While I’ve seen no real difference in cascades from primary gem matches, gem spawners in general seem to be a lot more effective which may be contributory to what people are recognizing.
It seems to be a combination of factors:
- You can now surge on match 4s, meaning you’ll get more mana.
- The algorithm for determining how many match 4/5s took place in a “blob” is a lot more generous in this version. In the Adobe Air version, having a huge blob of gems would occasionally resolve as 1 or 2 match 5s, and extra gems matched would be ignored. For example, sometimes a match 7 or 8 in a blob would count as a single match 5 for mana gathering purposes and trait activation, but if they were in a straight line, they would count the full 7 or 8 match with one trait activation. Now, a blob can resolve as more individual matches which is a ton more mana when banner bonuses are factored in, and more trait activations as well.
- The spawners themselves seem to line up extra turns much easier. The cases where I would throw a mass spawn onto a rich board and have it completely miss seem to be very rare. Before, I’d be lucky to get 2 or 3 consecutive casts. There might be bias on my part to how ineffective they were before this patch because of how agonizingly slow they were to use (plus when you “miss”, you had to watch the AI take all your mana for 30+ seconds) to the point where I basically swore off these type of troops as doing more harm than good, but in the current state, they are very effective.
Also, I should note that I did about a dozen games with Stonehammer (15 gems and color locked) and he is still extremely unreliable on an unprimed board. Things like Anariel (16 gems and color locked), the first cast may miss, but is low enough mana where you can try again and the second cast most likely wont. And if you prime the board with a converter first, the 15 spawners (like guardians) can get multiple consecutive casts without dropping the turn and are likely to get their mana back as well.
I’ve played over 250 PvP games with various gem spawn type troops so far to make these observations. My loss rate has gone way up (nearing 5%), but most those losses can be attributed to not bothering adjusting for the enemy team or just recklessly matching at the start of the game/not being able to gain the mana to start my spawner than my spwaner missing and causing me to lose a game.
[details=Most of the time, you end up with situations like this]
That hero started with 61 life, and no, I did not cast Jotnar on him. I casted anariel first, which missed an extra turn but gave me a blue match, matched blue, casted anariel again, which gave an extra turn, and that was it. From there, alternated Anariel and Venoxia, until I got the result here. Without dropping the turn once. Without even looking at the board. The following Venoxia cast also gave an extra turn with a rich board, so I could have kept going.
This not even that much of an outlier. Playing the same exact team again had me drop a turn after 20+ consecutive casts because the board only had 4 blue gems on it to start. The prismatic orb hero then gathered mana and cast four times in a row, getting extra turns on red, purple, and brown, before dropping the turn on a blue spawn. Now having the board primed for me, I did not give up the turn again. I played a game with Jarl where I had a terrible start and lost another one of my troops, but finally got him up and used him (alone) to wipe an entire enemy team - 20+ casts in a row. [/details]
While this is fun and all short term, I have to wonder at the frustration this is going to cause when the AI can do this at will. I strongly believe this is what the “cascade” factor is attributed to. That and them making an otherwise “bad” primary move that somehow gives them a lucky drop being attributed to malice rather than stupidity.
The team pictured still sucks because it partially mana blocks the troop needed to “prime” the board for looping and will likely drop the turn, plus has no backup board mod for when the board gets thin, and no status protection at all, but it was barely semi-functional pre-patch. Other teams, like the notorious Valk/Justice/Mab trio, are not only far more effective but prevent the opponent from using any less reliable spawn loop teams because they’ll just get frozen. It is pretty clear to me why that team dominates the console meta.
Note that I’m not calling for anything to be nerfed here, I’m just making an observation that gems spawners seem to work differently than they did on the Adobe Air version. As I recall, part of the code is supposed to make extra turns from gem spawns less likely after you’ve taken five turns in a row, mentioned by @sirrian here. This part of the code that is supposed to be universally active for both sides even in ranked PvP simply may not be working properly. Other than that, there may have been a change in the way primary spawns happen as well that makes certain spawners more reliable than they should be which should also be looked at.
Again, I’ve noticed no real change in cascades, though.