What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
Using 1 medal of anu 20% mana start + 1 badge of anu 5% = 25%
Instead i only get 20%
Even when you go through start animations, you can see medal then badge showing up but it doesnt add up.
From screenshots, testing pvp defense so both teams should have 25% mana start.
Merchant prince: 8 mana, starts with 1 mana instead of 2.
Dawnbringer: 20 mana, starts with 4 (20/5=4), instead of 5 (20/4=5).
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Everytime
Steps to make it happen again
Add 1 medal and 1 badge of anu.
Starting Mana never stacks with another mana bonus.
Also wenn you have a troop with 50% starting mana, it wont get an additional mana bonus.
“Works as designed”
I already knew that troops that already have starting mana doesnt get the medal bonus, but i had no idea that mana medals wouldnt stack. After all all other skill medals stack…
The trouble is it’s not documented anywhere, players just know it.
The general rules in GoW are that stats are arranged in tiers. The tiers are:
Common: HP, Armor
Rare: Attack
Ultra-Rare: Magic
Mythic: Mana
From there, the rules seem to be:
Common stats are handed out really often and tend to stack. It takes so much HP to be a reasonable bonus there’s no harm.
Attack, the rare stat, doesn’t tend to be handed out as much and doesn’t stack. For many reasons, even small attack bonuses can amplify very fast (We have 2 events per month where a 9x or higher multiplier is easily obtainable!)
Magic, the UR stat, is only tweaked in very conservative ways. It doesn’t tend to stack or even be multiplied much. I know of one troop that uses Magic * 2.
Mana bonuses are even less common than Magic bonuses, and tend to require you to take actions to get them. We get a lot more “match these gems to get bonus mana” than “free mana”. I can’t think of any evidence of mana bonuses stacking.
But these aren’t “rules” so much as “I’ve played for 2 years and this is consistent with how they tend to work”. For all I know next year they’ll release a troop that breaks one of the rules.
