Indirect buff to penetrating attacks and so also smaller indirect nerf to armor. But still a cool idea. Which very good items with penetrating attacks come to mind? D-e Sword, sth else?
Purging strike for warriors? Possibly, but all-warrior teams should (IMO) suffer some consequences of no spell support. It should also be noted that priests can push off nimbus with attachments, rather than just purge it. Nimbus hasn't changed. It's always had its critics, and has always been something of a PITA, but AFAIK it has never been dominant. Is this a result of the encumbrance, control, and movement nerfs? As many know, I don't play much MP. (I watch more than I play lately, but haven't actually seen a strong nimbus deck in action.) If nimbus is now as strong as some are saying, it seems to me the changes that may have caused it should be looked into to see if they were overdone.
Yes of course...Do you seriously want to waste 3 attachments just to see another Nimbus going off? That could've worked with a single Nimbus application or two throughout the whole game, we're talking about the spam here meaning there's 2 or 3 out PER TURN. Sorry but that argument is completely invalid.
And adding halt to Nimbus is an invalid solution too. Defensive Nimbus spam on victory points is annoying but not what it is primarily used for. Nimbusing up a warrior so that it can us all of its attacks freely and having the opposing character's cards rot in hand or possibly discarded at the end of turn is the problem. Push cards are already strong against Nimbus. Halt makes a good matchup slightly better and does nearly nothing for anyone else.
We are open to the idea of putting Purging Strike on Weapons in the future—it's not a spell, and there's no real reason Warriors shouldn't have access to it. That said, it won't happen very soon even if it does happen, as we're probably not patching in new items in the next couple weeks
what about changing the startling strike in "discard the oldest attachment card"? this would make weapons as the shieldpopper more viable I think
My idea, which perhaps is not very viable at all, is to give Nimbus a Savage Curse-type condition, where the card will nullify all damage, but the protected character loses one card each time it does so. If someone wants to spam a nimbus, that's great, but you're not going to stockpile a ton of attacks and moves while doing so, or more nimbuses for the next round. It makes the card a more-situational choice, a 'I really need to save myself right now' card instead of a 'oh hey, let's put some game-killing armor on before I even move for the first time' sort of card. I'm sure there's drawbacks that I'm not seeing, and perhaps this would devalue the card too much. But it seems to me that invulnerability should come at some sort of price. Just a thought.
I am not against Nimbus, but it is a bit lame. I think the best suggestion is the losing a card when you would take damage, until you think about how many burst spammers there are and it would make nimbus a bit of a desperation play as opposed to a mid-level strategy. BUT I think 9 out of 10 card hunters would agree there should be some drawback, so here are my 2 suggestions. First is alter it so that it doesn't block all damage. I have said numerous times that all damage from any single source could be reduced to 1. Still a powerful card, but increases the ability to wear down a player. Doesn't stop a Dwarf warrior from camping, but makes using it on a character down to 4 or less hps a much bigger risk, although for those want to complete 1HP challenges this is a HUGE nerf. The other idea was inspired by the suggestion made by Vradiel. Instead of losing a card every time you would take damage, have the target discard a card when the spell is attached. Now I know this has all of the same issues as the Halt idea, but with Wavering Faith gone (right? I forgot if it was completely gone or not) this gives a priest an new forced discard to use, but with a more significant cost (invulnerable for the rest of the turn), although a priest could do a 2 card nimbus+purge combo, but 2 cards to discard 1 is very fair. I also like that this could be a potential counterplay to Martyr's Blessing (and to a lesser extant Elven Maneuvers) especially when target is down to it's last card.
The idea I like most that I've heard is making Nimbus not work if attacked from the back. This gives some outs to opponents, doesn't affect singleplayer all that much, and doesn't have any special uses if placed on enemy characters.
Or just have the caster discard their oldest card when casting Nimbus. This would make it harder to spam nimbus on multiple characters in one turn.
Much neater solution, but a much lesser penalty, since the best use of nimbus is for aggression and the aggressor still has all cards.
So basically turn Nimbus into a block-like attachment. Seems too stiff to me especially with burst attacks being one of the dominant builds right now.
Most of the time, when I see two priests nimbus a warrior, I kill the priests. Now I will say that on multiplayer maps with a single victory point, camp+nimbus can be a super effective strategy against meelee heavy opponents. Adding purging strike to warrior weapons in the next expansion would sufficiently address it I feel. Alternatively, the penetrating attacks getting through would probably be fair, but would make me sad as nimbus would become very weak. For full disclosure, I currently use 6 nimbus in multiplayer.
I don't have a strong opinion on the current state of Nimbus... but one possible nerf that I think would be pretty interesting is to make it reduce all damage to 1, rather than completely negate it. That way it would still be a powerful defensive card against hard-hitting enemies, but it would still be possible to take down protected characters if you spent enough attacks on them...
The Big Problem with suggestions along these lines is that they effectively kill the card for 1 HP Quests. If it weren't for those, it'd be a great suggestion, probably, but I don't really want to take more things away from SP players right now.
I can't really tell if the build really is that problematic (haven't had the time to play any MP in the last several weeks), but the devs likely have all the data they need to tell if this is a serious MP balance issue, rather than a part of the players-base being extremely frustrated by it. Anyways, if a change really is needed, I'd find it far more preferable to solve the issue from an itemization angle, rather than straight out nerfing the card. I.e. simply take out 1 copy of Impenetrable Nimbus off of Shielding Token in exchange for something else. That'd make the max number of IN go down from 10 to 7, minimum tokens cost: 3 major + 4 minor power tokens. Alternatively, you could swap out Consuming Spear for a more valuable card, in order to make the Shielding Token cost go up to 1 major power token. This would make max number of IN go down from 10 to 9, minimum tokens cost: 4 major + 3 minor power tokens. Not nerfing the card itself should leave Impenetrable Nimbus as a viable option for both MP and Campaign/Quests, while still severely hitting extreme builds possibilities to the point it wouldn't be as much of a problem anymore. At the same time, while still limiting stacking possibilities, IN should still be useful for 1HP quests, although that'd likely be a tad tougher. The reasoning behind this is simple. In and of itself, Impenetrable Nimbus is not that OP (it lasts one turn only, and it can be dispelled by purges or attachments stacking). As many have stated, the problem is rather how easily you can simply cast nimbus after nimbus, given a sufficiently focused build. The situation, I feel, is not as dissimilar from what was going on with, say, Whirlwinds (but also SPRs and other cards). The card(s) themselves, imho, were not way too powerful. What was breaking the game was how many copies you could stack in a deck, leading to abuse-able deck-building possibilities. While I'm pretty sure a lot of people received the WW/SPR nerfs with great joy, I think it's also undeniable that the change totally killed the cards, for the most part, to the point you rarely (if ever) see them being played anymore. I shall also add, as a disclaimer, that I'm not against nerfing cards when a serious balance issue arises. But still, powerful cards are more often than not what makes the game (and the MP meta) more varied and interesting. Limiting card availability in order to minimize the effectiveness of extreme-builds (something which more often than not lies at the root of balance issues) should be considered as a viable way to tackle less serious offenders in a far more conservative way. While I'm perfectly aware solving balance issues is not a trivial task, I still think straight out nerfs should be relegated to the most extreme cases. Otherwise, you risk adding one more card to the already sizable "nice but not worth being played" pile.
Tossing a slight variation of the initial 'halt' idea into the discussion, cant find it anywhere in this wall of text. Its 'halt' or even a 'stun' for the caster.
