I love this forum. You people are so helpful. I thank you all for the suggestions.
I don’t have any traits on Mercy yet @ctu1208 but I do have a traited and levelled legendary Lamia. Very much like the game flow I’m used to. Did three defends with it and won nicely with good board control and not much chance for the opponent to get those cascades.
I guess I need to quit worrying about soul farming and just win. Maybe the new TH perks will make up for it. Lol.
It the patch done yes @Sirrian. Is it done yet? i want to play 1.0.9 now. i want to i want to i want to.
Shegger’s Heart is also a good replacement option - collecting blues adds some utility
@Jainus yes it does. It works better than Lamia anyway. Lol.
@killerman3333 won’t be long now. Feels like Christmas eh? Hurry up and get here. 
A little tip about skipping battles. You should skip battles, not to pick easier fights, but to gain more gold. Your first opponent could award you 350 gold for a win, and if you skip him you can get someone who will give you 1000+ gold for a win. Paying 10 gold to have that much increase in reward is really worth it. I think my average gold gain per battle is above 1700 gold, but I can skip more then 10 opponents until I find someone who will give me 800+ gold (which gets doubled from dragon armor).
Well, I for my part have decided to avoid PvP now entirely. Treasure Hunt can compensate this. Plus I can now focus entirely on unlocking traits 
I’m mostly excited about this update, as it will bring great new features, improve some aspects of the game (mostly Heroes and Treasure Hunt) and fix some big issues (mostly for PVP).
@Sirrian: I’ve seen a couple of posts ask the question but didn’t notice an answer: will this patch bring us randomized Traitstones at the end of Arena battles as well, or will it still be only Blue & Brown?
Unsurprisingly, this is the most divisive change and it brought the most responses from both sides of the argument. I’d like to voice my opinion on this as well.
The AI Combo Breaker was the one difficulty option I truly cared for, and it’s always been a great disappointment to me that it wasn’t a separate ON/OFF setting, but that I had to stick to Normal/Easy mode to have it. I’m very disappointed that it will now be taken away from me for half of my Arena games (I don’t like the “PVP” mode, once I’m at rank 1 for the week, it ceases to exist in my world, so this won’t matter as much in my case).
The opposing team having 80 or 200 or 10,000 to all stats instead of 40 makes nowhere near as as big a difference to my gaming experience as the fact that I feel like I’m playing poker instead of a match-three video game.
I hate poker with a passion. I hate games whose outcome is primarily defined by luck and where the impact of skill is a faint notion that requires Excel spreadsheet and big theories involving terms like variance, average winrate, bad beats, ____ bias etc. I know poker very well and it’s absolutely not my cup of tea.
Similarly, I fell in love with HearthStone for all the “wrong” reasons (great UI, smooth design, cool artwork, fun heroes, troops and spells - sounds familiar? ^^) and that game eventually broke my heart when it revealed itself as what it actually was all along: “Blizzard Poker”. When the absolute top professional players in a game are pretty happy and feel lucky to average a 70% winrate over time, and the “average” pretty good (non-professional) players can count their blessings averaging around 50% (I have an average of 3.8 wins per Arena across close to 400 runs overall, and barely reach 60% with Rogue and Paladin, my two best classes - and Bliz being what they are, you must reach 7 wins per run to get even gold wise)… it means that skill has a far smaller impact than luck in the game in question. Comparatively, professional and/or very good regular DOTA2 players achieve winrates that are worlds apart from what the average casual player can ever hope to achieve, because that’s an actual game of skill, with very minimal RNG impact (just one example from another game I know very well, this is true for countless other games, of course).
Now, GoW is a hybrid game that essentially boils down to “match-three meets all the cool stuff from HS”, in my book. This is great and, along with SolForge, it’s been instrumental in my recovery from my HS addiction. I do not want GoW to ever become HS in the derogatory sense that this term now has to me.
The troops/spells/heroes part of the gameplay doesn’t involve that much RNG, with the exception of issues or glitches like True Shot and Agile, which are thankfully about to be fixed. The match-three part of the gameplay is bound to involve a fair bit of RNG by nature, of course, but it’s been mostly the right amount ever since you’ve introduced that Combo Breaker, and solely thanks to it. Before that, RNG had too much say in any game’s outcome to my taste, even though I was relatively lucky with it overall (@Archenassa fared way worse in that regard, as she experienced literal instant losses regularly before that fix). Maybe the AI Combo Breaker wasn’t the right fix and maybe the current Normal mode skews things a bit too much in the human player’s favor when it comes to cascades, but the match-three RNG we get without it just doesn’t feel right and is NOT FUN as far as I’m concerned. Forcing us to go back to it might make me lose interest in the game, honestly.
I’ve just switched to Hard for a couple of Defends I had pending, one Gobelin team and one Rock Worm team, just to remind me of why I need the Combo Breaker to enjoy this game… I had to flee both times, as the AI obliterated my pretty strong line-up with ease. The 4 Rock Worm team was especially “funny”. I went to grab myself a cup of coffee at some point and when I came back it was finally my turn, and I had one troop left, barely alive… There was Brown every where! ^^
I’d be absolutely fine with receiving less cascades and 4-match into 4-match into You Win. If the issue is that the Combo Breaker only applies to the AI (I always thought it applied to both players equally?). I’d be fine with any solution that prevents the game from being a russian roulette in match-three form, with troops and spells as very secondary background decoration. The impact of an extra turn, an extra spell or an extra attack with Skulls is too big in this game to leave primarily to chance.
Could you please either make the Combo Breaker a standalone ON/OFF option, or rework it so that it achieves what you’re aiming for with this change without discouraging players such as myself to keep playing?
Arena will give traitstones other than blue and brown.
Combo breaker only gradually turns off. It becomes hard on the 8th win battle. There are no stats buff to troops at all.
From me it’s a huge thank you to the devs for all the efforts they have made and are making so that most players can have various enjoyable playing experiences at all levels.
ALL of the improvements in 1.0.9 are looking fine and I will continue to salivate and drool over the next 12 to 14 hours waiting for its arrival.
Big hand-claps for the dev team!
Awesome! =) Looking forward to that.
[quote=“Nimhain, post:230, topic:4296”]
Combo breaker only gradually turns off. It becomes hard on the 8th win battle.[/quote]
Thanks for the info, that’s good to know and it sounds like it won’t be as bad as I feared for the Arena. So, the first 4 games will be played with the Combo Breaker, then games 5 to 7 will reintroduce more and more RNG to the match-three, and only game 8 will be played with the equivalent of the current Hard difficulty setting? This is not ideal, but I guess I can live with that.
However, for non-Arena players who share my feelings about the Combo Breaker and the match-three RNG, there will be no escape: once they reach Rank 1, every single game in PVP mode for the rest of the week will be played with the Combo Breaker fully off, right? Although this won’t impact me anywhere near as much, I feel those players’ pain.
Of course, I didn’t anticipate there would be; I was simply referring to the current Difficulty system, emphasizing the fact that the stat buff part in Warlord levels was never the scariest part: it’s having the Combo Breaker off that made those settings unappealing to me.
This makes me wonder. What if skipping battles would not be possible? I mean, instead of turning off the Combo Breaker? It sure sounds like most players indifferent to the Combo Breaker skip until they find an opponent that can be beaten easily, even with a streak of bad luck. If the aim really is to make PvP harder, shouldn’t we be stuck with whatever cards fate deals us?
I’ve got to admit, I’m definitely biased on this one. I never scout, so this change wouldn’t affect me at all, like the Combo Breaker doesn’t affect others. Weirdly enough, this was originally intended as tongue-in-cheek reply, the idea is growing on me the more I think about it though. Battles no longer cost gold, so you don’t actually lose anything. Scouting is still useful, you can adapt your team to whatever you have to fight. You can still reroll opponents until you know the team setup (e.g. by scouting), so it’s still possible to fish for juicy targets. You just can’t chicken out any longer if your opponents looks like he might have a remote chance at beating you.
I skip for bigger rewards, I don’t care what’s the enemy team. And like I said somewhere up in this post I play with combo breaked off, and it is no issue.
The are a lot dislikes regarding to this. Personaly I like the idea, but i can understand some of the arguments against it.
Idea:
You make the fights in PVP and Arena “a little harder” (some argue quite a lot harder), but you only increase the rewards for the Arena. You should increase the weekly (or daily or both) rank in PVP as well, so people will kind of rewarded for their “harder” work.
Less than 12 hours to go, people! 
Arena rewards actually seem to have been decreased on average, possibly significantly. You only get more if you still manage 8 wins each time, which is no longer supposed to happen. It’s really hard to tell the impact of the change, assuming that a good player will now drop out after 6 wins and that the souls reward still gets cut in half for each win short of 8, the net payout will be roughly half of what we got in 1.0.8. Time will tell though, they probably have some options to fine tune the results.
For 4 to 8 wins right now is 25, 50(+100%), 100(+100%, 150(+50%), 200(+25%) souls. So if 8 wins is 500 souls now that should make win 4 to 8. 62, 125, 250, 375, 500. Arena would only be “a lot” harder if end up with a bad team.
PvP don’t need increased rewards again. It was increased early when PvP battles turned to free.
Ah, right, there’s an additional 150 souls reward within the sequence. Brain out of sync, I should probably check GoW prior to posting. Except that I probably wouldn’t find time for posting if I really had access to GoW.
Well it is true that the loss isn’t a big deal if you’re awesome at Treasure Hunt. But more than that, it won’t be a big loss for normal players either.
Think of it like this:
If you start with 15 turns and get zero 4-of-a-kind (4oak) you have made 15 turns.
If you start with 15 turns, but every second turn get a 4oak, you’ve had 30 turns.
That’s a pretty simple, and easily reachable goal.
If you start with 8 turns, and get to the point where you have at least 15 turns, you’ve played well enough that you’re probably going to have a similar game than you would have had in a 15 turn start.
The difference is not “half” because you still earn extra turns in the same rate. (one extra for a 4oak and two extra for a 5oak (the one you played and the one you gain))
In reality, in a normal treasure hunt as it is now, my last 7 or 8 turns - the final turns actually disappear very quickly.
These are the turns we are losing - the last ones - not the first ones.
So play a treasure map, and don’t count all the starting turns, count how many you have once you hit “7 turns” - they are the ones you’ll lose.
You probably won’t lose more than ten, twelve, or possibly sixteen to twenty if you’re a good player.
But if you’re losing that many at that point, you’ve probably had a hundred turns up until.
I’m not about to say I’m a brilliant treasure hunter, but I’ve had games that take over an hour to play out, and my highest turn counter was (I think?) 38. I cringe to think what other people can make them do.
Treasure maps, as they are, are too long - which is why many people believe they don’t “pay” enough return for investment. Hence they go back to PVP battles and they accumulate treasure maps. Myself, I only have 88 because I smash them once I get to the 380 gems mark.
Bringing it down to 8 will save maybe fifteen minutes per game. It’s still probably too long for one game, but with extra 20% payout, it might be worth a look. The traitstones will probably turn the tide.
I’m not affiliated, but I think the idea for them is to introduce a “ladder” system (in the next patch) and then reward people for how high they rank in that ladder.
I’m not entirely pleased with this concept, I believe it will make the rich get richer. But as I said, I don’t really know the plans of the devs. Just a guess here.
