This week (and many others) are a clear representation on how unbalanced the Journey event is. There is absolutely nothing fun about them. And yet more and more effort is made to make each one less fun. Such as nerfing journey troops and making defenses with no restrictions way more powerful than what players are allowed to build.
I don’t play this game to lose after 5 minutes of effort in hopes of keeping other players from quitting the game by at least trying to participate in a completely unbalanced event.
I had to fight a level 350+ Aravatar today, and he kept denying my yellow gems with death mark gems, and he could one shot anyone on my team. I managed to win the battle, but I seriously said to myself, “I think I’ve had enough.”
Sadly, and as you probably already know this is old news. The Journey Pathfinders were nerfed because they were too powerful elsewhere. Yes, there were plenty of potential alternative solutions proposed by members but the “fix” is in and done.
Meanwhile, there ARE teams that work somewhat acceptable in this Journey event, Doomed Spear is a good weapon early, Rope Dart is a virtual necessity later.
As I’ve reported before, this is my least favorite event, by far, these days. We’ve had players “rage quit” over Journey and others simply refuse to play it.
There were a substantial number of complaints about those Journey troops and their impact in PvP. And, to be honest, they were an issue in PvP when you could more easily build a brutally effective team around them (because no color restriction on the rest of the team) and they could loop you to death by their lonesome.
I still believe very firmly that the problem wasn’t the nerf. Rather, the problem was the piss-poor design of the troop in the first place. Because if what we currently have was the original paradigm, the complaints would be substantially muted. (Not gone, because there’s no pleasing some people.)
For that matter, the first two Pathfinder troops didn’t even follow this paradigm in the slightest. Mind you, the color/type restrictions on those two were incredibly friendly and therefore it didn’t matter so much. So, whatever.
I liked Deathclaw for the undead purple journey restriction because he stole life while exploding gems. Compared to nowadays, it’s actually a good concept because you could accumulate at least some mana, instead of giving the AI all of your extra turn gem matches, while gaining life so that you don’t die as easily.
This is just my own opinion, but if journey troops were adjusted around this type of idea, it might be better, and they could be reworked around this concept:
Steal (magic +1) life from an enemy and explode 3 gems, boosted by xx allies (2×).
Journey troops would be able to scale their damage better at higher levels, be able to gain life so they can’t be defeated as easily and accumulate mana more reliably. I know there are other ideas out there, but this seems like a good way to “fix” journey troops.
Of course, none of this feedback will ever be considered, so what’s the point…
They could have just fixed them in PVP like Stellarix and Wand (the solution exists since Dawnbringer) and all the grievances would have been avoided …
There’s a total of 18 Pathfinder troops in the database; therefore, we’ve had 18 Journey events.
And we’ve had four Purple events, not 2. Deathclaw (Undead), Seekra Darkwood (Elf), Keeper of the Paths (Wargare), Cartographer (Mystic). So not only haven’t the devs been “stingy” towards Purple Books, they’ve actually been generous as compared to other colors because we should “expect” to have had three events per color by now and Purple has out-kicked that coverage.
It was never a power problem-- it was a rarity problem.
After the Journey troops were nerfed (note: Journey troops with an obscenely low barrier to entry during the event and comparatively easy after the event ends), the functionality (somewhat) returned in the Doomed Weapon set.
Now compare the difficulty in powering a Doomed Weapon vs a single troop at Epic Rare rarity. In terms of both gems and time (both of which can be somewhat assisted by money), the Doomed Weapon was exponentially more expensive and more in line with what I believe the design philosophy to be. F2P and all.
I also believe in the design philosophy that nobody considered the opportunity cost for a weapon vs. a troop and I’d wager that set of Doomed Weapons underperformed expectations. In a Journey event, the pre-nerf Journey troops were essential before even the scoring. In any other scenario, the Doomed Weapons compete in a much tougher environment (read: an environment where Wand of Stars exists).
The restrictions for Journey read like there’s a chart somewhere that has “If there’s X number of troops of Y type and Z color, add a Journey troop and go” It simplifies the design of the event and all it costs is…a forum full of angry users.
