New trait idea to counter Bone Dragon?

easiest fix is to make barrier block all the damage that occurs in one instance. So that it would break the barrier, but not his armor. they would then be able to do damage with skulls after the cast, but it wouldn’t kill the troop through the barrier. Also you shouldn’t be able to break armor through barrier, that is retarded imo. If barrier could counter bone dragon it would go a long way to balancing things, and also skull spam teams.

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Then you are using a sub par troop on defence, which is generally a bad idea.

I really wish the game could have some kind of proving ground for ideas.
Hearthstone’s Tavern brawls can develop a meta within a day with a much larger card pool.
Path of exile has things called Leagues that run for a few months with something that drastically changes how you play the game.

The only way this argument is gonna end is with examples and results.

Barrier needs to be fixed. PERIOD.

But if you want a counter to BD how about this:

Trait: Hulk Smash
If a troops armor and life are reduced to zero in a single turn, troop is revived with +5 to all stats

If it helps you win, it’s not sub par any more.

Deep Borer was never considered a very good troop on its own, yet when you combine it with BD or Famine it can be surprisingly effective on defense, and so has joined the meta as part of the most used defense teams. Any other troop that can help gather wins (even if it’s by virtue of a single trait) can and will join the meta.

Stealing the turn sounds like an even worse and more irritating solution than Mana Shield (and its extension to impervious) was to Mab.

We don’t need to break a subset of the game to get a good counter. Rewarding getting whomped and forcibly breaking turns just sounds like another thing people will use to annoy each other on defense. Then we’ll be back here in a month complaining about that.

The entire team is pretty much useless if you pull bone dragon to the front and entangle it. Right now you need at least two troops to do that. If you want a contrived counter, how about just combine them?

Forest Lights
10 yellow/green
Ultra-Rare/ Fey
Traits: Fast, Stealthy, Agile
Pull an enemy to the front, and entangle them.

No damage, not much better than Khopeshi or Dust Devil, low enough rarity and cost for the general public to use it, and it counters bone dragon spammage in one team slot. You still have 3 team slots for damage.

I believe barrier is working as intended at present, but yes, it should also probably function like Agile does, blocking any number of simultaneous skull hits (but subsequent cascades are fair game).

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That would be perfectly reasonable, though I’m not keen to see barrier-spam become the new meta. Does anyone remember the 4x Celestasia loop? (Never again, please!)

In contrast to @KrudlerTheHorse’s video above, I posted one of Agile completely dodging a similar (but slightly less extreme) skull spam:

Agile only goes 25% of the time, so it’s not nearly as reliable as a perfect barrier would be, but barrier seems to not be as good as it should be…

I had something like happen to me even though my troops had about a third of the armor yours do. The attack and health values more than doubled if not tripled. I thought it was a glitch because I had faced the same team before and the skulls formed were much less and more like I had seen in several other games.

WRT Courage’s third trait, it is WAY over powered particularly combined with the Bone Dragon. Skull matches are relatively common in a match anyway and is a favored move of the AI to allow an increase of 3 to both attack and health. Justice has a similar trait, but requires the enemy to die to get it. The max benefit the third trait should give is add 2 to either attack or health, not 3 to both.

As it is now I will not fight a line up with 2 Courages and a Bone Dragon. Even 1 Courage and a Bone Dragon is dicey.

BTW I thought the barrier blocked all simultaneous skull matches, not just a single match. At least that is how it has appeared to me. I had seen times in which there were multiple simultaneous skull matches like with a Bone Dragon and my Winter Knight sufferred no damage because of the barrier.

A thought I just had that would help is any bonus to attack has to wait until after the present impulse is complete (after the cascade is done) so you have to wait until later in the turn or a later turn to enjoy the benefit.

Chip damage from incidentals (exploded/destroyed skulls, multi component spells) traits (death, famine) poison, burn, and skull cascades all would still drop barrier, as well as lethal damage and devour just straight ignoring it. Even without skull spam teams, at present, I can mostly ignore the presence barrier on the enemy team.

I never had trouble with team Stacy, and even being pretty low level at the time it was a “thing”. And now stuff like Dragon Cruncher and Queen Mab exist. Even so, that one was more about the near-infinite self looping having a ten gem spawn and less about the barrier. If she was put back in her pre-nerf 10 gems state even with the proposed barrier buff, you’d be able to dispatch the entire team with hilarious speed once she dropped a turn regardless of how much life they buffed to, even with barriers up. I’m still of the opinion she got a bit over-nerfed, but that is another discussion entirely.

Bone Dragon is not the problem. Fix the Double Courage Buff or Fix Barrier. Bone Dragon is not the issue.

Mab’s freeze on gem matches is far worse, as is EK True Damage to two targets being over 20 Damage.

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Please no more specific trait as ‘counters’. Mana burn resist trait was a bad idea to start with. A more generic: resist 25%/50% dmg done by spells would have make more sense to me.

Bone dragon in itself scales too well with our high level armor. Make bone dragon create a fixed amount of skulls (and still destroy all armor and gain armor if you want). This would still be a painful troop but not an instant killer.

I’ve been musing on this for some time, and sadly am coming to same conclusion that this is probably the only long term solution. Needs to be say 8 skulls so it’s strong but not a guaranteed screen-filler.

  • buffing barrier - NO. in any way done it would become too powerful and a new meta, i think barrier is fine and well balanced the way it is

  • stealing a turn - even bigger NO.

but this i like:

or the solution i offered before:

  • Trait: whenever I loose 10 or more armor - halve first enemy attack.

and i would prefer just increase bone dragon mana cost slightly if you really think he is too overpowered. personally im just playing sylvanimora and i do not mind him

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@Cell

i would love it except that its broken on the way to use that spell:

ppl would try to figure out how to make bone dragon low on magic.

any mechanic that penalises player for maxing kingdom / ascending troops should be not introduced to the game since we cannot degrade neither troop nor kingdom so it would be unfair.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t the intent that it reduce the damage from the next source of dmg, since connected skulls are a simultaneous strike and not multiple instances then it SHOULD block ALL of Bone Dragons Skulls, unless you have an outlier of 3 or 4 matched skulls that are NOT connected in which case it is up to RNGesus to determine which struck first, the mass of 35 or the small string of 3.

But in cases where EVERY skull is touching another skull, creating a single massive strike, the barrier is being ignored or the game is counting this as more than one instance which it should not. In either case, whichever is happening is the opposite of what is intended and is therefore a bug.

Again, this is my understanding of the situation, if I am mistaken, I would love a GENTLE explanation as to why I am incorrect, so I can better understand.

Thanks! :wink:

Why not buff a semi worthless mechanic? Take Hunters Mark for example. Change it so all Skull is applied to the first troop in the lineup with Hunters Mark. This would allow players “to snipe” a specific troop of their choosing. and would also work as a counter to other troops in addition to BD.

In addition Hunters Mark already has troops with immunity to it (a counter counter). And Stealthy.

imo it should block only first ‘blob’ of skulls and nothing more, not the follow up skulls. thats what im expecting it to do and thats what it does as far as i know… (however if they reworked skull damage count recently then i do not know in what way?)

and the fact that some troops have a way around the shield i find rather good. otherwise breakign shield would become too much of a struggle.

That is what it SHOULD do, unless I am completely misinterpreting here, I don’t believe anybody is suggesting that it continue to block dmg for the entire turn. But if you watch the videos around the forum of this bug, what is happening is when you have that initial BLOB with no additional outliers, it is disregarding the Barrier effect and still inflicting lethal dmg.

We WANT what you suggest. Block all dmg from initial BLOB, if that sets up a string of further matches for the AI well, darn, but at least you blocked that first insta-kill knock out punch. :wink:

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That’s because the “blob” of skulls is being counted as multiple skull matches instead of one giant match-30 or whatever.

It’s broken.

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While Bone Dragon’s skull spam is scary, there are many options already in the game to counter it. Not trait idea, but ways to counter for now.

  1. Silence or drain mana.

  2. Use Gnoll to deal heavy damage because brown mana.

  3. Use Warhound to reduce the first troop’s attack heavily.

Bone Dragon does not have Impervious, Alert or Stealthy. So we can use this advantage to do something to it.

There’s no counter to something like this:

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