(!) Spoiler Alert (!) -- [Any Details Provided are Subject to Change] (Part 1)

I find your name choices for the faction troops, questionable.

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So would a werebearschweine be half man/half bear-swine, or half man-bear/half swine? You know how bad I am at math. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::+1:

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I thought the win-con in Mirrored Halls was to copy a good troop or two with Doppleganger? That’s how I beat it with a 500 faction team anyway.

As for the Werewoods faction, yeah it does look frustrating. Its basically a race to see who kills fastest before all the transforming (which also means full healing) happens. The team does have a lot of tools to do high damage though. Of course that also means the enemy faction can kill you very quickly if luck isn’t on your side.

Summon clones - of something, yes, I never specified it had to be faction troops. To be fair, I did clear 250 with faction troops only because my target died before I could secure a clone from it, but my clear of 300 was incredibly fast by comparison.

Queen Moonclaw’s spell counts the number of Green Allies, then counts the number of Green Enemies, then creates 9 Skulls plus the count value, then summons one of the following three troops:

  • Gnoll, the Red/Green Rare from Wild Plains
  • Savage Hunter, the Brown/Green Rare from Wild Plains
  • Bane Jaw, the Brown/Purple Epic from Wild Plains

The troop IDs for this are randomly encoded into Queen Moonclaw’s spell. This is similar to how Cocoon randomly summons one of five hard-coded troops.

Interesting. Why not Wild Fang? It matches the criteria of the other 3.

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Thanks for the information :slight_smile:
I didn’t mean “What programming is involved for this troop?”, but rather “How can players know which troops can be summoned?”

It would be weird for Wild Fang not to be in Moonclaw’s summon pool. For that matter, shouldn’t she be able to summon herself too?

Not terribly excited for the new legendary, sadly, which seems like a marginal improvement at best over Bone Dragon and Tomb Robber. The coolest thing to me about it is the third trait, the first one to finally give teamwide boosts based on ally skull damage. Could come into play on Wild Plains events, where the attack gains (to the Tauros troops) and summon both would be useful.

The glory troop Bullserker is yet another Tauros attacker that scales based on its own stats. As an ultra rare, it looks like the worst of the lot.

(My personal ranking of Tauros: Ketras>>>Minogor>Chief Stronghorn*>Earthcaller>Bullserker.)

*Stronghorn’s third trait could improve its standing if we ever got some Tauros with better board control, to create a proper looping team.

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Summoners can’t summon themselves. This was just discussed recently in another post. I am looking for the link…

My memory is the issue was discussed re: Vanya in silver necropolis can’t summon herself, I assume same issue but could be wrong

Copycat says:
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My new questions (there are so many theories, that the questions end up being more relevant).

  • The 6 new troops classified as part of Hall of Guardians sound like new Guild Guardians. However, they may be new reward troops at GW events.
  • For starters, in either of the two cases above, there is a problem with how to get them. Faction troops should only be obtained by opening portals on the corresponding faction. Guild Guardians are obtained from Guild Chests, opened with Seals. And GW reward troops come once a month at the end of the mentioned event.
  • There is no point in a faction winning new troops and those troops not being obtained by opening portals. In my opinion, these troops should belong to the Guardians kingdom. Neither like GW’s reward troops do they work because such troops belong to different realms in Krystara.
  • Just closing my thinking cycle, what imbalance would it be to add 6 new troops to Hall of Guardians (and hence to Whithelm) compared to the other factions and kingdoms?

I believe we will see changes until the arrival of such troops.

In time, I lost some of the spoilers, so could anyone update me on how the new Baited Pet Gnomke works?

The HoG part is probably just a place holder.
They’ll most likely be classified with this.


Otherwise, they would be tied to Whitehelm and I seriously doubt the devs are taking 4 troop Factions to 10.

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Players can’t find out. The only way to know which troops can be summoned in a case where the text is ambiguous is to check the programming.

Exactly. I also doubt a faction will win 6 new troops. Certainly there is an error in naming the kingdom to which they belong. Guardians are most likely, by logic.

I understand. And honestly, I don’t care if it’s 6 new troops from the Guardians hidden kingdom (purchased from guild chests). It would be nice to see new Guild Guardians and (call me crazy) but I wouldn’t mind having 12 statues in the guild to choose which one to worship with donations (forgive my daydreams). It would be more ways to get resources in my guild.
It is important to see the positive side of change, not just the negatives, as many do.

Yeah but let’s step outside of the context of this particular thing and talk about this kind of rhetoric in general because it’s really been fatiguing me lately.

First let’s get the a bad analogy out of the way. Think about a situation where two wolves and one sheep are arguing about what is for dinner. The wolves believe the sheep should be for dinner. The sheep, however, believes that is not mutually beneficial, and wants the wolves to hunt for something else while it finds some grass. Or, we could flip it. There are two sheep and a wolf, and the sheep agree that meat’s not on the menu.

I can see the positives in both scenarios. If the wolves eat the sheep, they don’t starve! Or, if the wolf/wolves starve, the sheep get to live! There’s a silver lining to both clouds so clearly it doesn’t matter which happens, and no attempt to find a better solution should be made, right?

That tends to be a bird’s eye view of most extended internet arguments. Changes are usually a mix of good and bad and not the same mix for everyone. The people who think they’ll get more good like to argue as if there is no bad. The people who think they’ll get more bad like to argue as if there is no good. It swirls around and around because the people who will get more good don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the idea that other people in different circumstances will have a different, potentially more negative experience.

Now, we are talking spoilers. New guild guardians could be part of some bigger mechanism we haven’t seen yet, and the value of that system could be greater than the lost value of the guild seals we’ll spend on guardians. But we don’t know that yet and we can only discuss what we see. If we talk about hypotheticals, I could propose “Maybe the plan is to give free healthcare to people who get all the guild guardians, that would make it worth it.” And it would. There’d be few people upset about that change. But I don’t think very many people would hear that argument and believe it, and history shows us a different trend.

The devs tend to make changes like this:

  • Before this change, you were making $10/hour and had to fund your own retirement.
  • After this change, you will make $8/hour and we will contribute $1/hour towards retirement.
  • Due to interest, that will eventually be worth MORE than what you were making before. You have benefits now!

Unless you’re pretty comfortable, you know that final statement is false even if mathematically speaking it’ll hold up at retirement.

That’s the danger of always looking at the positives. To make good decisions, you have to compare the positives to the negatives and decide if they balance. This is difficult in GoW because the value propositions are wildly different between game phases, and I believe the game’s bottom line depends more on new players entering the game than old players maintaining status. (That’s a very complex argument and I don’t want to digress towards it.)

So that’s why I’m pessimistic about it. I do believe we haven’t seen the whole picture yet. I don’t think we’ll lose as much as this incomplete view suggests. However, I don’t have any evidence to support the idea that new guild guardians will be a net positive for me. So it’s not that I’m “not looking at the positives”, it’s that I think they won’t outweigh the negatives and I am basing it on speculation of the pieces I cannot confirm yet.

“I disagree, because few people do” isn’t an argument in the logical sense. The supporting fact it presents is very weak. It’d be much stronger if you could build a case for, “Few people see the positive side because it is unintuitive.” followed by an explanation of some alternative viewpoint no one has stated. I think most “negatives” have considered the thrill of collection and potentially new guild rewards and asserted we will, in the end, get fewer rewards after this change than we got before. A weak flashlight with an almost-dead battery is still a boon with a bright side in the darkness, but that doesn’t change whether a freshly-charged flashlight is perceived as better.

I liked the story with wolves and sheep. Fables are great for representing serious things.

Really, for everything there is a good side and a bad side, Yin and Yang.
Being optimistic and thinking about the possibility of good things, as well as pointing out the good points, does not make the bad points no longer exist.

I quoted that I wouldn’t mind having 6 new Guild Guardians, but I didn’t say they would be beneficial to me. I started playing on Dec 14, 2014, so I am one of the oldest monkeys in the Gems of War family and hardly anything in the game can change my gaming experience dramatically. I still play simply because I like the game, with its ups and downs.

However, I have a very close view of a developer. In my view, 75% of the game should offer a practical and intuitive concept for novices in order to attract new players. 25% should be geared towards endgamers in order to keep them playing.

In my opinion, this was a promising year, with more pleasant elements than bad in the game.

What would I like?
Honestly, new enemy teams in the dungeons. I got tired of the current ones a long time ago.
A new boss in Raid? I would certainly like it. Zuul’Goth is cool, but a new face would be even more interesting.
A new GW system? I know a lot of people love GW, but it’s not my case. I’d love to rework this event.

Hope to see this happen? Really no.
I’m waiting (hoping it will happen) for a rework at the Arena, which I haven’t done for over two years, at the Treasure Hunt, which I haven’t done for a while, and a recycling of items, where we could exchange items we don’t use for others we need (swap one color orbs for another color orbs, swap Arcanes and Ingots, god, I have a lot of useless mythical Ingots) even if we had to pay a fee for that recycling.

So I see the good points and appreciate them, but I don’t say that the bad points don’t exist. On the contrary, they exist and I hope they will be resolved gradually.

Oh, and in the history of wolves and sheep, I’m a Wargare.

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I consider that bad design. In a game that is (presented as) tactical/strategical players should not have to resort to trial and error or digging through the code to figure out what their troops do. This is also why you’ll never ever see me use Mongo, for example. The way it’s worded it could instakill all my own troops or kick me out of my guild for all I know! If I know those options are on the table and I accept the risk, that’s a different story.

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Welcome to the club. Here in GoW we either lower our standards, spend all of our time angry, the special third option, or quit.

The troops are littered with text that doesn’t say what it means or mean what it says, and sometimes it sits that way for years, especially if it’s a low-end troop that few players use. Bugs/issues like this are lower priority than grand, sweeping features, and even when we get a “mostly bugfixes” update like this one it it’s a guarantee about 25% as many bugs will be regressed or introduced as fixed. And many of the fixes don’t actually work. And most of them would have taken downwards of 1 minute to QA.

GoW is basically a Hanna-Barbera cartoon at this point. It perhaps began with good intents but it hit upon a formula that guaranteed revenue no matter what was done. There aren’t corners left, everything’s been cut. Visual style. Balance. Story. Functioning features. Bugfixes. It seems no matter what the devs stop caring about, the players keep signing up and buying $50 traitstones. The “it won’t matter, they’re just a bunch of dumb kids” attitude shows through in their work, but how can you argue with the metrics? The kids are eating it up.

So the special third option is kind of like what I’ve felt this Pokèmon iteration. You list out what you want from GoW to have fun, realize it’s a list about as long as “a functioning Match 3 with matches that last about 2-3 minutes tops”, and try to hold on to “at least that part still works” and find a little joy while you grind away at PvP or Explore or whatever.

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