What cards are breaking the bank?

Right now i'm trying it with a Focused Healer priest, a Focused Piety priest, and a wizard with a few firestorms and a mix of other cards. I'll put the build details down in the MP builds thread.

There is a certain charming synergy to firestorm, team heal and talented healer. Medic's Cudgel is a really good item if you're going to try this, with two of those I got to 17 cards that can proc talented healer and only 14 or 15 that sit in the hand and can't. The other priest has 16 cards that can proc altruism, so basically half the deck either gets you a bonus card or a chance at a bonus card.

I agree it is powerful (even more firestorms would make it even more so) but it's really reliant on having both priests get their traits up and not getting it purged off. You're waiting to draw those cards and running for cover until you do. Once you get talented healer up and have two healing spells in hand, you get to heal your whole team to full pretty much every round. You don't even really need the second healer, you can run anything you want.

 

Guess what I found in the rare shop this morning:

 

The synergy with demonic feedback is pretty great too. I revise my earlier statement, Talented Healer is potentially quite ridiculous in the healing and card draw it can give you.

Judging from the above screenshot it looks like talented healer alone can get you to draw out your entire deck and suffer trait-death (drawing and playing your traits in a never-ending loop because your entire deck is in your hand).

 

https://forums.cardhunter.com/threa...oduces-an-avalanche-of-cards.1371/#post-16752

Nothing really new, knew it was OP....just have no idea how often it breaks.

 

I've been testing the decks, and my concern isn't really with going infinite, it's simply that each turn a talented healer (and altruism still can do this pretty good anyway) casts 2 or 3 or 4 turns worth of heal spells. The developers talked about balancing heal a long time ago, they mentioned that heal values had to be kept lower than attacks so that games didn't drag out or so that heal didn't become the dominant strategy. So, in general, the amount of damage healed by a spell is significantly less than the amount of damage done by a "good" attack.

Talented Healer (and to a lesser extent Altruism), breaks this design by allowing a priest access to a lot more cards (which will likely be more heal cards). Each individual heal is still weaker than most attacks, but when the priest can cast 4+ heals each turn, the total life healed each turn can overcome the damage being done.

Using firestorm takes advantage of another aspect of the heal design. Group heal cards generally heal more total damage than single heal spells. In regular games they are often difficult to get full value from, because an opponent rarely spreads out the attacks across your entire team. Because firestorm consistently damages everyone, it allows you to get better value from your heal spells. If you can consistently use group heals, you can heal more damage.

Lastly, I think there's another design issue with firestorm. As this is a tactical game, attacks normally require you to spend time and cards moving your characters, trying to get within range of your opponent and trying to get LOS for your attacks. Firestorm ignores all of that (so does volcano in many ways), and that is a big advantage. Because a firestorm deck doesn't need to spend cards getting LOS or within range for an attack they can spend ALL their cards on their other strategies. Also, in a deck where you aren't even trying to move (thus insuring you have available movement cards each turn) Volcano becomes trivial to abuse. Simply put, firestorm and volcano allow these decks to play a completely different game. Personally, while I don't think these cards are OP on their own, I think they're inappropriate for inclusion in a tactical game since they often don't require the same tactical decisions of other attacks.

 

I think the only problem with firestorm is that it is drastically undervalued at weak level. Which means that you get it essentially for free with no power token cost. And yeah going infinite is not really the standard whether something is broken (even drawing half your deck is obviously too strong), but it shows very nicely that a card/combo is broken and needs addressing.

 

Eh in your link it is an old version that breaks because it triggers on healing effects, not healing cards (which is obviously trivial to break with holy armor). Afaik mine is the first shot of going infinite with the current talented healer.

 

When you first design a game you start out with a lot of concepts or ideas for the game, and over the development cycle you figure out which ideas you can fit into your game. A key part of game design is recognizing not only what concepts should go into a particular game, but also recognizing what doesn't fit or is inappropriate for the type of game you're currently making. It's a hard thing to do, and long running games often evolve as the designers make these decisions over time.

Cardhunters is, to my understanding, first and foremost supposed to be a tactical RPG. Tactical RPGs are a genre represented by such key games as Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, and the older Shining Force games (to name just a few). The design hallmark of tactical RPGs is that they are similar to playing a pen and paper RPG with miniatures, where you have to move your characters around a board/map in order to attack each other. The "tactical" aspect of these games come from the decisions players have to make about movement, LOS, range, damage, resistances, terrain, etc...

The problem with firestorm (and volcano in many ways) is that a card with unlimited range, and that doesn't require LOS to use, greatly reduces the tactical decisions a player has to make. If you don't have to worry about things like LOS and range there's little reason to bother with a map and miniatures in the first place, since you don't need them to measure anything. Essentially, it's not a very tactical card, in a game about making tactical decisions. This is just my opinion, but due to those reasons, and not any power balance issues, I don't think firestorm is an appropriate fit for Cardhunter.

 

While I agree with your sentiment I think it's less of an issue due to the victory squares. A firestorm deck has to race to get the correct combination of cards before the opponent wins all the while protecting their wizard(s) from attack. Being someone who does play with armor, I've found that the simple fact that I have armor neuters firestorm decks a great deal, even if the 1300 ranking range. I've only ever lost to one (empowered) firestorm/fireball deck and that's because I didn't draw even one of the cards my deck was based around and when I went to burst down a priest I failed to draw any attacks on any of my characters the next round.

 

Read the entire thread. People were alr aware TH was OP even after the holy armor fix...we just didn't make it an exclusive test. What you did was simply verify our suspicions. I'm more curious as to whether its an autowin.

 

Well if you can get your entire deck in hand as turinturamba shows in the image is possible (even if it doesn't show it actually done), I'd say it is. So long as you have things that can damage yourself/your allies you can keep healing them and drawing what you need. Demonic feedback and demonic pain seem best suited for the task -- or even attacks if you are standing next to them.

 

Firestorm isn't that OP because it hits every character. The same goes for Volcano.

There are many ways to counter Firestorm:

1. Get some armor
2. Destroy the enemies armor

Firestorm plays around armor cards, which are plentiful, so it's pretty balanced IMO.

 

It's not the OPness that is the issue. It's the play style. It is totally separate from traditional play style where tactics and positioning is needed. Instead of using their move cards, they can just cycle them with leadership (for instance) giving them access to more cards to win than an opponent can get. The game then boils down to simple card drawing and if/when they can get their combos going.

For instance, with Whirlwind Enemies and a firestorm build, it could very well get into a situation where an opponent will have to come kill another team at it's spawn points in order to win as the victory conditions could continually be denied by WWE while the team continues to do damage with firestorm. Sure armor will help mitigate the damage and make it so you can survive, but you still have to walk over and kill the team to win since the victory squares aren't going to be an assured way to victory. Assuming you have the armor on all of your characters to not be killed by firestorms (perhaps even empowered). It then becomes a long, drawn out game of whether or not the team will draw enough WWE or control cards to keep you away.

That doesn't create a very fun game for most people.

 

I don't think the game should try to enforce a play style, but that last part is a fair point. Let people do what is fun even if - especially if - it's outside the bounds of what you're expecting to see, but when their fun becomes another player's grief, then it's time to change things. Yes, i agree that Firestorm has the potential to be a fun-killer in just the ways you describe.

I think the first fix i'd try is to change it to a Frost card, doing cold damage - Hailstorm. That eliminates the Resistant Hide immunity without changing anything significant in the card itself.

 

But hailstorm wouldn't burn, which does change something significant in the card. And remove the synergy with Burning bonus, as well as thematic with ember burst and volcano

 

Derp - yes - you're right. Maybe Frostburn or something - base damage is cold, ongoing burn.

Edit: Technically the fire damage type is not directly associated with the burning keyword so changing it to frost shouldn't affect that part, but yes, it would be a little weird.

 

So wait, Nimbus isn't OP? Esp if someone says they have 9 of them in a deck? I purged 2 and he cast a 3rd.. while on the VP... and by that time my guys were dead from firestorms and slows trying to kill his other 2 guys...

 

One anecdote does not make a card OP. Sounds like he had a really good draw, but the events would have to be easily repeatable and have no easy counters for me to really worry about it. The rest of the parts are more concerning to me - slows and firestorms.

 

Since I sort of started this, my fix would be different. I love the flavor of firestorm, essentially setting off a massive whirlwind of fire, but I think I would change it to originate at the caster much like Flash Of Pain . This makes terrain matter, which is a key difference.

 

I like this suggestion a lot. I am not sure whether terrain should matter, because it would make it too easy to shield your teammembers.
Range 6/7 originating on the caster and ignores line of sight/terrain would be my suggestion. Would make for a much more fun card.