I don’t know the exact number of those troops, but let’s say there are about 50, that are almost identical except for one additional spell effect. In an arena run, you are almost certain to get one to pick for the purple troop slot, often two or even three.
While it means, that you can be sure to have at least one troop that is on an average level of usefulness, it also makes things feel really boring and uninspiring. Having what should be your strongest troop being coincidentially be a clone may not make the mode more attractive or entertaining.
If you filtered out all troops, that have the word “ascensions” in their spell description, it should work.
Also known as “Godslayer” and “Siegebreaker” troops (the name of their third trait):
Godslayers are one per Kingdom (raid bosses are kingdom-based) while Siegebreakers are at-least-one per Troop Type (Tower Invasions are type-based).
Both are base Epic rarity and I’ll agree they show up as options a bit too often in Arena runs, and most of them don’t have useful secondary effects in this mode, but the ones that do … egad, some of them can actually be pretty OP even without a lucky team composition. Ahrimas, Lucifria…
What does “almost certain” mean?
Sure, my sample size is ridiculously small (I didn’t pay any attention to it before yesterday) so far - 5 raid/siege troops out of 30 troops offered; I’ll keep an eye out just because of curiosity but it will be slow-ish (of course, there is a speed-up option 2-for-1-price of “start arena/select team/reroll/retreat” all over again, but that’s not something I would care to do - I despise repicking and never use it).
Besides, you have heaps of compiled data - how many total troops? how many raid/siege troops? how many doubles? how many triples? - readily available for sharing to better illustrate your case.
Secondly, there’s a glaring problem with your “clone” concept - almost identical except for minor details - it makes nearly everything a clone of something else in one way or another.
Convert X to Y (plus possible effects) - clones;
Damage to all (plus possible effects) - clones;
Scatter damage (plus possible effects) - clones;
Splash damage (plus possible effects) - clones;
Damage to single troop (plus possible effects) - clones;
Explode a gem and do something - clones…and so on and so forth.
Unless you can give much better explanation on what exactly is wrong with raid/siege clones (but not all other kinds of clones), it’s pretty unreasonable to arbitrarily single them out - all clones should be removed due to making things boring and uninspiring. That leaves us with… haphazard guess, 12 troops to choose from and opens the floodgates of entertainment.
There are 340 troops of epic rarity. Out of those, 297 can be available for arena fights (due to the nature of the concept, only troops that can drop from regular chests are available, so 1 treasure, 4 gnomes, 36 normal delve troops and 2 deep delve troops are out of the equation).
63 troops are either godslayers (36) or siegebreakers (27).
The chance, that at least one out of three randomly chosen troops belongs to those would thus be 51,1% (1-(234/297)³). At a chance of slightly under 1%, all of them will belong to these categories.
The wording “almost certain” may be going too far, but not by as much as you assume.
About variety, consider, that the spell description for all of them consists to two thirds of the phrase “Deal X damage to an enemy. If they are a boss/tower, deal 3x-5x damage based on my Ascensions”, with X being an identical number for almost all of them (no, I did not count the exceptions yet. Don’t insist that I do).
The main difference, as has been said in this thread, is the secondary spell effect or applied booster, which, yes, can make a significant difference in battle use for some.
Does not change the fact, that it feels like a pallette swap.
Usually I am too lazy to do my homework, but I still can do it, if forced to.
Oh…carry on with your quest then.
No good luck wishes, though - I don’t see the issue (that has never caused me any bother and is not an actual gameplay problem) as significant enough to warrant slashing off one fifth of the troop pool.
Exceptions? As far as at least Switch is concerned, there are no exceptions … yet. All Godslayers/Siegebreakers are 3-5x, Bounty Hunters are 2x-6x (and we have yet to see the other new event types; our first “Journey” event debuts on Monday)…
For fun and clarity, the full breakdown is:
Three such troops: 0.9%
Two such troops: 10.6%
One such troop: 39.5%
None (yay): 48.9%
I’d argue that perhaps Arena should have a hard cap of only one Godslayer/Siegebreaker picked from the Troop pool. I don’t run Arena too often but it does just feel bad that they are that common to see. And in the 10% case where you get two of them at once, your team options start to feel INCREDIBLY constrained.
Unless I’m missing something, delve troops do show up in Arena.
That being said, I hate most of the siegebreakers and godslayers and would gladly opt out of using them.
Immediately after posting this, I got the wonderful troop pool of Rubitressa, Stone-Biter, and Hellcackle.
There’s a lot of troops in Gems of War and Godslayers and Siegebreakers just flood the Epic troop pool with single target troops. Creates a very samey experience. I usually just reroll when I get stuck with them as choices.
I won’t try to change your opinion on Siegebreakers/Godslayers and admit some of them are useful… I’d certainly hope so considering how many there are, but I will say that the effect on enemy deaths abilities are largely overshadowed by Boost ratio skills , burn status effect, and Doomskulls in the Arena nowadays. I wouldn’t pick Runic Blade in the current Arena environment even if Heroes could be used and had weapon choices nowadays. So yeah, not a fan of Stone-Biter in the slightest.
Sounds correct, I have memories of seeing faction troops in Arena runs but I can’t confirm which ones specifically.
Alternative suggestion: What about the Epic slot having 2 Troops and 1 Weapon? (Epic tier, no Tempering, fixed Hero stats and no Class/Talents) That would increase the pool of non-event options AND allow you to see an enemy Hero on Arena teams without Dawnbringer/Mang/Runic Blade ruining the mode.
