Ive been thinking about this for a while, and it has been hinted at in several topics, and blatantly brought up in others, but this is what I perceive as the big flaw of 1.08.
“Skills” (as I+2 puts it).
Attack
Armor
Magic
Life
These have all (except for magic, the reason I am writing this post) been boosted through levels, ascension, and kingdom levels to the point that troops are nearly homogeneous.
Yay im fighting 20 attack goblins, or 20 attack skeletons, or 20 attack EVERYTHING.
Attack spells have become obsolete. Why do I want to do 9 targeted damage to someone when I can pop off my KOS and one hit anything? True damage now is pretty lame when everything has 20-40 life.
I think there needs to be a re balancing of the core skills of troops to give magic a higher boost, and reduce the huge bonuses to all the others.
How much more interesting would it be if your spells provided an important damage rating, or gave you enough armor to make the next hit survivable? How much better would it be to feel the difference in the troops again of the “glass cannon” troops that were STILL glass cannon’s instead of hyper buffed homogenized troops?
With all the talk about goblins, and true short, and whatnot, how much of it would be solved if it didnt feel like the troops skills had all just inflated to ridiculousness.
I mostly agree with this. I usually change my invading line-up every week or so (I’m easily bored, what can I say? ^^), but since the patch hit, I’ve pretty much stuck to the same line-up that’s all about huge attack boost, with a pretty Abhorat on top to clean house and a cute little Orion bottom to mark every target (sorry @Jainus, I don’t have a mythical Dire Wolf).
Troops feel a lot more homogeneous than before, and only a few spells seem very potent, mostly those that either create or negate skulls, weaken the enemy or boost your troops. Every other spell damage feel a bit weak overall. And I was sorely disappointed to discover than even mythical units didn’t gain a single point in Magic.
I don’t want to be overly negative on it since I’m sure things still need to be tweaked a bit, and it’s still the holiday season, so usually not crunching time. But I do agree that the game is a bit unbalanced right now in that regard.
Pretty much this. Having the exact attack/life/armor bonus when you ascend a troop then level past 15 makes everything too homogeneous for the moment. I do wish a little more thought would have been put into the stats for each troop instead of the same +1/+1/+1 for each Ascend and level. I do realize that it would be a lot more work and potential balance nightmares to deal with though.
I believe I’ve said similar or at least thought it. The dev’s took a frankly lazy approach of +1 per level +1 per rarity and it seems only balance thought was don’t do that to magic when the end results show you need magic to make some of these spells useful with the life/armor in the game. There should have been a troop by troop balancing done rather than universal + 2. I think more traits should be unique to troops as well or maybe just legends. If as in another thread orions true shot applied to his ability he would feel legendary again even if he did hit for 3 at least it’s true damage.
I have a mythic Kerby and I don’t see the point of using him over 3 ultra rare rock worms fullyt raited. Even if I fully trait kerby he’s still feeling underwhelming because his stats are no longer that much better than the worms.
I’m sure they would take exception to it and speaking as a very lazy person I’ll say they should. But all you did was rephrase lazy and make it sound pretty. Kudos for that but it’s still the easy approach.
Kingdom/Unit bonuses and ascension were basically two rounds of nerfs to every direct damaging ability.
Kingdom bonuses gained +9 life, +5 armor, yet only +1 Magic that might help with spell damage. Not too many people complained at that point, because we were too busy dealing with the infinite turns. Yet these same kingdom bonuses are massive buffs to skull generators.
What was the average high level of attack before kingdom bonuses. around 9? Even Sheggra was 7. So with kingdom bonuses at max, suddenly skull damage is buffed 50%.
Now you add in the extra levels, where no units gain magic, but every level gains you +1 Armor, Life, Attack. You have another buff to units relying on skull damage, and another effective nerf to damaging abilities.
This is without even looking at how so many traits work off skull damage only. Why should a Paladin only deal double damage to dragons on skull damage? He shouldn’t all unit damage should be doubled.
True damage is a powerful ability. Sure they wanted to throw some traits on commons to make them powerful, but they ignored how strong True Shot is. It should be used with the card’s ability, not skull damage.
Now they said they don’t want to “nerf” troops now that people are investing in traits, yet if they don’t accept they need a balance patch, the game will lose its depth. It will become True Shot + Skull Generation or Loops. It will lose the strategic back and forth.
We don’t really see a need to nerf much at the moment. But redistribute some of the values? Yes!
As soon as everybody’s back from holidays, expect us to be taking a look at stat balance to see what can be done short term (via hotfix) and long term (via update)
If you wait until def teams starting with 2 mas-trait centaurs get widespread and use the nerf bat only then, way more people will be angry. And call it ‘bait and switch’ unless you add ability to in-trait cards getting back the stones at the same time.
I don;t know what a good solution is, but I’m sure time is of essence.
(Making trueshot working as people intuitively thought, me included, applying to ability not skull dmg would IMO make sense but I doubt it can be done without code change. Maybe you can just turn it off temporarily until better idea emerges.)
Thank you thank you thank you thank you seriously a million thank yous. You have given me hope. Even if its just a glimmer, I needed it so badly it’s embarrassing.
Just lost because 3 army (2 glade warden + 1 centaur) has true shot trait (1 hit about 25-30 lifes). I think this trait so unbalaced :(. Need to be fix.
it seems that to find out what was causing the imbalance the devs decided to take 3 things out of the equation. These are life, armour, and attack. indeed this ment that it was easier to see if skills were a problem and it did nerf skills by not including them in the buff. Also please notice that ya true shot is strong but then again its counter is entangle so really why is there complaining about a passive when you have a cheap and effective answer. Also the traits that let you dodge skull damage can be quite effective as well. I do not think this update with traits is imbalanced as much as we need to find the answers that are already there. Some traits are obvious counters to somewhat popular team builds and yet we don’t use them enough. Has anyone realy fought a black beast that ate an ally or two? What about burn? It destroys armour and can be used to slow down the enemy. Really the update has not been out a month and people are just now figuring out the traits system. Lets give it another month and see what the community can come up with for a meta because everyone lost their heads when goblins surged ahead on defense and then worms came back just for true shot to show up. I think people are not really planning out their teams effectively when they scout their opponents. When you entangle a bone dragon that makes 20 skulls on the board just for it to not be able to attack you for alot of damage.
IME the worm/worm/borer/worm team deals with those fat goblins fine even if not so fast.
Also if kept as is despite 20 true damage is completely ridiculous it could be made to work only on invade or attack, not defense that poses the problem.
Here’s the other thing. While I don’t disagree that the stats are out of whack, increasing the magic stat would also cause a lot of kerfuffle.
For lower level players, who don’t yet have the resources to ascend, trait, and level their troops to max, there are still strategies (like the entangle strategy that @killerman3333 talks about) that can allow them to try to keep up as long as they have a good solid team. It doesn’t work all the time, but I won’t discuss that in detail here. My point is this: with higher magic stats, spells now do significantly more damage. Remember how much more powerful you felt when you got that Karakoth bonus? Now double or triple that. The other stats, like life or attack, are lessened, it’s true, but after having been soooo high, my bet is that you won’t notice much difference. But you’ll notice that magic stat difference.
It’s a difficult thing. I know the devs will be testing a lot, and all that. I’m just worried that the uber leveled troops will very suddenly overwhelm everything with just a slight rise in the magic stat. 20 attack is crazy enough, but take even just 2 of that away and give it to magic…? For good reason, I think, they’ve held back so far from adding much in the way of magic bonuses.
With the few but existing magic bonus the cheap abilities went up somewhat, but all the expensive ones are almost worthless.
I recently mentioned the formerly rocking 2-color weapons like fire&ice, sun&moon and the rest of the line. Since then the stats almost tripled. And they do almost the same for the really steep cost.
The abilities usually deal X+Magic damage, so with every point it’s just 1 plus, up to 4 with area effect. When the opposition sits on 240 total that is almost nothing.
Those that used magic elsewhere were already trimmed.
Viable dmg abilities are in minority, spaming is a must, goblin, worm and such work only for that reason. The rest is interesting for effects.
Flat bonuses always help smaller things more. For example, give everybody a $2 an hour raise. The guy making minimum wage goes from 7 to 9, a 28% increase, that is huge. The manager making $30 an hour goes to $32, so just 7%, not as big a deal. The CEO goes from $200 an hour to $202, a 1% change, hardly worth noticing.
Likewise a Skeleton gaining 10 attack (5 from ascension, 5 from levels) sees a huge increase in power. The bigger legendary guys seeing a 6 attack raise (1 from ascension, 5 from levels), not as dramatic. Same with life and armor. There is no simple solution. Adding a flat magic boost won’t solve it, as the same thing happens. Troops with lower magic will see a big increase, those already strong will get a small nudge.
One way around is to move to a % modifier instead. Troops get an innate level of stat based on their level. Then card rarity is a % multiplier, likewise kingdom bonuses are changed to increase the modifier as well. Something like:
Common 1.0
Rare 1.1
Ultra-Rare 1.2
Epic 1.4
Legendary 1.6
Mythic 2.0
Then kingdom bonuses are +0.1 for each, so a Mythic troop with 4 kingdoms giving an attack bonus would have a 2.4 multiplier to the base attack level. This would allow for powerful units to maintain their proportional edge, and allow glass cannon type troops to remain as glass cannon troops. A unit with 4 armor as base, even at mythic would only be 8 armor, while a troop with a base of 12 armor would jump to 24.
But, that is a Serious code reworking, and likely outside of the scope of resources they could afford to invest.
Alternatively, they could just be done manually. Case-by-case basis. We already have specific stats for levels 1-15, why not do the same for 16-20 and tweak ascension to fit?
Well I was never implying that there skulls be a blanket increase in magic, ala karakoth, but more that there should be a case by case basis. Not only that but following the rule that magic is not 1:1 with other stats. I.E on some cards decrease all stats by 1, add 1 magic. Or 4 armor for 1 magic, etc.
