That comparison makes not a lot of sense. The problem with fireball is that it cannot reliably be countered while doing very good damage at the same time. Warrior attacks can be countered by blocks/encumber/pushes/dodges etc, so melee range damage can and should be a lot higher than ranged.
First off, your math is bad on that 42 damage. I assume you're talking about Oblit Bludgeon - 17 damage. All Out Attack doubles the base and then adds buffs, so it's actually 38 damage with wellspring. But that''s really beside the point because you can have multiple All Out Attacks and there are a million other buffs you could also include, so why not ask about a 68 or 132 damage attack? I'll answer that for you - because the straight numbers are misleading and irrelevant. For one thing, that's a heck of a setup - it requires you to not only have moved into position (melee), but to also have 2 (or more) relatively rare cards (in the sense of how many you have in your deck, assuming you built specifically for this overkill) in your hand when you get there. All of that damage gets applied to one person, requires you to be in melee range, and can be blocked with one block. (If i didn't make it obvious enough before, i'll point out here that the buffs are irrelevant because you've already set up a binary system where either the target lives or dies - buffs just make them more dead.) The Fireball on the other hand, requires one relatively common card (again in the sense of how many you'll have in a focused fireball deck) from the mage and one relatively rare card (ditto) from the priest, and can be done from far away requiring only line of sight to a spot within 2 squares of your targets, possibly even on your second turn of the game. Every character it hits has to mitigate the full damage separately, and armor has to roll for both the direct damage and the burn. In addition, if you draw more Fireballs (which are 1/4 - 1/3 of the deck) or you have Firestarter, Kindler, Arcane Aura, or Savage Curse it only gets worse - for Fireball the buffs matter. It's misleading to judge a card in relation to vastly different cards - judge it by what it can do on its own or in relation to cards that are more similar to it. Does any other AoE in the game have comparable range or damage? No on both counts. That right there, all by itself, should be a big flashing warning sign. At any rate, it's not insanely busted - just regular busted. Worth changing before it becomes a bigger problem.
I just built a sub-par version of this deck to prove the point. Only 7 fireballs in the deck but it's already bringing serious pain. I just took 3 dwarves down to 7 (priest), 15, and 19 (warriors) health on the first turn. 2 Wellspring-buffed Fireballs, a cone of cold, and a Winds of War that drew out a block. The guy with 19 health is wearing heavy armor, so yeah - it helped, but he still took 15 damage in one turn without ever getting anywhere near melee range. The other player didn't even bother finishing the game - we just talked about how broken that and frost are - especially together.
Just on a technical note, there are AoE spells with a bigger range than Fireball. Firestorm and Flash Of Pain come to mind. Granted, they both have friendly fire involved too.
Yes, fireball is way too overpowered with no means of blocking since even if you have a deflection card those only work if your the actual target and do not trigger if your simply caught in the AoE. The damage is definitely too high.
Technically, Fireball also has friendly fire, but it's much less of a limitation for it. Good catch. Just had another fight in a less open map - killed a human wizard and took a dwarf warrior down to half health on the first turn - did not have line of sight on either one. The Dwarf missed a bunch of blocks. Take your pick about whether that makes it an unrepresentative sample or a demonstration of the inherent unreliability of counters and why they cannot be used to argue against the OP-ness of any given card.
I've had similar results on the first turn using flash of pain with unholy wellspring. The fact is you can accomplish similar results with a wizard who doesn't have any fireballs in their deck. That being said I do think fireball could use a slight nerf to bring it down a peg so people don't see it as the only option because all others are objectively inferior; which would make wizard deck building boring because it would become fireball or bust. Another possible simple solution could be requiring the initial target to have to be a character instead of being able to target an unoccupied square. This would buff evasion tactics vs fireball and make it harder to splash a whole team plus more difficult to avoid friendly fire(or requiring the purposeful friendly fire to splash around blocking terrain.
Well, even with a range of 10 fireball still doesn't have the mass aoe effect of firestorm, nor the nuking power of volcano. So fireball is still inferior in some ways compared to those two options. A better comparison is Sizzling Bolt - it has just as much range as fireball yet deals much less damage, plus no AOE burst. Yet you see sizzling bolt on high level items like Roaring Staff. This is clearly an oversight. Either fireball needs to be weaker or sizzling bolt needs to be stronger.
With burst fireball has a longer range than sizzling bolt. You can target the fireball up to 10 squares away, than burst adds 2 more squares.
I think the problem here is Burst. Burst's power increase exponentially with power of 2. Burst of 1 cover 9 squares. Burst of 2 cover a huge area of 25 squares. (Similar problems exist with cone of large range such as cone of cold, though not as severe as burst). 25 square is roughly 15 to 20% area of any given map (not excluding blocked terrain. Either force it to target a character to limit the area a wizard can control, or introduce a new AOE modifier. I suggest a modifier like Cross which splash in a cross-like shape. Cross of 1 will cover 5 squares. Cross of 2 will cover 13 square. This does break the symmetry of diagonal vs horizontal/vertical direction though. Which is what I think the dev intended to design Burst for. Edit: To easily visualize it: Code: Cross 1 x xxx x Cross 2 x xxx xxxxx xxx x
I do in fact not mean a 17 damage attack + wellspring + all out attack as that wouldn't be a self contained warrior any more and make no sense at that point. I did however remember incorrectly and the attack is 20 not 21 but thats a minor point still and doesn't change anything i said. Also let me just say i called exactly this reaction from people when they removed resistant hide from warrior and priest and i think the best solution if it needs to be fixed(which i don't think it does mind you) is to give them back resistant hide on some items.
Limiting resistant hide does probably helps wizards run wild, but can a single armor card reliably fix an issue with an attack card? With the right items, you can run upwards of 12 fireballs on a wizard(there's also fireball on a magic skill I believe). That's roughly 12 out of 36 cards (ignoring traits/card draw effects), so odds are a wizard will have at least one in his opening hand, and has good odds to draw more each turn. Armor is, IMO at least, probably the best counter to the attack. Due to Fireball's range and burst, it's playable on turn 1. And I've already shown that with the right items you can easily expect to have at least one in your opening hand. That combination puts your opponents in a situation where they also need their answers in their starting hands. But, I think it's much more difficult to reliably start with an answer to fireball (much less encumber), and almost impossible to do that across all 3 party members. The only real option is to run the maximum amount of leadership (but that seems to be the answer to any problem). It's tricky, since there is no concept of paying for your spells or attacks in Cardhunter, every card is potentially playable from turn 1. Melee attacks however have a built in limit, in that you also have to be able to get adjacent. So on turn 1 it can normally require multiple movement cards before you can even use a melee attack (this is why warriors are so mean on MP boards like the dungeon). By contrast, the only limits imposed on a ranged spell is the ability to target an opponent and it's range. Except that Fireball has both a very long range, and doesn't need to target anyone to hit with burst. I just don't really see many limits on the card.
And thats why there needs to be different kinds of boards some where a turn 1 hit is possible and some where it is impossible. Also if you have that much of a critical mass of fireballs in your deck good luck against someone that is actually packing armor so that your 4 damage attacks are now 0 and your 8 damage attacks are now 4. The fact that the meta seems to be no armor all damage makes fireball overpowered but that is only for the current meta not actually the cards fault.
Well, than they use priests to boost the damage of fireballs, and wizards have plenty of access to armor discard effects anyway. But that's off topic. Attack cards, and those can be melee attacks of all kinds or various wizard attacks (fireball, encumber, lightning or whatever), can be put into decks at a much higher rate than many other cards. Many card games put limits on the amount of specific cards you can use. For instance, being able to use a maximum of 4 of a specific card. Cardhunter has no such limits, instead it's based on the items. So when there are items with 6 fireballs, or 6 ice spells or whatever, it's possible to put lots of those cards in a deck. On the other hand, the answer cards tend to be much more limited. For example, you can only have one copy of resistant hide in a deck. Making the answer far less reliable than the cards it's trying to answer.
Why don't we just change it to Burst 1? The fireball is just too large, even from a lore perspective. Fireballs aren't supposed to be the size of somebody's living room.
From what I've seen of fireball I'd say decrease the AoE size and perhaps remove its ability to simply target terrain, or if they keep the terrain targeting shorten the AoE a little more for it.
Since Fireball has a burst of 2 you can't decrease the AoE and then decrease it again if terrain is targeted. That would eliminate the burst completely and make it pointless to target terrain. I would not be against shortening it to burst 1 or scaling down the damage the further from the center it gets, but fire is pretty bad without Fireball and if it gets nerfed hard then everyone will just play frost.
The classic DnD fireball typically about 30-40 feet wide, depending on the version of the game, which ends up being 6 to 8 squares on a grid map (each square being 5 feet), so if anything, Card Hunter's fireball is below average. GMs who are Math nerds may also change the shape of the fireball in response to the surroundings, so that it fills the same volume regardless of obstacles; For example, a 25 foot wide/long fireball (Card Hunter's fireball) launched into a 5 foot wide hallway will become 5 foot wide and 125 feet long. You can probably be thankful that they didn't add this to the game, otherwise Temple and Cave would become a giant inferno.
This is a good point. Even though fireball is better than nearly every other fire spell, there is still the following issues: - Frost is OP - Arcane is useless - Electric is 'meh'.
