I would bet that at least half of players complaining about how they hate to face defense meta are also using it 
Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you.
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I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the current system is ideal. ;p Even still, you’re just debating the settings on the dials - what if our hypothetical uncommon / creative defense team with a 20% win rate still loses the 6-7 points you’re seeing now, but gains 40 points on a win? There’s no reason that the other guy’s loss and your gain have to be parallel. Or what if defensive teams with drastically lower ratings that your average attack team gave you drastically larger losses? That single-troop throwaway defense would quickly become a terrible idea if it was losing you 15 points a pop. Etc., etc.
in my case i prefer find a team myself but it is true most of people are followers.
Not I…heeeeeeeeeell no. I was running a Ysabelle team for a while because she’s the New Shiny, I pulled a bunch of her, and it amused me, even though the win ratio was awful. Then I eventually changed back to a Hero-lead team that’s I’ve been fiddling with for a while.
A few things:
Buffing the AI won’t make compositions like this less likely. It will only make it more effective and introduce even more polarizing combos. Imagine if these manticores waited until there was no better move to mana drain you. People seem to forget that the entire game runs on RNG, the configuration of the board and what drops from the top. Two identical perfectly played teams facing each other is going to depend entirely on RNG, so much so that even turn priority can be overcome.
We would have slightly more variety if people stayed in the matchmaking pool longer. The whole “rival” thing is silly.
Nerfing said team or parts of it won’t accomplish anything long term. In addition, nerfing bone dragon’s ratio might actually make him more effective at the top because currently he gets less skull damage if you manage to have him create a giant blob that can be resolved to a few skull matches.
The current system barely incentivizes using defenses like this and for whatever reason people are still doing it. Part of the problem was that I’ve heard from at least two people that they are using the defense in hopes that people will complain about it and get it nerfed. This in and of itself is not healthy for the game.
I still think our best bet here is to better reward winning with variety. Yes, it is a tricky thing to balance and yes, some people are still just going to ignore it and put up cookie cutter defenses, but it would go a long way to see the devs at least incentivizing the right things.
Oh, that also reminds me of something I forgot. If you have more than around 2000 PvP points, but less than enough to get a top 1000 spot (and I’m currently below rank 7000 with 5k points on Wednesday), the loss of PvP points is meaningless one way or the other. Generally I just put up a themed team, or a lower score team if I’m farming. I still think everyone else trying to win on defense all the time is “doing it wrong”.
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I presume you are on pc/mobile cause this is what they do on console
Yeah, PC/Mobile. They’ll still take anything with a big mana bonus before attempting to drain. They do seem to prioritize mana generating troops, and will hold the spell on some other occasions (if there are a couple troops close to full, they’ll wait until one is full). They don’t always target the highest mana troop, either, but this can also be taken advantage off. They really like targeting Queen Ysabelle, for example, and if you have general generators like Valk, they love her too. I can still “bait” them out, most of the time on the first couple turns.
Basically, the biggest counter to the team right now is knowing the AI.
You can know the AI all you want, but the fact remains that after you’ve “baited” the manticore(s) a few times, suddenly there’s something with 60-70 attack in the first slow that will level your team to the ground as soon as BD charges (or simply by getting random skulls, which you can’t just feed to the AI anymore, and that means you’re not picking up any mana).
Once again, remove Empowered from manticores, OR take away the Impervious. That should balance it enough to not make people hate their lives whenever facing that combo. You want to have an Empowered troop and can mana drain me AND gain enormous amounts of attack? OK, then give me a chance to entangle it. You want it to do all that but keep impervious? well, ok, but at least take away the Empowered.
“Baiting” double manticore team is just retarded. You literally give up on two turns, at the cost of your enemies buff their attack to 40+ on first two troops, zzzzzzzzz. How about you just give them those 40 attack FLAT and take away the empowered, so I can skip to that point right away and not waste my time? thanks. (oh wait, but then those BLUE RARITY troops would be overpowered right? …)
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Lack of variety exists because we have few viable troops and “new is always better” (power creep) while metas doesn’t changes fast enough to please everyone…
There are games where you can only unlock new units and powers at certain levels, this adds some (unwanted by most people here i assume) restrictions, but at least it allows some more control over the metas for each level tier (101 ~ 200 for example) as it makes more significant the changes on old/low tier troops. The three options we have in pvp now kind of covers this, but i’m a bit surprised that end-gamers are not expecting the best kind of defenders people can assemble for the best score/rewards… Really?
I don’t know if in a End-Gamer vs End-Gamer you can really blame the other for trying/copying the best team he can, nobody wants to lose, specially if it comes with a penalty no matter how small, and if there are no penalty people wouldn’t assemble any defender at all aside from a Peasant and it wouldn’t be fun or even rewarding at all…
So far, the best suggestion i can make for all of this would be to restrict the use of each troop on a team to a single copy, and every copy of the said troop should be accounted for each team you have, this way if you have 4 Manticores you could have four teams using one of it on each.
This would have a lot of impact in how people deal with their teams and collections:
- Disenchanting and Ascending would have much more impact in team building if you want enough copies for all of your teams.
- It would avoid some of the past “4x something” teams.
But even this wouldn’t solve a lot of issues until a new team is created in the likes of this one. As an example:
- Manticore/Spirit Fox/Deep Borer/Bone Dragon → To keep double mana drain.
- Manticore/Deep Bore/Courage/Bone Dragon → To keep skull/status gain spam.
Anyway… To cycle the meta as much as people desire i don’t think there is a way to it so without adding restrictions to team building, even as a parallel pvp like i suggested before:
Simply adding bonuses to using certain troops/kingdoms could also work, but it would require a faster pace on the rework of old troops to some end-gamers even consider the bonus worth the trade in the possibles defensive losses…
@sirrian the devs have been rather silent in this debate so far… views?
For my tuppence, here’s some suggested balancing changes to encourage a bit more variety and wind back some of the powercreep:
- Manticore - loses Impervious or Empowered, and gets +1 spell mana cost
- Khorvash - drains 7 mana from both troops, not all of it, and gets +1 spell mana cost
- Bone Dragon - gets +2 spell mana cost
- Courage - should be +2/+2 not +3/+3 on the trait
- Loyalty - should be +3/+3 not +2/+2 on the trait
- Honour - gets reworked as it’s the only Guardian that is rubbish
- Deep Borer - gets -1 gem created - 9 gems for only 9 mana is too much
- Desdaemona - needs to hit harder, maybe twice and lose the extra turn
Cheers
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That’s no Yu gi oh, weekly ban will become “some cards permanent ban” and i find that ridiculous.
if that’s in the game i must have the right to use it.
I rarly use Khorvash, I don’t say he is average, he is a pretty good troop, but I have rarly problems when I am up against him.
Manticore could get fast trait, instead for Empowered, but he has already been reworked.
Bone Dragon, he also had a rework, we can call it minor, but I don’t like to see tons of reworks on the one and same troop. Rather use energy making some of the other Legendaries playable.
Courage should not give 3+ to attack and life to allies upon skull damage, he should give 3+ attack and life to allies if an enemy troop dies, his skill is already great alone, and gives tons of attack.
Loyalty and Honor I agree with. But Sacrifice should be looked at first.
Deep Borer is somehow very good when CPU uses him, for me he is pretty random to use, almost like Siren. No rework needed.
Agree with Desdaemona, and I think Daemon lover, Lyya, agrees with it too.
i agree
again agree
yup
(just wanna mark it that since manti got nerfed last time i can at least breathe, it was a headache before now its just a nuissance)
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i would have liked but i disagree about nerfing deep borer
also id like some buff or rework to sacrifice please, who do you say only courage is rubbish
Please don’t derail the thread to individual card balance changes. That’s not the point. The individual cards don’t matter; it’s always going to be something. I’m talking about systemic changes.
I’m pretty sure determining the uniqueness of a particular team isn’t the question at hand. Displaying that information to the player is. This is my greatest concern with such a system: how do you provide the player with sufficient information about the reward structure in a convenient way, so they don’t have to keep putting together teams blindly, hoping to find one that isn’t being penalized for being too common? It’s hard enough to build a decent defense team. How frustrating would it be for the game to tell you that every one you assemble isn’t unique enough?
I don’t think incentivizing variety so directly will go over well, considering the response to the Valkyrie changes / Necromancy redistribution. So many people saying they won’t use “garbage” troops just for souls. Why would they be willing to assemble teams that are less likely to win, just for the sake of a bonus? Despite the frequent claims that the game actually rewards losing defense battles more than it does winning them, players still want to win.
Then again, my most effective defense teams are the ones that look least effective on the surface. I think surprises are more effective than meta teams, once people get used to the meta. Each team is a puzzle. Most of them are easy to beat once you figure out a good counter, assuming you have the necessary troops and resources to assemble it.
Steamroller invasion teams that can beat nearly anything lead to meta defense teams designed to counter them. Harder counters could lead to more variety on offense and defense both, but carry the risk of needing certain troops to be able to compete.
I agree that something should be done, but there’s nothing “organic” about trying to disrupt the incentives so artificially. It doesn’t solve the actual problem, or get at the reasons why people choose the meta defense teams in the first place. Once again, they’re not doing it for the resources. They’re doing it because they want to win, because the game communicates to them that they should be, and they can’t find any other way to do so. Building invasion teams is a complex puzzle, but at least you have the advantage of knowing your opponent. A defense team has to face whatever the opponent fields. Invaders have a huge advantage, and I don’t know if there is a way of solving that, or even if it’s a problem to solve.
I think a better approach might be to reward players for creating teams that other people want to fight, and yet still have a chance of winning:
- Give players a way to mark that they’re specifically skipping an opponent.
- Reward players for fielding teams that people want to fight, even if they lose.
- Reward them even more for winning.
- Show players how many people skipped their defense alongside wins and losses.
You don’t need to penalize players to fielding a common defense, just show them how much they missed out on for fielding something nobody wants to fight. It’s a feedback loop that would encourage players to create strong but interesting teams, rather than either fielding the meta or the lone peasant.
hmm[quote=“Spherix, post:76, topic:14735”]
Give players a way to mark that they’re specifically skipping an opponent.
Reward players for fielding teams that people want to fight, even if they lose.
Reward them even more for winning.
Show players how many people skipped their defense alongside wins and losses.
[/quote]
hmm, i think a cool idea would be to allow player to set 1-3 cards banned from their pvp - as in if the enemy defense have one of those, then they arent rolled into your pvp choices
at a cost of: for example weekly gold fee, lowering base gold pvp rewards and/or not being able to play those cards in pvp invade
would totally nullify all the meta frustration
althought i still prefer the ‘favor rare teams’ solution as banning cards makes the pvp less pvp and more toddler game
I still have the Manti/Manti/DB/BD team set as defense from my leaderboard run a couple weeks ago, because I’m lazy. I initially set it because of how the PvP leaderboard works. Having a defense team that slows down other players, regardless of win rate, makes climbing the leaderboard slightly easier.
I think part of the problem with the team’s prevalence is that Tacet repeatedly called it out as annoying during his week-long stream. When I first started playing, and actually cared about defensive wins, I would copy defense teams that annoyed me. If a defense team is nasty enough to annoy Tacet, then it must be worth setting up.
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then do you suggest muting @Tacet will increase pvp defense team variety (partially)?
just making it clear - this is a joke
[runningWithTheJoke] Anna gets it. [/runningWithTheJoke]