Having traits that make your troop(s) immune to dragging or transformation.
For example, you could have a trait called “Rooted” which locks the troop in the slot it is placed in and if say Bulette tries shoving someone in 1st slot but a Rooted trait troop is there, they can’t do it and so counters Bulette in Delves as well as acting as a nice counter against Stronghorn or even helpful for your team if you use Skrymir and don’t want to fully push them to the front.
The second one is allowing troops to have immunity to transformation. Night Hag, Dragon’s Eye and Toadstool immediately spring to mind with how annoying they are. I don’t know if Invulnerable (Zuul/Tower) counts to it but excluding that, why isn’t there more options or traits that make it impossible for the troop to become dead weight?
Off topic but why not make the craftable Zuul’goth have Invulnerable instead of Impervious? It’s already stupidly difficult to craft so why not make the trait a little bit sweeter? Not like everyone has Zuul…
A nice idea, it’s a PITA having the opposition rearranging your team, especially if they have Dust Devil which is cheap to cast and starts will full mana.
Might I suggest that “Stand Fast” might be a better name?
Changing the order of troops is annoying, but i don’t feel we should have a traited wasted just for that. Maybe a low level talent for the Hero sure, but a trait…
If troops could be further upgraded to unlock something like five talents…
Actually this is probably the best way to look at it.
What makes a troop powerful? A combination of ability and traits. You can carefully place it in your party to deal with expected threats. For example, I often see two variants of the same Blue Day teams because some people want to protect certain troops from Khorvash.
But now imagine if one of the troop’s traits were replaced with “I can’t be rearranged.” The troop is less powerful than it otherwise would be and now is vulnerable to other approaches. For example, one I’m thinking of has Mana Shield for trait 2. One of the easiest ways to deal with it as a threat mana burns all opponents. So if it had a choice between “I don’t want to get pulled into Slots 1 or 2” or “I don’t want to get mana burned”, it’s hard to say which one makes it “stronger”. (Personally I think Mana Shield is more useful.)
Anyway, I think it’s wise to address the root cause here: there’s a Delve room that’s 99% guaranteed to rearrange your party, and you don’t always have the choice to avoid it since 2 Delve rooms are mandatory on the way to the boss. That means some % of our very limited 3 daily Delve runs might not be possible for those players.
Players don’t like losing to RNG. (Unless it’s a thread where someone claims the AI gets too many cascades. Then losing to RNG is fair because it never actually happens.) So this is really a thread about how players are not satisfied with how the RNG can make some Delve runs much harder than others, regardless of level.
My feeling is “players are going to be dissatisfied, this doesn’t seem like an unintended consequence.”
As far as transformers, any trait should also protect against instakill, destroy, lethal damage, assassinate, slay, hang, lethal injection, firing squad, buried 6 feet under, ascending to another plane, sending them to the other world, sending someone to the next dimension, sending someone to another dimension, time, recorded name in death note, lost a shadow game, die when they are killed, terminated, no longer in the world of the living, no longer in the world of the unliving, beheaded, exiled, banished, removed, combusted, shot out of a cannon, exit stage left, or just dead like this joke at this point.
On a side note, while this may be in the delves thread already, just like with waiting for dust devil to refill, if you deny 13 or more brown gems, you can have bulette rearrange your team back to normal eventually.
In higher delve levels you don’t necessarily have the luxury of surviving the enemy’s punishment for as long as it takes Bulettes or DDevils to order your team correctly again.
I don’t agree with the premise that Delve has to guarantee a 100% victory rate.
But I also think Dust Devils are more frustrating than Bulettes because of Empowered. With Bulettes, you at least have a race. If you can kill them before they activate, you don’t get rearranged. With Dust Devils you don’t get the luxury of racing. I don’t like the notion of a room where the bad thing happens to you unless you can engineer a turn 1 win.
But I think this is how they introduced “chance” to Delves. For some reason they like “chance” everywhere. It’s not enough that you might get a bad starting board. They want there to be some chance that you can’t zip through Delves without sometimes encountering a “bad” room.
I get it from a game design perspective. But not every design that makes sense is fun to play. I don’t think it’s fair that some % of Delves are going to rearrange your party no matter what. Not when Delve tokens are 3/day. I don’t mind Delve not being a 100% proposition, but I want it to be for a reason other than “we’re going to MAKE you play a team that will rearrange you.” I want to feel like I can counter anything that threatens me.
There are teams that can perform well regardless of their order, but this will not always be the case because we have too much useless troops and Delves have a restriction in colors.
In a sense, having troops that can’t change position due traits will be just like troops with traits who deal extra damage to Towers, Raid Boss, or multiply your score on Bounty. And those are barely acceptable outside their events…
Creating those “unmovable” traits will do very little to change things in minor or bigger scales…
As high level Delves goes, doing the minimum battles possible still allows you to complete the challenge with less undesirable changes to your original strategy.
I don’t think the comparison to event troops is fitting at all. Those are bad outside of their respective events due to their spells’ distinct specialisation for those events before anything else.
Also such a proposed trait would surely be a lower tier trait akin to all the other specific status effect counter traits like nimble or insulated. There are many really great troops with those traits in the game now, i don’t see why this would not be possible with this proposed new trait too.
How about a Gambling Hall we can gamble our extra valuable items such as: Souls, Gold, Gems, or Ingots or Treasure Maps… Really anything of value. A Warrior needs to have a good game of chance after Battles!
Because these troops are already great without needing the subpar traits for one single effect that happens to be a major nuissance in one single feature.
If we imagine any future troop being released with such “unmovable trait” its utility will still be highly dependent of what the troops does… So if each week we receive at least one new troop with an “unmovable trait” we can assume some common, rare, ultra-rares or epics that would hardly fit in the current, and in some future, Delves. Those would probably still be bad for many builds simply because the general design direction is inconsistent in the first place. And when a new Legendary is released with an “unmovable trait” it wouldn’t be able to play on all Delves thanks to color restrictions…
All this work wouldn’t bring immediate results at all, and if the devs would take time to put this “unmovable trait” in some current troops it would still fill some gaps in lower rarity troops with no discerning utility in most cases, specially if you need such trait for high level Delves.
Mechanically how would it even work ideally:
The troop with this trait can’t be moved around.
This could help tankers/frontliners that can’t be pushed, but, effects that can pull other troops would still have a clear differentiation and work as counter-counter (also Stun). A single trait keeping the whole teams stuck in the same position feels quite hard to imagine/explain thematically. And while not everything needs to be on par with reality, specially in a game based on a fantasy setting (that has some of the WORST gnolls hunters i ever saw i must add) i think we can at least agree that if things makes some sense then it’s a great bonus…
As much as i like things with clear counters, in some cases some strategies must remain untouched in order to achieve a “perfect imbalance”…
If it would come between creating a trait that prevents reordering troops i would prefer the devs would allow us to reorder our team after a battle, like it was suggested before, at least this would probably take less coding time and design meetings/brainstorming that could be better used in other areas… Like finishing the reworks of “Goat Land” and finally moving on to the next kingdom.
You are really overthinking this.
As for the viability of a troop with such a trait, obviously the troop itself has to be good… duh that literally goes for every trait in the game. I don’t understand why you pinpoint that on this specific trait.
If all future troops turn out to be too bad to be viable, they are useless regardless of what low tier traits are on them really.
As for the trait application, i would just suggest that the troop with the trait simply becomes immune to being subject to the knock down/drag effect, but still falls in line when other troops of the team are subject to such an effect and force it to move, seems simple enough.
However i fully agree that Devs allowing the reordering of troops between battles would be preferable!
But i have not yet seen any hints that the Devs would be willing to do so, but if we play the free wishes game, sure i’d go with reordering between battles too!
I am just under the impression that the Devs stand firmly behind this design decision, and would be more open to the introduction of a counter trait than they would be to changing their design. But if they happen to discard that design even better, no counter needed, i’m on board!
Sometimes just going with “I agree.” or “I disagree.” does poorly to explain things in my case, specially when i try to consider design direction, impacts and other possibilities to be explored.
But at least we agree that creating this trait and adding it to troops, future or current, wouldn’t bring a significant impact while in a sense doing exactly what the OP/players asked for… Removing the “lock” on team order would be simpler and preferable if anything.
You know who could/should overthink such stuff in the first place? The devs. There is still room for improvement in Delves, but i feel they missed some huge opportunities to use some of these challenges, as they are presented, to offer faction troops that can do better tricks.
That could go from buffs, or even the trait if you wish, to maintain the team order with a simple explanation for Hall of Guardians, the troops simply are statues, made of stone, so they are also protected from being moved against their will. And there is also friendship (magic), Hall of Guardians could also have spells removing/transforming the Stone Blocks for extra effects since there are a lot of them in that particular Dungeon.
Well, i’ll stop for now. If the people who are paid to think about this stuff is not doing it what business do i have doing it for free? Well, these are some creative gymnastics, but still…
That is not quite how i would put it, such a trait would absolutely have an impact, namely solving the player’s problem with the knock back troops at the cost of including one potentially not optimal troop in their team.
However the Devs allowing reordering instead would probably just be an easier solution.
…Hmmm come to think of it more, that trait would already help you directly during the battle with the knock back enemy, making it more helpful than just being able to reorder after it. I guess i am leaning more towards the trait again then
However i’d take any of the two.
I meant it as wouldn’t cause a distinct impact because it would be tied to the troop usefulness. As in, we could have it in 100+ troops (assuming reworks of existing troops and really hoping for some reworks on Wild Plains ASAP…) and yet maybe only two or three have some general usage for Delves…
Now i’m thinking about a troop card for Juggernaut from X-Men with this “Unmovable Trait”…
Correction: Blob is the one who is unmovable, Juggernaut has Unstopable Force.
