[Feedback] Upcoming Balance Change MEGATHREAD

Thanks for this feedback. It confirmed most of our early presumptions. I didn't know about Free Move either, as I never used it. I also associated somehow with Teleport, glad I know that now. Just a minor correction: Htpd has a 66% success rate and Surging Block a 50%, not 50 and 33.
But yeah, as you said, it's much worse now because Surging Block has now the ability that Htpd had of moving after a succesful block, only that it has an inferior success rate and it moves less distance after the block. To make things worse, wizards have usually attached one of the great traits that come with Electroporter Novice. So if you want to block any arcane (like Punishing Bolt) or any of the hard to block 2 sparks with Surging Block and they have Spark Inductor attached, you have to roll a 6. Yes, like Unreliable Block. And if they have Spark Generator attached, you simply can't block any of those. Only fire and snow, but nobody will be playing much fire with the FS nerf. So that means that most of the time, Surging Block, the best block against wizards (as it allows you to block and get closer like Htpd did), will only be good to block snow attacks. And when I say good, I mean at only a 50% rate.

 

Anyone tried smoke bomb against control wiz these days? Back in the day I had a build with a single human wiz (for team movement) packed full of smoke bomb and ember burst (for shooting inside the smoke bomb) and two simple step warrior dwarfs (however no step attacks longer than 2) and it worked wonders against the control wiz combo. Killing all wiz was tedious because after each step attack that got through they would send you flying, but they couldn't really counter-attack due to smoke. As long as they didnt spam wwe it was quite easy to kill a few of them and control the victory point.

I wonder how it would work now.

 

Basically, yes.

 

It is called a limit. Drawing is perhaps the most powerful single feature a card can have, it is now being limited. So you cannot have unlimited access to a very powerful feature. Would you prefer that there were no drawing cards or traits didn't have draws?

 

I would take Martyr's over Elven manu. with the step nerf. Martyr's allows you to draw any attack, elven only steps.

 

Matyr's Blessing can draw you any attack but only around 50% of the time. Elven Manuvers is way more consistent, especially if you're using armored boots. Although with the draw nerf it'll likely net you less cards per turn now.

 

SO playing around with the test server a bit I am starting to think the Randi's restock might be overkill.
Having everything has be completely befuddled.

 

But finally all people will have the same chance in MP after a few weeks or months to have a very good collection.
Even if all play a fotm, at least the best ones will be on top because of skill and not because they got lucky.
And if new players join the game they realize that they only need a bit of patience and gold to be able to keep up with the players who grinded for months.
New players are the important customers because they have more potential to invest funds into the game.

 

Maybe. There are a lot of things I'm still missing (like a whole bunch of the legendaries that don't suck), but I really don't want them to come too quickly and easily. I don't want week after week of nothing to buy in Randimar's anymore, but I think there is a better middle ground between the current version and a daily 10/10/10.

 

And that middle ground could be a 10/10/10 but restocking weekly. Maybe with more rares, which would be better for new players.

 

Middle ground is good.

 

If I remember correctly, there have been a few mentions of the Punishing attacks being good against Harness spam. Well, it seems to me they wouldn't be. Each Enchanted Harness (armor 2) nullifies any Punishing bonus damage (+2 per card in hand) and the other Harnesses only let through +1 per Harness. Especially when facing Harnesses combined with Armor 3, 4 or even 5 you'd still be doing pretty small damage per Punishing attack.

 

Aactually, I think it's the other way around. Enchanted Harness doesn't nullify Punishing Bolt. See: if you have 5 cards in your hand without any armor, Punishing Bolt deals 10 damage. If you have 5 cards in your hand and 3 extra Enchanted Harness, Punishing Bolt keeps doing the same amount of damage. It's Punishing Bolt that nullifies Enchanted Harness defense and deals even more dagame against the other Harness armors. So, Enchanted Harness is useless against Punishing Bolt unless of course you pair it with other non-Harness armor.

Now that I think about it, if Punishing Bolt becomes big in the new meta (and all indicates that it will), Leather Harness, Chain Harness and specially Officer's Harness are going to suck badly. The only defense it would work is Enchanted Harness plus another armor, but with the limit draw (less traits) it would be much more difficult to draw the combination of armors you need. Maybe something like Helm Of Reinforcement + Reinforced Mail + Og's Boots Of Peril (the extra movement will be more welcomed than now) could work. With 3 Enchanted Harness and 3 Thickened Mail you should be able to draw at least one of each often. Bern's Untouchable Mail would be a very solid option as well, but this armor plus the helm means two major tokens spent right there (where before the most common thing was going tokenless for both). Grounding Plates is also great, but I think you can only have one of them per deck, so that's a dealbreaker for me.

To make this story short, no matter which or how many armors you equip on your warriors and priests, wizards will kill you anyway.

 

There is no middle ground.
New players need a fast way to close the equipment gap between them and old players.

I understand that some of you feel threatened by the potential of more MP competition and some feel that their collection which they grinded for will be devaluated.
But BM can not care about that. They need to care about new customers because they can bring in more money.

So why would a so called middle ground, which would be ~45 legendaries per week atm, so much better for the game?
What is the point to limit item gathering, besides ego?

 

I see you keep repeating that this is because top players feel threatened about more MP competition. Please, stop talking non-sense, would you? Why would anyone want a game in where there is no competition? What would be the fun in that? I think you're smart enough to realize that this has nothing to do with anyone feeling "threatened". I have already told you that there are top players that don't have the best items like VP. How do you explain that? Do you se those players *****ing about "closing the gap" with the players that do have the best items? No, you see them adjusting their builds to what they have, competing and winning. So don't blame the items, if you aren't on top is because you lack skill.

Sorry if I was too direct, but I can't stand someone repeating senseless arguments all the time. We have explained the reasons why many of us are against the daily restock. If you don't want to understand it then it's another issue.

 

That's a good point, Jacques, I was only thinking of the added damage per Harness, not abut the Punishing damage incurred by the other cards in your hand. It's true you need to have drawn good armor to mitigate that which makes the defense more swingy.

 

Ask that from Diablo, Torchlight, Titan Quest and every other successful loot chase game. Ego has nothing to do with it, as you trollingly try to claim.

It's fine if Blue Manchu no longer want Card Hunter to be a loot chase game, but that is what is has been so far.

By the way, while you're at it, ask Diablo III about their experiences with offering every item for easy sale (the real money shop). See how happy it made their players.

 

Limited item gathering is basicly what this game is all about. The name suggests so itself, after all we're not playing Card Shopper (yet).
If you have access to every item there is nothing left to want anymore, besides MP ranking, which is maybe OK for MP players obsessed about their ranking but not for anyone else (especially SP players).

New players don't need a fast & easy way to close some gap because they get paired against players with the same kind of items anyway in MP. New players should also have the right to the same fun of hunting for cool stuff just like older players had.

Otherwise you might as well have everything for sale all the time, and just have chests give you gold instead of items. If that was the case I reckon the game would be long dead and forgotten, for me anyway.

 

The new cheaper chests aren't enough to close the gap quickly?

BM is making two changes here that push the game towards pay-2-win.

First, they're increasing the power of certain Rare cards because they are Rare (explicitly so in the case of Sparks and draining attacks). This makes higher rarity items more powerful than Common items of the same level (something I was complaining about before these changes were announced). This makes the game more about what you own than what you do with it.

Second, they're going to allow big spenders to outright buy 70 Legendary items every week. This is pretty much the definition of pay-2-win.

Maybe BM feels this is what they have to do to pay their bills. If so, that's really depressing, but I don't have any solutions.

 

Except CardHunter is far grindier than Diablo or Torchlight ever where. Don't get me wrong I enjoy Cardhunter immensely But the time investment to reward ratio in this game is no where near Diablo or Torchlight where almost any random mob of the hundreds of mobs per level could potentially drop awesome rare loot and the Bosses burst into loot piles when you killed them. Where as Cardhunter you kill an entire levels worth of enemies for two pieces of almost guaranteed junk loot and completing the level chain nets you another four pieces of pretty much guaranteed junk.

Plus both Diablo and Torchlight have always had merchants that dealt in rare goods. Not to mention the gambling merchants that sold unidentified random sometimes epic loot. All of which restocked every time you entered the town.

Also part of the reason the Auctionhouses decimated D3 was because their loot drops were so terrible until recently that the only way you could effectively get the loot you needed/wanted was to buy it from someone else who chanced to luck into it. Part of them gutting the Auction houses out of that game (that were shoehorned in in the first place) involved them retooling the loot tables across the board.

I'm personally not sure if it Randi should reset daily but there is nothing wrong with it having a decent selection of loot for players to blow their gold on. Personally I'm sick and tired of waiting a week for the shop to restock only to have one or two completely lame Epics a hand full of meh legendaries and some junk rares.

Really who cares if a whole bunch of players now have (X) in their toolkit? If so then why? Anything beyond them no longer corning the market on (X)? You want skill then people need to be able to pull themselves onto equal footing. Whether that be chancing into loot or saving their gold to buy said loot.