I’m a relatively new player, only 5 weeks or so in, but I’ve really been enjoying the game. I made an account here on the forum solely to comment that I hate, hate, hate the exploder nerf. I would absolutely prefer to go back to 3.5 just to be free of it.
This nerf literally makes the game less fun to play. No nerf should do that.
For me, I love exploders. I love the chaos, the board turnover, I love figuring out how to work exploders into a team synergy, but most of all, I love the quick mana fills, which make for much quicker fights. Make no mistake, we have to get through a godawful amount of fights in this game, whether to farm traitstones, raise gold for kingdom maxing, or get through to Tier 1 PvP each week. Let’s not even talk about Dawnbringer. I don’t mind the grind, as long as it’s fun, but the explode nerf makes grinding more tedious and less fun. It even affects the basic Sunbird explore team’s speed—I’m averaging a couple rounds more per match now. That means even more time slogging through traitstone/gold farming, and the farming being less fun.
The purpose of the nerf doesn’t even make sense. Oh, mythics were filling up too fast for far endgame players? Cool, maybe increase mana requirements for the Mythics that were the problem, or nerf exploders just for people with obscenely high magic. As for me, I don’t HAVE any mythics. I don’t have huge magic levels. I just started playing, and my basic Sunbird explore team and the Gorgotha PvP team I just put together last week and was really enjoying are now much less fun to play. They get stuck way more often. They got stuck plenty often before! Once I passed level 200, weekly PvP tier grinding became a painfully slow chore—I’m fighting teams built by players who have been playing for years, so I’ve got to cheese them to have even a chance of winning!—and that Gorgotha team made it fun again. Not anymore.
You’ve made the game considerably less fun for new/midgame players–or at least for this one. I don’t even have a TDS, but I was really looking forward to getting one because I love explode teams. The endgame players already have maxed their kingdoms and farmed a lot of traitstones and gotten Dawnbringer, so the slowdown of explode teams doesn’t hurt their progression as much, but I’ve still got a heck of a lot of gold farming to do just to max kingdoms. Dawnbringer isn’t even on the horizon for me yet. If I’d known about the nerf, I would have been dreading 4.0, not looking forward to it.
Explode teams make for quicker matches. Quicker matches are a problem how? You devs are the ones who decided we needed to farm one point freaking three MILLION souls for Dawnbringer. You’re the ones who decided we needed to do over 4,000 explore fights just to max a single hero class. You made the game a huge grind, and what, you’re upset we are able to get through the grinding at a decent pace? Getting lots of mana quickly and ending fights quickly is just plain more fun than getting bogged down on a single fight.
So mythics are too powerful if they get all their mana in a turn or two? Boo hoo, you made mythics powerful because they are so very god damn rare—and plenty of them still suck uselessly. Or so I’ve heard—I still have yet to pull one.
Almost the only substantive changes I’ve seen to this game are nerfs of long established game mechanics. Why bother playing at all if every time I get a powerful card or put together a team that lets me win fast, it will get nerfed?
What’s your endgame? Magic levels are going to go higher and higher as new kingdoms and factions are added and new kingdom levels are achieved. Eventually you will have to nerf it to only 30 or 20 or 10 percent mana gain. Why even have explode if the thing everybody loves to do with it is a problem that you devs think needs fixing?
Who exactly was asking for this again?
What problem does it solve? Explode teams get to chain spells? Not that often at my magic levels. And apparently never! The enemy still gets a turn between unless you get a four in a row on the fallout anyway, which happens plenty often both for the player and the AI on normal gem drops after a standard match, so I don’t see how it’s unfair or a problem. I mean, you devs invented the Goblins and the game survived, so clearly spell chaining isn’t the worst thing in the world.
And reading over the patch notes, I guess that Glaycion I was so happy to finally pull Monday isn’t going to be so great either.
Sure, there are teams everybody hates to fight, but strangely enough, they really enjoy using them when they finally get those cards themselves.
Edit 24 hours later: It occurs to me that if this nerf is considered must-have (which I still don’t see a reason for; if the problem is Goblins, well, they’ve been in for what, a year and a half and the game goes on?) by the devs, since we are all taking a hit to our grinding speed, it seems like they should be giving us something at the same time they are taking away. It would feel much more like we weren’t just getting unnecessarily slowed down if they bumped arcane drop rates up or upped souls received as if there was a single extra 25% necromancy bonus all the time. It would be something anyway.
As it is, I’m frustrated, and I think pretty much everybody who prefers exploders to transformers/creators feels the same way. That seems to be the feeling I’m seeing on discord and in this forum–feeling about the nerf varies based on preferred playstyle. You hit one particular playstyle kind of hard here.