Trial Team Feedback

To the devs who designed this completey out of touch game mode:

Be more like Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and less like Redfall.

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@Kafka Thanks for the “Adana Epic Trail” team selection. It was fun to play.

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First one (and probably the last one) that wasn’t a pain to play or a grindfest. I agree. Thanks @Kafka

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Agree. If they were all like this, I don’t think people would be complaining (much), but at the same time I think the Adana trials were probably accidentally okay, lol.

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I concur. P4-NTH4 is a straightforward DPS troop vs low to mid levels, but vs. super high cpu levels it becomes a store-brand Zuul’Goth. They may or may not have added it to the team if they analyzed (even on paper) its viability vs. cpu level 500.

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Anyone want to talk about the big L that is Merlantis? (Current Switch kingdom)

  • You are hinted to use Submerged.
  • Apparently the ONE and ONLY AOE troop in Merlantis is … Leviathan.
  • Leviathan.
  • LEVIATHAN.
  • A troop that explicitly dispels your Submerged before dealing the damage that Submerged is supposed to protect you from to begin with?

(slow, sarcastic applause)

Devs. This is the EPITOME of “counterproductive”.

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I said my piece there

and if I were you, I’d get started with trying to get Drifting Sands fixed.

The current version is going to end up being the enemy AI Great Mawing your Great Maw to beat the player, which sounds like a sick joke, but since it’s mana blocked on both colors in the back and you can only kill top down, it’s really going to be a thing. Devouring a non-devoured buffed enemy may not lead to a pleasant fight when your only win-con is sky skulls, so you’re stuck devouring a Sand Shark that has devoured something, probably. (The Great Maw on their team has no real way to fill in a timely manner)

By the time Drifting Sands comes around in 2 weeks and nothing is changed, it’s already too late.

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That might actually be fair compensation :rofl:

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The Drifting Sands trial is SO awful and miserable. Once I used all my skills I’d just set it to auto battle because it was beyond tedious.

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I gave Merlantis epic trials a go yesterday. The team order I ended up with was : Kuotani - Triton - Waverider - Mantis Shrimp.

Strategy (if you could call it that): Cast shield on Kuotani because Lamprey loves one-shotting with sky skulls, and unload every spell at Leviathan. At higher levels you need all the help you can get to kill Leviathan and Lamprey often ends up dead first due to skulls. I usually cast Triton first for the magic buff.

Immediate reset if anything is devoured / sky skulls destroy 2 troops. And above all: praying! Praying that I dodged every Lamprey devour, that I didn’t lose troops to skulls, that Hippocampus didn’t buff Leviathan exclusively. Just praying. If you manage to destroy Leviathan it will be a slow (extremely slow) whittling down Golem and Hippocampus. I tended to go for Hippocampus first, since Golem can submerge and if you manage to get Mantis Shrimp first due to reshuffling it takes bonus damage. Triton is a great alternative (if you can keep him alive), since he can buff damage. Haven’t tested with only Wave Rider & Kuotani left.

Please rethink the enemy/player team. Just because it’s technically possible, doesn’t mean it’s good design and that every one has hours to try.

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I’ll ask again: @Kafka does it still make sense for any player to post in this thread?

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It make it no sense!!

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@icy
I’m pretty sure they were beyond caring at the time of release. And it’s not a bug.

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Just wanted to weigh in on last week’s Merlantis trial - yes it’s bad at the higher levels. While the issues with Lamprey and Leviathan are well-documented here, I think at level 350 Hippocampus and Coral Golem become bigger problems, as their healing just outscales the player team’s damage by too much. Golem’s skull reduction and healing are so much that the player doesn’t have a chance of winning even if they have two troops versus a solo Golem.

At the highest level, the only troop that really matters is Waverider - the other troops scale that badly. Please replace one or all of the other three player-side troops with Merlantis troops who can actually do damage to high-level enemies. Anglerfin, Cyrene, and/or Kharybdis would all be improvements over the current player-side lineup.

(Also, by now it should be clear that giving players no board control options is a recipe for painfully slow and drawn out matches, especially when the enemies are high-level. Why not give the player side 1-2 board control troops as well?)

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Merlantis Kingdom should be have a buff / change like what Stormheim or actual Grosh-Nak are

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Holy :poop: are the devs just punking us?

So they fix it by giving us Florian instead of Pixie and swapping out the three enemy troops that were immune to fairy fire for (wait for it…) three troops that are immune to mana drain. You can’t make this stuff up. :rofl:

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Last week on Switch, we had Broken Spire Epic Trials. Bar none, the worst-designed Epic Trial we’ve seen yet, and the only one that was nigh unbeatable even at level 225.

The Good: In Flame Troll and Fire Beetle, we were given two legit board control options to try and speed up mana generation and avoid bad boards. Progress!

The Bad: The centerpiece of the team, whose mana we were supposed to fill with said board control troops, is Pyrophemus, a bad troop with no reliable scaling that only does single target damage. While all of the legendary-rarity troops in Broken Spire are pretty bad at scaling content, please replace Pyrophemus with Sheggra, which would give the player some ability to lilmit the number of red gems on the board. (It’s nigh-impossible otherwise, as both of the player board control troops add red to the board, giving you no reliable way to counter the enemy Sheggra.)

The Ugly: Bro, Flame Rhynax? You literally couldn’t’ have chosen a worse ultra-rare troop from this kingdom for the players. Light splash damage is effectively the same as single-target damage when the enemy team has this much of a stat advantage. Zero scaling aspects. Zero traits of interest. What a dog of a troop.

Please replace Flame Rhynax with literally any other troop from the kingdom (preferably Sulfur Slime or Ograk Shaman). Then replace Flame Troll (since players don’t need 3 board control troops) with something, anything that lets the player team deal with higher-level troops (Luther would be a decent choice; after him, Terraxis would probably be the next best option, though I would prefer a new troop.)

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I can’t believe we didnt get Luther honestly, hes like, the mascot for Gems of War.

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Luther might actually be the best troop in Broken Spire for Epic Trials. Doesn’t say much about the Kingdom.

Doesn’t help Broken Spire already had its Kingdom rework. :fire:

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Whitehelm trials, while not an utter abomination, are still stupid.

We are told:
“Give allies skill points (…)”
Yet the only troop that does this is Priestess of Light, who does so to a random ally. Both she and the other mana generator The Topaz Giant are unreliable as they destroy a column and convert 6 gems respectively.

The enemy OTOH gets to convert all red gems. The enemy has a troop that gives armor to all allies, and 2 troops that do true damage, one of them doing life steal. In my case, one attack from Lady Sapphira leaves any of my characters with 2-3 hitpoints, to make matters worse, the Topaz Giant is nigh unusable, as unless there are very few purple gems and those are conveniently aligned, you are going to be charging up the true damage dealers on the enemy team by casting.

This battle would have been more enjoyable, if that term can be applied to epic trials at all, with the Topaz G on the enemy team and lady sapphira on ours, alternatively with Holy St Astra on ours in place of the priestess, or even just the templar.

PS - I’m still waiting for someone to explain in which universe any of these epic trials are in any way fun, and in what way they teach us anything besides what not to do. Yes, I know I don’t have to do them and by now I only do them if I cannot sleep - but it remains a problem to implement game modes that almost nobody enjoys and imo this will be causing people to quit the game even if they don’t know it’s because of this feature precisely, as it leads to boredom, frustration and fatigue. If we must have this rubbish, there are still better ways to do it such as:

  • Give us the team from last week’s kingdom, so at least we are doing something different from the enemy.
  • Let us build a team from the kingdom’s faction
  • Let us use the hero
  • Let us switch out one character to a troop of our choice.
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