I crunched some numbers yesterday and surprised myself. I don’t have the exact digits around, but let’s talk about what Ubastet can really do. I think a “problem” here is there’s no way to really understand what players at different levels are facing.
For simplicity, I treated Ubastet as an “above average” mythic troop and considered how it performs vs. a mirrored team with troops that have about 10% of its stats. This made the math easier for me and meant I didn’t have to look up a lot of different numbers.
So first I considered a newbie with no real guild bonuses, no leveled kingdoms, etc. I think this is a dumb profile to consider but the guy on reddit was screaming this is where he’s facing nonstop Ubastets. At this level, a turn 1 Ubastet can double-kill anything that isn’t roughly its own power level: it survives itself with roughly 5 HP remaining. I agree Ubastet is broken at this level, but I sincerely doubt the players in this tier have Divines teams and that the matchmaking algorithm places them vs. each other.
At a higher “player has leveled all kingdoms” level, Ubastet is still dangerous. This adds 22 armor/HP to each troop and about 10-12 damage to Ubastet. It can one-shot fewer things, but the survivors still have less than 15-20 HP so it’s a serious hit. If we assume it’s paired with practically any AoE troop I’d argue by turn 3 or 4 it’s a double kill for sure. Still, at this level, I do not think players with fully-powered Divine teams are common, nor do I think the matchmaker should be pitting players without one against them.
Once I accounted for guild bonuses and 5-star stats, things got more reasonable. Now 44 total armor/HP are added, but Ubastet’s damage is only up by about 23-25. The troops that survive a turn 1 hit tend to have 30-35 HP and might even be able to survive an Infernus followup. I feel like this is the level where Ubastet is “hard”, not “broken”. I also think this is the level where I’m not surprised players might have a Divines team and players without one will have to match them.
Then I considered my own teams with my stat bonuses. An early-game Ubastet hits me hard, but my weakest troops have enough HP left to also survive an Infernus cast. More realistically, the losing games go like this with the CPU getting lots of free turns:
- Ishbaala fills and casts, I take a couple of skull hits.
- Infernus fills and casts, I take severe damage and at least 2 troops are in Ubastet kill range.
- Ubastet fills and casts, taking out 2 of my troops.
This sometimes leaves me with “only” Infernus and Dawnbringer. I still win about 50% of the time.
Let’s get out of paragraph mode and make some bullet points for my opinions:
- Ubastet in the hands of a newbie is a Death Star. Without endgame stat bonuses and troops there is no hope.
- Early midgamers also face a hopeless challenge.
- Endgame teams with sufficient defense stats should be able to weather all but the worst-case Ubastet scenarios, but it is extremely dangerous.
- Divines is a team that requires two mythics and a legendary, fully traited, to function at its base level.
- That is “an endgame team”. Newbies or early midgamers should not be facing it frequently in PvP, and if they are it’s a matchmaking bug.
Ubastet’s attack scales a little bit faster than Atk/4. When you combine HP and Armor, the game scales bonuses more than 4x as high as it scales Atk. So the more stat bonuses you’ve accumulated from Kingdom Power and other sources, the more Ubastet shifts from “broken” to “dangerous”.
I don’t care about the newbie, early, and early midgame levels. I think if a player at those levels gets EITHER Infernus or Ubastet they’re going to slay everyone else at their level. Getting BOTH is extremely lucky. I don’t think players with that kind of luck should be PvP matches for people who didn’t.
I don’t care about the endgame level. I play at this level and I feel we have a different problem: there’s no reason NOT to use one of the 5 or 6 Divines configurations. They all play out a little differently but I don’t care. PvP is fast and grindy, and I only lose to Ubastet when it gets the Christmasland scenarios and kills my troops before I can cast Infernus the first time. I see it as a Time Attack and luck is a big factor.
I now care about the “late midgame level”. I think people at this level are very likely to have the full Divines team or be very close. There’s not a good reason for me to say people without it shouldn’t be matched vs. people with it at this level: people without likely have some other mythic/legendary team with similar team power. But due to how Ubastet’s offense scales, these players aren’t always powerful enough to brush off the first Ubastet hit.
If Ubastet is nerfed, I think the most appropriate change will be to adjust the Attack boost factor. Changing it to 6:1 or 8:1 might make it more fair, and I think at the endgame level it won’t have a severe impact on Ubastet’s utility.
Another consideration: as-is, Ubastet is EXACTLY the kind of troop that could warrant a “can only be cast once” limitation. Since it has a trait that self-buffs per turn, it still has utility even after the cast. The Great Maw is “cast only once” for “kill one troop”, I think it’s fine if we limit Ubastet, which is “Deal a lot of damage and conditionally kill one.”
I stress again: philosophically speaking *this is the impact I think a mythic troop should have". It’s a very exciting troop. I want the devs to make more troops close to this power level, not fewer. But overall, it is a problem that we can jam several of these onto a team when they synergize. Some day it might be a good idea to cap teams to 1 mythic. I think we need a few more varieties of Ubastet before that’s a great idea.
i found the way to win