You know how you unlock a class talent, and then the game just lets you decide if you want it equipped or not? Feels nice to have the option, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be even better, imagine it, if you had the same option for troops and even, say, weapons?
Maybe I don’t WANT my troop to explode a gem or start a storm when battle begins. Why, you ask? Maybe I just have my own playstyle. Who’s to say? It harms nothing, I would think, by allowing a player to spend resources on a trait and then allow them to simply… turn it off. No resource refund. No different trait as a compromise. The selected trait is just… Off.
The same goes for weapons. There are quite a few out there that we have upgraded and then been surprised to realize… Maybe we shouldn’t have. That sounds counterproductive, and yet, what to do? How do I stop regretting that Essence of Evil defeats its own purpose at times by making a disabled troop into a toad? Turn off the trait. No refund, but the trait won’t activate.
I think this would be a simple solution to a complicated problem, and I would love to see it implemented someday.
Wishful thinking, but this will never happen. There are 934 troops and 386 weapons. Each troop has 3 traits – that’s 2802 variables to track on/off per player for troops. Then for weapons, each Doomed/Mythic weapon has 5 trait/upgrades, Legendary weapons have 4, Epic have 3, etc. There are 61 doomed/mythic/class weapons. That’s another 305 variables to track on/off per player. There are 200 legendary weapons, and that’s 800 variables to track on/off.
So just with troops and class/mythic/doomed/legendary weapons, you have 3907 variables that the game would need to track as being active or inactive. Not going to happen.
These variables are already tracked per player. The game tracks, which troops you have on what level, what ascension lvl, what traits they have unlocked, same for weapons. It just needs a flag and a UI element to toggle it.
3907 variables are peanuts in a database, certainly because db already contains the fact you bought a ‘talent’, so just a boolean to add in the tracker.
yes, but to make them “toogle” you would need to create extra one flag, so each of these traits would need to have 2 flags:
has player enabled trait
has player turned it on/off
it’s doubling it… or replacing binary flag with something more complex (depending from implementation, such variable could weight more or same as binary flag…)
Of course it requires implementation, no feature emerges on their own.
My assumption is that they use MongoDB, based on Mongo the troop. So it can be a lazily initialized map on the player document, which do not contain an entry for a weapon or troop till the player do not use the select trait/upgrade feature. From there getting the effective traits/upgrades is very simple.
Furthermore, I suspect this would be a headache for support and bug reporting, where people claim things aren’t happening that are supposed to, but it’s actually because they forgot they disabled a trait.
I saw this on a tech related forum:
“Programmers and God are competing, the programmers make better and more idiot safe software, and God make better idiots, and God is winning!”
The problem can be mitigated if the game indicates to you that your team has troops/weapon with turned off trait. Not some dialog or anything annoying just an icon on the team.
This could easily be done with grayed-out icon of trait on troops (so a grayed out icon would mean, trait is unlocked, but switched off).
But, aside from that… i realy don’t think i need such “feature” … i prefer troops to be rebalanced, rather than such heavy feature would be implemented…
thing is: there are only FEW troops, where you’d want to turn off any trait(and NEVER more than 1 trait on a troop) and such mechanism would require EVERY troop to have it implemented…
so… whole idea is like using artillery barrage to kill a fly…
I really can’t think of too many troops that you’d ever want to disable a trait. Let’s see, disabling Stealthy on Bandit would allow Thief and Assassin (the only classes that have both Shadow and Cunning) to hide the Hero even after a Bandit is summoned and there are no additional troops. As it is, once you have only your Hero left (or your Hero and only other Stealthy troops), then summoning Bandits doesn’t let your Hero go back to being Stealthy, because they are Stealthy as well.
I can’t think of any others. I’ve never been using a troop and thought “Ugh, great, it has THAT trait on it…” Weapons? Yeah, the Doomed weapons that can create gems that overwrite the Doomskulls, absolutely, those upgrade/traits are horrible.
I started to level up runepriest, and it summons a duststorm when an enemy dies, totally mess up my firestorm based setup. Eoe frog, secrets of the crypt last upgrade.
Current event, best troop is Lord of Slaughter, the doomstorm at start is totally suicidal.
Ideally they’d have designed the medal system to allow players to customise traits on troops (and maybe weapons and classes, too) instead of dully bumping life/magic/armour/attack by [number].
They should really just replace ‘Stealthy’ on Bandit and Sister of Shadows with literally anything else, especially now that a lot of people have refunded ‘Bandit’ without unlocking his ‘Stealthy’ trait. Thief has taken Orbweaver’s place in my bracket…
As for Emperinazara and TLoSlaughter: They balanced them around the assumption everyone’s going to want to get that juicy last trait. It’s really sad that TLoS is a better troop for most people in most situations if you don’t unlock his Doomstorm.
I think storms as traits on classes are acceptable as it opens up several team comps and gives them a reason to exist, which is more than can be said for the classes which have no storms, fast mana starts or ANY synergy with other troops or between their OWN traits and talents.
Traits on weapons remain the biggest offender IMO and seriously need looking at already. The list of weapons that become worse the more traits you unlock is long and it hasn’t gotten any shorter in two years…
Mm, I had a similar situation to Tibo, recently, except with Obsidius (wanted him for the Stun, but would have preferred to keep the Firestorm running).
Storms and Storm control are hugely important to whether or not various setups succeed (can easily make the difference between winning and losing), so I do think this is a design issue. Something that allows more choice and control over Storm traits/affixes would definitely be welcomed by me.
I could understand why they might feel a bit disgruntled over changing those traits just because they’re featured in Hero Talents (although… they did MAKE those Talents to begin with…). I’d actually be interested to see what would happen if the Stealthy effect persisted when all 4 Troops had it, i.e. no Troop was targetable. The screen would just display the “No target available” text that shows up when you try to Charm a troop with no buddies or summon into an occupied slot, etc., and then resolve. This would remove the incentive to keep Bandit/SoS untraited (since it wouldn’t affect the targetability of a Stealthy Hero – you’d have to Stun or use untargeted damage). Just a spitball, though, and would potentially need some rebalancing in other areas (e.g. since Stealthy would be getting a buff, Bless might need to be harder to get in some situations to make Stunning easier).
Terrible idea IMO, people would be forced to more skull dmg teams and random targeting or aoe spells. The stealthy talent on thief is a major pain, but orbweaver is worst it summons spiders who are not stealthy.
