Agree with your point regarding the Skull damage of raid troops. The only reliable way to Skull ZG is to use Lion and Tiger hero weapon or a troop that moves others around.
Unfortunately, these strategies often bring reduced efficiency to overall team damage output. Not to mention it makes ZG gain mana faster being in front and the GSlayer more likely to die to cascades of skull, ruining the match…
So it is back to what you described, Mang into Godslayer. Yawn…
I actually enjoy both events (Raid and Invasion), but I view it all from a different lens.
Like many here, I started playing before anything existed. No Raid, no Invasion, no Pets, no Guild Wars, no Dungeon, no Soul Forge. Each week you could climb the ladder and get your rewards, and after that you had Treasure Hunt or Endless PvP.
Then they introduced Guild Wars, which gave you something every day to look forward to. That was a great addition, until it started feeling like a job. Also, Guild Wars has terrible rewards for the effort put in.
Then they introduced the other Events to break up the Guild Wars monotony. The new content was fun and different and had much better rewards. The problem with the new weekly events (Raid, Invasion, Bounties, Pet Battles) is that they don’t fit the game’s psychology.
Gems of War was always a ‘feel good about yourself’ game. You could take a sub-par team up against another person’s amazing team and win. You always felt smart and powerful because you were the underdog who came out on top, but this was a false accomplishment since it was against a bad AI instead of another human being. Gems of War made us all feel like the Top 10%.
The new events are not designed that way. They are the hill that you will die on, just how far up the hill is the question. You start by feeling strong, and end frustrated because the AI is winning the only way it knows how: by breaking the rules. The AI levels past where we are allowed and uses troops we can never get. That feels unfair, which triggers a dissatisfied part of our brain.
TLDR: although the new events feel bad in the end, I’m happy for the variety and the excellent rewards.
I would agree with almost all of what you said but the rewards for Raid and Invasion are crap. Particularly for the investment in both time and gems
When you consider the long-term reward of recruiting Zuul’Goth you eventually reach the transcedental “Eh, whatever…” state of mind and can almost enjoy these events at least for two or three days for breaking some of the monotony in kingdoms with troops you like to use.
I would like some of these features more if they were used in some sort of “New GW” where everyone in a guild could invest in their towers and setup some members in certain areas to fight back the invaders, maybe some Guild Guardians with the Boss Type being fielded in the last day of war. (I’m almost sure i suggested something like this before…)
Two or 3 days, agree, that’s about my limit
I don’t understand a lot of the complaints about Raid and Invasion. Some of the critiques make sense, like the one about the uselessness of multiplied skull damage. It’s really not going to come into play seriously, if ever. On the upside, just don’t spend those traitstones. It is also repetitive, but so is the rest of the game. The scaling does eventually get out of hand and break game mechanics, but you can usually kill ZG and that’s all that matters.
Maybe Zepp is right and it’s mostly about people whining that they aren’t invincible. I think perhaps people also lose sight that damaging ZG is all that matters, not actually winning.
I do think people miss some of the benefits.
Rewards. They are crap? They are worth more than a lot of draws on LTs, how is that crap? Even the minor orbs are often the equivalent of a few thousand souls, or a hours of trait stone farming if spent wisely. Short of pulling a mythic, this strikes me as some of the more lucrative rewards in the game. It certainly beats GW rewards unless you aren’t hitting 40k regularly.
More importantly, as a game it aids the following:
1 - Mixed level guilds. Every member can actively contribute to the rewards regardless of level. This is not true of invasion. GW is rough on the new guys. Additionally, the fact that orbs are rewarded
2-Like all the extended sigil based events, it gives something that weekend players can contribute to for the guild.
3 - Forcing you to use specific troops, in my experience, really helps you expand your team building horizons in short order.
4 - People think the troop of the week is useless, but at some point there are only so many kingdoms, and having acquired them should make buying in more optional.
Honestly, my biggest disappointment with it is that it is always ZG as the boss. It could use some variety there.
And one last nitpick on the gripes. It isn’t 75% of guild play now. THere’s three events cycling in order. it’s 33.3333% of guild play and with invasion it is 66.6666%
Yep. If I wasn’t playing these modes I’d be grinding for gold, ingots, or hero XP. Before that, I used to grind for souls and traitstones. It is what it is.
It’s a slightly different kind of repetitive. There’s so many levels of nuance in all the comparisons.
In Explore, I’m aiming to finish fast. I’m using a team that wins in 2-3 moves and beating levels at a rate faster than 1/minute. My brain is off, I can do this while watching TV or a stream.
In PvP, I’m aiming to finish fast, win or lose. With most of my teams, I still manage slightly faster than 1/minute if I retreat from battles I know I’ll lose as soon as it turns bad. Again, my brain is off.
Even in pet rescue, my brain is off. My team wins. Eventually.
In all of the game’s grindy modes, you don’t have to invest a lot of brainpower if you don’t want to. The cost of a loss is minimal, and you get to try again as many times as you want.
In sigil-based modes you can’t turn off your brain. Every choice has consequences. I’ve still got 10 Invasion sigils stored up because it takes me dramatically longer to play each game and it stresses me out. If I lose, someone else in my guild has to pick up my slack. So I try harder. GW is similar, but limited to 5/day total and the consequences of my screwups are not as good. The difference between portal 9 and 10 is pretty big. Nobody gets kicked from Rank 4 to Rank 30 in one bad GW, and even that difference in prizes isn’t as significant.
The snap-back will be, “It’s not about maximizing all rewards” and that’s great, maybe for you. For a lot of players, it is. I like being in a competitive guild, the cost of being there is I don’t want to look like I’m slacking off. I don’t like Raids because on a bad luck week it looks like “I didn’t try” more so than Invasions.
Honestly I could shed a lot of my frustration if we had more visible stats about events. A few months ago the devs asked exactly this and it’s never found its way onto their priority list. Right now, all my guild (and me) can see is:
That doesn’t tell you much. If I have a high score, I could’ve had a fantastic Tier IV run or I could’ve bought a dozen Tier VIIs and lost 50% of my matches. No indicator. I wish I could display and analyze this information without using a notebook:
Then I can say something like, “Wow, this raid was a bad run, I only won 45% of my matches and most other people with my score used far fewer sigils.” Instead, I can look at the chart and say things like, “Wow, I’m in the bottom third of the guild, wtf, am I using the wrong team?”
I’d also be able to answer questions like, “Does the guild spend more sigils on one mode?” that might reveal imbalances.
I just have zero faith in the “leaderboards” for these events given that there is a goddamn infinite gold sink attached to it. I’ve got all kinds of derogatory names ready to go here, but I will limit myself to repeating what I said before: the only way to win is not to play.
Someone else has already used the term “loserboard”, I take no responsibility but I like it and was thinking of it just now.
Infinite gem*
Gold would be worse. 
May I ask how much of the Raids you do? Like average damage done and how many tiers you purchase?
I participate to a dedicated, but still casual level. I buy the first two or three tiers, then fight Towers until I get my Orb, or do Boss damage until I’m out of sigils.
No clue how much damage you usually do or how much you did last week in terms of damage done in raids?
And you only do invasions until it gets to 4 towers? (Stage 8). I believe stage 7 is when you get an orb for finishing it.
Oops, yes gems not gold. Mixing up my games a bit…
For me, and i am sure a lot of other end gamers, the rewards do feel crappy. For the time invested to get to 20k+ points in raid boss or 200+ tower kills. With everything fully traited and ascended. the orbs are only useful to make power orbs for zuul. and to make 8 of them will take many many weeks. He is certainly not worth the time investment needed to craft him.
I would like the events a LOT more if it did not take so long to do them.
They’d feel less crappy if all the orbs had an equal drop rate. But since Major Ascension Orbs only drop 5% of the time. Even one power orb takes months to craft.
Don’t even get me started on needing 20 growth orbs to make one Major. I sincerely hope that new players aren’t using orbs to raise the level of troops from 1-15.
To be honest, I’m of the opposite opinion. Invasion and Raid seem like the more rewarding modes. You get a vault key, some arcane traitstones, some celestial traitstones, several orbs of chaos, one major orb of chaos, a bunch of gold and souls, some diamonds, and event keys from raids and invasions. From guild wars, on the other hand, what do you get? Like, a couple copies of an exclusive card you will never use because they end up quickly being the only cards in your collection stuck at common rarity with a lvl 16 cap, and a tiny bit of another resource that you earn tons of every week. I don’t even remember what the resource is because it’s so inconsequential, and since it’s not guild war week I can’t look it up.
That said, although these modes are more rewarding, they are not at all fun to play.
Yeah… Um, quick question for you? In order to be competitive and actually reach third place, how many gems did you have to spend on leveling up your sentries? That eats into the 500 gem prize. Then you have to consider how many guilds spent a similar number of gems but placed lower, getting fewer or even no gems at all. For 99% of guilds, guild wars is a huge cost that has no payoff at the end.
Sentinels…255 gems.
