While we’re on a nerf discussion let’s nerf void portal. His defense is too high in arena and I cannot one shot him with my Dawnbringer. That is all. Thank you.
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I’m sorry that the team to counter the team that everybody is crying about isn’t your preferred race and doesn’t come from your favorite kingdom. Are the mana colors they use okay, though?
Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel.
4 Likes
I despise Burger King waffles!
Another counter, Great Maw + Mercy.
Another counter, Dragons: Dragonguard Hero (Crescendo), TDS, Elemaugrim, Draco’s 1337. Drain their attack and magic. Not sure about Hero weapon yet but you get the gist.
Inconceivable. How dare you suggest that anything can counter Ubastet!?
1 Like
I’ve been waiting over a year for a nerf on peasant and there’s no sign of it happening.
Anyway, ubastet isn’t as bad as some make out. His mana cost could be a bit higher and possibly the wrong type but as already stated, he is only an issue because of divine ishbaala.
Besides, if there was to be a nerf then how am I suppose to do pet rescue runs in about 4 minutes? 
9 Likes
I know right 
it is against the norm to suggest counter troops than to cry for nerf.
I’m sure everyone have a degree of problem with divine teams but I do have decent win rate against them with the Great Maw deck.
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The last half of my stream yesterday was dedicated to hunting down divine teams, mostly with Ubastet.
(joke team I was still winning with)
I’m seeing a lot of suggestions to take up a defensive position and try to make their attacks survivable. That is a bad idea because the setup generally uses troops that can chain into Ubastet for total damage in the hundreds, so you are still going to die. Most people that aren’t attempting to counter just try to race with exploders that don’t deal immediately lethal damage. Also a bad idea. You need control, particularly fast control, and focused lethal damage or loop-friendly disable if you are attacking with a team that takes longer to kill them. The team is particularly skull-weak, but most reliable skull spam starts slower than they do.
So is Ubastet “balanced” in terms of power? Nope. Does it need to be nerfed? No - at least not for this reason. In terms of power, Ubastet is closer to being “balanced” than troops like Gargantaur and War, or even post-match-trait-nerf Ketras. Things in the raw damage role need to be exceptional to even be usable, because dropping the turn without lethal damage is often a death sentence. Aside from his immediate lethality (he does, in fact, occasionally one-shot endgame stat troops from full and take another with them, just not when you have an extra +16 to +24 points of bulk from using a full divines team), which can be solved by a slightly lower boost ratio (or something easier to counter, like a slightly higher one that counts only allies). Divine synergies put him in a position unfortunately where he is good enough where his raw power, lethal setup, and real time speed can make him at the top in terms of both power and speed, leading to a situation where most people that are able to are just playing divine mirrors in PvP because “countering” the team is not 100% reliable and it is half as fast and you have to think about your moves and you probably already have your divine team selected. This isn’t healthy for the game for a number of reasons.
Honestly, we mostly just need better tools on other setups. Divine half mana accelerator probably came out too early, and divines are one of the only troop types where you can have a homogenous team type (something that is being pushed hard as of late for whatever reason) with high synergy, raw power, and has a half mana start. But the others really should have had more tools a long time ago, before divines got them. And it might take us a long time to get there from now. And I am starting to see an overcentralization on defense teams that I haven’t seen since back when Kraken was broken. A little bit of starting speed on anything you can use to hard counter (and more hard counters, not junk like Vargoullie) this would go a long way toward making it less prevalent.
tl;dr: Hes “overpowered”, but not by much, and not in a way that can’t be worked around. Could have slightly less opening shot damage maybe. The divines troop type is itself is starting to see some overcentralization, and for that we need hard counters definitely, better tools including half mana starts for other team types absolutely.
12 Likes
The struggle is real…
I’ve been waiting for a rework to the gnolls for over two years already and nothing happened also…
You have to throw up a barrier to party/or weakest troop to counter Ubastet. I don’t remember if you can silence him but that’s worth considering. Perhaps a trait that resists instant kill is needed.
50% starting mana+Dawnbringer usually barriers team before he can cast.
If you build a standalone team, or one without Ishbaala, I feel like it’s roughly on the same power level as Infernus. It functions much like Runic Blade in Arena in that you cannot get a guaranteed kill shot (vs. high-level opponents) unless you’ve softened them first. If you can activate Ubastet turn 2, you will almost always wait until turn 3 or 4 before activating it.
A turn 2-3 Ubastet is a serious wound to your team, but a waste of 22 mana for the opponent. At that phase of the game it just can’t reliably double-kill. If the enemy is able to hit you hard with something like Dawnbringer, Infernus, or even a single-target sniper early, you’re going to lose 2 troops. The thing is, on the Divines team, losing 2 troops isn’t as severe a handicap as on others. I was often left with Infernus and Dawnbringer. Or Ishbaala and Infernus. The worst possible configuration was Ubastet/Infernus with low mana, because it was really unlikely I could fill them before the opponent started another round of major damage. The teams that most reliably destroyed me were Ubastet/Famine based. If I got 1-2 punched by Ubastet then Famine the game was over, there was no way for me to recover. Overall, I feel like I lost more games to Famine teams while I had Ubastet. (I think this is why Lord Ember felt more successful: it can dig me out of a Locust Swarm.)
I sort of see in each update that the devs are kind of “done” with PvP, or that their goals are not the same as the players. There are 2 “modes” for playing GoW right now:
- Grinding is how you play when accumulating some resource is more important than anything else.
- Struggling is how you play when you want wins to be associated with teambuilding and skill and rewards are less relevant.
Explore has been the traitstone grind for ages. You don’t design “interesting” teams for it, you find something with huge AoE and try to figure out hot to get that online ASAP so you maximize traitstones per hour. If anyone wishes Explore took more work and more thinking, those threads are getting buried. Arena has a hint of grindiness to it: that’s why people fought so hard to keep Dawnbringer on offense.
Guild Wars and all new modes have been “struggles”. The first sign is sigils: since you can’t play infinity battles you are motivated to figure out how to optimize every individual match. Goofing off a round costs a ton of resources. Many of these modes limit your team in some way: GW does it passively by offering score bonuses but new modes explicitly limit your teams. So you have to think pretty hard about your team, since you don’t get to experiment. And you play each game more carefully and slowly because losses matter.
I think PvP is far more “grind” than “struggle”. You get points, trophies, and other rewards for winning. It takes more time to build a purpose-bulit team to beat an opponent than it does to eat a loss and keep moving. Thus, most people have 1 main PvP team and some sub-teams for specific matchups, and their goal is to change teams as little as possible.
Ubastet is very good for a grindy PvP. It helps matches end faster, win or lose. It’s not so good for a “struggle” PvP, because there are limited answers even if you can field resources with no limits. But I think since PvP is far more “grindy” than “struggle” these days, I can’t bring myself to demand an Ubastet nerf.
Ubastet is also very good for the “struggle” modes, though Pet Rescue is the only applicable one so far. It can function as a very powerful sniper, and from the Divines angle there are plenty of ways to feed it. I bet for a ton of players, “I got Ubastet” was the first week they could finish Pet Rescues reliably. That matters, and is the reason mythic troops exist. How often do we complain that a mythic has no impact?
I don’t think we can get a “struggle” based PvP mode as is. Sigils are important to struggles, because they make losses matter. Team limitations are important to struggles, because they can deny powerful synergies. I don’t think players want either of those in PvP, especially since it’s dropping ingots.
So based on that, I reckon nerfing Ubastet/Divines such that PvP becomes a “struggle” again will impact the game roughly as much as if AoE damage from Sunbird/Rowanne/Tesla/etc. were nerfed to cap at about 18. Does Explore farming sound fun if there’s no way to win in 2-3 moves? That’s what ingot farming with the called-for nerfs will be like. I don’t think the devs intend to get to that place at all.
2 Likes
Whenever I fight/use Ubastet…
Soft kitty, warm kitty, giant ball of fur.
Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, KILL. KILL. KILL.
7 Likes
Ubastet is broken, of course, but the problem is larger than one troop. Having a full team of overpowered mythics half-charged to start is insane. Ishbaala compounds the problem. Divine Protector compounds the problem. Infernus compounds it further. But unless it cuts into the devs’ bottom line, it isn’t getting changed. This is now a highly monetized game, and they will do what continues to make them money. Generally speaking, that involves keeping the player base happy, but not always.
There are no real counters. Suppose you run into one of the now extremely common overpowered teams consisting of Divine Protector (or Dawnbringer, take your pick), Ubastet, Infernus, and Ishbaala.
If you use Mercy and Maw, as I do, you are at the mercy (no pun intended) of the starting board. Nothing there? Good luck. However, EVEN IF you can charge Maw before any of the enemies can cast, who do you target? There’s no good option. If Dawnbringer casts, you now have ~160 less health on your team and the entire enemy team is protected. If Infernus casts, you will be looped to death by his not-so-modest AoE damage. if Ishbaala casts, you will be looped to death as she’s both a skull generator and a self-feeder. If Ubastet casts, two troops are either dead (or very close to it). It is still extraordinarily easy to lose even with a successful preemptive devour of an enemy.
There is a solution, but the devs don’t want anything to do with it because it makes the game less monetized. If we limited the number of mythic troops (or weapons) on a team, it might be a start. Hell, we could assign each tier a point value and limit the total number of points allowed on a team. This would mean that two mythics might mean you only have two or three cards on your team.
I don’t think it will ever happen because I don’t think there’s enough concern to actually do anything about it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - the broken troops and combinations in this game aren’t fixed until they are replaced with troops and combinations equally more broken. They only shift problems - they don’t actually solve them.
1 Like
They do fix problems, they’re just really slow and hesitant to make changes. At 3.5 patch update, they nerfed the effect of the Doomstorm, essentially slowing it down enough to go from accidental easy win button to just easy win button.
Famine, Nyx, Kraken, Guild Guardians, Trolls (a litle) etc.
Unfortunately, they break thngs a little faster than they fix things, especially with this accelerated troop release schedule.
Limiting the number of mythics on a team doesn’t even matter, because most Mythics don’t do anything when combined together. They end up being too slow to do anything.
Mana acceleration is what breaks a team (with Mana denial acting in a similar function), which is also why Maw/Mercy even works in the first place.
Imo the change that needs to happen to balance this game.
Change infernus from divine/elemental…
To Elemental/Construct
Change Ubastet from divine/rashka
To Rashka/Mystic
5 Likes
I guess my question in response to this is, “Do we want it fixed?”
Imagine a PvP where you lose at least 50% of the time, and the matches take 2-3 minutes of strategic play. People with 65% win rates are legends.
In terms of gameplay, this is a GoW that makes many people very happy. I’m not going to focus on whether this game mode is good or bad in terms of play.
But go look at your ingots, trophies, and PvP points. Divide them by 6. That’s your new score in the GoW that is ideal. Do you like the number? We’d need to dramatically rebalance the economy to accomodate this GoW too.
This isn’t as easy as “delete these troops and the game’s better”. For every person who wants a very slow, strategic GoW I promise you there’s a person that likes getting 6-9 trophies per minute. It only seems simple if you ignore that other people like playing the game differently. (That also means it’s not as simple as “tough cookies”, we need a game mode that’s slow and strategic, with sensible rewards, too. I happen to like both ideas.)
I have to admit, Ubastet makes me 
Unless you have a team with high health, or a health gaining mechanic, he is often devastating.
Also he seems to be giving me a dirty look.
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