consider it won’t have board control, it’s somewhat fair i guess
Do bleed stacks have a cap?
Caps at 4 (so 10 damage per turn)
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Gruz still looks terrible…disappointing, considering a) there hasn’t been a new non-faction Legendary in almost two months, b) there hasn’t been a good human troop for offense released since Tesla, and c) Darkstone really could use another useful troop (there’s TPK, Sea Troll, and maybe Magnus? yeesh).
EDIT: Change my mind on further analysis…City of Thieves seems to have troops that are OK at best. Here’s hoping they get tweaked a little further to have some main-game utility (especially the King of Thieves).
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City of Thieves, on the other hand, looks like it will be a fun release, with three good troops.
If only soul-based troops could get as much love as the gold-based ones have the past year or so…
It would be great for there to be more soul-troops, especially those that could be used in the place of Pharos-Ra for players without him (or make such teams even better for those that do). The more good mythics get released, the harder it is to justify advising anyone to craft a mythic whose sole purpose is to gather the currency destined to die first for any player.
I furthermore think it would be appropriate for the base cap of the souls-per-battle to be 75 rather than 40 at this point, especially in light of the recent preview streams’ revelations and the sheer number of troops that are now in the game (and, mind you, continue to be added), because when the next update(s) hit(s) and makes explore battles (potentially) harder (since removed difficulty bars probably doesn’t mean “always set to normal,” amirite?) it will make it that much more strenuous for midgame players to fully level their cards—let alone chase things like Dawnbringer.
And the effect will hit newbies even harder still. They struggle as it is to catch up, or even field a passable team.
The fact is that if Explore is changed to make harder battles each battle will take longer in a game where time is the true, premium resource. And if stats are boosted high enough a lot of current quick-teams won’t work, as AoE damage out-putters with low mana costs are typically dealing small enough amounts of damage that players only really use them against chump-tastic explore teams.
So, if the reward outputs don’t increase commensurately with difficulty changes, either by creating troops to increase cap-limits or by hardcoding new, higher limits entirely, a nerf to the resources endgamers don’t care about is going to happen—not just to souls, but traitstones too, and anything else that is best gathered by exploring.
Of course, it will also affect Vault Keys by lowering our gnome-killing-rates, so maybe it would be a good idea to champion the needs of the little guy on this one…
UNLESS tin-foil-hat-donned :
Maybe only players of sufficient level will get harder Explore fights, so this is intended as a measure to let newbies catch up to veterans who won’t be able to compete in a battles-per-hour race, similar to the months when we got half as many points for PVP as they did…
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The difficulty will definitely scale. The change (imo) is to prevent higher levels from farming Explore during vault weekends. Those who actually need easy Explore fights will still get them. Otherwise they’d be punishing new players too much. Basically all the changes this year to date have been to help new players, not hurt them. So it’d be strange to change that direction abruptly.
I may have missed this but when was it confirmed that Explore would scale in difficulty?
4.5 Preview stream confirmed that they’ll eventually will be removing the “difficulty” option from explore. Won’t be changed for 4.5… But a future patch.
When that happens, it’s a safe assumption that the difficulty will scale since it has been confirmed to start scaling for quests in 4.5 (if I remember right).
Yeah, I saw of all that.
They are adding a finite difficulty level to challenges and removing it elsewhere.
Not sure this means Explore will eventually go a similar way as challenges? We will see 
Honestly the fastest way to make me quit would be to make the grind slower and harder.
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I’m 99% sure that they mentioned removing the difficulty from Explore eventually.
Great post. The first point you made kinda goes to my concern - it stinks making a soul-farming team that’s fun to play these days, and you can forget about such a team being usable for any other purpose (Free Pharos-Ra!). We badly need some modern soul-based troops, maybe one of the upcoming factions will be based on that gimmick (too bad Khetar already has an underworld faction).
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Yup. Skimming through the dev stream Q&A notes,
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I’m not exactly thrilled about a potential future where data analytics decides for me that because I’ve cleared Floor 25 in Tower of Doom, that an appropriate difficulty match should always be at least level 300 or higher, complete with the dynamic difficulty (aka “luck factor”) that is auto assigned to match of that difficulty.
Nope, not at all.
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Do we have anything definitive that says difficulty will scale with player strength? I could imagine, for example, that future Explore would always be the same difficulty as current Explore on Normal. Nothing about that is contradicted by the statement that player-selectable difficulty is going away.
Call me overly optimistic (and you may know a lot more because beta tester), but until I see something that says there is behind-the-scenes scaling for these battles, I’m not yet ready to assume the worst.
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I hope you’re right.
It’s a little sad to me that, as time’s gone by playing this game, my optimism and hope for future features have waned. I want to be like you and still assume the best.
I don’t know why people are saying explore will be scaled to the player. By removing the difficulty slider I just assumed that would mean it instead becomes something like pvp where you can choose your battle (left, middle or right). So if you want easy explore battles just keep playing the left one.
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The problem with that is how are they going to define “easy”? Say you’ve got 10k+ team. So “easy” is an 8k opponent, “average” is a 10k opponent & “hard” is a 12k opponent.
That would stop me from ever doing explore again. They’ve already consigned Treasure Hunt & Arena to the bowels of Hades, do not do this to another game mode.
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That’s not really what I meant. I just meant “like pvp” in it’s layout of the battles. So the current slider of nomal/hard/Warlord 1 etc. would be replaced by a side by side layout of the battles. I really don’t see us losing our “easy” explores.
I have a bunch of kingdoms whose power levels are stalled because I can’t bring myself to grind through those boring challenges. Now I’m wondering if what’s coming will be even worse, and maybe I should do them before the update. (Hard to know.)