New human build that is unfun to play against

So I just played a game against the player Peseto. In that game, first turn, i watched him play through his decks multiple times, continuously drawing cards, healing over and over, and doing me damage slowly but surely. I could not do anything to stop it. This was setup in the first turn, so I had 12 cards total to try and stop it, and unless i drew the whirlwind spell, i was left helpless. I don't even want to play until this is fixed. It uses 2 human clerics and a human wizard, and the key cards were the holy mails (heal all 1 if this blocked damage) Leadership (discard and draw), Martyr Blessing (Draw when you take damage), Path of Knives (Take damage when you move), Various bash attacks to force them to move, Draw card spells that deal damage, and so on.
I really don't want to play against this again, and I shouldn't have to auto concede. Please, fix this somehow.

 

Due to all of the top cycle decks rely on Martyr Blessing, I'm pretty sure it is going to be adjusted. While changing this one card doesn't fix that build entirely, it will be a good step.

Perhaps changing the ability to cycle through your deck more than once per turn should be addressed.

 

Immediately below your post is someone else commenting on the same thing:

http://www.cardhunter.com/forum/threads/bad-behavior-griefing-will-there-be-penalties.2039

And, for both cases, you'll be glad to hear that people (including peseto) discussed the issue with the devs before these threads started appearing:

I wonder if peseto is flattered or chagrined.

 

What about possibly just limiting the number of extra cards that can be drawn per turn? Martyr Blessing might be an issue now, but without a change to the core mechanic itself then future cards or undiscovered combos are still a potential problem.

 

Right, the infinite recursion is the underlying problem of both the fun factor and the op'ness.

 

limiting martyrs blessing to, lets say 3-4 draws instead of 2 turns might be a start. it´s surely enough for "normal" builds, without allowing endless rounds.

 

Considering the other priest draw cards also cause damage, cost a card to cast, and draw only 2 cards; why would 3-4 cards be fair? That still leaves Marty's Blessing better than anything else in the game.

Also the recursion isn't infinite, but drawing so many cards is incredibly abusive.

Without trying to sound like a jerk, try to understand the issue before suggesting fixes. Build the deck and play it, or play against it multiple times paying attention to what exactly is happening. It will give you a much better understanding of what they are doing. For example I find many of my opponents blame Leadership, they notice me casting it a lot but they didn't notice the constant card drawing from maryr's bless. While it is a very useful spell for this deck, it still relies on you having large numbers of cards, which is due to the blessing.

Right now the decks abusing this are doing so by damaging their own characters. You can easily control the amount of damage (for instance by using small melee attacks or spells), and since you use priests you can than easily heal the damage. No card should be allowed to draw this many cards. I'm honestly astonished it made it this far already. Card draw is always at risk for abuse especially cards that have no limit to the cards you can draw. (Necropotence anyone?)

Limiting it to draw on your opponents attacks seems to put it back to how it was intended to work. I believe it's supposed to function as a shield type card. It gives your opponent an option to damage the character, but only if the character gets a card. If you want to limit the number of cards it can draw instead, I suggest looking at the other card draw spells and 2 seems a better place to start.

 

Isn't it? when people say that the first X minutes of the game is me just drawing cards and people not ever needing to get past round one, how is it not infinite barring a really bad run of draws?

Right, and this is likely what will happen IMO. That doesn't address the issue of being able to cycle through your deck multiple times though -- which along side card drawing is something to carefully look at.

 

I think if Martyrs blessing is going to proc off of all damage and not just damage from enemies it should work something like the following "Whenever the target takes damage that character draws a card. Add 1 to their roll for every point of damage taken. Dice 6". Basically this means that drawing a card this way is unlikely when you are taking small amounts of damage (since clerics are usually dealing 1-2 damage to proc this effect it should limit this benefit), but when taking larges amounts of damage (5+) the card is guaranteed. 5 damage for a guaranteed card seem like a bad trade to me, but if I'm going to be taking that damage anyway, I'd love to get a card for my troubles. This could be a nice middle ground between it's current state and limiting it to just enemy damage, while also making it less powerful against lower damage enemy attacks.

I should also add I currently us 4 copies of Martyrs blessing in my build and in my experience it is very powerful if not too powerful. I already suspected it is in need of a nerf, and this thread only supports that suspicion.

 

That's because you haven't been playing around with Martyr's blessing enough

You can combine Martyr with a Talented Healer and make misguided heal return 2 cards on a martyr below full health. 5 damage for a guaranteed card (i.e. Demonic Feedback) would work just fine in some of these decks with a bit of adjustment.

 

Well my point was with my suggested change misguided heal would be 1 card 33% of the time and 2 cards 66% of the time. The lack of reliability would make it less valuable. And yes i run Demonic Feedback and it is great, but at this point I would say fairly balanced and it gives two cards not one. The power of these decks comes from the amount of healing they can generate. The only reason they can generate so much healing is because they have reliable draws. This nerf (or the one mentioned above) would push things in the right direction, slowing down the card draw and making the drawback of taking damage an actual disadvantage.

 

I'm definitely not flattered by this. As stated in the other thread im fiddling and playing with this deck in order to show the devs that it is in fact op and needs nerfing. I think the best solution for fixing the abusive potential of martyrs blessing is to limit it to: 'enemy caused damage'. The problem with this is, that as far as i know there is not such a trigger in the game yet, but i believe it would be worth to integrate it and to differentiate between self-caused damage and enemy based one (similar to how illusionary wall can block los for only one player). I know this proposed change, would reduce the usefulness of Martyrs blessing, but it would still serve its purpose of punishing the enemy player for attacking a certain character.

 

So the most intuitive fix is to change Martyr's blessing to trigger on enemy controlled sources of damage.
How about the following: if the same player passes x times in a row, the turn ends. x should be no lower than 5, maybe as high as 10. So this puts a clock on any future extended card drawing shenanigans, but it's somewhat arbitrary. If this was the case, I'd really want the game to keep track of how many passes my opponent has made - perhaps giving a warning when the end of the turn is beyond my control.
Alternatively:
- the end of the turn could trigger when one character has to shuffle their deck for a second time that turn.
- whenever a character has to shuffle their deck, every character on the other team gets to draw a card. It's not much, but it gives you more counterplay against a heavy cycling/card drawing strategy.

 

It is in. Don't forget that Blocks trigger off of enemy-controlled cards; Purge and Holy Presence only remove enemy-controlled attachments; and whatever else I'm forgetting. "Owner" is shown on the cards themselves when played.

 

I can only speak to the builds I have tested, but I haven't been able to go infinite with the combo. It's more an academic point, simply meaning you can get to a point where you can reliably draw cards forever (given that the decks replenish).

You could also potentially just get to a point where you have all cards in your hand (I wonder if this would break anything in the game).

What's sort of interesting is that Card Hunter doesn't use a resource system to power it's cards. For example, something like mana in Magic. Resource systems allow developers to constrain more powerful cards with higher costs, theoretically preventing them from being used until later in the game. They also limit the number of cards you can use in a given turn. In Card Hunter there are no such limitations, so cards like Spark and Obliterating Spark can both be cast from the first turn, and you can use any number of cards. The only limiting factor is having the cards in hand (and having a target).

This has the potential to make card drawing even more powerful in a game like Card Hunter. These decks are a good example of that, if you draw a bunch of cards you can use them immediately and simply win. You don't have to worry about anything like setting up resources to pay for those cards. It definitely represents a place to focus testing.

I also worry a bit about cards like firestorm (not that I think it's OP). You can damage your opponent without having line of sight (LOS). For one thing, I find it odd that they allow cards to do this in a tactical game, as it functions outside of the tactical choices (like range or LOS) that other cards require. It also severely limits what your opponent can do against the card, since most counters (outside of armor) require you to have LOS.

 

You misunderstood what i meant to say. I realize, that there is a trigger for enemy controlled cards, but not for enemy originated damage if that makes sense (i believe). E.g. blocks or holy presence just check for the owner of a card, but a damage source check would have to be applied after the armor rolls if that makes sense. But anyhow even if it's not implemented yet, i don't think it would be hard thing to do.

I can speak for my builds and they can, and already have (well in L^2 convergence at least (nerd)) reach infinite draws. The only limiting factor once you are set up is the time limit, but once the time management gets changed to a flat xx seconds per action even that wouldn't be an issue anymore.

 

Is there a thread discussion about this? I'd really like to voice my concerns about uniform cost and the advantage of offensive (range) cards over defensive (reactionary) ones.

 

What about a character dying if their deck is reduced to zero, like in MTG? Then there is a risk/reward setup for decks that increase drawing speed and also you can introduce attacks that force people to draw and discard things, like MTG's mental-themed attacks.

(Haven't actually played any multiplayer yet btw)

 

ahaha ^_^ I'd like to meet such a team in a Tolkien's story: two priests sadomasochists get pleasure from beating each other, pushing spikes into each other asses, torturing each other for a couple of minutes, then on the wave of supreme rapture they bless their fellow wizard, who's been watching this bacchanalia with impatient tension, so much that he can't restrict himself and obliterates everything around. Ahh, the sweet power of perversion...