I would have to agree with this sentiment of the RNG the AI always seems to have. Perhaps instead of everyone blaming Stella, Wand and Elementalist the real issue we should have been lookibg at is how the AI in particular is able to win so fast with all 3 combined. I saw a few days ago someone say how whenever they cast Wand they get an extra turn rarely and when the AI casts it almost every time gets an extra turn.
I always assumed I just always managed to pick the wrong Wand spell, but an entire screen can be yellow and putple and I cast want and don’t even get a match 3. Ive said before how mnay times I have lost a full team to the AI with just Wand left. Just infinitely casts getting skulls until I am wiped. However, I can say my Wand casts net me an extra turn maybe 3/10 times? Its why I always try to avoid using it in Bracket 1 GW. It cost me pretty much every loss I had when I would cast, not get an extra turn, but set up the AI with nothing but 4 and 5 matches all over the board.
Nope, just observation.
As annoying as the wand is, I can’t object to coding that gives AI slight advantage on matches. After all humans play better than AI anyways. So it’s a minimal tilt. We can’t expect to be undefeated forever. A 5% loss rate isn’t a big deal to me. Although I’ve racked up over 150 wins in a row vs (old) Stella teams.
Additionally AI had me in many matches where all they had to do was take the skull match or cast Stella for the win. But it decided to keep looping the wand instead allowing me to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
I admit the AI makes some very weird decisions on what it is casting or when sometimes, but thatvdoesnt discount they also make the best out of nothing consistently. I mean a 3 match always seems to end in multiple match 4s falling from off board or skulls falling off the board 2 or 3 in a row
If it was only 5%, I wouldn’t be complaining. But it was racking up to 20-30% of fights (if not more, especially in blood frenzy area) against it at times. 4-5 losses due to weird AI luck in a row. This is poor gaming experience I’d rather avoid, if I can.
8.0 will change everything. But what will stay is -5% player base and PvP will most likely make less sense then before because the people who produce the game have no clue how the player use the product. So enjoy the last 2 years.
I hope it works out well.
5% is just about statistic error in that case lol
especially given summer time when most of sane persons are taking trips/rest instead of farming pvp and protesting pvp changes
I’m starting to record some actual data about this, though I am still only in the “prototyping” stage. But of my first ten casts (Chalcedony with +10 total Gem creation, oh and one Todd at +8 Gem creation) I’ve received an extra turn about 50% of the time, and when not, an extra turn is left on the board for the cpu 50% of that time.
…Yes, I know it’s pointless to attempt any real analysis at this stage, especially with much of my initial data being “noisy” (e.g. Gargoyle / Ghost Gems limiting the effective board layout), but if I don’t have an update by 1,000 samples later send help. (hehe)
[link] for anyone curious of what my logging looks like – yes, it’s verbose but for a reason (so I can correlate the various factors later).
I was 10% losses (with most of those due to bad rng.) every week with hundreds of battles agaisnt old stellarix teams. If you have the counters and were losing 20-30% of your battles then with all due respect you are not very good at this game
With all due respect, losing after taking ONE match-3 because nothing else is available on the board, and then watching AI kill everyone to death, has nothing to do with skill.
That part is not skill i agree. Ive always said that they rig the ai. But there are ways to mitigate that. Spell monolith keeps stellarix from one shotting you is a big one. And I already shared the teams.
I do about 300-400 battles a week, sometimes 500. I always had a 90% win rate.
Unless you are doing a lot more blood frenzy battles than me? Then i could understand 20-30%
It doesn’t have to be Stellarix to cause such a bad run. Taking this week’s restrictions as an example, if your start-of-turn freeze hits the wrong troop (this is down to RNG luck, not your skill), in Divine region, Takshaka can still fill itself and chomp your troops in a loop of 3-4 casts (same in the yellow region). 99% of my losses in any area look like this: I take one move, AI takes over, game over 1-2-5 minutes later.
Im using this on divines
If you use spell monolith ai takshaka needs at least 2 usually 3 hits to kill you.
Without a wand on their team they have no way to get rid of freeze and aurora undoes the damage they did while getting your takshakas filled
I have 100 battles in divines without a single loss this week
All my losses were due to the ridiculous rng the ai gets, mostly due to skull spam with diamantina. I agree that the ai gets better rng than we do, that its rigged. But…as i said theres ways to mitigate even that. You remove as many advantages as you can. The tools are there. Those 15 losses i took i probably could have salvaged half of them, but i just retreat and dont waste my time if it goes sideways early.
What is an acceptable number of losses to you? Im perfectly fine with 10% out of 100s of battles when they are seconds long and dont penalize you.
Thats what i dont get. I feel like the people are on the nerf side of the argument want zero losses.
I’m not calling for a nerf.
And to me, this is not about a specific number or % of losses - some losses are inevitable. This is about poor/bad gaming experience of facing the 
side of RNG/AI luck over, and over, and over again, without a chance to take a move to counter it. If your counter doesn’t work on turn 1, you lose. That’s what I have a problem with. If I lose because I noticed a match-4 too late, or fat fingers caused matching the wrong colour of gems, or created a match-3 instead of match-4 while playing on the phone - fine, this is my fault, lack of skill, not paying enough attention, whatever - I couldn’t care less. But somehow, the first type of losses take up 99% of my losses, while my skill-related losses are about 1%. This is what I have a problem with.
Thats my losses too. But i guess i just dont care about them? 10% out of 100s when that 10% are really quick with no penalty? Its not a big deal to me and thus i didnt see the need for removing stellarix and wand to cater to those that either couldnt beat it or didnt want to put in the work to beat it.
Now guild wars was another story. That did punish losses with lesser guild scores…whoo boy…if it ever comes back it CANNOT be in the state it was in.
Removing stella and wand and takshaka from the game? It’s not a big deal to me neither. I was happy with the game even before they appeared.
Just to add some possibly pointless, additional data here:
I always had an 87% win rate. Annoyingly consistent. heh. I did only blood frenzy except doing necessary citadel battles (once those started.) The 87% win rate was with none of the buffs. I could definitely see some of the buffs raising it to 90-95%.
Spell shield monolith is clutch. Lots of times all i need is a second turn
Oh I get it! I would start doing that if pvp was still challenging. I was just pointing out that the win rate was pretty darned high with nothing. So doing the buffs was a relatively easy way to make things even better? But at the same time not that necessary if you ccould live with the “tragedy” of only an 87% win rate. 
