Just signed up, was wondering about this! Currently with Fighter, Cleric, and Wizard, you have the basic trinity. They have a rogue to add later, and maybe other classes. But the class trinity is usually there for a reason, so how viable would it really be to play without a cleric? I didnt see any inventory for healing potions, so im wondering if every class can get some kind of support/heal and a cleric wont be an absolute necessity like some games.
It's highly doubtful that Clerics will ever be useless. There may be a class that has some support/heals, but in a drawn out fight, a cleric is the only person that will sustain you. ANY other deck combination will either rely on not getting hit or killing them so fast that you don't need to heal. The problem is, clerics are good at what they do, so an enemy team with a cleric would most likely outlast any damage deck. Not to mention that some items (such as ones that give terrain neutralization) may only come in the form of cleric items, which means that team of wizards throwing down lava tiles can only be neutralized by a cleric. Honestly, you're taking a chance no matter what combination you use, but having one of each ensures that you can have a response to pretty much anything. I think that's what they were going for, too. Every class will have it's use and no other class will take that away. That would compromise gameplay too much and they don't want that to happen. Personally, an all warrior/mage/cleric deck would be fun, but I can see it not working real quick in a lot of situations due to lack of range/heal/tank/tiles manipulation/you name it. I personally think the best decks will be the well rounded ones that can have an answer to all other decks. I could be wrong, though. I'm sure straight warrior decks with lots of charge and hard hits/armor would wreck people, but if you have the AoE and heals with your 1 warrior, you can probably outlast them and outmaneuver them pretty easily. Just my take at least.
It's definitely possible to build very competitive decks that don't use priests. We've had success with all warrior and all wizard decks. As you note, they don't bother trying to heal at all - just race the opponent. Wizards can kill from a distance and warriors can either tank up or use Step attacks to dance in and out of range.
. . . And I'm just gonna guess that card suites change a lot of this thinking anyway. The basic fact that your warrior's sword can give you a "wizard's" fireball card implies that, say, your wizard's t-shirt can give you a "priest's" healing card. You mentioned healing potions; with this logic, the designers can make ANYTHING a healing item if they feel like it. I'm delighted by this freedom. Because I don't like the unbalanced dichotomy you get in standard fantasy: "EVERY SINGLE DAMAGE-DEALING CLASS oh and there's the cleric don't forget that." "DAMAGE DAMAGE DAMAGE LET'S LOWER THOSE HIT POINTS RRAARGH oh and there's the Cure Light Wounds spell to raise them again." It seems kinda silly. So yeah, I intend to have healing warriors and such.
When I won the internal developer tournament (Did I mention that I won the developer tournament? I won the developer tournament) I played the first few rounds with all warriors, and the last few with all wizards. Focusing parties on particular strategies leaves you very vulnerable to specific other strategies, but overall seems to be more effective than fielding a generalist party. This is based on a pretty small sample size though, and we expect to learn a lot more about it during the beta.
kinda late on this but didn't the dev diaries mention that healing is not a cleric/priest exclusive card ? I was under the impression that if you can terraform for damage, you could also terraform for heals, discards, buffs, debuffs etc ? So instead of an party/single target heal, it should also be possible to create healing tiles ?
I can't help but think of the OOTS with the two-cleric team just constantly healing each other until the monster gave up from boredom. Go Team Cleric!
I never meant to sound like I thought certain effects would be exclusive, and I apologize if I did. I merely meant to state that clerics are MEANT to be healers, warriors tanks, mages ranged DPS, etc. Meaning, yes, you can have some heals on your warrior, but 1 heal for 2 points on a warrior vs a group heal for 5 points/person on a cleric + 4 more of those tiny heals does a lot more for you if that's your strategy. I don't know if I like that. If a group of 3 mages with basically the same card is a better deck than a mixed, then what's the point of having more than 1 class? It seems like the point of having more than one class is for synergy, not grouping 3 characters of one class together and play rock-paper-scissors against another single class team.
Remeber that it was a developer's tournament. I got the distinct impression (from sentences like the quote above) that Jon and probably the rest were working in dev-think mode as well as getting in some smackdown. The builds described in the diary seem to purposely explore the far edge of party strategies, testing how large the viable design space really is. And it's no surprise that focused parties performed well. But in a tiny field, with almost nobody actually playing a three-class party, it would be unwise to conclude that mixed builds are uncompetitive. What would be disturbing is if a jack-of-all-trades party ended up beating the specialists all the time. That would pretty quickly kill innovation and interest. Any party, single-class or mixed, should be successful because you have built your deck around a specific strategy for each member. Just trying to react to a little bit of everything with your limited allotment of cards will likely leave you vulnerable to lots of one specific thing. (Not that there isn't a place for defense, but you have to as smart playing defensively as you would be attacking.) Specialist strategies are a bit more obvious for single-class parties; the question posed to beta experimenters will be what specific, focused strategies will be available to multi-class parties. That's only hinted at in the diary. I think we get better information by studying the PAX demo, where the three-class party performs fairly well and you can see the possible intersections of tactics even though the fight was slightly rigged. And when you ask, "what's the point of having more than 1 class," well, if single-class parties are strong, imagine what you could try with two-class parties. What can you do with two Mages and a Warrior? Or two Priests and a Mage? Etc. There's only one kind of three-class party, there's 3 single-class parties, but there are 6 possible two-class parties. (Until we get Rogues, then it's 3, 4, and 12.) The additional capabilities of another class should strengthen the party in many cases. That tournament was hardly the last word in party building. P.S. And on top of all that, let's not forget that there is a competitve meta-game as well. I am already planning how I will build multiple parties: using one to bait you, my opponent, into a certain frame of thinking and then catching you with a build to take advantage of your reaction to my first party. That's how you win Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Here is the reversal, what about a deck full of priests? I would imagine using a turtle style of gameplay and drawing things out would still be viable and possibly the priests working together would be something worth looking into as a balance perspective.
Good i was hoping for flexibility kind of like GW2. Certain game modes might make certain builds more/less viable, i assume it wont all be death match.
So far we know of death match as well as capture points where you get points for standing on certain squares at some point giving you a alternate win condition.
Pretty sure we've actually been shown this in one of the old dev diaries. Ah yes Consecrate Ground. http://www.cardhunter.com/2012/02/consecrated-ground/
There's almost certainly a dominant build in the game right now. Whether it is actually three wizards is really unclear as we simply haven't done enough testing yet. That's the point of Beta - to balance things out so that there are a variety of builds that are competitive and to develop an interesting meta-game. I think there will always be strong builds that are vulnerable to counters and other builds that are slightly weaker but with less counters.
If I may suggest, it is possible to track imbalance via mass bot simulation, outside of the usual human testers. There is a certain lvl of skill/time required to set things up but the results can be quite interesting, varying from finding broken mechanics to skewed ratios. In fact, hmm....I think I could even do it on my lappy right now ...
Just remember guys, even if an all out damage party, with all of one class or not, is good at one game scenario it doesn't mean that they will succeed at a non-standard game modes if introduced.
I really don't think an incredibly small set of developer skirmishes held 10 months ago should worry anyone as to the balance of the game.
Egad, I forgot about that. Blue Manchurians, have you done any other internal tournaments since then? (The answer had better be "yes" . . . )
There's no way they haven't had another tournament by now. They should've had like 1 a month at least. >.>
Maybe we're being too specific in terminology. Internal playtesting doesn't have to be "a tournament," after all. There could have been numerous "Farbs wipes the floor with people"s over the months.
