When will this elf on elf violence end?! We’re better than this!
1 Like
As I recall, there have been Bounty events including Sacrificial Priest before, which acted as expected (to my delight).
It is incredibly frustrating when the developers throw logic out the window for the excuse of “game balance.” If you wanted to make Invasions balanced the least complicated way would be to exclude Elspeth from defenses entirely.
3 Likes
Elspeth cannot kill a player’s Doom (invulnerable) the same as an enemy Elspeth cannot kill an enemy Tower (invulnerable). Are we arguing she should be able to?
I mean, using the logic Kafka presents… the reason Elspeth can’t kill a Doom while Sacrifice can is because Sacrifice is being balanced around creating gems and giving magic, while Elspeth isn’t being balanced around creating gems and summoning a troop. Except that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
With Sacrifice, you create a bunch of gems, you give your allies a ton of Magic, and to balance that, you’re down a troop. With Elspeth, presumably the act of creating gems and summoning a troop isn’t powerful enough to warrant being unable to kill a Doom, but that also means half of her ability (summoning a troop) is useless. Can’t summon a troop if the first troop doesn’t die.
In other words…
Elspeth trying to kill a Doom: Create 11 Gems of a specific color. Stop. Do not summon a Knight troop. Doom is still alive.
Sacrifice killing a Doom: create a mix of 15 purple and chosen color gems. Doom dies, give (Magic/2)+1 Magic to all other allies. Doom is toast.
This seems like Elspeth is being punished, basically. You’re saying “Okay, Sacrifice is clearly powerful because he gives Magic to allies, so anything he targets HAS to die.” Whereas with Elspeth, if she acted in the same way, you’d lose your Doom and get a Knight troop.
Is that really worth it? Obviously not. No one in their right mind would put a Doom troop in a team with Elspeth. I mean, why on earth would you? There are no Doom troops from Silverglade, so you’re not getting any bonus there, you could maybe put a Doom of the same color or something so that you can create a bunch of gems right at the start of a match, but those 11 gems you’re creating are limited to the color of the Doom troop, and you can’t really plan how the board is going to look…
In other words, if Elspeth+Invulernable Doom was REALLY actually a strategy, like people were actually going “Hey, I can create 11 gems infinitely without having to kill a troop!” we’d have seen it already. Because the only thing you’re getting is an empowered troop that creates 1 gem color, and not very well. ANY other troop that actually converts specific colors to other colors is undoubtedly better, because you don’t have to run a Doom with them.
On the flip side though… it’s actually kind of interesting that Elspeth can’t kill the Doom, because now you have a source for matches for the Doom’s last trait of applying Death Mark.
So would I want Elspeth to be able to kill the Doom? No, I wouldn’t, I think when it says “Immune to Lethal Damage” it should mean just that. So… then we come to Sacrifice. Obviously the text is the same. He says Kill, she says Kill, but the coding is very different.
And the solution is simply, “Well, he’s not really killing the troop… he’s sacrificing it.” Well, as Mithran noted, Sacrificial Priest and Widow Queen do both actually kill the Doom:
That obviously means that Sacrifice is literally using the same code that those troops are using, just the wording is wrong. Now the question is…
Should Invulnerable prevent being sacrificed? Because the developers are essentially saying that there exists a third instant lethal source beyond “Kill” and “Devour” and that is Sacrifice, but it only works on your own troops, and while Impervious prevents Devour, and Invulnerable prevents Kill, nothing prevents Sacrifice.
But that just raises more questions. How is Princess Elspeth’s ability NOT a Sacrifice? I can understand that Dullahan is basically going to kill someone, and it’s either going to be your troop or the enemy troop. But Elspeth? Her ability asks for you to choose a troop, it’s a “Royal Demand” and to make way for this new Knight troop, you need to get rid of the old troop. Uh, that sounds like a sacrifice to me, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t peg Princess Elspeth as a murderer…
4 Likes
One more thing. Elspeth’s ability reads:
Create 11 Gems of a chosen Ally’s Mana Color and kill them.
Summon a Knight troop.
If you have an empty spot in your team and you use Elspeth on your Doom, she still won’t summon a Knight troop, because the Doom didn’t die, even though there is an empty spot for her to summon a troop, and her ability doesn’t say “If the Ally dies, summon a Knight troop.” The summon part is completely separate from the kill ally part, but it won’t work anyway.
6 Likes
This is too funny by far. I laughed so hard I forgot to rescue Bright Beetle (not a bug??).
1 Like
Your reasoned and valid comment is bound to be deleted by the dev who polices the Bug Reports section, for it disagrees with said dev’s stance.
Maybe move the thread to another section before she does her censorship rounds so hopefully others can benefit from your insights?
Just change the subject to feedback @igniteice.
They’ll only delete comments under “official news” or “bug reports”.
1 Like
I’ve moved the thread to the feedback section so the feedback doesn’t get lost 
2 Likes
Elspeth doesn’t summon a Knight if you attempt to kill an Allied Invulnerable, which I don’t think seems clear from her spell description (in which ‘Summon a Knight’ is a separate sentence).
While it might seem clear from an intent perspective that she’s supposed to kill a troop and replace it with something rather than being an endless source of summons, it seems like potentially an oversight from the “Oh no, Elspeth is killing Towers!” fix.
Suggested solutions:
-
Edit her spell text to something at least as clunky as Vash’Dagon’s:
- Kill an Ally, then summon a Knight if the Ally is killed [or if successful]. Create 11 Gems of one of that Ally’s Mana colors.
-
Change her spell such that a Troop is (attempted to be) summoned regardless of whether or not her target dies
- (Did she perhaps not always dispel allied Barriers, leading to this ‘IFF an ally dies’ condition?)
-
Have fun playing Invasion with an Empowered, mana-generating summoner (
probs not that bad, but eh)
Can we also please shift the ‘n’ in ‘Invulernable’ from the thread title two places to the left? 
2 Likes