Exactly.
So everyone is using teams, they use themselves.
But everyone is complaining.
Am I really the only one that sees, that everyone is doing the same.
It takes a snowflake to start an avalanche.
Everyone change there attack teams, for a week.
Don’t do the meta.
Exactly everyone uses the best troops.
So your fighting the best troops.
My idea might be dumb, but atleast I can see this obvious conclusion.
Genius! And just how do you expect this to happen? Say i made a point to suffer through beating meta teams with non meta. Do you think a player will see my non meta team and think “oh thats fun! I should do the same!” Nope. Theyre gonna smash it for an easy quick win with their meta team
Again good idea on the surface. Silly idea when you think about it for half a second
You realise you could be complaining over fighting syverscales last attack team.
He could be complaining against fighting your last attack team
Everyone on here, always speaks for everyone.
You all think your the majority and you speak for them.
So you all can get the majority to change there attack teams, which in turn changes there defence teams.
Ino none of you will do it, because you all want to use the best troops, but you want to win quick.
Just get used to the defence being the attack, there not going to change the massive PvP change, for 30 voices on here.
Again. You arent going to get people to stop using the meta. And one snowflake doesnt start an avalanche here. That one snowflake gets melted by stellarix, the player trying to be that snowflake switches back to teams that can win easier.
Youre asking players to give themselves a harder time winning
Well if you don’t want your Stella killing my team, then change your attack.
Or should I suffer, even tho you don’t like suffering yourself.
The VP grind is much slower now, but I’m fine with that, since it affects everyone. I like that I’m no longer seeing much lower level players flying past me on the leaderboard with far fewer battles fought than me.
Battles are much tougher now, but again, I’m OK with that. Having to fight the same teams over and over is tedious, but I don’t have an easy solution. In old PvP, I would try to set a decent, but not meta defence team, since I didn’t care too much about defence wins. I do care about attack wins though, so I’m forced to set obnoxious “Defence” teams now.
I don’t want any nerfs. If my opponent is using Stellarix and Takshakha, that’s OK, I can do the same with first turn advantage.
A change I would really like to see is to have access to our team slots again. “One team fits all” worked when the opponents had 4 random troops with no hero, but now we need different teams now that enemy teams have a strategy (e.g. looping, spamming status ailments). Having to edit your team every time you want to counter a different team is a pain in the arse.
Old PvP
Orbweaver life n death
4 firebombs
6 journey teams
Elementalist brown team
Has everyone on here only started playing gems in the last 4 months.
We’ve always had repetition on defence teams.
The underlying complaining is really because it’s slower, and harder.
Which it should be harder, so the endgamer get to top, and get the books first.
Now you can’t grind, quickly and easy as a low level player, and you shouldn’t be able to anyway.
Or it’s punishing high level players.
The new update is great, the grinders are losing battles, and the end game players are winning.
I dont want nerfs here either. I do want some variety.
And truth just shut up. Your idea is dumb, people are going to use the best team possible to win as quick as possible. And thats perfectly ok.
They arent the flaw. The flaw is the dev choice to make defenses your last attack
The outer ring has variety.
Also no matter what, your gonna see same teams.
Every kingdom or troop type has one or 2 metas.
Just look at any restricted event, guild swap teams, all members shoose the best teams.
You’ll never get variety, that’s called ARENA.
Which no one likes
Sure; there’s always a meta. But old PvP was better at containing the meta: you’d often see a meta team in the hardest tier, but you wouldn’t normally be offered a choice between almost-identical meta teams in all three tiers.
I think the meta problem in new PvP is three-fold: firstly, we have a handful of recent troops and weapons that are so powerful that it does not make rational sense to use anything else,
Secondly, the region restrictions often effectively reduce the pool of viable non-meta teams.
And thirdly, the removal of defense teams as a concept – that we’re now always fighting against other players attack teams – has removed a lot of the playfulness from PvP. We no longer get players demonstrating new clever team construction ideas in PvP defense. We won’t see any defense teams with new mythics unless they’re new metas like Takshaka; we won’t see any silly show-off-my-rare-pulls teams; and yeah, no more fireball teams.
I think this last one is a big loss; defense teams were a means for players to express personality.
Well I did not do one single PVP battle today. Thank you for freeing me from my addictions.
Shiny button was used many times after four bombs team 
max honour level was achieved very fast: people prefered easy battles
Okay, so there is a bit of nuance to this that I will try and make as brief as possible.
As I stated before, Elementalist should have never been released in the state that it is in (as in, it is kind of ridiculous that it was given the tools that it has and by all rights should have been considered “too much” at the drawing board stage). But at this point, I take a staunch anti-nerf stance here and for anything else proposed.
Every new tool introduced to the game that is adopted into even semi-infrequent use changes the entire landscape of the game. Over time, these establish a “baseline” for the game. The baseline of the game is the measuring point for everything in the game, and anything that enters the game. It is also the place where players feel that their power and efficiency level is. A game where one of the main long term goals is about power accumulation and iterative improvement of your efficiency for, bare minimum existing game modes.
When we swing in the opposite direction on a game-wide level, it takes time to reestablish what the limits are. If you could do a bunch of things more efficiently before, or with less effort, and your long term goals align with gaining more power (and/or gameplay knowledge and muscle memory) in part for the purpose of making things be more efficient or take less time, you must spend a certain amount of time operating at a “deficit”. Its a big game, and sometimes you can just shift to a different team, or sometimes a team you use wasn’t impacted, but if it was, you still get these little reminders that a thing that you poured hours of your time (and some amount of money for many people here) to be able to do is no longer a thing you can do. In some cases, the thing you have been happily doing for over a year. And in case it isn’t obvious, that is a bad thing.
One of the reasons why the “revamps” of the guild events to increase the restrictions was less felt so bad about them being “more difficult” and had everything to do with the player feeling less powerful or less efficient that they did at the same task. This goes, again, for the recent nerf of the journey troops while also refusing to go back to the drawing board on their overall design so they can function the way the requirements of the event demand they do. You have way more flexibility on this when you introduce new systems, as a baseline has not yet been established and people will all make their own cost/benefit analysis on engaging with it based on the other systems available. You’ll often hear gripes about this, but you can dial these in on a per-system basis.
A good example of this is what was done with Underspire in “spicing up” the dead ends with special battles that have additional rewards. Now, many people still think the rate of sentinel drops is a bit too low (I’m one of them) but the presence of these little things is an improvement. Others still have a cost-benefit analysis of this mode that favors mostly minimal or non-engagement (I’m one of them again) and thats fine, because its a side mode, and the game has plenty to do. Do I wish it was a bit more accessible by having slightly less obnoxious restrictions on most weeks? Yeah. But it still managed to “settle in” to a place that isn’t completely horrible.
So lets take a look at this from the other direction. A semi infrequent complaint is that the underspire battles can get too difficult by the end (yes, I know this isn’t a widely held position amongst endgamers, but bear with me). For at least some subset of these players, this problem could be “solved” with more stats or access to more of the troops in the set they are restricted to. So imagine if we just did that. Without regard to any other piece of the game, we simply changed kindgdom stat bonuses (and pets) to be about ten times as powerful. Does that sound like a good idea? It would address the problem at in a way, but also every other mode where you could put together this team would be affected in the same way. (Incidentally - the mess with Journey troop nerfs could have also been avoided if the original spawn 15 versions of the troops had been simply checked against this concept, or addressed within a week, or stopped being introduced past the first one and gone back to the design phase.)
Basically, if you something isn’t working, you should start by taking a look at the most recent changes, and you should try to limit the downstream impact to the thing you are trying to fix. If your “cool new idea” does not work within the ecosystem you have established yourself over an extremely long period of time, maybe take a long hard look about how that idea is implemented and how it better fits around trends so well established that “this is what the game is”. Unless you feel that the foundation is so broken that it is the only way to move forward, that is. The steps taken to “solve” this issue will be a strong indicator of that.
To me the problem here is that not having defense teams at all was a half-baked idea that most people could see the outcome of severely overcentralizing the teams faced to a ridiculous degree. This is COMBINED with the whole “Blood Frenzy” thing being balanced around mostly random teams that never had a hero on them appearing for all restricted regions before the fix. The “broken” PvP was in for weeks and the only pervasive complaints were about the nonsensical VP distribution system. “Blood Frenzy” was in for a week with the “broken” PvP and none of the complaints about the “overpowered” troops, classes or tools. Blood Frenzy in its current state is rampant with one-shots. To compound the problem, because it gives double VP and nearly every endgame player still has a win rate of over 50% here, it has also created “hot spots” for player interaction in which, for a sub-level-1500 player like myself, it becomes difficult to find decent scoring teams in the other areas.
The two most recent changes made that “broke” everything were the introduction of actual player teams into restricted PvP areas and Blood Frenzy. Going a bit further back, it is the new PvP system as a whole. Then the new PvP system conceptually. Nerfing any group of troops, classes, or weapons will not properly address this, and will have knock on effects to the rest of the game. If you want to look at one of the things that has long been an issue, I’d start with the matchmaking. I’ve maintained that this was always a gigantic problem within the PvP ecosystem since the last revamp, its on my post history somewhere. Matchmaking is an old thing that must be handled with care in changing any part of, but its influence is still limited to within the PvP ecosystem.
Okay, so much for brief. I’d condense this more if I had more time, but basically:
The Wand of Stars isn’t the problem. Stellarix isn’t the problem. The Elementalist class isn’t the problem.
They’re all symptoms of the problem. And it’s a problem that shows up at some point in any game like this that runs for a considerable length of time releasing new content. That problem being the vicious cycle of inflationary power.
Those of us who have played for a long time? We can probably all bring to mind some of the previous meta-builds that seemed pretty ubiqtuous for a period of time. We might even be able to bring to mind the handful of ways that we could counter it at the time, and the new stuff that has emerged since then that has relegated that old meta to the scrap pile for the most part.
The problem as I see it is that the developers have created a situation where the newly-released stuff falls into one of two categories. Most of what gets released isn’t very good and just satisfies the need for numbers, a new weapon here and an Event Captain there and other stuff designed as a combination of FOMO for completionists plus an encouragement to buy new stuff because it’s necessary for an event or whatever. But the rest is stuff like the cosmic dragons; while difficult to get – especially Stellarix at the end – you’re looking at stuff that’s leaps and bounds more powerful than most of what has come previously. Heck, I’ll bet that everybody who has at least one copy of Nebuladryx is using her this week in Raidboss and Underspire. (If they’re playing those modes, anyhow.) And there’s nothing else in that kingdom that comes close to the ruthless efficiency of Nebuladryx for clearing battles quickly, especially at higher levels.
The problem isn’t necessarily this troop or that weapon or some class. At least not as a root cause. But it’s symptomatic of how the developers have leaned into inflationary power and a desire to keep players investing in the new stuff. Because if they could find that magical spot where power stayed exactly the same, we wouldn’t feel much of a need to buy the new stuff when the older stuff did just as well. And if they erred in the other direction and and we had a deflationary spiral, it would drive away new players pretty quickly and the Google Play store would probably populate with reviews about this being more P2W than it might already be because the longtime players have an overwhelming advantage that newer players can’t catch.
I think there has to be some re-balancing of some sort. But we’ve seen that the developers don’t attend to that very often, and when they do it’s often trying to swat a fly with a baby grand piano. Which then spawns a brand new problem in the process of “solving” the previous one, assuming that their solution even hit close to the mark.
This game definitely encourages looping, and there aren’t a whole lot of strategies to stop looping. But you’ve also got a number of things – most of them more recent as compared to the early days – where you’ve got a troop or a weapon or a class that does a large number of “good things” all at once. And might do so in ways that it snowballs very quickly once it gets going.
Everybody remember when Life & Death seemed to be the weapon of choice? Because it did five good things once you put all the affixes on it? (Steal Life, Death Mark enemies, Bless the Hero, Enchant the Hero, drain mana from the first enemy) They didn’t fix it, but you don’t see it very often anymore because the developers simply released a weapon that’s even more extreme. On its own, for sure, but also when used in combination with other things. And all of that rolled together simply creates an amazing package.
I believe Elemental Force on the Elementalist class is a problem, and I recall saying so prior to the release of the class. Not only is it a top-tier trait, if not the single best Hero trait out there, but once it’s combined with the Talent trees for the class it’s very difficult to counter other than deploying your own Elementalist and even then it makes almost every other class worthless and useless.
I believe the cosmic dragons in general are a problem, because they blow most other troops out of the water when it comes to damage potential. Unlike Elementalist, there are counters to them, but there are also counters to the counter and ones that are very frequently used by most players these days.
I believe the Wand of Stars is a problem, because it fits into the same definitions as Life & Death did in that it does too many useful things at once – only it also has looping potential on top of that.
I don’t have an intelligent fix to the Cosmic Dragons, because simply nerf’ing their offensive power is likely to cause howls of dismay and I don’t have an obvious second idea to propose.
I think Elementalist could be reined back into line a little bit if that class didn’t have access to the Stone talent tree, thus taking away Rock Solid and Fortitude. At the very least, it would make it easier to slow down that class rather than also requiring a way to curse the class to remove its’ status resistances and then nullify Elemental Force. There are undoubtedly other 9maybe better) ways to bring it back to the pack, but I think changing the trait in question would similarly spawn an outcry.
As for the Wand of Stars? I think it would be better if it wasn’t both a (potentially) massive generator with immense looping potential and a Bless/Cleanse or Curse to the entire other team. That’s simply too many “good things” in one cast with the possibility that it can simply fire over and over again and fill something evil alongside it as a “two troops / I win” thing.
But could we rein the Wand back in and introduce some strategery into things if we made it a “one time only” spell? Obliging a player to pick which of the two s/he uses and when to use it as opposed to casting it willy-nilly and letting all the other nice stuff happen?
…
One other thought. While it seems like a popular idea to some, I’m strongly against the idea of banning particular troops/weapons across PvP in general. Because I believe it to be a clumsy answer to address a seeming problem that doesn’t really do what you’d want it to. Beyond my lack of confidence in the developers to properly identify and target the handful of things that really are a problem, or to pay close attention to the list and make modifications as necessary? I believe I’d like to see more in the way of intelligent design when it comes to the new stuff. Some things are always going to slip through, because that’s the nature of things in this sort of paradigm and it’s difficult to figure out how things might synergize when released into the wild – e.g., who saw the notion that Centuragon would be the most useful troop of its’ campaign with how it synergized with skull generators, especially somebody like Zuul’goth?
So I’d rather find other ways to address these issues that doesn’t depend on an often-absentee crew to maintain things when they don’t really maintain stuff now.
Basically the tldr version is “power creep can kill a game.” Instead of balancing you just keep releasing more powerful stuff. If you dont the new stuff is worthless. How many times have you said this about a new mythic “its a trophy mythic.”
They “fixed” Life and Death by changing the mana cost from 14 mana to 18 mana, thereby making it slow to the point that no one wants to even use it.
Right?! I’d like to take all the people calling for nerfs, round them up. and ship them off to their masochist nirvana of choice. Leave the rest of us alone. lol
Meta = the best thing available for the situation. There will always be a meta. Nerfing the meta, just elevates the next in line.
And nerfing the meta for pvp? Holy wow what a stupid request!
I want the hero gone man. Its not even enjoyable to chase silver marks and ignore blood frenzy.
Either remove the hero or come up with something else other than “last attack team is your defense.”