The Silence of the Devs (Weapon Upgrades)

Agree with most of this thread. Excellent idea, poorly implemented. Guessing it saved time to have the upgrades assigned by a random number generator…

Over time, more and more evidence stacks that Dawnbringer was a terrible idea and should be nerfed, no matter how many hissy fits that causes.

The devs, back then, wanted to make something flashy and exciting for players who had too many resources to invest in. So they invested in it and got the most powerful weapon both at the time and since.

Then the players who were already endgame and quickly bought DB also very quickly regained all the resources they spent. What a solution!

So here we are. There are about 6 relevant weapons in the game: Dawnbringer, Divine Protector, Mang, and a handful of Mang-like weapons that serve interesting niches. Dawnbringer sticks out as the most generally powerful of them. (If Divines weren’t broken I think Divine Protector would fall out of favor.) No one wants to invest mythic ingots in a weapon less powerful than Dawnbringer. But imagining one at or above its power level seems scary, too.

This would be the perfect situation for a nerf, but for one thing: because the devs made the price so high, anything that makes Dawnbringer more in line with other mythic-level weapons will be met with OUTRAGE. It takes months of farming to get one, and that’s after you spend months acquiring the troops needed to efficiently farm. So to nerf it down to the level of, say, class weapons, a lot of people are going to want million-soul refunds.

What’s dumbest about it to me is they already had one obvious solution to “too many resources” implemented: guild tasks. Even after you level your kingdoms, gold remains important because you can convert it to nicer things via Legendary Tasks. There are still people who hoard gold, but we don’t really see complaints about “I want more to do with gold” because except for people who have practically everything, LTs are welcome.

Dawnbringer didn’t work for souls because it’s finite. It’s one-time. You spend the souls, then if you get 1m more you have no reason to buy another. Ingots are sort of a solution, in that it’s super-expensive to upgrade. We’re going to NEED to upgrade every mythic weapon. But.

Because Dawnbringer is broken and the rest are meh, nobody wants to spend millions of souls upgrading mythics that aren’t Dawnbringer.

So we have a lot of souls, and a clear thing to spend them on, but the reward for spending that many souls doesn’t match Dawnbringer, the Worst Mistake in the Game.

The only way forward I can see is to:

  • Declare all current weapons stupid and start aggressively releasing new weapons with dramatically higher power levels. (People will throw hissy fits because now Dawnbringer’s price tag doesn’t match its utility.)
  • Dramatically lower the cost of Dawnbringer. (People will throw hissy fits because they had to farm for months.)
  • Nerf Dawnbringer’s ability. (People will throw hissy fits because they had to farm for months and now can’t speed-farm trophies in Arena.)

There are no good moves. There is no way to resolve this mistake without making a lot of people very angry. But the longer nothing is done, the worse it gets because more people craft Dawnbringer every day.

I feel quite outraged when i think about the other Mythic weapons from classes being completely laughable even when compared to some legendary weapons…

Rework the class weapons, we have what? 16 classes? Can’t the devs spare some time to rework these weapons not to be as powerfull as dawnbringer, but to be at least worth the rarity?
I can’t really stand bad design being used as “diversity in mechanics/effects”

Or just buff the rest of the existing weapons to something even vaguely useful. Legendaries should be as strong as legendary troops. There can be duds but they should be legendary duds. Not ‘this does the same as the ultra but slightly more and costs more’.

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I have to disagree with that part.
I don’t think the weapon is broken, it is the only weapon being even remotely competitive with current top tier troops aside from the 24 gem spawners for highly competitive trooptype team which currently really only includes Divines’ Divine protector.

I don’t have Dawnbringer yet and while my hero makes for a fantastic skullsmasher leadtroop with its hero talents and traits, i struggle to equip it with a weapon that really feels meaningful in most teams, 'cause almost all of the weapons are weaker versions of already mediocre or weak troop spells.
I am not saying DB could not be very slightly weakened and still be good, but weaken it to the level of other weapons would be insane.

Other weapons need to be brought up closer to DB not the other way around, and since we know the Devs don’t like to buff old stuff in a significant way that means your option one is the only realistic one.

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I got question about mountain crusher

Last upgrade saying explode 1 random brown gem So since it already explode 20 brown, will it explose 21? or 20 then after cascade 1 more?

To clarify: I’m being liberal with the definition of “broken”.

When we’re being very strict about that word, it would mean Dawnbringer is so powerful it can solo PvP by itself. We tend to argue about Divines being broken because there’s no real counter to them other than “another Divines team”. But the individual troops aren’t broken, it’s the synergy between them.

When we’re being looser, it has more a sense of “you have a set of options, but one is so clearly optional you handicap yourself if you don’t take it.” Dawnbringer fits the bill. If you could choose any mythic weapon, Dawnbringer fits almost any scenario. We can contrive situations where some may do close to Dawnbringer, but overall you pick Dawnbringer or Divine Protector in PvP. Period. That’s “broken”, in a loose sense.

Yeah i understood you didn’t mean that DB breaks the game and we are not disagreeing about the fact that there is a gap between DB and almost all other weapons. I still object to DB being the problem.
Yes it is the obvious choice most of the time, but that is a problem with the other weapons being just weak for the most part and not Dawnbringer being too strong.

DB barely holds its own among top tier troops right now, as a matter of fact in the current Divine meta, where DB fits very well, the vast majority of players decide against fielding DB in favor of the gemspawn hero to feed mythic troops mana instead because their spells are deemed more potent.

The gap between DB and other weapons must be closed upwards not downwards, unless the strength of top tier troops also gets readjusted in that direction.
But as long as troop strengths stay the way they are(or more realistically even go up with time), i’d like to keep the one competitive damage weapon the hero has just at that level.

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I haven’t upgraded it, but if it works like Titan’s Bane which I have upgraded it will explode after the initial 20. Now this is where it gets really dumb.

Titan’s Bane destroys a column and then the doomskull creation and explosion is done BEFORE gems fall back into place in the destroyed column. So, if Mountain Crusher works in the same way, and it should, the trait will attempt to explode a brown gem that is not even there due to the board being cleared by the initial explosion!!

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Ok ty this is worst than i thought at least if it explode after cascade it could be useful

Weapon upgrades were just changed to have a new spell step, “DelayUntilEffectsComplete,” which might alter the timing of the gem explosion. It’s worth a retest as anything before this change is invalid.

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Interesting, @Drathas do you mind to test again? I would like to buy it for mountain crusher but not it if does what you said

On Mobile, restarted game. Still works as I described above. Explosion occurs while column is still destroyed.

Gems then fall into the empty spaces at the same time.

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Oh well that suck thanks again

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A somewhat similar issue occurs with the ‘Rending’ trait. As the target of the this is locked at the point of initial cast. So when a troop dies during the sequence but BEFORE rending then a empty space can be targeted.

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Yes so the Crusher is great until tier 8 and you can just skip the last upgrade.
With the Storm and the + attack, I have looped to death many game. You are always full after the explosion, many extra turn from the storm, and your attack goes up each cast for lucky skull shots.
Crusher
Jotnar for Barrier
Mab for freeze
Your grandma ‘s cat

Is a great team.

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Ahahaha XD For what?

Yes and no. If you want to focus on another color than Brown your Crusher will make some fuss…
For example this invasion: Old Treant can create a Leafstorm and Crusher could replace it with a Brown one…

Affairs devs remain silent of @Saltypatra could unravel.