Well said, hope they are listening. 
A Troop that got nerfed in a huge way just by The Great Maw merely existing.
How come no love for the puppy @Sirrian? How can you even compare Kerberos to Maw?
remind me, what happened with Kerberos? Iāve never really used him, console or Pc, before or after nerf I guess.
I donāt think anything happened with Kerberos, other than Great Maw appearing. Why would anyone use Kerberos now with a 25% chance to devour when for a few more mana, you can get a guaranteed devour with Maw? Plus, Mawās 3rd trait triggers a chance to devour that is almost as good as Kerberosā spell. Yes, Kerberos also does damage with its spell, but these two ālegendariesā are not on the same level, at least in my opinion.
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Roger that, I was being a bit daft I supposeā¦ working at a pc and trying to follow forums, and failing.
Makes perfect sense @TaliaParks and agree, thanks for spelling it out for the slow and distracted @Stan !
Hopefully Kerberos is on the short list for revision.
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Honestly i gave up last week and assembled a Maw team to face all the top enemies for the points.
I also have a fully traited Mab but she is better farming souls outside PVP.
Or just limit the number of troops that Maw can devour in a match to 1. That would solve most problems. You can still (quite easily actually) win a battle in which you have one of your troops devoured. But when Maw devours 2 or even 3 troops itās almost impossible to win the match. Then rage quitting seems like a more logical option.
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Im on console and just played a team with 3 fully traited Maws. A bug allows for each one to cast devour.
Ive recorded the perpetrators name; seen him around here!
Lol I run 4 maws on defense, I rarely even get attacked now
3 Hail Maryās and 4 Our Fatherās
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I havenāt tested it since last patch, but does Entangle still not block Hunger from triggering? That simple change would allow so many more teams to be viable vs Maw. I havenāt actually had any trouble with Maw in a while - provided I bring an appropriate team. Problem is, the appropriate team (eg., one that wins every time unless I mess up badly or get the worst gem drops imaginable) list is rather short in this instance. Most of the time, Iāll just use whatever team Iām currently using (usually some event team or something) with the understanding that I can quite possibly lose to some random skull hit.
Maws are still being seen so much on defense because they are still a good way to win in the hands of the AI (best way to win with AI is play to the RNG rather than strategy, and maw is one of the best ways to do this) and for some reason people still care about their defense win rate. I actually highly doubt a change from 15% to 10% or raising his mana cost would do anything to curb this, as they still can eat half your team in a single random cascade (especially if you dont bring counters), which means they still will be used on defense. At this point, the only way for Maw to not be seen as much defense if there was a more attractive option. Technically, this could be achieved by nerfing him to the point of uselessness, as then pretty much any option would be a more attractive option. But then we would just see a shift back to our previous front runners, which, while more varied than maw in the front slot every single time, is still a very small cross section of the troops. Otherwise, prepare for an even better (or even more RNG based) troop to come along and take his place.
Iāve said it before, but the only way we are going to see real variety is by rewarding usage of less-often used troops on defense (by times invaded maybe? time spent on defense) based on their current weekly usage and then reward victories so we can build fun teams that can win instead of the mindset of āmust win as many defense battles as possibleā, which, in the end, amounts to very little either way.
P.S.: Whatever happens, leave my Black Beast alone
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They just need to lower the trait chance by 5% and see what happens. Iāve said many times before that the ācounters not buffsā strategy is great in theory but not in practice. More troops with Stun is not the answer. Just nerf the thing alreadyā¦
Still say Mercy needs Fast not Empowered too. There really shouldnāt be a first-turn transformer.
Agreeā¦ So to compensate we get a rash of first turn removersā¦
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This.
Nerfing the proc chance would not change anything, because those (un)lucky 2+ devours in one game will still happen. And the devour skill itself is not a problem (imho), itās simply the trait and the fact that nothing you can do can protect yourself from rng. You can play a picture-book perfect game, where you are doing everything completely right, and then when Maw is in the first spot, the AI has 3 skulls falling in the boardā¦
I donāt mind not having a perfect win record (the AI winning is something that can and should happen every now and then imo) but having this much hang on pure 100% rng makes things feel frustrating and unrewarding.
My suggestion is to rework the third trait. (Instead of an instant-kill, let it steal a good amount of stats, or traited worms can cast the one shot skill twice. Or or orā¦ I have seen some really good suggestions already)
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Interesting thought on the trait enabling a second Sandstorm cast. I think perhaps this has merit but it may require the gem creation part of the spell to change. Currently it has the potential to fully charge Maw again once cast.
Personally, I donāt mind Maw as it its. I still leave skulls on the board and take mana if thatās more beneficial, more often than not this strategy works. The change to impervious further assists my strategy now, that I will slot behemoth into my team to see how that goes.
I hardly ignore maw teams, i rather ignore/dodge mab teams. Just lost for the first time when the enemy maw (at 1 hp) ate my maw. 
I actually did fight and beat Sisterās defense team using Sooth/Valk/Mab/Sooth when I was first testing the team out. It was a terrible slog, but I did win, mostly due to Soothsayerās incredible utility as a quick-charging board manipulator. Destroying a row and column means generating 15+ mana, or clearing up a couple of skulls. Double Stone Link means they can loop each other for a while in many circumstances. The only downside is that you canāt always guarantee an extra turn, and the drop-in for the enemy can occasionally get you in trouble.
The thing is, when I said I havenāt lost a game since I started using the team, I didnāt mean that Iām using that team exclusively ā I scout and pick the best team I have for each battle. Mab tends to be the fastest for a variety of possible defenses, but after slowly grinding down Sisterās Carnex with skulls, Iām careful not to use Mab against anything with Impervious. And thatās how it should be: no one team should be able to easily beat everything. For every possible team, there should be at least one possible team that it performs poorly against. Mab still performs very well against nearly everything else, and is still possibly too powerful. However, I think sheās now in the range where buffing other troops or introducing other, softer counters may be appropriate.
The changes to conditional effects (10 to 13 gems) were needed independent of the power of the troops with them or their representation in the meta. There are 64 gems on the board, and 7 gem colors, including skulls. Unless you or your opponent are actively removing a particular color, on average there will be 9-10 of any given color. Thereās no point in making an effect conditional when the condition is nearly always met effortlessly. For it to have any meaning, it has to require some effort, and the amount of effort necessary to get 13 gems on the board is still minimal. All this ranting and raving about Mab being nerfed to oblivion and useless because sheās no longer guaranteed an extra turn after casting her incredibly strong AoE is whatās ridiculous. Sheād still be a top-tier troop without the extra turn at all! If you canāt win without casting her spell four times back-to-back without the AI getting a single turn in between, then you really donāt deserve to.
Maw, however, is not an appropriate target to balance around. Saying that Mab was made too weak because people are using Maw more is not a sane argument. Maw was not nerfed at all, while Mab experienced a minor change that should not affect her performance in most cases. The introduction of counters, including the changes to Impervious, are not a nerf, unless you consider buffing any troop to be a nerf to all other troops. Countering Maw still requires a multi-pronged approach that pushes the boundaries of what can effectively fit into 4 troop slots, particularly when Maw is backed by Mercy. Having two outliers is not much better than having one, when you have several hundred other troops that donāt see much use. Maw and Mab both needed to be brought down for the sake of variety. Neither one has really been touched, and the addition of counters to both have done little to affect the meta.
Thereās a fundamental difference between the typical Mab and Maw teams that makes Impervious affect Mab more than Maw. Maw teams are essentially just buff+skull gen teams. Maw just needs to be able to devour one opponent for an attack buff, then itās not really any different from any other skull gen team, just faster. Faster buff, and the all-too-frequent Hunger strike just speeds it up even more. Impervious only slows it down, even if all four enemy troops have it. But the same team could perform pretty well substituting Maw for almost any other troop, as long as you have an attack buff. The same scenario brings a Mab team to a screeching halt, because theyāre typically entirely dependent on Mab for damage, with the other troops being there just to support her. If you have a second source of damage, the performance against Impervious teams should be much more comparable with Maw.
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Against Sisters team (and anything with a single Impervious troop) I now use:
Soothsayer
Queen Mab
Valkyrie
Psion
Mab wipes the non-impervious troops then Psionās split true damage nukes the remaining unit. I changed to this after having to beat down Carnex with only skulls and no generator. Very slow!
Watcher could work as well and benefits from having the Arcane trait. However, I prefer being able to fill Psion with Valkyrie.
Now that iOS has the fix I scout a lot more and change teams as the need arises, as shown by the example above.
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This is true. Before I got The Great Maw, I used Abhorath in the front spot, backed by IK/Valk/Mercy. Having Abhorath get over 70 attack (2 casts) very easily is the same result as Hunger triggering on most troops. The difference is that the Hunger trait doesnāt require the turns to achieve this.
As youāve stated, any Majority (2+) impervious teams are easily dealt with skull generators and attack buffers.
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I agree with you, if not Maw, then what else for RNG? The AI has its limits and if not this, then / else? A much better way to mix up defenses is to incentivize variety v.s. nerfing to force it. Players love choice and decisions which have an impact, it allows them to learn and adapt to overcome.
Why not leverage the diverse board and kingdoms that we have here? It seems like a no brainer! Want a quick and dirty example? Why should a āsand wormā like Great Maw be so effective in the cold or water regions? Sure, it can pummel through dirt and sand, buy youād think that ice / water and moutainous regions of the north would work against it - right? Why would things based so heavily in water, not be an exceptional counter to denizens from the lava pits and volcanic areas of the southeast? Surely the Fey like Treefolk of the northwest would find extreme danger in those same flame rich areasā¦ generalization list goes on.
I suggested a while back, after the 2.0 release, that kingdom specific environmental modifiers would create a variety of defenses.
Essentially, each kingdom had pros and cons to troop types, or mana colors used, or trait benefits and negativesā¦ it would create a variety of defenses for players to create, by kingdom that defense was selected to defend, and then players would not always be fielding the same defense, but could have a number of them. One defense wouldnāt work the same everywhere, and there could even be incentive to use a poison defenseā¦ or a web defenseā¦ or a centaur defense, where one would not today. More of the cards would be used due to pros / cons in place in those kingdoms.
We have this great board of kingdoms, why not have some variance between fighting in each - more than just a banner?
Down the road, if they really wanted to mix it up, they could even add ārngā to when the kingdomās environmental effect on the kingdom went off during your gameā¦ could be first turn, could be every turn, could be last turnā¦ but the bonus could be āadvertisedā in the game when it went into effect.
Even further down the road, if kingdom environmental are working with the desired effects, then āseasonsā to the kingdom could be institutedā¦ so that each quarter, the pros / cons in those kingdoms changed! Which would force folks to reconsider their defenses per kingdom - quarterly at minimum, if the new troops coming out didnāt add enough consideration.
Kingdom environmental would not only have the side benefit of not only putting more cards to use, but in PvP, folks would have different offenses to consider and a variety of opponent team compositions to experience with kingdom environmentals at play.
I see so much untapped potential thereā¦ and then things like pegasus is too weak, Kerberos needs reworked and Maw is too strongā¦ might just start to melt away, as each has their own niche.
Just a thought (again - lol),
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