Why do they exist? I get it, they can easily be gamebreaking depending on the troop but your telling me that Roc, who gains 13 health and attack can only do it once but Luther can give 6 attack to everyone for less cost and have two open gates?
Scorpius vs Ubastet is another good example. Scorpius can insta kill the bottom two troops regardless of them IF they are already poisoned but if they aren’t, they take damage and are poisoned. That’s it. Ubastet on the other hand takes all attack (Think Tesla with shield) and attacks the weakest two and if one dies, the other dies… and isn’t a one time ability… hmm…
((Speaking of which, if Scorpius was released today, he would be divine/monster considering, if I recall, in the bright forest story, he is called a god)).
The Great Maw I can understand considering it’s guaranteed but why not change it to be a set amount of chance or have it randomly kill any troop including allies? Would make it more threatening.
Still, drifting sands has it the worst with the one time abilities (And Tasseron for some reason) but I digress. Maybe they should be removed? Or bring them back to try and stop the more OP troops dominating the meta.
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They are victims of power creep.
A long time ago we didn’t have Infernus, Ishbaala, or a lot of other troops capable of fast multi-kills. From what I gather there weren’t even as many exploders or gem generators. Check out the timeline. The game was more than 2 years old when Mercy released.
So if we’re in a game where you can’t feasibly generate 20 mana on one turn, everything slows down. For 15 mana, Roc can dole out 20+ damage and gain 20+ life. When you don’t have to worry about Infernus that’s a pretty big deal. Look over what the game had available: not much could race a Roc. Especially since Mercy, only 2 weeks old, can suddenly turn 1 generate enough mana to fill either TGM or Roc.
So a lot of one-time-only troops were designed in those days, when the troops were NOT slow compared to the rest of the game. The restriction was meant to let them have a devastating effect but maintain balance. Today the game moves much faster and that restriction doesn’t make a lot of sense, both for the old troops and newer troops. It’s better to stay away from such flashy abilities, as you’ve suggested.
But rebalancing old troops is a pain in the butt. If the devs make them even the slightest bit worse, they have to set up the game to allow refunds. If the devs make them accidentally more powerful, everyone whines that they were fine as-is. Overall, players get more excited by new troops than rebalancing old ones. So I don’t think we’ll see these troops get rebalanced. They’re relics of a time when the game needed that restriction.
The F2P model have this “New is always better!” mentality, and that’s usually fine if the developers have some solid plan for the progression, but in GoW we see things changing much faster and sometimes… we kinda of have doubts about the consistency of some plans…
Something that grinds my gears is how some things “have the same weight but use two different measures”. The gnolls had random targeting for their spells because it can deal Triple Damage in certain conditions, but then we have some other cards that can do it without the random targeting.
But then a few years later, OH JOYFUL AND BLESSED DAY when the devs reworked the gnolls. Now their random targeting was changed for random targeting between the first or last troop. HOLY SMARGORBOASTING REWORK BATMAN!!!
Anyway, it’s best to not keep any shred of hope about reworks for old troops you may like for any particular reason, the devs claim they can’t spare working force/hours on such matters very often.
We shall see some rework for Pan’s Vale next, but aside that no compromise. I hope someone out there enjoys goats and goats derivatives.