It seems that True Shot teams totally disappear. Like dinosaurs, the meteor well-named Nerffffff crush this great team to ash.
Even the last survivor, Orion, has a 75% effective trait only.
Why this trait is not anymore played? Because of the luck based nerf? Overnerfed?
I never used this kind of teams but it can be interesting to ressurect them with some buffs. I think it offered another way to win based on true shot damage. Now, this possibility is gone…
My point of view is the nerf added a too much random factor. I would prefer something like: 50% damage and 50% true damage. It seems the same but if you remove the random factor, you can say “okay this troop will be useful” better than a “this troop can be useful if I’m lucky”.
It just feels like it has no synergy with itself :
There are very few troops having health <= armor
<=> few troops with armor > 50% * [total health]
<=> few chances that, by only using skull damage, you won’t be tearing all the armor of the ennemy in the process of killing him.
So, basically, it has became absolutely useless.
The thing is that it pretty hard to come up with a solution to keep it as a true damage maker AND make it so it would always have a positive effect…
For example, if it had become “Deals X% of attack as true damage”, it would be a nerf against ennemies with very few armor but lot of life, even if it became “Deals X% of attack as true damage as long as ennemi has armor”.
Problem is that its now inconsistent. First attack, hits health pool. Second attack… could finish them, hits armor. Which is pointless. Or the troop kills the armor first, then it doesn’t matter if it triggers. So in a true 50/50 scenario it is basically non-existent. If it happens to trigger twice in a row… then it works. Maybe.
I can’t imagine they ran this and thought ‘this feels good’. Really can’t.
I believe their intention with it was to make a switch so true shot troops need to be paired with true shot spells rather than skull spamming. Compared to other traits, the 50% chance to deal true damage is still very strong. Comparing that with brand traits that only give 1-4 extra attack makes true shot seem a lot better.
There was also a rise in the use of Armored/Stoneskin/Granite Skin troops to counter-balance the True Shot meta. I think folks realized how strong those traits were and they didn’t get nerfed so folks continue to use those troops, which means attack-based teams in general are suffering.
If you go by abstract damage added, trueshot is still a strong trait.
If you add up all the points of damage you don’t have to do to kill troops by bypassing armor because of true shot, it will easily outperfom most other offensive non-legendary traits over the course of a match.
You will have whole battles were the trait triggers close to 100% and effectively working as if unnerfed, and it is still not the way it was before the patch.
There are a lot of factors making true shot less prevalent than it was pre nerf, most already mentioned in this thread, bigger health pools, more viable alternatives in spell damage or spell effects, better ways to dispatch of true shot troops quickly, the addition of legendary traits and generally more defensive traited troops.
Even if true shot triggers all the time, some unlucky skulldrops won’t completely dismantle your team anymore, which was one of the main reasons for true shots dominance before the patch. It is still a good trait, i’d take it over pretty much half the other non-legendary traits that generally tend to be no factor in my teams anyway.