[BALANCE] Balance Suggestion List (January 2014)

I'm not familiar with Heartstone, but comparing M:tG to CH is not fair either. They are fundamentally different games. A good player can pick up M:tG quickly and be competitive assuming he or she can acquire the cards for decks. Card acquisition is not dependent on RNG deciding to give you the best cards available - you can go out and buy or trade for the cards you need. CH requires grinding and farming, and even then, you aren't guaranteed to get the items you need for the builds you want.

Imagine if in M:tG you wanted to play Mono Black Control, but you couldn't for the life of you pull any of the cards you needed from booster packs. You knew how to play MBC, you knew you could play MBC at a very high level, but you couldn't play it because you didn't have enough lucky booster packs to pull all of the cards you needed to build the deck. That would provide an enormous barrier to entry for players who wanted to approach the game from a competitive standpoint.

It's kind of the same way in CH. Yes, I realize that it is possible to play competitively without VP/Xander's Mail/Strongarm/other really good Legendary items, but having those Legendary items is an undeniable advantage - and attaining those Legendary items may be impossible for some players because the RNG gods decide they don't feel like giving those Legendary items to them.

On a completely different level, though, CH strikes me as the kind of game that doesn't want to take itself too seriously; the campaign is all about poking fun at players who take games too seriously (i.e. Melvin). Setting up CH for a tournament-caliber competitive environment strikes me as going against the spirit of what made the game so appealing to me as a player when I was first starting out.

 

Ah, got another idea. Idk should I use the new balance thread or this one, anyway:
if afraid that after nerfing the WWs some wizard teams will get too strong, out of 4 maps in rotation, some (2?) could be with very distant spawn points or possibly even with totally mixed spawn points so the game would start as if a WW had been cast already

 

@tuknir made a couple maps like this. They were fun.

 

That's problematic because it just adds randomness. What if your Wizard gets spawned next to the enemy Warrior? The goal should be to reduce variance and increase build variety. Making it risky to use a Wizard due to random starting spots isn't really a good solution.

 

Completely off topic but imagine if CH was a real tabletop game like it is intimated in the SP. Imagine being the game master and having to reset the board everytime someone cast a WW or WWE... That would get lame real fast and house rules of no WW/WWE would be common.

 

THIS

 

Yes, but so would a lot of other things in the game. Resetting the board would only be 2 die rolls (x,y axis -- reroll if spot is not possible). Wouldn't be much more work than rolling for multiple armors every attack. Not really relevant but interesting to think about nonetheless. =)

 

Yeah just from my experience there's a couple of SP levels that did this, like the zombie gladiator level, and it really results in some starts that are just auto losses.

I don't think the team has to start together, but random positioning introduces a lot of randomness for low HP characters mages/elves to deal with.

 

Alright, the Elf Wizard casts memory loss, discard your Dwarf's oldest card Steve.
...uh, which one was that again?
Oh come ON, I've told you a million times to keep your hand in- fine, it casts perplexing ray instead.

Alright, Cardotrons' minions move in to attack-
Man, you always play too well with Cardotrons' set. You don't even attack people with nimbus!
It's a ROGUE MAGIC SUPERCOMPUTER, of course it can tell this stuff! Now, take 20 damage from that hack.

Alright, combat starting, everyone get your decks out.
Erm, my decks got shuffled together on accident.


Alright, time for some competition! It's only a hour long drive down to the Blue Manchu game store.
*collective groan*

Alright, you win the fight!
*cheers*
Sadly, I didn't buy any booster packs last weekend, so no loot for now.
*boos*

 

Well it would be 2 die rolls per character + re-rolls and since it was SP style adventures there might be 10 kolbolds to roll for including blocks... and you would need to take all the pieces off and put them down 1 at a time after each WW role and you might need to do a separate roll for facing.

 

Sounds good. =)

 

Amazing!

 

That's great! This will lower the threshold to run tests very much. Hopefully players will now flock to testing.

Will it be possible to get multiple copies of items with these cheats? Normally you'd build your party with several copies of the same items whenever possible. It'd be hard to properly test the item balance if it was only possible to get a single copy of each item even with repeated invokes of the cheats. I'm sure this has already been taken care of, I'm just checking to be cautious.

 

Great, thanks, Jon!

 

I was just about to ask for this very thing (having seen the recent tweets). Do you have code in place to ensure that the cheat cannot possibly be used on the live server? I don't want to put all my trust in the config file.

 

lol considering that the highest percent people have collected is like 88%, I think that it would be pretty easy to spot someone with 1 of every item

Still, I'm excited for the balance changes. Although, the thought of running a cheat 9-12 times and ending up with a dozen of every shield and boots in the game... oh god...the lag...
Please make it so that you can choose the item type to collect 1 of each....

 

What item do you need 9 copies of?

 

Divine items?