The actual meaning of the word suggests a troop that is unkillable by any means, as @killerman3333 suggested. But that would make the game unplayable, so you can’t use that meaning. You have to find an alternate one, that explains the inclusion of Mana Burn but not any other damage spell, and I haven’t found one such meaning. Would be happy to hear yours.
I think the description of the trait itself is pretty clear. Impervious to status effects, mana burn and devour. If you really want to argue semantics, note the comma between “effects” and “mana”. Mana burn and devour are not included as status effects, they are separate conditions from which the troop is protected.
Is your imagination really so limited that you want to continue to argue this solely over definitions?
I believe it was made pretty clear by the devs that Mana Burn and Devour are NOT status effects, so there’s really nothing to argue about here, and that argument is not what bothers me. (while I do argue with people who still try to say they are, that’s mostly for fun and is not the point here).
What bothers me is, why would it make sense to include just these two in the definition of Impervious? Other than “because the devs say so” or “because that’s what the description say”. These aren’t really answers. It needs to make sense to group these together (but not other similar effects).
What I mean is, if the trait description said “Immune to Status effects, spells with an extra turn, and any kind of damage from any troop whose name start with an L”, would you just accept that? Wouldn’t you question what made the devs do such a thing, and on what ground are these grouped together?
Thematically I think allowing Big/Huge/Immense to be an implicit counter to Devour makes more sense. After all, just because something is “Impervious” doesn’t mean it can’t be swallowed. Or is it somehow immune to digestive acid?
Mana Burn, though, I have no way of justifying that for Impervious troops. They’re not immune to Moloch’s true damage based on their mana levels, so…how is that really any different from Mana Burn?
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Considering they make mistakes but think of the troops that have the trait that can’t be devoured. Troops - Gems of War Database
Starting with them in order
Behemoth = too big to be eaten considering size.
Carnex = Is basically a walking furnace so you would not eat that. Sorry carnex not my plate.
Dragon cruncher = top of food chain
Dryad = poisonous? I actually have no idea
Dwarven miner = um ok i am losing this argument.
Dwarven slayer = ok seriously do dwarves give indigestion or something?
Fortress gate = why would you try to eat it?
Golem = made of rocks but idk it could just change locations and its body could be a ruse.
herdmaster = magical mind control i guess, i got nothing to argue why he should not get eaten.
Plague = You can’t eat a skeleton or at least one that is as deadly as this one is.
Swamp lash = it is a forest almost or at least i hope it is.
Tau = faster than he looks?
war sphinx = um riddle me this, is maw smart enough?
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@yonizaf - To be quite honest here, I really think that this is a sop to the folks that have been crying that mana burn and devour are overpowered ever since those traits made their appearance. For reasons of their own, the devs have decided to roll it all into the impervious trait. It may not be what you or I would have chosen to do, but we are not the ones designing the game. For all I know, it may have come down to something as simple as ease of coding.
Wish I had a better answer for you, but minds of the devs are an unfathomable mystery to me.
Technically, yes, any troop can deal skull damage providing they arent reduced to zero attack and also providing they are currently in the front slot. Mab’s attack is not really bad (whose is with ascensions and kingdom bonuses, though) but is by no means good either, and she doesn’t have any other qualities worthy of a first troop. She has nothing that board modifies to increase the incidence of skulls, gets nothing on a skull hit, and has no skull resistance, her spell doesnt raise attack, life, or armor, and she and gets no special bonus from a skull hit. I should have specified “anything that sets Mab apart from every other troop”. By comparison, Hag’s spell, though pretty terrible whether facing impervious or not, still gives a stat bonus. Poison Master still explodes. Scale Guard still deals damage. Even Dire Wolf, a common whose spell exclusively causes a status and conditional extra turn, still has Nature Brand and Agile and is meant to be a skull troop. Mab has Insulated to protect her from getting frozen after hitting Bone Dragon with skulls, and thats about it.
To be clear to everyone, I’m not saying Mab isn’t overpowered currently, and I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a counter. I just think that 100% counters present a bad precedence and relying on this type of design turns an an advantage wheel into literally a rock, paper, scissors style advantage system, which is bad long term. A 75% reduction for mana burn damage for Impervious, for example, would still be a hard counter to Mab without being an absolute counter, in the same way that Gorgotha is a hard counter to (non-maw) skull hits without needing a trait that has 100% reduction.
It is only the absolute that makes it a poor design choice. Even with the change, Mab still solidly beats over 90% of the available troops, meaning anything that doesn’t specifically set a Mab counter is still going to be blasted apart in seconds by a Mab team. Unfortunately, I don’t have any better ideas for dealing with the Mab “issue”, since partial reduction for a single spell type probably not feasible code-wise (not to mention the nightmare of trying to describe that for Impervious with the limited text space).
And while a Maw is also severely hindered by being counter picked, it is still nowhere near the degree of Mab. Any non-devour immune troop will still allow a Maw to chew through an entire team with ease. Even versus a full team of devour-immunes, Maw still has good attack, decent life, frenzy, and Huge, with a spell that, even if it cant devour, can still reconfigure the board and has a chance to charge most of the available skull spammers in exchange for the all the mana it blocked. You would definitely still take something else versus full Impervious given foreknowledge, but you could still muscle through.
As it pertains to Maw, though, it would have made much more sense overall if having zero attack would have simply blocked Hunger (possibly in addition to the impervious change). Entangles and attack reducers could then still be hard counters. Regardless of the entangle changes, if Hunger remains available to trigger at zero attack an entangled Maw can still devour its way through an entire team that isnt devour immune, it just wont gain attack or break entangle while doing so.
I never actually said Plague or Famine was unstoppable in my earlier post, but it is undeniable that they slow down games (jinx/stat reduction traits especially). Logically, without a solid way to even “randomly win” at defense, your ultimate competitive goal would be to extend the game for as long as possible. Though I think that is pretty much the entire point of these changes. I expect average win rate to actually go up, but average match time to go up as well. Nothing is really actually “more difficult” unless you were 100% reliant upon Mab (or even Maw) to win at PvP at all.
Although, again, I look forward to everyone putting full Impervious troops on their defense. None of them really present a solid threat to any of the other dozen teams I could use to quickly tear through them.
2 Likes
Any impervious team will get chewed up by a true damage team just as fast as anything else. Why rely on status effects, devour, or mana burn? I’ve always thought true damage was the way to go for an invasion team, and this hasn’t changed my mind.
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Thanks for taking the time to write a clear, lucid and polite response.
I don’t entirely agree with your point about issues over ‘absolute’ counters; the difference in match difficulty versus ‘hard’ counters is (in my opinion) not that great.
I support moves that encourage variety. We’re just setting a few new rules for the pvp world to adapt to. In simple terms: don’t take a Mab to an Impervious fight… like you wouldn’t take a cucumber to a gunfight… (bad analogy I know 
)
Absolutely agree with this; it’d actually let me go back to using any number of viable teams again.
Cheers
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Bat is amazing more now that it is was buffed and this news makes it look even better.
I can already vaugely see a slight justification for Devour anyway (even if I don’t agree, I can see why other people would).
I’m way more interested in answers about Mana Burn, since it’s just plain spell damage, I can’t think of any justification to single it out form other similar spell damage. Care to make another list?
That’s not completely true. Devour existed for ages and nobody cared until Maw came along. What people want nerfed is Maw and Mab, not Devour and Mana burn. The current method needlessly nerf every other troop that uses these mechanics.
But all that has been said already.
That’s what I thought.
Still, in the Frozen case the devs showed that they still somewhat care about things making thematic sense (that’s the reasoning they used for giving in), so I really wanted to keep hope that they still care about that.
I can try but i can not see a way to defend it but i will try my best.
This is what I get for trying to be nice and conciliatory. Well, that won’t happen again.
Ouch… I know it must have been painful to try it 
but do keep trying, the pain lessens over time…
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REasons why they can not be mana burned
Starting with them in order
Behemoth = He is too big for the effect to work on him. He does not fit in the magical circle?
Carnex = Is basically a walking furnace so is protected from burns cause he is already on fire.
Dragon cruncher = he can handle the heat of a dragon so mana burns are nothing
Dryad = can handle the sun so mana burns are less powerful.
Dwarven miner = What mana i have a pickax.
Dwarven slayer = I am already dead.
Fortress gate = its not a spell it is plate armour
Golem = made of rocks and it uses rocks i guess, cant magic the brainless especially if they can not feel the burns
herdmaster = Anti magic barrier?
Plague = His powers can’t be burned away, he is to powerful.
Swamp lash = no fricken clue. Maybe same as behemoth?
Tau = faster than he looks?
war sphinx = um riddle me this, he asks riddles not magic?
What? I was not trying to say it in an offensive tone. I didn’t even know those words of mine could be taken as offensive. I really don’t understand what just happened.
Internet just internet my dear gem matching friend.
What remains to be seen is how much variety it will encourage on defense teams, long term. I suspect we will be settling firmly into the new meta within a week or two. True Damage will probably get a bit of resurgence, we’ll still see goblins (I still see them fairly frequently nearing level 800), and we will still have anti skull, skull spam, and still have maws and mabs, maybe with the ratios tweaked a bit, but really, thats a symptom of a larger issue (ie., basically boiling down to people wanting to win and therefore use the “best”).
Personally, I try to change my defend team every week (in addition to the random team swaps the game STILL throws at me occasionally) and try to use at least one event troop in the mix (not this week, though, ugh), but thats partially because I don’t care about randomly losing points at all since I’ll never play enough to hit top 1000. I really think defense diversity being rewarded in some way would let us see more of the other 80% or so of the troops that exist, rather than making sure the 20% we always see are roughly in line with each other in terms of power and would be much easier than fully rebalancing troops so they could see more usage among people that have every troop unlocked.
I hope the new kingdom has something worthy to at least get a spot on one of these staple teams, but for which a reliable counter already exists in game so situations like this don’t happen in the future.
what about a pickle,better chance with age im sure?
Lost in translation, but: “That’s what I thought” comes across as dismissive or smug, like “I told you so.”
I think everyone’s made their points. The devs have heard this feedback, even if they haven’t addressed your grievances to your satisfaction. I also don’t think it’s a great plan, but with only three traits to a troop it becomes hard to add new immunities retroactively; this is one way to do it, I suppose.
I agree with previous commenters that, for each new status effect introduced in the game, single-status counters become marginally weaker (as the attacker has new options) while Impervious gets stronger (it defends against something that hasn’t even been conceived at the time of its creation). I too feel like there’s potential for a middle ground (say, a trait that blocks all of Silence, Disease, and Web, and any future effect that might interfere with spell-casting).
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