She’s functionally/tactically identical (actually a little better if you like Mana Shield). Her non-functional/strategic benefit of soul generation is up to 50% slower, depending on where you are in the game and how you play. And assuming you’re not willing to change any of your teams or play style.
To call a 50% reduction in the non-functional benefit for a specific use case “blind & handcuffed” and/or the worst nerf in the game’s history… well, all I can say is I disagree.
The devs have stated that they want to see Valkyrie used less. To that end they’ve provided a carrot (revamped Necromancy with means of farming souls significantly faster, and alternative soul generating troops) and a stick (nerf to Valkyrie’s strategic benefit). Some won’t like the carrot, and some will find the stick unacceptable.
There are other means by which the devs could have pursued their stated goal; this is what they’ve chosen, and personally I doubt they did it lightly. But really… nobody ever promised that one particular team would provide X number of souls per match for all eternity.
This is an online game that changes over time, and that awesome team I love so much right now might be rendered useless by the next update or new troop. It’s happened before, and I continued to have fun. It will happen again, and I will either continue to have fun or I’ll stop playing. Hopefully long before I get to the point where I’m frothing at the mouth furious about something.
At 55 votes the consolidated standings were:
Neutral or Haven’t tried:…42%
Dislike or strongly dislike:…36%
Like or strongly like:… 22%
At 84 votes the consolidated standings were:
Neutral or Haven’t tried:…37% (-5%)
Dislike or strongly dislike:…39% (+3%)
Like or strongly like:… 24% (+2%)
At 113 votes the consolidated standings were (still):
Neutral or Haven’t tried:…37% (+0%)
Dislike or strongly dislike:…39% (+0%)
Like or strongly like:… 24% (+0%)
At 136 votes the consolidated standings were:
Neutral or Haven’t tried:…37% (+0%)
Dislike or strongly dislike:…40% (+1%)
Like or strongly like:… 23% (-1%)
At 169 votes the consolidated standings are:
Neutral or Haven’t tried:…36% (-1%)
Dislike or strongly dislike:…42% (+2%)
Like or strongly like:… 22% (-1%)
This will most likely be the last update as voting appears to have slow way down at this point. The trend remains virtually unchanged however with the Dislikes being the strongest voice followed by the Neutrals and trailing at the end with less than 1/4 of the votes, those who like the changes.
THIS! RIGHT! HERE!
You raise an important point that seems to be overlooked by many: The new distribution for Necromancy trait wasn’t aimed to please all level’s range of players, yet… We have Warlock for example that is a fairly okay troop for targetable damage that can be fed by Valkyrie’s spell. It’s not a great deal for us at higher levels but it certainly provides MORE to players that are just starting out.
So far a lot of points were made being based solely on “high horses” and as much as some would like to be “THE VOICE OF REASON” in this debate, on one side or the other of this, we (forum users) have little representativity when you take the subject on the global scale.
I think this is what @htismaqe mentioned before about his understanding of how things works, and people interpreted it wrongly as a “defeated posture”. But really, even if we don’t create nerf threads or something like that, changes will happen in the game. We can deal with it and argue, politely, about it.
Does anyone remember that Crimson Bat wasn’t supposed to gain 16 life with his spell, but after some feedback from us, in general, the devs decided to leave him this way?
Now the extra status for heroes, that was also a bug, is being studied as a future buff because it had some positive impact on our opinions as well.
So, at a certain extent we have some power to help the developers at conducting the game to o more desirable path, but we shouldn’t get bitter because the path they took is not always the best we would wish. Also, i’m not saying they will, always, make a perfect choice, but we haven’t saw the end of the path yet…
Nit: Crimson Bat’s damage was nerfed (scaled with 1/2 Magic) and the damage was turned into life steal. The feedback from us caused the devs to revert him to doing unscaled damage and to change his life gain to a flat 16, after some comments from them about how the forum-goers’ usage of Bat differed from the community at large. The change the devs had in mind would have caused the Bat to gain significantly more Life per cast, at the cost of damage throughput; ultimately this change was incorporated in the Mythic Draakulis instead.
What Sirrian said about the reasoning behind Valkyrie’s nerf was:
The quote about her “taking one for the team,” was about how she’s the most used troop in the game, by a very large margin. Good science says make a hypothesis, change one thing, evaluate the results, then repeat the whole process. This change is a first step in fixing that. Without changing something there is no way for the devs to positively identify why Valk is so overused. The forums are of limited use because those of us here are the vocal minority.
If it turns out that Valk was overused because she’s the blue transformer, these changes will have little effect. If Valk was overused because she was the best soul generator, these changes will have some effect (not a huge one, mostly due to the poor viability of many alternatives.)
I didn’t bother voting in the poll, because it doesn’t matter if I personally like the change or not; it does not change the fact that a change was needed, and the devs are making what they feel are the best changes based on the data available to them.
I don’t like the necromancy rework, because the trait’s relevance is even more dependent on the presence of a soul generator. I would have preferred if it had been changed to “Gain blah souls when an enemy dies.” This would have been useful on a much larger variety of teams, because it no longer needs a soul generator to be relevant.
The vertical scale is a little messed up because Valkyrie went down in usage… the important thing is the proportion of Valkyrie against other troops is a lot more sane than before.
Nerfing her reduced her usage. Doesnt mean it was the right thing to do. Balancing the chart for the sake of it means nothing. There were still better options.
No, actually reducing the use of over-used troops is exactly the right thing to do… overused troops make the game stale, and stale games churn players at a faster rate.
That seems like the appropriate amount of people that used Valkyrie just for souls. Now what’s left is a bigger portion of people that use her period. Thank you for posting the chart though @Sirrian. (seriously) It pretty much represents what we thought it would. Any plans to change her further? Or releasing more troops will help solve the issue even more?
I can’t tell how you’ll take this, but I know how I meant it. I just keep reading it over and over and I’ll admit it makes it sound like i’m being a smart ass. I promise i’m not.
I just mean she is still the most used troop (currently according to charts) So i’m just wondering if there are any plans to continue to pull that down?
I think she’s currently still the most used troop because (a) still good soul gain regardless, and (b) we have a lot of powerful blue legendaries in the meta right now, so I’m pretty happy with that. I think as the meta slowly evolves for some more non-blue troops we’ll see a natural change in Valkyries use.
Short answer… absolutely no plan for any further changes to Valkyrie right now.
I knew it! It would bother someone. Also i still have no mythic troops after 2 years of playing, lol. Therefore i can’t has level 20 troops.
Now that i do not have to revolve my team around valkyrie for souls my main team is faster.
Burning bones is slower than S&M redux. [quote=“Robert, post:171, topic:14368”]
but you have to use garbage troops.
[/quote]
Not rely, now we have a reason to use anti-undead counter to fight the meta with, the 4 horseman meta![quote=“htismaqe, post:183, topic:14368”]
Before the 2.0 update, you HAD TO PLAY OTHER GAME MODES TO GET MAX SOULS.
[/quote]
One point to make is, pvp=gold,arena=souls, maps=glory. Can we agree this has not changed too much?[quote=“HKdirewolf, post:187, topic:14368”]
That’s what we get for using a troop so much.
[/quote]
They thought it was a balancing issue, i like what they did, now i want to see a graph showing valk use that spans 1 month after her change. [quote=“htismaqe, post:290, topic:14368”]
1000 souls for level 12 seems REALLY light.
[/quote]
You forgot to mention that there are also some “reverberations” in the troop’s usage, while some troops like Queen Mab and C.Bat moved just one spot others had a more dramatic shift in their positions, like Mercy for example that went from 13th to 23th. And they are all sort of related to Valkyrie in some way or another.
Probably a good thing since it theorically brings more diversity to the meta.
Just out of curiosity: Is there a table with the numbers of all troops that were used in a given week?
There was a very long spell in this thread with nothing but rudeness and acrimony. I am glad it seems to have calmed down at this end.
@sirrian I think it’s far too early to judge any new graphs just yet… let’s see trends settle… the meaningful data will come from the thousands of players who are low to mid level, don’t show up swearing on this forum, and felt obliged to use valkyrie as the only available soul generator. I hope these changes gave them all more options and more fun.
