When Lust dies, her third trait still kicks in. To me this seems like a bug. When a troop is dead, it’s third trait should also be dead.
Another example of this is the hero summoning a troop on its own death.
As an extreme example, today I cast a spell that wiped out three troops on the opposing team, leaving only the hero. Two of the troops I killed were Lust. As a result of the resulting charms, three of my own troops died. Because of this, the three troops I killed on the opposing team were replaced with 2 Sister of Shadows and a Thief. So with one cast of a spell, three enemy troops died, three of my troops died, and three enemy troops were summoned. Instead of me having 4 troops and the enemy having 1 troop, the exact opposite happened! It was actually quite funny, but I do think there is a problem.
If it didn’t work this way, it’d have to be special-cased for “When I die…” troops, like Infernal King. They wouldn’t make any sense if they didn’t trigger on death.
Also, this is part of making Thief the only viable defense troop, so it has to stay this way. Nobody likes it if you can face more than 2 different PvP teams.
This is one of the instances where I can say it is like this by design rather than “by design”. Sunbird’s entire gimmick doesn’t work unless on ally death triggers work like this.
So there’s some universal mechanic that has to be used for every single troop that has an on-death trait? I figured it would be something that can be specified on a case-by-case basis.
I’m working on a project to try and better classify/search traits, so I’m waist-deep in the data files. There are 20 used values for the activation field that controls when a trait triggers, one of them is ‘death’. (There’s a different field that tells it if it’s all deaths, ally only, etc.)
So yeah, the data files lead me to believe there is one unified “on death” code branch this walks down.
That’s not to say other aspects don’t seem hard-coded, but the “trigger” is one of the few things I feel I can consistently rely on out of the data.
I guess they could add a distinction between “when an ally dies” and “when some other ally dies” for death triggers. Queen Aurora uses something similar for her spell, she won’t buff herself, just all other allies.
They could, but winding back to this specific trait:
I think it’s reasonable. Lust is a pain of a troop to have on the other side. The trait, as written, should tell you, “I will hurt you more the longer you let me linger. Something bad happens even when I die. If you kill me first, only one bad thing will happen. If you aren’t able to kill me, you’re going to be in trouble.”
This is a pain because in GoW, “kill this specific troop”, especially slot 3, is usually slow and difficult. Our targeted snipers all have drawbacks. The teams people prefer for fast PvP hit either “first and last”, “first two”, or “weakest two”. In the first two cases, even without the Backup trait, Lust gets to trigger twice before you can even hit her in slot 3. By the time we consider summoned Bandits, it could be 8 or 9 troops killed before she is vulnerable. “Weakest two” is inconsistent: again you end up hitting more Bandits than you want and taking 4 charms instead of the desirable 1.
The proposed adjustment is a nerf, plain and simple. I don’t think Lust is strong enough to justify it.
The easiest way around her is “don’t play those matches”. I don’t care about honor. I care about resources/hour. It takes me more time to set up for and win a Lust match than to win a lower-reward match. Over an hour that means 50-100 low-reward wins gives me more than a pile of 25-30 high-reward wins and 10-15 losses.
The next-smartest approach is to have a Ketras team or some other sniper on retainer for Lust teams if you want to play 3t or bust. Set up your team slots so it’s fast to switch. A good Ketras team can usually finish off Lust pretty quick, which is how you survive. People complain about this because it’s fiddly. They don’t want to change PvP teams, they want to treat it like Explore. Lust breaks that up.
That’s not a good reason to change her. My personal wish is there were some penalty for keeping the same defense team every single week. That’d at least cause people to rotate between DE and Lust.
I suspect the pain is rather encountering multiple Lust. A single one is easy to deal with, more than one of them can make your team go *poof*, because all of them trigger for each other. I think when resolving all those charm effects, your troops killed halfway through still get to smack their neighbors, so this often gets around the “two troops with an empty space in between are safe” restriction.
I think a player should lose rewards for putting up a 4x team. Yes, that’d cost us Fire Bomb. But I think you’ll agree with me 4x Lust is just a silly exercise and not worth the time. (I’ve always felt this way about 4x Drake Rider, too.)