Thank you.
And yes, this. Every Champion of Gaard setup that I liked using at all pretty much required using Sunspear to ensure that I had a consistent Firestorm. And some of my Stonehammer setups. While probably not the best teams in terms of farming or speed, these were things that I would enjoy trotting out every once in a while. Because the troops were mostly defensive in nature, it was common for the battle to drag on long enough for a starting storm to fade and the team’s effectiveness to hit a wall - one missed cast and there was pretty much no way to regain board control, making them miserable to play rather than a fun little diversion.
Also glad to hear that it wasn’t an intentional nerf and that the reasoning originally communicated for the change was actually the reason. Means my feedback was potentially not wasted.
Going to further give my feedback that it would be completely unnecessary to change anything on the Fire Tree, to remove the fire tree from sunspear, or even remove the Fireproof trait from Sunspear. There are overlaps with the talent tree, but there are also other choices. It doesn’t bother me that one of the minor talents of one tree on a class coincides with one of the minor traits (it would if one of the minor talents was strictly better or the same as the legendary trait, as was the case with pre-release Stormcaller, which was addressed before release).
I also want to express that I understand why you don’t want to add the +2 mana traits to troops and I’m not really of the opinion that you’d need to put them on troops, but I also disagree with your reasoning. Per turn mana generation is barely impacted by these traits. Opening casts can be hugely impactful, so getting whatever you use to generate up a turn sooner with matches helps a lot… but mattered a lot more before there were a flood of empowered converters (and 2 exploders and a spawner) to lead into spells that can cycle into other colors or gain board control or just win. Any troop in question that would benefit “too much” from stacking +2 mana links (ie., using 2 or more of them) would have to have self loop capability or an immediately lethal spell or empowered or some variation there of to want to stack them. Current game state makes it possible to accelerate the highest cost troop, Zuul’Goth, a 32 mana troop (26 with anu, no half mana options) with an always lethal spell, on turn 1 or 2. Stacking links on troops that didn’t generate and aren’t empowered wouldn’t make this faster or more consistent, not on first cast, and not on the refill, it’d make it slower and more inconsistent, especially if said traits were in the place of legendary traits and also not using the hero. For example, a +6 blue links and +2 blue banner would allow him to generate 14 mana in a single blue match with a surge or 16 on a match 5, but only on blue, with no way to generate blue or recycle, so it has to be available right from the start. This is explicitly consistently slower than using a dedicated generator (or 3), empowered converters, and having the hero, where you can force 5 matches, or board clears with storms to generate far more mana far more consistently than any match 3 with any amount of theoretical links you could stack.
I’m bringing this up because there seems to be the assumption that these double links are at a certain power level which may have been true in the days long gone, when they aren’t now, or that they somehow allow unchecked mana generation to the point where stacking them would somehow make mana generation out of control, when we are already generating tons of mana every turn. They are good in very specific situations where they coincide with getting whatever is generating for the team up a turn sooner and better with very types of troops that can self generate, but you need these types of troops present for them to shine. Long gone are the days when people would stack stone link to one-shot some battles with War and Peace in one brown match on Archer… now you’d just cast Leprechaun. Balance wise, putting double links on a troop with a mediocre or bad spell would mean not only would they not get stacked, but the troop would probably not be used all that much at all.
This should also, hopefully, explain why storm control of your preferred color is not of equal value (or power) to a +2 mana link and why it was considered a massive nerf to trade the former for the latter. Even in terms of direct generation potential.
But again, I’m not saying to put +2 links on troops, I’m still in agreement that you shouldn’t put double links on troops but for a different reason. Having them on hero classes where the hero classes have decent trees and heros have a wide variety of weapon selections to choose from to define their role within the team, making it more likely that they’ll actually have a combo with an identity that sets it apart. Corsair isn’t quite there yet because of lack of troops that synergize with both his trait and his trees. Archmagus is a good blueprint at what can work, but most of its best qualities are shared with Frostmage, who can get freeze immunity, freeze others, and submerge instead of that +2 purple link and is generally more universally applicable. Still, the +2 purple link is enough to occasionally set Archmagus apart and carve out a niche. Thats what I’m hoping for whatever classes happen to land with these, as there are some that have really bad traits right now. I still think we need some tree tweaks for these classes to be decent even with the trait changes, but thats what I’m hoping for.
