How best to slightly nerf Winds of Wars

In [Suggestion] Control Wizards are a problem there are 3 suggestions

1. Kogi: nerfed to one target
2. Mosalla: WoW should put 1 turn Immovable buff on the target.
3. Mosalla: WoW should put 1 turn Hover buff on target.

I like to play WoW in the game, the core effect is sound & fun. Playing against the SLG 3 Wizard or its variants is a bit on the depressing side. A slight nerf on WoW should be done.

For suggestion #1, the cons is this penalize too much for 1 Wizard only party.
For suggestion #2, Putting buff on enemy pushs off useful buff on enemy, which the WoW caster can stragetize to do so intentionally. Hover on a friendly ally is also a buff to the WoW player.

My suggestion is:
4. ClimbHigh: Encumber 2 for 1 turn on the Caster
This will means it is quite certain that the Dwarf Wiz stay on the same spot after casting WoW. Make them even more vulnerable to step/team move cards.
For Elf wizard, its mobility is not quite as affected, they can cast WoW pre/post move.

As of now, WoW basically give caster the ability to play 2X Run cards (2X 3 movement card). This nerf reduce that 6 move to just 2-4 move gain.
5. ClimbHigh: WoW cannot move units that have encumber
This reduce the happening of perma-freeze-on-lava by a 2nd WoW. It still can be done by other means like telekinesis/force bolt.
Wind is 'too' weak to move encumbered units. (This should be the same for WhirlWind / WWE, there is no need to double penalize) . Heave Armor get a slight buff here, too.
I have slight preference for #5. If you have your suggestion, show us too!

 

Winds of War is a gold card, yet it hardly seems to have the opportunity cost of most such cards. This is because people are usually getting it from Runestone, and Runestone has a "drawback" that's actually better than most non-drawback cards (Squeamish). Adding to this issue is the fact that Wizards aren't even remotely hurting for tokens when it comes to weapons... one of their best weapons is tokenless (again, because it's loaded with "drawbacks" that arguably aren't).

Another glaring issue is that, if we assume the premise that gold cards are supposed to be of comparable efficacy (I still haven't seen any official sources regarding whether this is intended to be the case or not), it seems notable that Winds of War is better than Improved TK in essentially every way: range, spaces moved, and damage potential. If you had a choice between WoW and ITK, there's simply no contest whatsoever.

 

Here's my take on these suggestions:

1. Simple and makes sense but also removes the only unique thing about the card
2. Too complex and weird
3. Too complex and weird
4. Too complex and weird
5. Too complex and weird

So yeah.. I'm not too excited about any of those. I'd probably do something like..

6. Decrease spell range by 2
or
7. Decrease effect (push) range from 3 to 2
or
8. Some combination of the two

This way the basic idea of the card would still apply, only in a less powerful way. Lets not forget that the idea is not to make WoW useless, only to balance it a bit.

Yep. It could be that WoW itself is not that op, but the fact that it's so easy to get in pretty much every single draw, makes it op. Squeamish is a big problem here.

This is one of the design features in Card Hunter that I find a bit odd. Besides WoW/ITK, there are many other instances where a card, like you said, is better in every way.

I think the main philosophy should be that as the range increases, the power of the effect diminishes. Examples:

• the longer you step with a step attack, the less damage you do
• the longer the range of a spell, the less damage it does, or the weaker the effect like encumber or healing is
• etc.

There are many cards that do not follow this very simple logic that you see in other games. Sure the cards have different power levels, but I don't think it should mean that a gold card is 10 times better than an equivalent paper card. If the power gaps between cards were smaller, I think the game would be much more fun.

 

I'm a huge fan of a range decrease on WoW, even just by one. That would make a wizard loaded up with WoW vulnerable to all the range 6+ wizard spells.

 

I have a fairly consistent win rate of 64% over the last 66 games with my build. I play a speed aggro deck that just tries to kill whichever enemy I can get close too. Often, that's the enemy warrior in War/Pri/Wiz decks. Without a main damage dealer to stop me, enemy support and control are easy pickings... There are mainly two cards that keep my win rate below 65%: Winds Of War and Unholy Nimbus. Nerf either and my build becomes overpowered...

The caveat here is that I'm still only in the 1150-1200 range so I don't face that many WoW decks. If I had to bring my deck to the top ranks I'd probably be frothing at the mouth. Or maybe I'd learn how to deal with the card. I'm not really in a position to judge whether the card is overpowered.

Suggestion #5 (WoW affected by encumbrance) has some merit. Right now, encumbrance only affects the encumbered PC's own move cards. It would make sense if Encumbrance also affects when moved by teammates or enemies. In return, halt should not stop a PC from playing team moves...
However, this would be a massive rebalancing of the game. It would make the game more logical, but it would need to be thoroughly tested before any rollout on the live server because of the many many cards this would affect.

TL;DR: I think the card is fine, at gold quality it's quite expensive to put in a deck. YMMV.

 

My suggestion:

1) wow applies only to enemies or range altered to 2 and damage removed.
2) improved TK applies only to teammates, altered to push 3.

 

Best is what SLG said. I've always thought of pushing should be 2. That alone would make the card much weaker. There are many step cards and movement cards that would get you back to the enemy. We don't want to over nerf it. This is the best option.

 

Any consideration for slide simply being shifted to slide back? Is this a devil's advocate sort of question? My gut tells me the card would be way less fun to use for both parties, even if it did the job and also felt intuitive.

 

My suggestion is that as it is a sort of "gust" of wind not a telekinesis spell the caster should not be able to select targets nor destination. So:

a) make WoW a cone effect spell or make it affect the two nearest characters in front of the caster AND
b) as Aldones suggested change slide to slide back

A much simpler change would be the range of the slide from 3 to 2 but then it would still be a better improved TK (range + dmg) so I would say something else is needed to make this a unique card.

 

How about change it from Slide 3 to Move 3? If you encumber your enemies you can't push them very far with Winds.

 

I believe that with move instead of slide the affected character would choose the destination. Not sure though.

 

Yes, that's correct.

 

Obviously the range is the main issue, the main non sense of this card, 6 range both side of the caster + his own location make it 13 square wide, bascially if u near the center of any map that is more than 50% of it total size.

I never took the time to check it but now that i did, Improved Tele is the exact same card reguarding his color and rarity : gold uncommun, to me since Winds of War is an attack card it should be only castable on enemy, being soft countered by block and martyr blessing, but since no such thing as "target only enemy" exist in this game we really need to nerf the range, i feel that the slide 3 is good as it, punishing the already too stronk dwarf and letting faster races recover, but that just me (a biased humain player). So yeah nerfing the range by 2 or maybe even 1 would make it way more balanced.

 

6. Decrease spell range by 2: reduce by 1 will probably a more appropriate nerf
7. Decrease effect (push) range from 3 to 2: I like this a lot <== I hope developer take a look on this

9. Caster draw a Slow card into his hand: Make the WoW caster feel dangerous & need to be totally committed on its own positioning. Opponent can plan with less worry that the caster can escape. (The original idea is to get a Halt status, however, it help pushes out an existing trait which can be an advantage to caster so I say Slow. Slow has smaller effect on Elf than Dwarf)
10. A combination of 7 & 9: Seems to be the right balance for me

 

No, that may not be correct. See Acrobatic Flip.
I knew there was a card that moved enemies... just took me a while.
The question is, can acrobatic flip move an encumbered opponent? I'm not sure.

 

Oh interesting!

 

Just quick counterarguments against nerfing WoW too much plus some other thoughts:
- Range should be greater than 4, because of Nimble Strike or elf Run threat, so it could only be changed to 5 in my opinion
- Reducing Push to 2 is huge nerf because of Vicious Thrust step attacks (or frozen Nimble Strike), Push 2 would be little worry for step warriors build
- Lava, WoW and freeze should be useful strategy, so it should not be limited too much, but I would suggest focusing on making it weaker and weaker with every additional wizard and more WoWs in one turn. While one or even two WoW is ok, being hit by 4 in the same turn can make you really mad.
- Remember that WoW alone cannot really kill you (although I use it to hit hard in one build). Lava does only 8 damage so it all need to be executed perfectly to work.
- My another suggestion is buffing priest heals or clearing lava and purge a little. This would work also a bit better against Mass Frenzy and Volcano strategy. Small buff to priest utility might be enough to make 3WDC build much less useful.

 

As i posted in other topic, i think that dwarf wizards control don't need to be nerfed. Their cards have about the same power as other cards in others classes. At the top of the leaderboard I think few people play 3 dwarf wizard control so it isn't op. To win agaisnt them you should have team runs and/or arrogant armor and you probably will do ok agaisnt them. At the moment, i'm running 2 war 1 priest but before that I was running 1 warrior 1 priest and 1 wizard and i'm and was at the top of the leaderboard. You basically can do well with any type of party if u are good and have good itens. ​

 

I think the problem is that people like to pick one build and join the nerf bandwagon without even fully understanding the issue. It's this kind of mob mentality that pressured the devs to nerf card draw build completely extinct, which I think is a shame because it was a legit build. The worst part is that many people think it was somehow a great win to make the game less varied by getting rid of a popular build and making many cards close to useless in the process. And now reading some of the suggestions on these forums, seems like people are once again asking for total a extinction of trait cycling control wizards, instead of simply balancing them. I really hope that BM starts making smaller changes to cards instead of always targeting the most "evil" build of the month.

I agree that control wizards are not as big of a problem as overly dramatic topics like this one or this one suggest, especially now people have learned to better counter them. that That being said, I think that some of the cards that dwarf control wizards use should be nerfed because they are too powerful, just like I think that Vibrant Pain/Nimble Strike should be nerfed. Control wizards are not unbeatable but I think they are way too consistent and too easy to build.

 

People want easy wins, so they want to nerf everything that wins agaisnt them but that is a cycle that never end. If devs follow that, they will have to do new cards or there won't be any card left lol. I have no vibraint pain or lochaber axe and I don't play dwarf wizards control and i'm at 5th place of the ranking at the moment. People should stop complaining and try to build good decks and play well.