As long as the AI is so dumb, there will always be a deck it’s best at using, which will be the one you see on the large majority of defenses.
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I don’t think it has much to do with the win-rate itself, but how unpleasant pvping is when you have to play against double manticore. And again. And again. Oh look it’s just 1 manticore (+2 x courage and BD, BOOM). And again.
Yeah, the current one I hate is:
Orion / Courage / Courage / BD
Annoying.
I don’t disagree but fixing the AI is a longer term fix than altering individual troops. There has to be some mindfulness of both approaches.
EDIT: Somehow the system quoted the wrong post. I was responding to @Mahamoti.
How do you understand the phrase “fixing the AI”? Because making it “smarter” will only make it more effective at using broken combos like double manticore.
edit: even if AI was capable of “smarter” use of other cards in the game too, I’m betting people will STILL use double manti, because fu everyone, that’s why. It’s annoying, and it has more than good chance at winning because of RNG spike, or because someone just decides to leave the game because it’s a waste of time.
And seriously, I can play vs famine (and other horsemen) cards/decks all day long, same goes for pretty much any other team. But those double manticore games are making me want to harass @Sirrian more about the pending adjustments to the arena, so I can say fuck pvp and just do arena until for SOME REASON double manticore teams are gone.
This is a legitimate gripe. I have it myself. However, as Zoo stated, there will always be a new meta. People cried about Maw/Mab. They were nerfed. From their ashes came, Manticore/Khorvash. People are crying now about them. I’m sure they will be nerfed soon enough. From their ashes, Troop XYZ will rise. Rinse and repeat.
The only way this variety in defense problem will be fixed is by the devs either punishing players for using the same copy/pasta defense or for them to incentivize people using unique defenses.
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Bone Dragon already had its ratio nerfed back in March / patch 1.0.9. It still scales incredibly well at end game, far better than other skull producers.
Let’s not talk about true shot meta, or webspiner meta, or TSO meta. More then a year now we always had some meta. It’s obvious there were never times with no meta.
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I have three mushrooms and a giant spider on defence, trust me if it works there will be rage. I already won one defence with it, but i haven’t checked it in a while.
You didn’t win, game freezing won that one.
Bone Dragon doesn’t bother me. Bone Dragon being really usable when in the AI’s hands doesn’t bother me. Neither Empowered, nor Stun, nor Impervious, nor mana drain bother me. Manticore having all of the above doesn’t bother me. I couldn’t care less about my win ratio. I am kinda annoyed at people randomly trying to ascribe to me a motive other than the one I thought I was pretty clear about.
My problem is running into literally the exact same team over, and over, and over again, because the game incentivizes following the pack and setting nothing but the “best” defense team (even when it’s one that I can trivially defeat).
“That’s the meta” is simply a description of the problem. If the game rewarded creativity and differentiation, then this wouldn’t “just be what the meta is”.
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I have no way to confirm that, so it may be true. WAit a second, did you really face my mushroom team?
I never said a word about wanting “no meta”; that would just be silly. What if the metagame was an ebb and flow of popular teams which gave relatively small rewards (by whatever mechanism; that doesn’t matter) peaking towards being a plurality of defenses, then naturally becoming less common as people intentionally shift away to find a less common team which gave relatively greater rewards?
The metagame doesn’t inherently need to be “this is probably the best team with the current patch, so everyone use it exactly” just because that’s what it is now.
I think the only real solution is to either (1) nerf the flavor of the month troops with every update and/or (2) introduce Sirrian’s idea where you get modifiers based on the popularity of your team.
The former comes with big risks b/c players would invariably complain when they’ve invested a bunch of time/resources into creating a team. I think it’s a great solution personally, but I understand why it probably won’t happen.
The latter would have to give really big modifiers to have a significant impact as I suspect that folks will still want to “set it and forget it”. I think this is probably the better solution.
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How would you visualize “popularity” though? It’s hard to imagine how they’d guide people to making unique defenses.
Unfortunately, the best tool they have to enforce unique builds – limiting resources through extremely unforgiving RNG such that end-gamers don’t have literally everything maxed out, and are forced to adapt to what they have – is infeasible, partly because that ship has sailed, and partly because there’s immense backlash whenever something isn’t immediately available to those with resources to spend.
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Manti are easy to kill they got low health so true damage is the solution , you just need to refill another troop then manti waste his cast and then you finish him with true damage
Great question! The two main ways that immediately come to mind are (1) win rates and (2) total defenses set with that team.
Agree that the ideal solution is to choke supply. Games like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes/Summoners War/Marvel Contest of Champions are great at that (in part b/c they proliferated troop numbers by doing the star/element system).
No one is going to choke my supplies unless I give them permission.
I’d say make something like this:
Every week we have a new kingdom in event (current is zaejin). What if troops from those kingdom would have 150% status during that week for both invade and defense.
We would see a new team every week probably 
Also perfect to test out new troops you just bought
Never forget the first meta, what was it again?