Rope Dart Extra Turn - An Obvious Mistake

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41

The only legitimate nerf(besides instanerf of fizzbang) was valkyrie/justice/mab/kraken as any color could screw u, especially with extra turn freeze from mab
Even that could be beaten to a decent degree of success with well thought out teams
These newer teams have a chance to win quickly if a certain color lines up, no more no less
As I’ve come to realize over the years most players just copy and paste others teams, even in top guilds maybe a quarter of the members create teams while the others copy
And they are the same people who usually complain to nerf but then are using it on defense too

I’ll still never understand the way of thinking that if it’s hard make it easy enough so everyone can do it
We’ve all seen the effects of this mentality in schooling in how many adults can’t do basic math and spelling
Let them learn strategy or go play bejeweled Lol

1 Like
42

Get off your high horse.

Let’s use Red Day as an example.

For a long time, Dwarves was the only sensible Red Day defense. It had “deal bonus damage to red troops”, good synergy, and was hard to kill quickly. Eventually, red got a lot of tools to deal with it. That’s when we stopped seeing Dwarf teams. The original situation wasn’t just people netdecking. If you thought about Red Day at all you realized there was one offensive strategy with dramatically higher capabilities than any other team.

If the smart people only have one choice, they’ll arrive at the same conclusion. Everyone knew, in that context, Dwarves was in a different neighborhood than its alternatives. No one cared enough about “copying” to hurt their win rate by playing a different team. That’d be stupid. Now that Red can eat Dwarves for lunch, people are designing different teams and avoid it. Playing dwarves now is stupid, so you only do it if you’re short on other defensive cards.

That’s where we are in GW now. Every day is fairly well-balanced, and I think if you really rack your brain on defense there are a handful of 30%+ teams out there to try. However, there’s also Rope Dart and Life and Death, which can perform 50% and upwards on any day if they get lucky. So on 2 days out of every week, you are stupid if you don’t use those teams. There is nothing even in the same neighborhood of effectiveness. It’s just a matter of you deciding where your expected win rate is weakest and saving those teams for those days.

There are two ways to solve this, but at the rate this game moves only one makes any sense.

If there are 2 teams that must be used because they are that much more effective than any other choice, the devs can either:

  • Add more powerful troops so there are counters and/or more high-effectiveness defenses.
  • Adjust the power level of the problematic teams so their win rate is more in line with others.

“Adding more powerful troops” will make the problem worse for much longer before it makes them better. Right now there are 2 “broken” teams. There have to be 6 before there’s an equal probability of seeing one on any given day. There have to be 12 before there are enough you can assert you will see some variance. There have to be 60 before it starts to get likely you aren’t facing the same roster every GW. 60 teams takes a lot of new troops!

“Fix the two teams that are broken” is the most reasonable solution. It can be done in a single update, and the results are immediate.

Here’s the other end of it, you’re owning yourself:

Any strategy that is very good on defense is usually great on offense. Remember Dragon’s Eye? There were two competing arguments:

  • “Dragon’s Eye is too hard to face on defense, you need to make it less powerful so it is easier to overcome.”
  • “Delve is too hard to overcome without Dragon’s Eye, if you nerf it I won’t be able to beat Delves.”

Or what about Dawnbringer in Arena?

  • “It’s too hard to overcome it with anything but itself.”
  • “Arena is too hard to grind without Dawnbringer, I have to be able to use it.”

Or the affirmatives for the criminally not implemented “re-introduce old weapons”:

  • As a newbie, I can’t keep up and compete with my guildmates because I lack some weapons.
  • As an endgamer, I don’t have fair competition with newbies because I have weapons they will never obtain.

Oh. Wow. It turns out a powerful defensive strategy is also a great offensive strategy! I’m winning > 95% with my Rope Dart team if I try. It’s the easiest PvP team I’ve ever run. Life and Death is similar, it’s slow but very hard to lose when I’m using it.

So I’d argue, “Leaving Rope Dart and Life and Death teams at their current power level makes grinding PvP a joke. I never have to change teams. They should be toned down so I’m challenged again.”

But the only thing you see is, “Waaaah babies are afraid they can’t beat it.” My opinion is you are too worried you’ll lose a powerful offensive tool and thus start losing more, and you hope by disguising that fact as “I think the game is supposed to be hard!” will keep people off the trail.

People are smarter than you think they are. They know when you talk about the “honor of making your own teams” you’re really just asking them to purposefully handicap themselves so you have an easier time winning.

7 Likes
43

I mean, appendix:

There are more than 20,000 cards available in Magic: the Gathering.

If we narrow the focus to one single set, there tend to be about 200-270 cards. By the end of a meta, there tend to be maybe 3 decks on average if you’re using that one set. That’s because there are roughly 10 mythic rares in that set, and maybe 2 of them will be “playable”. There might be 30 rares, 5-8 of them “playable”. Out of the 150 or so commons, roughly 100 of them won’t be “playable”. So the dumbest deckbuilders see 270 cards of potential, but the smartest deckbuilders know they have about a dozen cards to start with and maybe 50 viable cards that might work with them. Consider that there are 6 colors (including ‘colorless’) and a deck usually focuses on 2-3 of them and it’s easy to imagine the smart deckbuilders work with about 20-30 cards when looking for their deck.

How many decks do you really think exist in 30 cards? Is it a surprise that the best deckbuilders tend to find the same 3-5 decks in a set?

Expand that to Standard and there’s usually about 1,000 cards available. But similarly, there are only about 30-40 mythics and 50-100 rares. Once you choose your strategy you’ve cut them into sets that have about 20-30 “high value” cards and 100-150 “filler” cards, with 700-800 “unusables” in the trash can. Most standard metas settle on 8 or 9 decks. It’s not that they aren’t creative, it’s that smart deckbuilders know there are millions of losing decks and how to not build them.

When you look at anything-goes formats like Vintage, there are dozens of meta decks, each usually having several variants it can be tuned to face different opposing metas. While this format is considering more than 25k total available cards, the same ratios exist. Probably about 20k of those 25k cards will never see play in Vintage. People who play the game have had 30 years to analyze all permutations and come up with the best decks in what’s available. Every quarter, about 200-270 cards get added by new sets. It takes less than a couple of weeks to evaluate the cards and decide if any are relevant to Vintage. On average, people get excited if there are 2. On average, there’s no new Vintage deck, only a new variant of old decks that has different strengths and weaknesses than the variants people have played for 10+ years.

Assuming that someone’s going to come up with a new meta deck in that arena is foolish. Thousands of obsessive players have considered every card for three decades. There’s not a secret new meta deck hiding in the shadows. The only time that can happen is if new cards are introduced, and the waves settle very fast.

So what I mean to say is even in games that are far more complicated, the netdeck phenomenon is highly overrated. Even amateur deckbuilders know to cull the garbage first. The pros almost always agree on what cards are important. The pros almost always agree on what synergizes with those cards. So the pros tend to converge on the small number of decks with the most potential quickly. From there, it’s a matter of deciding what the other pros are thinking and whether your deck properly handles that, or if they predicted your counter to their counter and how you can counter their counter, etc.

So too in GoW. Once you slot Divine Ishbaala onto your team, there’s only about 20-25 troops that make any sense to put in the next slot. Once you’ve settled on Ishbaala and Infernus, there’s maybe 5. To pretend that there’s “secret sauce” beyond that is to insult yourself.

The only tricks of deckbuilding in GoW tend to involve troops that were irrelevant but have a clever synergy with future strats. Even though there’s a month between GWs, that’s usually only about 10-12 new troops. 1 of them is a Doom. 2 of them are Invasion/Raid troops that are super unlikely to be relevant. 3 are weapons that are, on average, unimpressive. 4 are going to be Glory troops that vary wildly in worth. 1 is going to be a mythic.

It’s not an awful hard job to put 12 troops on the table, narrow them to 2-4, then ask, “What synergizes with these?” Most people don’t bother, but it’s no surprise the ones that do tend to come up with the same ideas.

8 Likes
44

it still is a choice…if you do not put winning above anything else, there is lots of opportunities just to have fun. You don’t need to use rope dart or DE or egg thief…and the devs are making a step in that direction with the honour system. Just saying

45

The only thing honor inspires me to do is beg in global. I get absolutely nothing from saying “that was fun” in PvP. It’s never fun. It’s either over in 20 seconds or I never want to see the team again.

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46

that’s your prerogative…just remember there still is RL

47

You’re straight up wrong, honor changes literally nothing.

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48

oh ye of little faith…

49

Correct, I have zero faith in the honor system. That… doesn’t change anything.

50

well… I get gold and gem keys for free…

51

So do I but it isn’t because I’m running some laughable cringe-worthy softy pushover defense.

I’ve legitimately lost track of what anyone’s point was, wasn’t it Rope Dart and/or Empowered?

52

me neither…mine is at about 60% without the troops mentioned above…and: it pays to be friendly in global

53

the synergy of empored and rope dart

54

Okay but Rope Dart has nothing to do with the honor system.

55

i was following slypenslydes line of thought…

56

You lost me for a while but I found it -

…that’s not a reference to the new honor system. I think/hope. Unfortunately, Firebomb teams have been around since there were Firebombs.

57

actually i got honour for making up a whole female team and so forth…so people might be smarter than you give them credit for…as I said above: have fun. pull the plug out, (ok, I didn’t say the last part) :smiley:

58

I’ll reconstruct the conversation up to where you got confused, with paraphrasing so extensive it’s bound to be interpreted as hyperbole.

FeelTheBern: git good n00bs, Rope Dart is for babies, ur a bunch of netdeckers, you just want the game to let you 100% win, please don’t nerf Rope Dart and make it harder for these losers

Slypenslyde: Even in games with more depth than GoW if you use your brain there’s only about 10 viable strategies. You’re overstating your smarts. Also: Rope Dart makes offense more easy so if you want a challenge you might still support a nerf.

LuckyLocke: Not everyone tries to pick a winning team. The honor system will fix Rope Dart in Guild Wars and PvP, everyone will set the Fire Bomb team. Don’t ask me to support this with facts.

Slypenslyde: Honor is a broken system that’s done nothing but create a begging economy. It’s not going to fix Rope Dart.

[Here the thread got derailed by 10-character rapid-fire posts arguing about the honor system].

Here I tried to get it back on track.

LuckyLocke is still desperate to derail the thread.

I propose resetting to a point where the discussion on the table is:

  • “Only dumb netdeckers use Rope Dart and it’s perfectly fine so please don’t nerf it, eventually they’ll be so ashamed they’ll stop using it.”
  • “If you’re smart, you have to use it and that’s the problem. It wins too easily on offense and also defends too well in GW. Nerf it so we have to think harder.”
2 Likes
59

I still tend to disagree…you still focus too much on the game instead of feeling the flow

60

now time it is for the yedi to rest