eh? What do you mean
I’m just one person. My experiences alone confirm nothing, but I don’t see another reason for these circumstances.
My guildmates and I have the assumption that upgrading your kingdoms to Level 10 nets you harder matchups in PVP. As I described above, I don’t have them all upgraded, just a few and I get varied matchups, while my guidlmates with all kingdoms at Level 10 only encounter Maw/mercy, Knight Coronet, Dragons, etc.
I level up my glory kingdoms (kingdoms whose tribute contains glory) to level 9 then getting those kingdoms to 3 gold stars.
My level 142 phone alt faced her first Maw/IK/Mercy team today. She kicked them to the curb. It’s not nearly so potent a combo when the person trying to use it doesn’t have their kingdom bonuses yet.
So she is unique in that regard, that is a great thing not a bad one… Alchemist is the only transformer that generates Gold. Valkyrie the only that generates souls. Pointing out that a troop has something unique is not a valid reason for nerfing it.
Also fast is a terrible trait, people seem to act as if it was half as good as empowered which it simply isn’t.
Being Empowered is Mercys whole selling point, without it, even with Fast she is not significantly enough faster to fill up than the universal transformer Alchemist.
Her cleanse is just half useful as the most annoying frozen application in the game happens when you actually can’t counter it with cleanse(thanks for that Bone Dragon) and her heal is meh.
If Maw was Blue/Brown instead of Yellow/Brown Mercy wouldn’t even be on the radar of the nerfherd currently, just as she wasn’t until the yellow/brown event when people could trait Maw and started playing Mercy with him on a larger scale.
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I disagree. Mercy is just a bit too strong and far too common at the moment, it’s not healthy for the meta. Yes, the pairing with Maw is bad, but pairing with IK, or Gorgotha, or Moloch, or other yellow troops is also a bit much.
Fast is half way to Empowered, by definition, though its effect is probably less than half as good. Fast would still be a decent trait on a useful gem transformer and would fit her image / flavour.
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YES!
The bigger problem I have too, is that I was never lucky enough to get “Maw” and so as a result, I don’t even have the option to attempt a fight with them.
Secondly, I have found that the 3-trophy cheats disproportionately. On a mixed, no goblin team, I had the computer give itself 37 matches, of which 12 of them were 3 and 4 skull drops in a row. This killed my first two team mates and it happened on the FIRST ROUND.
This was so disheartening because I’ve never gotten that lucky with drops.
Well, I managed to get through my dismay and play another round, later in the day, and I kept running into similar situations where I feel like I’m not allowed to win 3-trophy matches.
The whole new PVP stress is pushing me away from wanting to play. I’m really close to deleting the game and maybe returning in a few months when they realize they’re alienating all but the kids who have no other obligations in life but to grind away at PvP.
Mercy was never a problem, literally no one on these forums voiced concerns about her until the brown/yellow event week.
I don’t remember when exactly Mercy came out, but as an event troop she came with her own traitstones obviously, and her Empowered has never been the slightest problem until the Mawmageddon happened.
Alchemist fills in two red matches when you chose a red/whatever banner without any surges, a fast Mercy would need two matches too, regardless of banner and would still need 2 non-surged matches even if you went full Mercy on the banner…
Personally i would drop her like its hot when Empowered was changed to Fast and enjoy the versatility and the mass of more yellow mana created that comes with a universal transformer.
Empowered and the fact that she matches so well with Maw are the only things that make me play her over Alchemist(well and the amazing art, but that is just me being an idiot). Once Maw is readjusted and i might not feel obliged to play him anymore in invades, empowered is literally the only thing Mercy has to offer me.
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To be fair, the gold Alchemist brings in is trivial at endgame, so that’s not a selling point. The universal transformation is, of course, as is the Fire Link.
In exchange for the flexibility of being able to convert anything, Mercy has:
- Empowered
- A heal
- A cleanse
- Blessed
- Mana colors that don’t conflict with most of the strongest damage dealers (seriously, green/blue is perfect for support)
I would be sad if she lost Empowered, but I would probably still use her.
I really hope she’s spared the axe, though. Like @Gouki said, she was just fine before people traited up Maw.
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I totally agree, I think the mercy hate is strongly inflated by the maw/mercy combo.
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Mercy was spotted as a possible problem the minute she came out with that trait, and @Shimrra and I were amongst those that noticed. I cannot however be bothered dredging through the forums to prove this. You are right though that proliferation of maws and now the new pvp matchmaking have highlighted the balance problem - we’ll have to agree to disagree on the rest…
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Mercy is a bit too strong, because of the ability of a player to gain the extra turn from the transform. So it provides, Mana Gain, a Life Gain, a Cleanse, Mana Denial, and often an Extra Turn not countered by freeze.
Any empowered converter would probably be a bit too strong, because of how much speed the mana gain and extra turn (often) it adds to the game.
I am OK with Mercy, because you can often play around her by going first and denying her the bonus turn.
I personally hate the instant kills. I hate Devour, Hunger, and Bullseye. I believe they allow RND to override strategy in the game. 15% is ridiculous based on how many skull matches will occur in a game. It’s not one or two per match, its many more skull matches, so they auto kill or devour will happen.
At most, Maw’s spell should kill a unit and heal to full. Hunger and Bullseye should go away or be reworked to something like 3x damage 25% of the time.
I don’t think anyone was disputing that people called her out early. I think @Gouki’s point was that the empowered conversion is what makes her unique. There’s something to be said for that, though I don’t believe it’s the only reason you’d want her on a team.
We’ll see. A balance pass is coming soon, likely on Monday. I guess I’m hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
Given its the ‘Empowered transformer’ bit that makes her unique, she can still stand to be hit in other areas. I’ve previously suggested that she either lose the cleanse, lose a chunk of the base life gain and/or the boost ratio, and/or have her ability’s cost raised to 13 or 14.
Of course, I distinctly remember someone saying ‘nah don’t bother with that, just change her to Fast instead’. Which makes a fair bit more sense to me and would solve all our problems.
For that matter, using a ‘targets weakest ally’ life gain on the first turn defeats the potential purpose of that theme, which is to save an ally from the threat of death - not exactly thematically accurate on the first turn of the fight. (Y’know, unless Maw-Mercy exists. *facepalm)
Anyhow…
She’s just too good at everything. Instant setup, life gain, cleanse, reasonably easy to recharge again. Something has to give.
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I’m hoping for the best and expecting the best… I have faith in @sirrian and company, they’ve done good by us all so far… And I reserve the right to scold and curse like a deranged cat if they don’t do exactly what I’ve suggested…
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Calling a new or changed troop out as being problematic when it is introduced and a troop actually proving to be problematic and starting a discussion about it being too strong or unbalanced are two completely different things.
If it were the same, then Dryad would have to be nerfed too after her barrier change, barrier in general, frozen even this second much weaker iteration of it would have to be further nerfed, even Zephyros would have to be nerfed.
All of these troops or effects had veteran forum members voice concern when introduced, but did not prove to be problematic at all… well aside from frozen which still seems to annoy the hell out of some people.
And these are just a few i can recall from memory, and since around 1.08 around the time i started to play this game and read the forums. I am sure there was much more of this before then.
Repeating myself(i tend to do that apparently -.- ), there was no ongoing discussion about Mercy being too strong or unbalanced, she wasn’t even used by many players until the Mawmageddon happened.
When the yellow/brown event week happened, and everyone had a traited Maw, there were many forum members voicing their regret to not having traited Mercy the day she came out, and the second Blue/Green event week was widely cherished by many because they could trait a troop they didn’t bother traiting at all before Maw was a thing.
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Here’s a team I recently faced that was a pain in my (Q-Bert has me say behind, I apparently still owe him for his over use yesterday, cutbacks are a (Q-Bert again has me say pain))
Having 2 troops frozen per 4+ of a kind is a really (Q-Bert has me say mean) thing to do
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The examples you cite are great evidence of why the devs shouldn’t overreact to moaning on the forum… And why they should pay careful attention to the wisdom and insights that I provide 
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That’s my exact team! Except mine are all mythic. It’s a really fun team!
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@Machiknight
Fun to use maybe, I use 6 different teams that revolve around either Green Spider loops or Valkyrie, not including @Tacet suggested skull spam team in his 1.9 vid that I brought to this game forgetting that the top troop laughs at skulls