My thought is the reason that exceptionally annoying defense teams are in vogue is because of the loss of PvP points from a defense loss. Folks keep trying to find the perfect defense team (which doesn’t exist), or else try to create one that is so annoying that they will be skipped. Sure, it’s not a lot of points for an individual battle, but they can add up over time. Perhaps a revisiting of this mechanic is in order.
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Probably right. I put up a couple an interesting, but not terribly strong, team last night and woke up to find a 1-15 record. I think that’s the most I’ve been attacked in one night. I figured it must have been one of the few non-EK, non-Manicore teams.
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hard to find a balance to that, the pvp points are added to defense to motivate ppl to put challenging teams in def so the pvp invaders would have something to fight against, if there were no point change for being invaded we could see a lot of peasants or anyhow purposedly weakened teams all over
hmm how about a match up system that would roll you enemies with teams similiar to your DEF team composition… those who wants little of def loses and set manticores on def would fight the manticors, those who prefers a lot of def looses and uses peasants in their def would fight more peasants etc… kinda feels a little too restricted and super abusable but at least would save ppl from being sentenced to fight only a certain meta and the ‘dont bother fighting me’ teams would loose their impact
edit: personally i think the reason why the current meta is so badly taken is the manticore, mab never bothered me as much, so wasnt the khorvash or any other meta before that, nothing was as bad as the manticore - whatever would kill me or not it wasnt actually stealing my time this much, i think it would just calm down a bit if manticore actually costed more mana (as any full-mana drain unit should and was so far untill manticore came) or if it was draining x mana instead of whole of it, draining entire lets say 20ish mana at cost of silly 8 mana is just overdone especially for an ultra rare unit… if it was a legendary i could understand
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YES! I agree that team bonuses have not maintained their power with newer troops at all. Perhaps they could do BOTH increase all team bonuses (Kingdom and Race) slightly across the board, AND have weekly kingdom bonus for some rotating variety.
In addition slightly improve the Race traits to also encourage themed teams. Instead of 'Beast Bond" +2 Life , maybe +4 Life to Beasts, or +1 to all Beast stats…
I find the teams that perform better on Defense are the ones that are deceptively good. They get wins from surprise.
RNG-heavy Troops also tend to overperform.
I contend that this would change nothing. Either the team bonuses are strong enough to dethrone the current meta – at which point the strongest team bonus would become the new meta, and people would just complain about that – or they aren’t, at which point we’re still where we are right now.
Variety at endgame cannot exist with the reward structure currently in place.
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variety at end game could be still forced by so many ways, anything i tossed so far here is another idea
make the units on defense be usable on defense only for one week of entire month, like this you would have to toggle between at least 3-4 teams per month on ur defense - guaranteed more variety (and a tone of programming 
)
I guess that’s what I’m calling for. There will always be a team that is “strongest” and it usually stays that way for months or more! I’m not calling for a ban on troops, but having the “Meta” change every week would shake things up for the best. Also It would be hard to ascertain the perfect defense setup before it switched again.
It could be a whole new meta of planning the perfect Defense team each week, then start the process over, players would have to customize their weekly invade teams as well (this would be a major change). yet players would still use the normal stuff as well I’m sure. IF the balance was in the ballpark…
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I’m not having any trouble defeating mana denial teams. Manticore? Bah humbug. My philosophy for this game has remained unchanged since launch day: You make 'em, I’ll whup 'em.
I do still hate Frozen.
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Unfortunately the issue here is not “I can’t beat these teams,” rather it’s more like “I see the same teams pop up all the time and it’s tiresome, especially when those teams are annoying to play against.”
@Lyya: while I agree to a certain extent, in that there will always be some team or couple of teams that high end players will make that will be zomg teh best, I suggested the improvements to the team bonuses in an effort to alleviate at least one problem: the monotony. If at least some team bonuses (hopefully a lot of them) can be improved to the point that they are useful again, it will encourage more players to branch out. Especially, hopefully, those who are tired of facing the same old same old, and attempt to take matters into their own defense teams. A variety of strong options is what I’m after.
I understand that the current system rewards in such s way as to encourage one of a few types of defense, and regarding that problem, I have no good solution to offer. But as it is, I am hoping that one solution might mitigate the other problem, at least a little.
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You’d still be pulling from a pool of roughly 10% or less of the total troops in the game that represent the meta at the time. Forced changes would simply inconvenience starting and casual players while not really affecting any sort of real change at the top end. Ideally, there’d be enough variety where maybe the top half of troops would be seen on defense, rather than the top 10%. Expecting troops like Tau and Elwyn to be used on a defense team (or any team) ever is probably asking too much no matter what the circumstances.
Overall, I’m not sure how I’d feel about fighting someone’s invade team on a revenge attack. Surely those are all pretty similar, too. Not that I’d complain if revenge rewards were boosted, but I really don’t see how that incentiveizes variety on defense. Even the “best” (and most annoying teams) get invaded and defeated enough to queue up a revenge battle every now and again. In the one week I had up my “troll” team to test how effective mana drain was (2 manticores, succubus, khorvash), I still had about 50 losses by the end of the week. Besides, getting losses and therefore a chance at revenges is already more profitable than getting defense wins for over 90% of the playerbase, everyone just fails to see it somehow.
This is harder and much more delicate than it sounds, to the point where it could never be an automatic system and would require devs to do new balance passes every time they did this. Certain kingdoms or troop types getting a slight bonus would put them in the spotlight for a bit, whereas others would need a huge bonus to even remember they exist. Increasing team bonuses would help those themed teams that can already synergize in some way, but for the ones that can’t, its pretty much hopeless - for example, and I know this is an extreme case, but the full construct team bonus would be utterly useless even if it was increased tenfold. Even elves, while having a couple decent troops added recently, would need some pretty big bonuses to see them on defense. And if you increased their magic by too much, you’d just see Lady Anariel stall teams everywhere that week.
I concur. Once again I would like to put for that variety for the defense team should be the players main goal, and that winning with variety should be a secondary goal. The goal would be to put together a team out of the least used troops that can still occasionally win. That way we can keep out those miner, peasant, and fortress gate teams, but also expand the pool of troops used in endgame defense builds by (hopefully) 3 to 5 times and spread out the stuff that is regularly see among that subset as well.
I won’t repeat my whole spiel here, but heres a link to the outline of things I think could be fixed for the better for anyone that hasn’t read it yet.
Nothing needs to be done to incentivize variety on invade. Thats on the individual player, and doesn’t affect anyone else. Unless of course we start fighting those teams on revenges. Lets please not make than an issue, too.
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Can you expand on this? I believe this to be true in the current console environment and assumed it would cease to be true once we get the PvP update. I would like to know your reasoning.
It’s true if you need gold or souls but if you only want glory it’s better to get wins
Worst thing to happen in the game?
Lets start with something that not so much happened, but rather didn’t happen for way too long a time.
Gem creatiion used to scale on magic. Do you know how busted that was? Do I need to dig up screenshots of Farsight Orb creating 44 blue gems?
Sure it’s not Manti/Khor, but an amusing thing that most of the players here today might not remember.
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Trying to think what the worst thing to happen to the game is for me… can only be the changes made to the daily tasks
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I am wondering why teams including my hero never get max points (8533) It inhibits me from putting up more interesting defense teams because lower team points affect the hard pvp battle point rewards ie max rewards tend not to be in the 45-50 range if my defense isn’t 8533
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i agree getting your def team to be defeated - therefore getting a player to be revengable to you - is the better profit. you getextra glory + extra defense win (scored in the def wins reward system that gives event key) in the end by just simply invading it as a revenge fight.
i heard somewhere in the channel1 a concept of rewarding a uniqueness in the defense
idk in what way rewarding but if the ‘uniqueness’ factor of your def had influence on the points you loose/gain by being attacked and/or some other rewards you could possibly gain by being attacked that could automatically mobilise players to actually try to find less common defense composition and solve the ‘boring’ problem?
The only thing you gain from defense wins is a bit of glory and gold, and a small amount of PvP points. The only thing you lose on a defense lose is PvP points. Revenge battles give +3 glory, so if you draw a revenge, you’ve made up for the difference in glory. The revenge win counter’s gold rewards blow the extra gold from defense wins out of the water (plus intermittent souls, and the event key at the end). While it is true that not every loss equates to a revenge draw anymore, defense win rewards are so pitiful as to be non-existent anyway, so even the chance to draw one is better in the long run.
Therefore, the only real gain from winning instead of losing on defense is PvP points.
If you are above 1900 points, but finish below top 1000 PvP rank, these points are entirely irrelevant. When I checked last week, I had around 2300 points, and was below rank 16000, meaning 15 thousand other people that were in this same range at this time, and it wasn’t even the end of the week yet. At this point, entire week’s worth of PvP losses wouldn’t put me back down a tier (which would lose me a whopping 1 glory per day even if it did), and I’m so far out of range of the top 1000 its not even an issue. Add to that the fact that you drop out of matchmaking pool after about 10 hours if you don’t invade, and it all seems rather pointless.
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Thanks, that is quite interesting. I have also heard that the strength of your defense team impacts the type of matchups that you are offered when invading. So, if I had a team of, say, one level 5 peasant, I would tend to have weaker options, with lower rewards, when invading. I don’t know how true that is, nor how much less the rewards would be, if any. I’m sure I will just need to play and experiment a bit once we get the update, but I like to learn as much as I can to prepare, and I expect it will take a few weeks for players to settle into a new normal with all the changes that are coming.
I had always assumed that I would need to retire my “dorks” team, but I know I won’t be competing for the upper echelons of the PvP rankings, so my current approach may still be viable.