Suggestion: Why target Bless? These 3 are WAY worse.

I can't understand for the life of me why so many people are complaining about BLESS, and so few people AREN'T complaining about Ancient Grudge, Rocket Charge and Accelerate Time.

Ancient Grudge: I personally don't think that ANYONE should be able to do more than 10 damage with a single attack card unless that attack is a Melee. At least Punishing Bolt keeps the damage under 20, though. Does anyone else besides me find it completely ridiculous that anyone can do 32 damage from Range 4 with just one card [no boosts or traits, just the card, itself] or is it just me?

Rocket Charge: The damage per square needs to be cut to 2. At least Werewolf Form's Mighty Charge cares about Terrain. Being able to do 15 damage on command regardless of any Terrain that doesn't block, however, is ALSO ridiculous.

Accelerate Time has always been the worst offender, in my experience, though: I'm aware that it once used to affect EVERYONE regardless of range. It's been nerfed to Range 5, now, but, I'll say now what I said then; a range of 121 squares is NOT a nerf, just like how Sprint, Team dropping from a combined Range 16 to a combined Range 12 is NOT a nerf. Accelerate Time needs to ACTUALLY ACCELERATE TIME, and drop the durations of all attachments within Range 5 by 1 whenever it's played, and that needs to go for both character attachments AND terrain attachments. Terrain Wizards already have Everlasting Ground to counter this, anyway.

There should NOT be what I like to call, "Press A and win" cards. These 3 [Accelerate Time, especially, though] are way worse candidate of this type of card than All Out Attack, Delegate, Greater Heal, Impenetrable Nimbus, Punishing Bolt, Volcano, and, yes, even Bless.

Am I the only one who thinks along these lines? Does anyone else find any of these overpowered at all?

 

Drying out those ridicilous fountains of joy would be a loss for the game. Ancient Grudge doing that amount of damage is a rare thing to achieve, same goes for the max damage rocket charge. To pursue these outcomes demands a lot of sacrifices. Take the grudge for example, what you most likely talk about is the combo with pathfinding. That combo (almost) only works on a elf wizard, once a game. You'll end up with a very narrow window to fire those grudges before your deck resets and they are blocked by a flimsy block. If youre playstyle revolves around parries and greater heals alone, i can see why it might bother your team. But as with any other card, you are free to adapt to the presence of grudges on the battlefield with counter measures. Block any, Dodge, Smoke, Barriers, counterspell, Nimbus, Boo, Cushioning armor - its a long list. But that demands softening up a tightly designed build to prepare for those niche events. Noone really does. Its the same with rocket charge. Its just one card. One answer is flash flood.

I am totally on board with accelerate time having an effect on durations though, that would be a new ridicilousness, and certainly a nerf of sorts, but with some peaks.

 

I played around with Ancient Grudge running reps at Wyverns. 2 EWiz with 12 traits each, 1 DPriest healing/draw. It worked better than I expected due the lava pools and hotspots from hotglass. I eventually started leaving 1 bedraggled wyvern alive until pathfinding showed up. AG is not a good farming tool, IMO.
Back when I played PvP I often ran Sprint, Team. Very few knew it, because it almost never showed up. AG reminds me of this.
I don't grudge anyone a big hit when a combo comes together.

 

I think making Accelerate Time reduce the duration of all attachments would actually make it into more of a problem, not less. Rather than necessarily being part of a combo, it suddenly becomes able to be offensive and/or defensive, all by iteself. In PvP, I would expect it would rise to the level of an Amethyst-level card, given how much more it could do -- reducing/purging your opponent's buffs, reducing/purging your own handicaps, triggering terrain so that the attachment falls off, etc. In PvE, I would expect it to still be useful, but it a more limited set of circumstances, since the player is generally the source of most attachments.

 

It already IS an Amethyst-level card, allowing you to draw more cards because of, get more damage out of, and, in general, make more use out of attachments than you're actually supposed to, and from all attachments within the 121 squares immediately surrounding you. It SHOULD be Amethyst, quite frankly. At least, if the durations ticked down, you'd still get the exact same damage and utility you're supposed to get out of attachments, instead of MORE use.

 

Usually, I'd say, I don't care - I don't play (much) PvP - but because I was already looking into this, analyzing cards, and searching the wiki (and I enjoy playing around those kind of cards in PvE, so I like to think about my options a lot), where is the harm in posting my results somewhere.
Accelerate Time is the highest ranked Utility card (available to players, I will mostly talk about available cards here, so assume I added this everywhere else) and among the 23 highest ranked cards overall. Therefore, it isn't easy to judge this card in comparison to others as there are so few (and in terms of Utility, no) higher ranked cards.

I don't know whether this card in its current form can itself kill a Doomed character. If it can, I'd argue that the card is technically already broken because Accelerate Time can't make a card expire (again, technically). Other than that, there are very few cards where the date of expiration is critical to anything. Hence, whether or not it decreases duration wouldn't matter, based on pure duration.

And honestly, Quality is also a very vague concept. Do we really care about the quality? The AI (allegedly) uses quality to determine card play and keep/discard-decisions. But for us players, the quality is irrelevant. What we care about is not the quality, not the level of items (that arises from the quality), but the token requirements (that arises from the level). So, we care for the second order abstraction of the quality. But I will still use the quality here to reason about what I'm about to argue because it's the best scale for cards that we have.

If we now look at Everlasting Ground (which itself is a Gold-Quality card), to me this looks like part of what Accelerate Time does. AT could be described as: Take all attachments within its range, increase their duration, trigger all and consequently decrease their duration again. EG does one part of this (with the only two differences being that EG has unlimited range and only affects terrain-attachments). And then there is Time Snap. If you never heard of Time Snap, no worries, this card isn't available to players. But it should be placed somewhere between EG and AT, as it increases the duration of all attachments by one (including character-attachments but again with unlimited range) while not triggering them. Currently, TS has Bronze-Quality, which MUST be a placeholder. If this card was in the game at all, it would probably be Amethyst, too.

Given AT's quality, I'd deduce that both variants would be reasonable. If we take the current form, you could argue that its quality comes from the (additional) effects that this card can cause. It can damage, it can heal, cause card draws, etc. If you manage to play Volcano and AT shortly after, AT's "base damage" would be 6*8=48 (I assume for now that you damage yourself here, too, if you wanted to move away from the terrain, your opponent would have enough time to move, too). Combined with Bless, AT's power would be a slightly nerved Team Heal and an Inspiration to every ally (btw, why do Bless and Consecrate Ground have the same quality if they have the same effect, but one card only targets one square, while the other targets multiple squares; unless you face Negative Energy Being where you might want to "bless" the square the enemy is on, Bless should be ranked strictly higher than the other).

On the other hand, assuming AT would decrease the durations, its "power" would be more or less zero. It wouldn't cause effects that aren't already "planted" and scheduled for a future point in time. It would just move those trigger points a bit closer. But given that quite a few attachments only have duration 1 (for example many Handicaps like Fright and Trip) or could be around for a bit already, AT's most important power could be a (somewhat) global purge/cleansing. The highest ranked cleansing we have is Silver-Quality, so Amethyst would be appropriate for this variant of AT, too, given that all available purge/cleansing cards either target character attachments OR terrain attachments, hence affecting both is a major improvement over all we have today. In addition this card could still cause damage and heals, but as I said, I wouldn't count this as its main effect in this version of AT.

As a last thought, I would like to see other cards that do similar things. Then, we could see how they compare and argue for their quality. It's hard to define the quality of the best card in one category. And the effects of AT depend on the situation you play this card. I'd say Dual Laser Beacon is weaker than AT but they have the exact same quality. Probably because AT does not have any effects if not paired with other cards but if paired it can become way more powerful than those Laser Beacons. But it is hard to compare cards of different types.

 

It's worth mentioning that Time Snap is kinda already sort of a thing. Everlasting Ground is only on one Item, and it's Wizard-only, but, it is a thing.

That aside, Accelerate Time and Everlasting Ground are two totally different beasts. Everlasting Ground can't kill anyone by itself. Accelerate Time can not only increase the damage that attachments are supposed to do, but, it, in fact, CAN KO a Doomed character if the remaining duration of the Doom is 1, almost as if it made the duration tick down from 1 to 0.......oh, wait.

Now, shouldn't it do that for all OTHER attachments within Range 5?

 

I concede your point on the interaction with Doom, and I personally don't think AT should interact with it at all.

I still think turning AT into a hyper-purge by making it tick durations down is at least equally and likely even more broken than it is. Now, if it only triggered terrain attachments, and made the durations tick down, that would be a different story. It would still be eminently playable, but a handful of fire wizards might harrumph.

 

But, it already activates all attachments within Range 5 of the user WITHOUT making attachment durations tick down, meaning you can use AT again and again and again to get more damage or use out of attachments than you're supposed to. How would making durations tick down make them MORE OP?

 

So how, exactly, would it decrease the duration of effects within its range without decreasing the duration of the same card, owned by the same character, outside its range?

 

I don't see any problem, since each attachment tracks its own duration (see Force Field).

 

I was referring to single cards with multiple iterations around the board, such as Volcano.

 

This would work no different than how Cleansing/Purging works currently I'd think, it just ticks down the duration of the (terrain) attachments in range and leaves the (terrain) attachments outside of range unaffected. Cards like Volcano and Mass Frenzy create copies of attachments that can all be affected without affecting the other copies. The only thing to keep in mind is which attachment is the original and which is the copy, for the sake of knowing when the original card is sent to the discard pile.

One of the beautiful things about CH is that it tracks these durations for you, so even if they make Accel Time tick down duration, you can still manually check each attachment to see what their duration is currently.

 

But is that really how it would work? I suspect each iteration is tied to the specific card from a character's deck because the card will not enter the discard pile while any iteration remains in play. I further suspect duration would be tied to that specific card, and wonder whether differing durations would be possible without significant recoding.
I didn't code it, so this is just guesswork.

 

Making durations of character attachments tick down while triggering them is a multi-pronged issue.

1) This change would make AT less powerful than the live version with respect to all character attachments it interacts with. (a point in favor of the change)

2) This change would directly reduce the effectiveness (both good or ill) of all attachment cards that are not triggered by AT. (a strong point against the change)
This has the capacity to make an even greater card advantage (than it already does) for someone playing AT. With it in a deck, it makes playing most drawbacks less risky and makes playing most buffs less rewarding. Also, encumbrance from cold attacks become less effective.

3) Wizard's Purge: Because of reason 2: it gives wizards a Purge-like card, and that's (mostly) a priestly thing to do. (a strong point against the change)
3a) Existing priest purge/cleanse cards affect either characters or terrain. This gets both.
3b) The largest existing priest purge/cleanse cards affect 9 squares, this would affect 121.
3c) It is NON-TARGETED, so blocks don't apply. Blocks apply to all purge cards, however.

I'm in favor of nerfing it, honestly -- making it terrain-only makes it a better fit with the wizard's kit. Making the terrain attachments tick down would be fine.

Another way to nerf it without turning it into a wizard's Purge would make it only tick attachments it interacts with (and remove Doom from that list), but coding this might be harder to do.

Edit: format oops

 

I just tested this with Volcano. The first patch of lava (under the caster) gives the item name in the source field, and the others just say "Copy". Cleansing the non-copy lava tile puts the card into the discard pile.

I think it's fine (and often good) for other classes to do similar things in different ways. See Force Field vs Impenetrable Nimbus.

Untargeted effects that affect chars can be blocked. And both existing cleansing cards are unblockable.

 

Thanks, @Kalin!
Edit: Um, any idea whether the timers on the copy lava tiles operate independently?

 

I know that if one uses Mass Frenzy, and the ACTUAL Mass Frenzy ends up Purged, the copies still operate on their own.
I presume the best way to find out for certain is to bring some Cleansing Presences and Cleansing Bursts to the Campaign level, "Descent To The Core"; The Apprentice Geomancers' Everlasting Grounds and the Practiced Geomancers' Blooming Ground would theoretically make very good testing grounds for this.

 

As far as I can think to test it, it appears so. I tested it making a custom MP map & took 3 Apprentice Geomancers & 3 Practiced Geomancers. When Blooming Ground copies a terrain attachment, it copies the original effect, at its original duration.

e.g., round 1: play initial Lava Pool, duration 3. Only the targeted square has the 'original' card, the rest are 'copies'. round 2: initial Lava Pool is duration 2. Play Blooming Ground => creates copies (of the original copies) of Lava Pool in the affected squares; these new copies are duration 3. Repeating a Blooming Ground the next turn puts the original at duration 1, the first copy at duration 2, and the newest copy at duration 3.
I tested using Everlasting Ground multiple times before Blooming Ground, but the newest-created copies were always created at the normal initial duration.

The Lava Pool card only went into the discard when the originally targeted square no longer had the lava terrain. The initial copies could remain and correctly get extended by Everlasting Ground, even if the original was overwritten by another terrain attachment.

edit: format oops

 

Besides the problematic interaction between Doom and AT, this is another scenario, where I would personally judge that the game does it the wrong way. Sure, this is definitely an easy solution, but putting the card in the discard pile while there are still copies of this card around could (under rare circumstances, with much luck, and good preparation) be abused. Especially Quick Draw matches might be affected by this. But I can also see, that if the game would wait for every copy to expire, you could end up with a Quick Draw match where one character has no cards left to draw from. (btw, what happens if you can't draw any more cards in either game mode?) But still, you are the one choosing your QD or regular deck, so if you use too many attachment cards, it's your fault.