic like Ubastet or Infernus easily every 2-3 turns.
So seen over time this spell idea that appears to look bats**t insane at first glance while potentially being more manaefficient isn’t even going to outperform Ubastets damage/turn. With its spread damage it is also not going to lead to early kills, giving you much more options for ways to play against it than Ubastet.
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I stand corrected, i think the “MS True Damage” from his Fiery Will and Windy Will got stuck in my mind for some reason when looking at his other suggestions…
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Simple solution for Sandy: Use 24 mana. And you are clearly overlooking the fact that Sandy will only hit ONE troop. Sandy is also Legendary and can only be found in a Secret Kingdom.