If divines get a nerf it may be time for me to go. No point in making new good troops just to turn around and dull them down.
Just be ok with losing a few matches. It happens.
7 Likes
Btw i don’t ask for nerf but might be a good idea to get 50% mana for every troop type so at least we get more then one counter avalaible
My new way of dealing with Divines
3 of my fights on blue day were Divine Protector weapon/Infernus/Ishbaala lost once then got the same person again and beat them and the champion had the same team so I skipped that battle. In future as soon as I see a Divine team I’m skipping the rest of the day.
If you are in Hoguns Paladins, the same was set with your team, parisedm, taran for sure, and one other I fought I believe had divine teams on defence with DP and Ubastet or combinations thereof that I fought today.
Overall I find myself agreeing with some people I don’t usually agree with and I like that. But it’s a complex issue.
Divines themselves I think suffer from “too much internal synergy” but that’s a very hard thing to fix without completely ruining the cards involved.
Ishbaala’s mana acceleration is probably the core issue. Magic: the Gathering had many, many problems rooted in mana acceleration and it’s caused very careful design or complete abandonment of that mechanic in “recent” sets. Acceleration is a major problem if you can accelerate other accelerators. Since Ishbaala accelerates both Mercy and Diviner, this is a serious problem.
The Infernish team behaves very much like MtG’s “Storm” mechanic, something so broken it’s never going to be incorporated into a Standard set again. It’s broken because it infinite loops too soon to be countered and, as part of that loop, it deals infinite damage. The pattern goes like this:
- Spend 2 mana and a card to generate 3 mana.
- Spend 3 mana and a card to generate 4 mana.
- Spend 2 mana to draw 2 cards.
- Spend 2 mana and a card to generate 3 mana.
- Spend 3 mana and a card to generate 4 mana.
- Spend 2 mana to draw 2 cards.
- …
- Spend some mana to shuffle your graveyard into your library.
- Spend 2 mana and a card to generate 3 mana.
- …
- Once you reach some amount of mana like 1,000,000, cast a card that deals X damage, where X is the amount of mana spent to cast it.
When Storm hits, it’s too early for the opponent to cast a counterspell. When it stumbles, it has enough redundancy your opponent can’t put enough counterspells in their deck to stop it. There are some very specific decks that can on a lucky draw stop Storm, but they still tend to need Storm to stumble more often than it is statistically expected to stumble. Now let’s consider the typical Divines game:
- Activate Mercy for a free turn, filling Ishbaala and/or Infernus.
- Activate Ishbaala to deal damage, fill Infernus and/or Diviner/Mercy, and a free turn.
- Activate Diviner for a free turn and to refill Ishbaala.
- Mercy/Ishbaala might be a free turn here, but you usually activate Infernus and get a free turn.
- Activate Mercy/Diviner for a free turn…
It can stumble based on board conditions. It’s not as reliable as MtG’s Storm mechanic was. But in more games than not my Divines team has killed 1 troop before my opponent’s first turn. I’m usually sad if I can’t kill 2 by my 2nd real turn. If I make it to turn 5 without having killed an opponent, my odds of losing are dramatically higher.
This works because every troop is a ‘mana accelerator’:
- Mercy, as a converter, gives you a way to turn 1 generate a free turn and mana.
- Diviner, as a converter, gives you a way to generate a free turn and mana.
- Ishbaala, as a converter, gives you a way to generate a free turn and mana while doing damage.
- Infernus, as an exploder, gives you a way to generate mana with high free turn probability while doing damage.
The solution is tricky and I don’t think, as players, we want any of them.
My personal opinion is the problem is the same as every other broken team: free turns. Goblins is broken because it feeds itself free turns. The Troll/Nyx/???/Mab combo works because it feeds itself free turns. Divines is broken because it feeds itself free turns. Doomskulls are broken because they generate large amounts of free turns. Most of these would still be very powerful in a game without free turns (Goblins is the one that fails the hardest without free turns.) Almost every broken synergy in the game is only broken in the presence of “looping” teams. But I think the probability of players accepting this fix is near zero.
That leaves us with investigating the accelerators and trying to tweak them downwards, and all of these would be unpopular. Mercy is one of the game’s best converters and is a low enough rarity to be accessible to newer players. Infernus is the best mythic in the game, only contested by Pharos-Ra for its soul farming utilty and Ubastet because it’s bugged. Ishbaala is very popular because of how strong she makes Divines. Diviner’s the only troop I think we could nerf without outrage, and I’d argue Diviner is a replaceable troop on this team. (I use Gorgotha instead of Diviner in pet rescues, and Ubastet also fits that slot well with or without its bug.)
Probably the “safest” nerf would be to take Raidant Aura off of Ishbaala. It won’t solve the team’s propensity for free turns once the engine’s running, but it’d make it more like Doomskulls by slowing it down.
Now all those words said, I still don’t agree Divines are “a problem”. Why? I’m simply not losing enough to Divine teams in PvP to care. At top tier play the team is manageable. It used to be true that I could only consistently beat Divines with another Divines team, but Doomskulls gives me another option now. That the AI has to go second puts it at so much of a disadvantage it can’t get the engine going fast enough. This is because it’s always been true that “a Mercy team” is the best way to shut down an opponent’s Mercy team if you go first. You can either eat all the purple yourself or be satisfied the AI is going to waste its Mercy cast. If you are mad that there are 2 viable counters for it, I’d argue the Psion/Ragnagord/Famine/Death team is a contender. THAT is the team I lose to the most in PvP, because if I stumble on mana generation it can KEEP me behind. I absolutely HATE to play against a Famine team and will usually skip them. But no one wants to play that in PvP on offense because it’s much slower and less flashy.
To me, the best “nerf” to Divines is to repeat what Doomskulls did: give us another fast, flashy, reliable PvP team. Then we’ll have 3 ways to beat Divines reliably. I feel like what’s happened is the devs have caught on to something no one really articulated: it’s more fun to make “more S-Rank teams” as an answer to S-Rank teams than to demote the entire game in an attempt to make them all A-Rank.
8 Likes
If we’re stuck with Divines having (arguably way too) high hitting power, high synergy and high acceleration… then the other (partial) solution is to give us way more equivalents for other types and colour combos. At 1-2 new troops a week, most of which are gacha padding, I’m afraid it’ll take years before there’s many other options, both to use and to be one-turn-pounded by as defences.
2 Likes
Not sure what team you’re using but Doomskulls are just as fast due to Mr Highforge 
I agreed because then I could use Divine Ishbala and this troop and have all my troops start at 100% and then BAM game over other team
this game always go in cycles like this. next week will be a new meta. you wont even remember divines
2 Likes
In principle you might be right, the Divine meta has stuck with us for some months now though, and with more and more of the newly released most powerful troops turning out to be Divine aswell, i don’t think change will come naturally.
Anyways i explained at length why i find the powercreep meta problematic in a game that receives virtually no rebalancing/strengthening of old troops for economic reasons and that will hold true even if the future undoubtably stronger and stronger troops turn out to not be Divine centric.
I don’t really agree, because the cycle’s been wonky for a long time.
The first meta I saw complaints about involved Mab and Wisp. I wasn’t far enough along to know or discuss the counter at this point.
When that got nerfed, the new meta people hated was Mab and Kraken. Again, I was still a baby so I didn’t even face this team let alone know the counters.
Kraken got nerfed. And nerfed again. Finally, it got nerfed hard enough the team lost popularity. Only it was replaced with Nyxbringer.
This was a time of turmoil. There was a lot of compaining about Goblins in this timeframe, but veteran players felt like there were plenty of counters. I was gathering significant power at this time and I didn’t find Nyxbringer to be that impressive. What I did fear was the Psion/Ragnagord/Famine/Death team (or anything with Famine, for that matter), and the Divines team I’ve come to call Infernish for its combination of Infernus and Divine Ishbaala.
I felt like Infernish was far more powerful than Nyxbringer and said so. Many times. I could tell it was getting more popular on defense. I didn’t yet have Infernus, and I was having trouble beating Infernish myself far more often than Nyxbringer. Nevertheless, Nyx was nerfed.
Nyxbringer still lives, but isn’t as popular. Infernish replaced it, just like I said it would. We were distracted from this because Dhrak-Zum came out and everyone hated Doomskulls. Everyone whined about it as the new meta that HAD to be dealt with.
Funny thing was I only rarely saw Doomskulls on defense. When I did see it, Infernish ate its lunch. And offensive Doomskulls had no trouble with defensive Doomskulls. The only teams I found gave me trouble when I piloted Doomskulls were familiar: Psion/Famine and Infernish. It took weeks, but people finally stopped talking about Doomskulls and pointed out Divines were still more powerful.
Then Ubastet came out and we flailed about it specifically, but it’s just a variant of Divines.
So here we are. The meta consists of these powerful teams:
- Psion/Rag/Famine/???
- Doomskulls
- Divines without Ubastet (tends to be more consistent due to extra mana smoothing)
- Divines with Ubastet (tends to deal with fast teams better)
Psion is strongest against slow Doomskull teams that rely on exploders to pay their mana costs, but can be overwhelmed by either Divines team. Doomskulls are powerful if you let them get to the explody phase, but Divines can take out its key players faster than Doomskulls can get there.
So two of the top meta teams are good counters against each other. The other two are good counters against everything, and they’re both Divines. We’ve noticed this for a long time, but were too busy blaming Mab teams for the game’s woes to focus on Divines. (Incidentally, the old Nyxbringer would be a good counter to Divines. Free turns are a key component.)
I don’t see how to fix it with counters, unless we give a lot of other troops a fast-start ability. I don’t look forward to any nerf of Divines. I happen to like the fast game they promote. So my hope is we get “more troops that accelerate the game like Ishbaala” rather than “take away what makes Divines work”.
been around three years… its always one meta or another. something always replaces the last and we start over.
6 Likes
This team is a huge problem. Imagine how discouraged new players will be getting slaughtered daily on their earliest forays into wars. I am over level 1000 and have very few mythics. I can no longer build coloured teams that are even remotely competitive. This extends to PvP. Most 3 tier fights are divines now and the chance for me to grind a place on the leaderboard is now a forlorn hope. I left a top guild because I didn’t want to let them down in wars. Its only a matter of time before I quit gems. I’ve put in plenty of effort to be thwarted by unkind chest offerings and an Ill conceived mythic set up. Strategy is redundant against this team unless you have a similar team to oppose it. This game has become all about the troops you find, no skill required.