So my second troop got slammed for 270 worth of damage… From one cast. 
Do y’all test anything prior to release or do you just try to figure out ways to reduce our ability to make LT?
I want to quit doing the delve but I’ve invested so many gems into it already that I simply can’t quit. So it’s more torture than fun. I wonder how many of your long time players feel the exact same way outside of this one of many shitty Faction Assaults.
This is kind of the problem. They know you aren’t going to stop paying gems. You knew what you were in for before you paid, and you did it anyway. So no matter how many angry posts you make on the forum, they’re going to call your bluff. You can’t stop because you’d lose status if you stopped. They know you value that status. So long as they believe you are bluffing, they are never going to ask you for less. Only more.
I’m not making fun of you or condescending. But I am pointing out so long as you are a player committed to being competitive, they have leverage over you and your complaints lack teeth. You will do what they ask, even if you don’t like it. They get to define what “competitive” requires, and their wager is you’ll take a lot more abuse before you give up.
(I’ve seen games where this isn’t true. In those games, changes to competitive parts of the game are communicated by devs in advance, and those features are designed with strong feedback from competitive players. Often, new features are used in the game in a non-competitive way and gradually introduced to the competition. These games are games where the players and the devs have very good relationships with each other.
Gems of War is not that. The devs have installed Salty to be a layer between Us and Them. Blame for anything unpleasant is shifted to elsewhere: WordPress, 505, Sony, Apple, etc. New features are not developed with player feedback, they are simply released and we are told to deal. If feedback is really bad, the feature is updated, but this is always portrayed “as a favor” and something we should be thankful for.
So I’m saying don’t expect treatment like this is the former. It seems like GoW worked that way many years ago, but now the situation is very different.)
ouch, im sorry for your position @awryan …
one business model is taking care of old customers
the longer they are as a customer, the better the treatment
other business model is abusing old customer and attracting new customer…
i hope GoW is not the second type
The Delves have become more and more onerous in general, necessitating the need for players to tackle them completely in the opening weekend or, for all intents and purposes, forfeit the hope of every completing them with an all faction team later. The resource sink can be appalling. The time sink can be even worse. Even with amped up potion purchases and kingdom hoard bonuses, it often just boils down a lucky RNG crapshoot that allows a player to squeeze by or an unlucky RNG crapshoot that impedes them.
Two very simple changes could make a huge difference in the drudgery.
First, the devs could allow potion purchases on normal daily Delve attempts. I am not entirely certain why they have not instituted this. This would still amount to a huge resource sink for the players but allow them to tackle the Delves at their convenience. Players would still have to use gems to buy potions but would not have to cram everything into a single weekend.
Second, the devs could allow the a Hero to be used on a Delve teams and count towards all faction status.
I would love to see both instituted but could live comfortably if either came to fruition, Daily potion purchases would reduce the time fatigue having to finish everything in the opening weekend. Hero counting towards all faction status would not really cut down on time but would definitely help with the frustration level of beating your head against a Level 500 team with, often questionable, faction troops. It would also probably save on some resources as well.
This is so true that I needed to quote it for emphasis.
I don’t think they’ll ever let the hero be an option for a faction run. It’s just too powerful a troop and will honestly make faction runs a joke. Mang, Yasmine’s Pride, Trickster’s Shot, etc pretty much make any faction battle a cakewalk.
Yeah, it makes a lot more sense to me that they will allow any troop from the Faction’s Kingdoms - for the all-faction teams.
Hero’s less powerful if s/he only counts while using the faction’s weapon 
I also wanted to see faction mythics released that would be permissible but—alas—the devs went in another direction. Who knows if they’ll ever give the idea a chance
I go back and forth on whether or not faction mythics would be a good idea. It would be nice to target ones you want at any time, but I dread what the drop rates would be, and the resulting increase in demand for chaos shards.
the more complicated they make a system, the worse the player benefits are. in this case, I don’t see an upside to adding mythics to factions
I do agree it could go either way.
If done right, I think it would be awesome (and would even make the chaos shards in the new tasks actually useful).
But it could also be done very, very wrong and make a lot of people upset as their collections get gated or getting to 2500 in a faction becomes a joke or something else I haven’t even considered
I think it’s really unfair to release faction after faction knowing full well that if players don’t have the gems and time required to complete during the 3 day release phase then thats pretty much it. I simply can’t suffer the torture that some people endure in order to do all 500 in a one day event. No other event is remotely as exasperating as delve, or as onerous in terms of commitment time wise. I just don’t understand why they’ve made it so unpleasant and lengthy. I would love to see a stream of any dev or publisher doing all 500 in a one day event…and coming out of it in a state other than one of frazzled bewilderment and fatigue.
I totally agree about the timesink that delves are. I was just thinking about this yesterday actually, that if it wasn’t for delves then GoW would still be an only 20-30 minutes a day game.
We complain but I suspect the devs are generally satisfied with the current difficulty of delves. If they weren’t they could have implemented simpler solutions by now. They already shot down the idea of improving treasure rarity in the soulforge. Same with a guild guardian type system for chaos shards. They could up treasure XP and lower the cost but there’s no indication they want to do that.
The only real help we get for regular delves right now is from Kingdom levels. That’s likely where future assistance is going to come from. With writs being introduced, I bet they’re going to raise the Kingdom level limit in the future and add more horde bonuses there.
so… let’s suggest that players can buy potion outside of events, for gems, cheaper maybe because they can only use it for that specific faction and for a day only. I think this might be a good solution for the fatique
Heck for the first few tiers I’d pay cash for a week of the potions. They make farming a delve so much smoother.
Daily potions might be a way to solve this. Combined with 2x25% faction boost and perhaps a medal or 2, it could get the job done. This would give players the option of saving gems if they prefer this choice rather than spending a stack of gems and A FULL DAY trying to blitz a 1 day faction event (soul destroying in the extreme). We should be able to tackle ALL factions at our own pace and not feel pressured to spend everything on 1 or 3 day events. Last time I checked, P1 on xbox for new faction had a score of 11 million!!! Why, when others had the job done for less than 2M? Sometimes I feel we just wreck it for ourselves by rewarding the companies economic “gun to the head” when it comes to delving. If people spend such ludicrous amounts of gems to attain a score that high then those of us with less spending power are truly screwed.
I superstitiously don’t like daily things, it’s hard to mentally value them. But if Explosion+Enchant were $10 for 7 days, that’s a tempting at least once-a-month purchase for me. It’s fun to play with potions. I actually really hate doing Delves without them, it feels slow and clunky.
It took me 7 attempts at level 500 pure faction to win, and that’s with having the pet partially leveled (I did a pure faction run at around 300). My Kingdom level for Stormheim is 13, so I was only missing the additional 25% faction hoard stats, but I was using uh… quite a lot of potions of power, at minimum 5 for a bonus of 35 to all stats, and 106 hoard level.
Getting through the first set of rooms was easy, I very rarely lost a troop. I used two Medal of Nyshas and one Medal of Cedric (the cleanse actually helped quite a bit). I actually did more damage than the enemy, but they had vastly more health and armor than me.
I also ascended Frostfire Wraith fully because he was my front line. I appreciate the Ice Armor trait for the 60% skull damage reduction. I was stealing something like 80-90 life with his ability, but the enemy was stealing close to 120, so I constantly had to use his ability whenever I could. The only thing I really wanted to do was cast Frostfire Troll to fill up Frostfire King, but it backfired so many times, not giving me loops and instead setting up matches for the enemy.
In my first 6 attempts, I basically got down to my last troop and simply didn’t have enough health/armor to keep going. Once my front line was gone, it was very easy for them to kill off my remaining troops, because their health/armor was so much higher, their required number of casts to kill me versus me killing them was very disproportional, so that by the time I even got through their armor, I was already missing a troop.
Some of the nitpicks of this pure faction team are basically this:
All in all, I like the troops, I think they’re really fun, but yes, as awryan noted, it was another delve where I reached level 500 and set out to do the pure faction with all my necessary stat increases (pet, hoard level, kingdom bonuses, faction bonuses, etc.) and simply couldn’t win because I didn’t have enough stats from potions of gem spending and luck.
This faction is purely a race to steal life before they can. Only potions or a colossal horde investment in daily delves give any hope of success. Same old story and a 33% increased requirement in the minimum number of reqd matches to boot. Delves are an exercise in sadistic torture that DEMAND resource and or significant cash investment. I can’t wait until the last faction is released…maybe we will have time to experiment and have some fun again.
