@Jeto The training Grounds probably have Astral Spire activated like all other game modes besides Guild Wars, but is it possible to turn this on/off for testing purposes?
Many of us like to simulate “real” Guild War battles, and the extra stats, bonuses, and extra effects from Astral Spire interfere with testing. There also was a time when we would set 4 Firebombs on our defense teams, so that people could level up their Hero classes a lot more quickly. The Training Grounds probably do not help with that either…
There is still a lot of things that need to be cleaned up. I will see for myself how this next patch changes match-making in PvP, but for Guild Wars, that system needs to completely overhauled. The community should not have to explain how idiotic it is that a #1 guild can face a #50 guild and gain no points from it.
Yes, Astral Spire bonuses apply in Testing Grounds - currently waiting for an update as they currently still apply if you select Guild Wars as a testing location, when obviously you don’t have Astral Spire bonuses in Guild Wars.
Also, waiting for the team to confirm WoS & Stellarix, cos they are not transforming in Testing Grounds.
I guess it’s not perfect then. Still better than nothing. Maybe in 9.5 we will get a real GW testing ground with no bonuses and highest difficulty of AI?
As always, Thank you Jeto. As long as the Devs try to understand where we are coming from, it is fine by me. Not everything is perfect, but The Training Grounds looks like a good foundation to build on. It will be nice to not beat up my friends from now on.
Let’s hope so, then. It might seem like a minor issue, but it isn’t; it’s frustrating and constantly takes up a lot of time. In case it isn’t resolved, I’m glad to hear you’re looking into it! I’ll keep an eye on how things go. Thanks a lot for the reply!
That one is actually much clearer to me.
Surprisingly overpowered capstone, due to how the numbers interact here. At max level, even blowing up half of the board may end up with zero mana gained. I guess this makes exploder weapons/troops obsolete as defense option.
What about gnomes, do they show up at random in Testing Grounds? And to get right to the elephant in the room, what about running a Gnome-a-Palooza?
Not like capstones work in gw, the only place where defense matters at all. But yeah, this will make a lot of pve content trivial - more than it already is.
20% means +1 mana for every 5 Gems of a color (rounded down). A typical board will have ~9 Gems of each color (Skulls counted as its own color). So unless you’ve filled the board with a lot of inert gems, there will still be some Mana gain of some color, at least.
Personally, I’m kind of looking forward to this. Superfast mana generation has been ruining the game’s meta for years.
Are we ever getting an option to save teams in PvP? Like we can for Explore and some other modes? This way I don’t have to keep recreating teams over and over simply because the a modifier switched from 1 Kingdom to another.
Not really enough to matter any longer for the opponent. This might actually be even stronger than expected, some heroic gems are calculated as explosion mana, even though their description talks about destroying gems. I wonder if those essentially get turned off too.
PvP defense teams are not manually set and are entirely irrelevant since the Dark Order dominates, and Astral Spire doesn’t affect GWs, so I don’t foresee this changing anything about defense teams. Unless you mean PvE?
