I'm finishing the campaign and starting to look at MP more closely (forums and spectating). At first glance it looks that movement-related cards (push, slide, encumber, step, terrain attachments etc.) tend to be very popular. From this I take that dwarfs are underpopulated in MP games? My impression was also that priests are sometimes swapped out for extra hard-hitting warriors or wizards, preferably human or elf due to their team or personal movement cards, respectively. Of course I'm just speculating without having much practice myself so If someone could share their thoughts on the current trends in MP it would be awesome I'm asking because I really enjoyed an all-dwarf approach in my single player campaign and I'm at the point of collecting cards for my own decks. I was looking into slow/tanky/all-dwarf-priest deck with life-leach, fury and purging capabilities but it would be a real shame to spend all that gold on nice items to find out the hard way that it's likely to do badly in MP
I thought it was the opposite - and that dwarves were overpopulated in MP? Since people rate their racials and hp very high.
Dwarf teams work great when properly geared. Oth, badly geared or unlucky dwarf team can be shut down hard by wizard or two. Or just get outmanouvred.
I've watched some streams and did some spectating and it seemed otherwise, but it wasn't much to be able to say for sure that I got a good idea of how things work, hence this topic. Maybe the MP is much more balanced and varied that I expected which would be even better than I expected!
I'm sitting at rank ~1100 in MP and I haven't noticed dwarves being any more or less populated than the other races. Certainly I've been worn out and/or brutally overwhelmed by dwarf tank parties on occasion. If you enjoy it, go for it - the worst that can happen is you just end up enjoying yourself lower on rankings.
yeah the worst thing about running dwarfs is that if you get iced by cone of cold or other 2 encumber can see them sitting in a firewall for 2 turns. I have seen people running all dwarf teams at top rankings(top 20-30ish players) however I believe you need a very good understanding of the game and also the gear to get you out of the tough spots that an all dwarf team can get into that does not really effect human/elf/mixed teams.
I'm happy to hear that - dwarves was very popular in the beta, so I just figured this would continue. Dwarves are better with lack of gear, due to their hp - which makes some people go with them by default. I'm sure this balances out in the long run however.
Little birdie over at Blue Manchu twitted this. Very nice read, mentioned some movement/map control/dwarf-issues. The more I read the more confident I become about getting a all-dwarf team, although they would have to be super-geared to make it work. I can probably postpone that idea until I'm swimming in good gear
Yes, movements are FTW in MP. Thats absolutely true. Positioning is insanely important even when both teams have more melee than ranged. However, it doesn't mean dwarves are bad or underpopulated. It just means they gear to make up for the disadvantages. If you want to run dwarves, make sure you have leap attacks, team movement and/or good boots.
I recently switched to an all-dwarf team, using the standard trio of classes (The Finishing Moves, currently composed of my warrior Vertebreaker, my priest GTS, and my wizard named, well, Shining Wizard). So far I'm having some success. I find a key to running dwarves is fighting fire with fire...so to speak...by which I mean packing your own encumber abilities. Give those poncy elves a quick deep freeze and teach them what it feels like to have short legs. Having some extra step attacks for your warriors is almost mandatory. Shrug it Off is great. Much depends on the map, of course. I find that dwarves don't care as much about difficult terrain, as they're not going very far anyway, so the map with the one stream passing through the middle (sorry, I forget the names), for example, is a good choice. The map with a maze-like setup can be more of a problem. And, of course, one Winds of War can really ruin your day. You'd think that dwarves would be less affected with their low centers of gravity.
I played MP with the standard party, then switched to three dwarves because I was tired of being squishy. I did well for a while, but hit a bad streak where I was getting out-maneuvered by quicker parties with better movement cards. The biggest loss was to an elven warrior / two dwarf wizard deck that obliterated me on turn two. So I decided "if I can't beat 'em join 'em." I still don't have some of the best cards, but I'm doing well enough that I'm consistently in the mid-1100s in rank. Yay average!
In lower ratings, dwarves are decent because people still don't understanding the importance of positioning and movement. In 1k+ ratings, dwarves start to show their faults as people learn to utilize positioning and movement to their advantage. In 1.2k (or 1.15k+ ? 1.25k?) + ratings, people start having enough good items to negate some of the movement disadvantages and they become more useful again. Mages already control movement pretty well, with frost spells and WWE/WoW/TK, so its less of an issue. It would also depend on maps. Right now all the maps in the map pool tend to be pretty open. They might be able to do better if there were more cover. Or worse if new haves start having more difficult terrain tiles.
