Weird not once has skull-baiting not worked for me on my PC account. Is this change Live yet??
Leave skulls they match skulls lol…Nothing has changed on my end. No cascade bullshit either
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You don’t have console AI yet, it will
Come when you get the slider i guess
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Thanks Ricky. Was wondering why. 
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@flip You might be fighting cascades because you’re constantly facing Astral Spirits.
… And I would need this confirmed, but AI can see which gems to remove to get a cascade.
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At 1x speed the game plays normal. player and ai get mostly 3 gem matches. on ocasion 4 or 5 gem maTCHES.
NOW on 4x speed both me and the ai get mutiple cascades, 4 and 5 gem matches. AND I MEAN EVERY TURN LOL. It seems to work on both sides. there is rarly ever just 3 gem matches.
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Now that’s interesting.
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I’ll try my gw on normal tomorrow because I lost two games in under 30 seconds today
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i pvp on pc
and
gw on my tablet
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I play my GW fight at 1,5x cause i like to see what happen and i play pvp x4
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Sometimes you’re as well NOT seeing what happens!
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Yeah of course lol. I played alot of pvp yesterday and when i puted it a x1 it was really slow. It’s slower then it was before?
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I see more cascades than usual and it seems that AI can find how to make them…
Of course, the new speed-up feature helps to not see this issue…
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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.
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Lol get ready…when its officially out everywhere. The burns coming. I went 2-3 in gw today on my 4th account that literally never loses on green day because tge ai kept cascading hilarious drops. Counted 22 turns on one turn.
The devs are literally ruining their own game and while it saddens me…it also enthralls me that they literally dont see the floodgates about to open and people mass quitting.
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Yeah, for example Elemaugrim with 2+ burns is basically a safe extra turn now, with 4 burns(12 gems) it seems to never miss at all.
Generally it seems even when not hitting extraturns the spawners create noticably more regular matches resulting in more gems being cycled. All that causes much more movement on the board probably what is opening up so many random 4- match opportunities making the game feel more volatile now.
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Cant happen fast enough.
Xbox game balance has left the building. Packed up and gone on a long trip with no return date.
Take the famine buff pre update - then supposedly nerfed slightly by the update except its now buffed for this weeks console event - making it a cpu favoured troop which is often filled by the cpu to the exclusion of all other cpu troops in 2/3 moves.
Result famine is harder to beat than it was pre-update by design. That’s great planning by the developers.
Justice cycling has been ignored for weeks on console quite deliberately by the developers because of the pc plan.
Every day is now endless justice mab cycling. There is no skill, no gameplay anyway - its just exploit garbage - by design.
The few troops on console that can mount a defence are largely broken, and no-one has fixed them for months.
There is no fun in guild wars now because of lazy troop design. No fun in pvp because pvp is 50% cycling and gw 75%. In short the game that had some depth is now completely unbalanced and not worth investing any time or money in.
Who wants to play a game where after 2 moves you never get a turn till 30 moves later your team is dead, over and over again in pvp and guild wars?
Those with famine - most vips - can enjoy their insulation but a game like this that now relies on so few troops is not worth any real game players time anymore because of zero game balance, repetition, and mass adoption of planned exploits.
The developers appear to have moved on - gamers should do the same.
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Well, I’m hoping things will turn around.
As you can see by the response in this thread, some people don’t see any difference, but others are noticing the difference.
As a player of both, even me it took two days to realize what happened. I thought it was bad luck first.
Moving to one code base is a good thing, as console players will now start to benefit from all development.
I’m expecting the console looping to move to PC code, and I hope that someone will look into the cascades now.
The longer people play, the more they’ll notice, and we should get some strife behind it.
For the record, it does happen for both sides, I’m not calling it cheating (never did).
What I did call it is not fun… It’s less crappy now that you don’t have to sit there and watch it (x4 speed), but to use the developers own words against them: It’s not in the spirit of the game.
There already is enough (to much) randomness as it is.
Adding the extra cascades does not help this…
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justice is fine. justice is fun.
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I’ve (so far) not seen any extra AI cascades on PC, but I have noticed the insane looping of X-Valkyrie-Justice-Mab that was reported by console players. Before this week I had never seen that, but I already lost 2 games due to it since 3.0.5 came out. Still, so far the Justice-Mab defenses are rare on PC, so it’s quite easy to avoid…
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