10 range, 4 damage, burn 2 AoE If you draw it in your opening hand you're guaranteed to hit the entire team on some maps. I know the spell is kind of iconic to the old school D&D vibe that the game emulates, but it just seems like something needs to give here.
And unlike many Burning cards, it only burns for one round. This weakens it quite a lot, especially if you're trying to use Firestarter. If you're talking about hitting "the entire team," do you mean single-player or multiplayer? For single-player, teams of any real size often have masses of defenses (Goblin Blocks) that negate much of the effect. (Or, well, Blue Manchu designed them specifically for you to learn the merit of area-of-effect Attacks.) For multiplayer, as you mention, it does vary by map.
I'm talking multi. To be honest, i don't think about card balance at all for single - there's plenty of other tweaks they can do for that.
Is a good card, but no more. 4 damages + 2 next round -> an armor in hand (not so difficult) and the damage will be 2 or less with a bit of luck (depending on the armor). Not a big deal, there's a lot of better cards for a fire mage.
I don't think we'll see many fireball players, what with the 2 best items for it being legendary. I doubt we'll get much consensus on the card, but fireball's range seems like a possible problem. It's hard to pinpoint a specific issue, open maps are the major problem against long range spells. But burst and range 10 give fireball an advantage over potential counters. With burst, fireball can hit targets up to 12 squares away, and also those trying to hide behind terrain. Since it' an area of effect spell, I don't think it's particularly accurate to only look at it's minimum damage. I like it a lot in campaign, where it does much more than 4 damage on average, and hitting 2 targets in MP isn't that hard. The extreme range, along with burst, are really going to limit MP maps. Counterspell (and Forgetfullness) seem to exist to help keep mages in check. They're very solid anti-magic counters. But they, like many of the other utility spells such as purge and cleansing ray, are limited to a range of 8 or less. Fireball has a much greater range, allowing a fire mage to stay well out of range of these counters. That strikes me as problematic. There are other potential counters as well, so I'm not trying to simply focus on these, but I suspect that range will stay in issue.
Fireball IS too good. and it IS a big deal, and there aren't better cards for a fire mage besides maybe volcano. It's strong because you don't need direct line of sight to your opponent's characters and so if your draw is better than theirs, they try to hide and get nuked without retaliation anyway. The effective range gives you safety which buys you time to buff the modest 4+2 damage into 7+2 or 8+2. The card has everything except damage, which can be fixed: 4+2 can be mitigated with some armor but 8+2 (Unholy Wellspring) on multiple targets from behind cover and far away isn't something you can be ready for on round one. I'd like to see the range reduced by two squares to make it slightly harder to get all the targets you want and slightly more dangerous to use in a wizard duel. I don't know what else you can tune on this card without getting away from the core concept, nerfing the damage or aoe radius or making you pick a character target would ruin the card.
This is a fair criticism. I think the range advantage should go to lightning wizards, followed by arcane, then frost, then fire..
Lightning already has the direct damage edge, but it should probably be just a tiny bit higher. Arcane should probably get the best range. Fireball itself should be shorter range, while the sprays should have a little better damage. Frost...frost is just too good all around. Shave a little damage off some cards, duration and/or range off others.
At its damage, it's really easy to negate it even with the weakest of armor cards. I don't see this spell a problem in multiplayer due to its so difficult to get an item with multiple fireballs
Rarity is not a balancing factor. Eventually, everyone in high-ranked multi will have as many Staff of Fireballs as they want. Rarity only determines how long it takes for this to happen.
Yeah it's too good. Most of my losses seem to come from unholy wellspring/fireball combos. I basically agree with Genericus, but I would reduce the range to 6 (effective range 8 with burst), which would make it much more difficult to use well, but still amazingly powerful.
Slap Unholy Wellspring on that mage with lots of any multiple target spells and watch the other team go down in one turn. Edit: Should have added Firestarter and arcane aura as well
Certainly a darn good spell. I at least 1 game against wizards in the 1200-1300 rank. I'm not willing to jump on the "too good" bandwagon yet, but it certainly does seem to have it all: Range, damage, lack of needing LoS and AoE. One thing I do question is whether it should trigger the 'targeted by' effects to help avoid it. I believe currently it does not trigger any blocks, dodges, or targeted cards.
Seems fine to me and has been just as fine since it was introduced a long time ago. Yes it is strong and yes strangely enough damage buffs are good with multi target spells. But lets be honest are we saying unholy wellspring is too good or that fireball is too good? Because fireball is not even close to overpowered but the interaction between it and unholy wellspring might be. But that goes for unholy wellspring and every single aoe than really doesn't it?
That's true, but how many AoEs can so routinely hit all three enemies (and only enemies)? How many of those do the same amount of damage? Adding 4 damage to a 1 damage spell certainly doesn't feel as strong as adding 4 damage to a 4 damage spell IMO. 15 damage for say, Cone of Cold if you manage to get everyone in it, 24 damage for a fireball (which can also do up to an additional 6 damage).
Make Staff Of A Million Fireballs a common item for a couple weeks and see what happens. There's no viable counter to it. Praying you can draw that one Resistant Hide in your deck is not a viable counter. Essentially an asymmetrical Firestorm (minus blocks) in most situations. I don't think armor is a viable counter to it either: it's one thing to need one armor to mitigate damage from one attack, it's another entirely to need your whole team to draw armor to mitigate damage from a single attack. Also in this case Unholy Wellspring is a hard counter to all armors except Resistant Hide. Too good? Probably yes. Only its rarity prevents it from being a widespread problem at the moment (still bull**** when you do encounter it though), but I guess that will change once enough Staff Of A Million Fireballs drop and trading is implemented to let people maximize the build.
The problem is an item that gives 6 fire ball cards. The hackmaster only gives one annihilating hack. The high end wizard staves should have one fireball, bunch of firewalls + fire storms + flash bangs + volcano etc. The main problem is that fireball is too easy to obtain, not the card itself. This should be re-evaluated.
This was why I was careful in my original post. I agree this is a powerful combination, and it probably should be. The only real issue I have with it, IMO, is the range. Other AOE spells, almost all spells actually, are shorter range, and thus there are more counters available for them. It's range/burst allows you to stay well out of harms way while doing fair to very good damage. I really have to wonder how much of this strategy we'd see if the best Fireball staffs were more available, but I certainly expect it will be something we see more of as the pool of players grows.
