With all these (lame) Mercy clones, its not uncommon to find first turn empowered troops on the defending team.
Big fan of Moon Rabbit. (not really)
Its also not uncommon to stumble onto a board that heavily favors said empowered troop.
Many card games featuring random luck for starting hands usually have mulligan options incase the starting hand is unfavorable. Gems of War has pretty much gotten to that point where unfavorable starts means game over on enemy turn 1.
There’s going to be some that complain that a board mulligan or reshuffle option would be unfair. The enemy defense team having a free cast on turn 1 with no option to defend against extra turns is even worse. A board mulligan doesn’t have to be unfairly implemented; even 1 retry is a heck of a lot better than what we have now and could only help the player’s morale.
Some might say it’ll slow the game down and that’s no fun. It doesn’t have to slow the game down. It could be as easy as R1 + L1 on PS, RB + LB on Xbox, or a refresh board button at the bottom of the screen for PC/Phone players.
Some might say this would favor the player too much. Fine, take away all empowered troops from the game, I don’t care. Give me back a game where I can match 3 gems and still have a 2nd turn waiting for me.
There’s more empowered troops coming in the future. Yay…
You have a mulligan already. It’s called taking the first turn in a match.
The ai gets the 2nd turn, so you have one turn to rearange the board in your favor. Maybe even by using your own empowered troops.
Any other artificial help will end up in tilting the win ration fully in player favour. No fun with godmode changes, and nothing that’s gonna/should be implemented just to make it easier for some.
And what happens when your reshuffle still doesn’t favor you? You want another? And another? Just keep doing it until you get the 100 you’re looking for? I bet we all wish that GW days!
Learn to deal with adverse circumstances. Not every hand is an instant winner.
and just say no. a hard no to those statements. Taking a turn can’t fix the boards that have been popping up lately.
If your idea of fun is Gimlet Stormbrew into Dragon’s Eye, Tai-Pan into Yao Guai, Moon Rabbit into Divine Ishbaala, Qilin/Forest Guardian, then sure, let’s keep the game the way it is.
Let’s keep turning this game more and more into a slot machine.
There’s a big difference between the AI having a better team and the AI not letting you play the game.
I knew there would be someone that would make the reshuffle over and over argument. One reshuffle is still better than none, the game doesn’t need infinite reshuffles.
There’s a big difference between “adverse” circumstances and not having a game to play.
Not every hand is a winner, but hands shouldn’t be an auto-loser as well.
I’d love to see you propose to Magic the Gathering players that they aren’t allowed to mulligan their 0-1 land hand at the start of the game.
At what point is it still fair for the players? We’re already treading on territory where Spirit Fox one shots a player’s troop in Tower of Doom instantly if the player isn’t lucky enough to draw an answer to it.
I can agree somewhat about the massive change that including empowered converters has brought to the game, starting with Mercy. I kind of feel like we’re too far gone, however.
My strategy to deal with a Gimlet board, e.g., is to convert all the Browns away with Tai Pan, the Greens away with Scurvy/Grave Seer/my own Gimlet, or some combination of those. If the enemy is a Frostmage, I may include Sister Superior so that I can freely loop.
I like the idea of Mulligans, generally, but I think this may need a bit more developing; and we do already have the attacker’s advantage (so removing empowered troops is the more complete, but unlikely solution).
Yeah,sometimes the board is in the AI’s favor from the get go but most times it’s in yours,and if not then make the best with what you’ve got. I’d get bored pdq if I was able to turn the tide in my favor every time. There’s always a meta team that runs rampant in this game,(mostly due to players who just copy and paste a team they lost to,and they have little imaginations of their own,blame the community not the game itself)and if you’ve been playing as long as I have you’ve seen them all. DragonsEye & Rope Dart will go away or be replaced with something else in a month or two.
There’s another solution that’s quite easy to put in, remove GW from the game :3
Anyway is just there you find millions of those (today every battle but 1 had 2 Empo’s on them, the one using a single empo was the usual troll/DE/famine/gimlet) and dont really have much of a counter other than, 1) AI idiocy and 2) luck with starting board.
Normal pvp who care, just go with a idgaff spam team (that give you anyway 90%+ winrate without even having to look at the board).
Oh, removing that silly mode from game will also cut by half the QQ in the forum double good side :3
There is inequality in mono colour playing due to certain colours that do not have empowered converters - like on brown…
Since the advent of all of these empowered troops and just as an example - Frostmage which is so much more effective vs mono colours, it is becoming a situation where people are getting frustrated by the game mechanics. To the extent it feels like it’s ‘unfair’.
Gone are the days where you can successfully argue ’ well we get first go’ as in GW actually going at all can mean a loss,
Normal PVP - nothing to see here, win/lose/retreat whatever. GW - it’s imbalanced by many factors, including limited options for mono colourisation vs others.
Take yellow or red
Scurvy
Grave Seer
Gimlet
Red all the above plus Fist of Zorn
Green - Tai Pan, Mercy, Moon Rabbit
So at this time there is also inequality by colour - as check out Brown for things like ‘cleanse’ - so not only does brown not have any empowered converter, it’s got very very limited options to deal with status effects or other options for empowered.
It’s this which is making it worse.
I won that game, I got a fluke in the top right to make 4 yellow.
Today however, an empowered troop is capable of clearing the day’s colour off the board on AI turn 1, without anything to prevent it. Nothing at all could be done to stop it, other than running an impure team. Frostmage froze a yellow troop, so even matching 4/5 yellow would have passed the turn. All skulls aligned to yellow, every move would result in a 4 skull match.
I said this somewhere else, but I will again here.
Guild Wars needs to update to the times. It no longer needs the color restriction on offense to help give Defenses a chance of winning.
Otherwise, the defenses need to be mono restricted as well.
I certainly agree that the surge in empowered troops has made certain battles guaranteed defeats as soon as you take a look at the board and that’s very frustrating esp when rope dart team loops and obliterates you in a game you never had a chance to win. I’ve spent time building wars teams to give me a chance (hopefully) in such fights but then the board drops and it’s clear I wasted my time. I am not sure I like the mulligan idea; I would rather see empowerment removed to bring a little bit of nous back to the game. Reduce it to 60% or whatever instead. Losing back to back battles against rope dart soldier teams is as easy as a slightly unfavourable board, esp on colour days that are generally a little slower to get firing. Haha just seen we are getting a ‘new’ empowered skull converter in today’s glory box. What joy
Well, it is a slot machine and always were to a large extent. But more so with more and more random and power creep in the sequence of metas.
Moreover, it is a double/triple/quadruple slot machine not only on the level of actual boards and the battles but more specifically, on the level of keys and other drops.
In most cases, you can influence the outcome although in a limited manner.
Actually, Warframe has the loot tables completely open unlike GoW developers who for some unknown reason are still resisting.
As has been stated by numerous contributors here, the steady increase of Empowered troops combined with items like storm generation traits, Lightning Strike talent, Possessed King’s Unstable Possession trait, and Wrath’s Cataclysm trait has significant,y reduced the strategy factor of the game. It is incredibly frustrating to watch the board convert, explode, sky drop 4/5 gem matches over and over ad nauseam. Standard PvP is bad enough but it appears the majority of player’s consternation surrounds Guild Wars.
There are some ideas the developers could implement in lieu of a reshuffle option. @awryan’s idea of requiring GW Defense teams to be color restricted seems like a really good potential solution. Another idea would be to reward additional defense points based on the base rarity of the troops used. Common troops would give the most extra points, with Mythic troops giving none. In this scenario, a player would have to decide whether the bonus points are worth not using more standard “Meta” troops. If the bonuses were scaled properly to make using the lower rarity troops very worthwhile, it would add more defense diversity and thus more fun for players.
With regards to GW and general PvP, other mechanisms could be implemented such as counter storm traits/talents that reduce a particular mana color from dropping by a certain percentage or having Disease stack reducing mana generation an additional 15% for each application. The developers could even implement some kind of gem explosion dampening trait (I’m not sure if this one would go over very well ). None of these would curtail the Empowered troops but they would assist in the ancillary traits/talents that add to our frustrations,
Love the creativeness of your suggestions!!! Counter-storms would be brutal . I do like ‘point’ balancing suggestions, as these can be fine-tuned for balance, and encourage making strategic decisions.
A preliminary caution would of course be that Mythic troops are often less appropriate than Legendaries or others in various situations, but we can work on that .
Both players get a mulligan though. Suppose we were allowed to shuffle the board once, would the AI also be allowed to shuffle the board once right afterwards, before we take our first move? What about a fairly competent AI that knows the value of multiple extra turn transformation opportunities?
Speaking game design, a “fair” way to handle this is to let the first player either make a move or reshuffle, forfeiting first move to the second player. The latter case could be repeated indefinitely, so each subsequent player could in turn either make a move (thus starting the match) or reshuffle (thus handing back the option to start the match or reshuffle to the other player).
I don’t see a board reshuffle being used the way you suggest; more than likely, 90% of board reshuffles would be done to give the player’s own Mercy, Gimlet, Tai Pan, or Moon Bunny a second chance at having a board they can convert.
). None of these would curtail the Empowered troops but they would assist in the ancillary traits/talents that add to our frustrations,
Counter-storms would be brutal 
. I do like ‘point’ balancing suggestions, as these can be fine-tuned for balance, and encourage making strategic decisions.
New board, but the AI goes first (unless they also want a new board, which would be strange/new).
