Hace unas semanas me dieron BAN al chat por decirles la verdad … no estan a la altura del juego y les importa cero lo que opinemos nosotrios los usuarios, es un desastre lo que estan haciendo con el juego y vergonzoso mas aun darle BAN a alguien que disfruta de un juego que ellos mismos estan destruyendo!
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Hey all,
Just wanted to let you know I’ve passed on a report about the PVP feedback and discussion we’ve been having here. I haven’t been able to discuss it with the team yet due to the focus being on the 8.0 release coming up very soon but I know the report has been read.
I will be on leave all next week. Because the team will be a person down you probably won’t get as frequent/lengthy responses in this thread while I’m away, but CX are still collecting your feedback while I’m not here.
When I get back and after the update releases so everyone has time to properly give this topic their full attention, I’ll make sure time is set aside to discuss the feedback you’ve all given in depth so that I can give you a status update.
Thanks for your patience and I hope you all have a great weekend and week ahead!
Enjoy your break from my wall of text posting 
Also happy 4th of July to our American friends
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I think this could or should be a post in itself, not a reply #342 in a thread which partially derailed and has feedback on very different things other than the pvp rework.
Just like a calendar we, the players, can look into to see who’s available or not.
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As someone who waited 6 months for a response from devs, and with the attention they give to any of our feedback, does it really matter? Really it just means that the next bug in players favour might go unnoticed for more than a day due to them being short staffed.
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In other words we will collect all your feedback for the team to totally disregard you.
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Got it in 1 
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This is an interesting and good approach! I already had a similar thought.
PvP on the right is the Hardcorde mode, where everything is allowed and where the most points are awarded.
PvP in the middle is a mode where certain particularly strong units are left out Stella/Magic Wand possibly also Zuul.
PvP on the left would then be the “old” PvP mode, where teams have no heroes, the supposedly easiest one with fewer points.
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Exactly. No one should have a problem with this…unless the whole reason is people want the best rewards…
The best rewards with 0 effort. That’s what the people calling for nerfs want since the hard battles can be won it just takes more than one shot
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That’s a gross generalization and just plain wrong, sorry!
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Long post incoming, but this is what happens when I want to stand my ground on a few points but didn’t feel like hitting the Submit button immediately.
Slippery slope argument? Yes, it is obviously useful to look to the horizon and monitor overall trends over time, but you do not let that blind you to immediate problems.
In contrast, I don’t pursue leaderboards, full event reward ladder completion (most of which entails four-digit Gem expenditure for the necessary extra sigils), or other “endgamer concerns”. If I’m playing GoW more than an hour per day that’s already too much, and if that makes our respective priorities / outlooks non-comparable, then so be it.
Wand and Elementalist aside, a combination that is OP in one mode will tend to prove just as (if not more) OP in almost every other mode too. Example: before the Pathfinder nerf, I farmed Court of Foxes to Lv.500 using a team of just Todd and 3x Persistence. With considerably less difficulty than any other factions I’ve farmed up to Lv.500 (Emperinazaar, Hall of Guardians, Silver Necropolis – bonus point if you can spot the pattern). The simple fact that this stupid team centered around just one Epic-tier Troop could beat some of the highest-level PVE content in the game with barely a challenge WAS the problem, despite it not impacting any other players.
Otherwise, the sole downside of me not engaging PVP is it’s extremely rare for me to encounter a wild Pet Gnome, thus my Pets are relatively under-leveled (which is actually the #2 bottleneck to me grinding out Kingdom Power progression).
You do not. know that.
Just because I’m averse to PVP as a mode doesn’t mean I have zero experience constructing counter teams, and I’ve definitely enjoyed assembling a few from time to time to take down a specific opposing team, whatever its position in “the meta”. I just don’t do it “for a living”, shall we say.
It’s one thing to get beaten into defeat over the course of 5-10 turns, you can typically spot your mistakes and devise a strategy to do better. (For one, I rarely employ Empowered troops.) It is radically different to face an opposing team that just up and deletes your party the moment you fail to get an Extra Turn (which was especially more frustrating in GW due to your limited # of attempts per day). I may have said this before but chess wouldn’t be an icon of strategic depth if every game ended by 3 turns. (And at the opposite end, the Tic-Tac-Toe meta is literally undefeatable, to such point that “the only winning move is not to play.”)
Back before the Dungeon rework, I did have the occasional wipe when, say, Mercy charges up Eternal Gaard’s Avatar before I can crack its Armor any, resulting in an instant TPK when he casts (and that was just a Lv.40 cpu team, not the Lv.200+ that we have now). Even today, I still sometimes get unlucky against King Gloomleaf’s Lifesteal and have to just walk away and restart. (Naturally, my team’s actual stats are higher over time so it’s less likely to occur now than then, but still.)
They did say that currently, PVP is a major focus being spread across several updates, yes.
You cannot claim that, but to be fair this “report” is an internal communications that we just do not have visibility into, and the sheer latency incurred between design and development and testing and release (just compare any large open source software project) makes it difficult to draw ANY clear causal connections between ANY feedback and ANY implemented idea. Quickest potential example: we complained about Dragonite being exclusive to the RNG of the Boss Dungeon, now we at least have (a) Dragonite Gnomes, (b) Underspire Diamantina, (c) Wandering Merchants, (d) occasional scheduled rewards (Campaigns, etc), (e) occasional Exalted Chests. Can we say this is related? Maybe not, but can we confirm it being NOT related? No, either.
I concur. There really is a HUGE array of content in the game, but it tends to divide sharply between one-and-done (introductory Kingdom Quests, etc) and endlessly rotating … stuff.
The “balance” argument is a dear one to me. Some teams will handily beat other teams (through various means), that is intentional, and for the most part it encourages variety – also intentional. But it should be impossible for there to exist That One Team To Rule Them All, a combination that (like the “Tic-Tac-Toe meta”) handily defeats EVERYTHING with no counter.
But when Wand and Stellarix (and/or Takshasa) already provide this (and previously, Chalcedony & friends), how much difference is actually left? You cannot truly balance a recurring benefit with a one-time acquisition/unlock cost, at least when said acquisition is permanent.
It would be lovely if we could get some more-specifics, but I understand there is a thin line between details and “spoilers” and you’re not strictly part of the decision-makers directing the project.
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It’s a really good thing that there isn’t any “That One Team To Rule Them All, a combination that (like the “Tic-Tac-Toe meta”) handily defeats EVERYTHING with no counter.”
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This is so true. And FYI Stella and Wand only loops crazy like that in the hands of the AI. My own Stella and Wand team is not nearly as powerful when I play with it.
It is also precisely for this reason that multiple team slots will be so handy - let’s say at least 5 team slots per Region. Perhaps 10 for Central…so I can change up teams fast. Heck Devs if you want to make money sell some team slots. (For warcoins not for an arm and a leg $$)
And yes I know I can save teams and copy and paste but that takes time and is especially inconvenient when playing on mobile.
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This! I honestly don’t understand why that’s happening, why AI has so fantastic luck with looping. It’s not just Stella or Wand, this applies to ALL loopers. It applied to Journey pathfinders. It applies to King Gob, to Queen Bee, and all troops & weapons that create gems with the potential to keep the loop going. On a yellow citadel wars day, I was looped to death (it took 5 minutes) by Doomed Spear and Sister Superior, by an enemy with a 12k-ish worth of team score and hit for 30 damage on each cast (my team score was 20k+)… The AI just didn’t give up a turn for 5 minutes, until my entire team was gone.
I second multiple team slots per region too (and assigned to restrictions, not to region - look into the pet rescue code, where teams are saved, depending on the enemy type, it is possible. I bet 99% of players take Stella & Wand to PvP where allowed because it’s the most powerful team they have, and it takes too long to switch teams with the copy-paste method. Mobile is annoying, but I shudder to think what people on consoles go through when it comes to team-building/team-creating. It’s enough to experience what I do while playing on Steam Deck from time to time, I can’t imagine dealing with this every single day.
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Since being removed its become clear to me that wand was the problem not stellarix.
And building off what others just said, ai definitely has some shady stuff going on with their rng.
More proof is its amazing how prismatic orb, which makes 8 gems, gets 4 matches so much for the ai. But…thanks to there not being bless freeze stops it
Sure, I hear The Gray King is a good answer because it cannot fail to hit Wand or Stella, and Silence+Mana Drain is a potent combination … but you still kind of have to be the one casting first. Aaaaaand it would be a better “counter” if you weren’t already pairing it with Wand of Stars yourself. (insert “I use the X to defeat the X” meme here)
As for me, since everyone likes to put Wand of Stars first, I imagine Gimlet Storm-Brew and Savage Hunter in first position would be able to one-shot it (so long as it isn’t Barriered or Blessed) and there goes your main problem.
And I want to actually research this, but it’s going to take a lot of time and (very carefully notated) data and stress and whatnot. Anyone interested in helping?
For starters, we already KNOW for a fact (and this means an actual fact, not “For A Fact™”) that the RNG has certain biases. For example:
- When there’s no more moves and the board gets shuffled, the shuffler guarantees that (a) at least one move is possible, (b) no matches immediately occur. Similarly, the initial board drop (and emergency reset) also guarantee at least one move is available, but no automatic matches.
(This is what truly makes Potions of Explosion useful, because as new Gems fall in matches can occur automatically, granting the player some Mana on turn 1.) - Golem type troops (e.g. “Explode a Gem; inflict Y on a random Troop for every X”) use a non-independent RNG. This guarantees that the effect (which is typically non-stackable) can always be confirmed to affect the exact number of targets counted. (Though this could get interesting if we had a Bleed version of a Golem spell, as Bleed does stack)
Yeah, we all suspected this to be true ever since Stella arrived on the scene to show everyone exactly what the Wand can really support.
Anyway, as long as “nerfs” are part of the discussion here’s a hot take: Let’s nerf Wand of Stars, Stellarix (and also Takshasa) WITHOUT actually nerfing them specifically. Super simple, really:
- Change Wildcards from a multiplier bonus (x2, x3, x4) to an additive bonus (+2, +3, +4).
- Eliminate the base Mana gain from Elemental and Umbral Stars, i.e. the only Mana they generate is from the other Gems destroyed.
Consider that Wildcards don’t generate any Mana by themselves, and they’re generally more likely to form matches of 3 Gems (generating 2x2 ~ 2x4 Mana per match currently; or as proposed, 2+2 ~ 2+4 Mana per match). …and I’ll confess I never particularly liked Wildcards to begin with, since they’re still eligible for a Mana Surge (edit: or are they? I forget…).
And remember that Wand typically gets placed in first position, so if at least 4 Elemental Stars pop upon cast that’s a minimum of 16 four-color Mana (plus whatever else gets affected) and that’s how the Wand notoriously gets to recharge instantly and cast again.
Pretty sure I read somewhere that wild card matches CANNOT trigger a mana surge.
AI seems to prefer mana generation (Thrall) over damage dealers (Zuul or any other damage dealer in the team; same with Wand, actually). It also seems to favour bless/cleanse whenever possible (Sister Superior - even if there’s no status effect on any troop - if it’s full, AI will cast it). It will quite often forego skull matches, especially 4-matches IF one of the skulls in the line-up is a doomed/über skull. AI will also cast Greed over and over in a gold-farming team, if Greed is placed on first slot in the team (even if it makes no sense).
Is there a way we can track this / try to work out RNG/AI quirks without recording and re-watching hours and hours of video? I noticed a lot of the above while running autoplay in Explore (some things are not easy to notice at x4), but I don’t run autoplay to watch AI play my teams (usually pretty badly and inefficiently), I run it so that I can do other things in between getting the next battle going.
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You said:
I said:
Because, there is no team that handily defeats EVERYTHING with no counter.
- There is a whole lot of real-estate between being defeated ALWAYS and being defeated never.
Before the recent temporary change, my win-rate against teams with any combo of stella/tak/wand and/or elementalist was consistently 87%. When I did a quick average of everyone in my ladders, the average win rate (against whatever they were fighting) was also 87%. So either we are all getting wins against these combos or people are also losing to other combos or both.
- There is a whole lot of real-estate between never (no counter) and always.
There are a number of different teams that will roll an enemy team quite often if they get “first cast.” This works whether the team is played by the player or the AI. The advantage goes to the player because we get first turn. But yes, even having the proper counters does not guarantee you a win. One could argue that ALL looping teams are a potential pain to deal with, because of this.
I’m going to go back to my original question.
Because this really does not seem to be a “this combo crushes everything” - problem. And if progression in this game is meant to be completely and totally irrelevant, I’d like the devs to say so. Because, if I’m supposed to be able to do everything, regardless of my stats, my collection or play experience, I’m going to have to reevaluate my investments in the game, be that time or be that $.
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Buffs can be better
But since it’s not possible in this universe, let’s nerf (remove) Takshaka from PvP too 