If you are equating the class weapon with a troop spell, so be it. I personally find the mythic weapons underwhelming, but the classes useful (3 of them at least).
In either case, traits are equivalent in terms of investment time and relative strength.
That is a fair assessment of their traits.
Well Daemonomicon or however it’s spelled is good if you have traited Abhorath. And I use (and love) Creeping Death. I seem to be able to get Death Mark to trigger fairly regularly assuming the troop lives long enough.
As for the traits, depending on the class, it takes more Arcanes And Majors in exchange for a few Runics so it would take longer. Of course I don’t know the color for Archer. Again, feeling lazy at the moment to look it up, but those Arcanes really are a drag.
Why can’t rng work this way for me?!
Point in f fact is that Archer’s trait can be used with ANY weapon, even those that are not green (although you won’t get a magic bonus from the class (other then with the +2 perk))
So there are many more spell options with an Archer’s class compared to Maw 1 spell (although it is one of the best) and any yellow weapon can be used with Mercy and and other weapons have “Fast” and can also be filled using mana generators.
The biggest bump I see is if you can get 16 arcane mountain traitstones before you get 18 mono Green traitstones
@Shiratori Archer uses 18 Mono Green traitstones
The question is never just “Is this game mechanic OP?” but “Does this game mechanic make the game more fun?”
Some builds are adjusted because they really don’t perform as intended. But that’s not always the problem–or even primarily, I’d guess. If a game becomes monotonous, people stop having fun. If people stop having fun, they quit.
Even fun, balanced metas have to change, because if the meta never changed, people would get bored, stop having fun, and quit.
Why i think maw and devour in general is not overpowered is because once you fix the bugs, it still requires a lot of support. EI mercy, bone dragon, infernal king.
Let’s suppose we had a troop with a trait that said “every time you match 4 or 5 gems, there’s a 10% chance to instantly win the game”. Would you consider that not overpowered? It’s only a 10% chance after all, so it should be okay, right? And it requires at least the same amount of a lot of support.
Trait yes quite powerful and it can be debated as overpowered how ever it with chances that low and like maw requiring 2 support to 3 support units and this trait only requiring 1 support unit it is stronger than maw’s trait but only just in the number of supports it need. If the troop actually needed a minimum of 2 supports to make that instant win trait function properly and at a 10% chance no it is not overpowered.
The real broken thing mentioned in this thread is shadow hunter. It was designed in old times when troops had third of their hp and never adjusted.
Nerfing devour would be a nasty move, the game is bad enough for the endless addition of troop health and defensive skin/barrier. Currently we at least have devour to have a hope for a game that ends this year.
As said many times before the good way to shift meat is to ADD more well-playable things the single-minded setups are usually indication of most other troops being too weak.
It’s not overpowered, it’s a design failure. If you want games decided on a coin toss only, why keep in all that distracting stuff like matching gems and powering up spells? Why not go all the way and add a trait that says “at the start of combat, roll your average win rate, immediately win or lose the game”. It’s not overpowered, it doesn’t let you win more often than you would without it. Still, those of us who actually like to play a match-3 game instead of slot machines probably wouldn’t like it. Same applies to Devour, it makes all the core game mechanics completely obsolete.
Not really, You need mercy to set off maw’s one time spell, usually empowered, you also need a skull generator to make the third trait work, and you need a troop for if maw fails. If we remove mercy and skull dragon, maw is horrible. the only reason maw is good is because of the team composition. A maw team is like a machine, every part matters. If devour was so powerful why did no one cry nerf when black beast had it? The reason was support, Black beast might be lower rarity but if properly supported with a mana generator and a skull generator and a troop generator can become unreasonable strong just like the great maw and casting black beasts effect can sometime (just like maw) kill an opponent.
No, but it helps. Alchemist is far superior.
No. I have lost three troops with unfortunate falling cascades of skulls. Also, Bone Dragon helps glitch Maw’s third trait, which is why the troop is broken in the first place.
No, Maw is a one man army, a Rambo movie, and A Call of Duty montage rolled into one. Maw is an exceptionally broken troop with 3 fanatics behind him.
Black Beast devours its ALLIES. The argument can be made that you are shooting yourself in the foot each time you cast Black Beast.
After eating your mana generator, skull generator, and troop generator…you better kill someone
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EDIT: As for my actual 2 cents, I think the fact that most of the top match-ups involve one or sometimes two Great Maws on BOTH teams, along with Mercy and Bone Dragon / Infernal King points to the overpowering strength of this combo in the current meta. Counters do exist (Your own Maw, Gob-chomper, lock-out combos) but it’s making PVP rather boring since the patch. I find that competitive players have little choice, especially as it’s one of the fastest ways of winning a match. And you need to win a lot of matches to get up to the top 100 (or even 1000), since there isn’t enough of a drawback to being defeated on defense - shouldn’t top-ranked players be worth more pvp points than those ranked in the 3000-8000 range? And shouldn’t they lose more points for a loss? That’s generally how ladders work.
This really needs to be emphasized. Mercy will give you the occasional turn one fill, but it is rather rare to happen. Even if you get a starting board that allows Mercys spell to keep the turn, the yellow Mana generated often still isn’t enough to fill Maw with the first activation.
On average out of many invade games Alchemist gets Maw going faster more often than Mercy does because of Alchemists versatility as a universal transformer.
Also in opposing Defense teams Mercy is rather easy to sabotage by setting up the board and be used to your own advantage as she will transform when there is just a 3 match available.
Nope, you only need Great Maw, anything else is just icing on the cake. There is no need at all to get off his spell, skull matches alone suffice. Try setting up a defensive team that contains 4 Great Maw, I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets less attacks and a higher win rate than the one team composition one. Playing somewhat carefully, you can often turn the Mercy kill chain to your advantage, there’s just no counter against a random coin toss tough.
Nope, the reason was that it devoured your own troops, not those of your opponent. I’m pretty sure if Agile troops would have missed 30% of the time themselves, nobody would have cried nerf back when it was an issue.
I’ll get right on that. Just as soon as I draw three more Maws. 
Going by the number of mercy/maw teams i have to disagree with you there. Mercy is a transformer that has empowered which is one of the reasons this combo seems to work is is being used so much. A turn one transformer is strong when you can dump it into a 24 mana hole. The likelyhood of you getting a match 3 skulls is random but it is safe to say that on some boards you might get lucky to match 3 but less likely that maw’s effect goes off. Maw on his own is actually too easy.
I’ve never had a problem with Maw… But I’ve also never faced it on a defense with an Empowered Mercy and/or a skull-gen team where all the troops are maxed out (Mythic, Traited, etc.) Pre-200 he’s very easy to take down before he can do anything so long as you have a decent team for it. Post-200 I don’t even bother tryin because it’s clearly much harder.@killerman3333, I think your argument is very much biased by your own experience.
Great Maw is too strong even without Mercy. The skull bug is definitely a part of this. Changing Mercy to Fast should happen (since Empowered mana gen is too strong). I think that’s a solid start, but Maw may also need higher mana cost and or slightly lower proc chance on Devour (10%). The dev team knows what they’re doing so I hope we’ll see some incremental changes.