[Suggestion] Frost magic rework - what if frost spells forced discard of movement cards instead?

I don't like the terrain attachment so much, but the mechanic is interesting. Reduce the cooldown of encumber with each move spent. I'be be worried, though, that this doesn't actually hamper warriors enough since potentially every attack they have can also be a move card. so they spend a few and get out of it, next round them step up and one-shot you. That's pretty much my experience anyway, they can wait out encumber without much of an issue.

 

I agree. I don't like Terrain attachments because they then create a situation where terrain damaging effects are mutually exclusive to slowing effects.

This may not be a problem in the future, but the (frequently) aforementioned Step-Move domination that currently exists would become more prevalent without an opportunity for wizards to, you know...actually kill a target with a reasonable fistful of cards.

 

I would refute this statement - two turns is a long time in a game of card hunter. In that time the warrior in question, without a card to counter the effect, will probably have to discard several cards (this is where the maximum hand size of two gets pretty brutal) - I would call this is a noticeable detriment to the warrior's chances of being on the winning side by the end of the game.
Here's an example of where I think a frost jolt can exert an undue influence on the outcome of a game - any map where it can be cast on an enemy on the first turn eg. Streams of Blood:

Though to undermine my point, I nearly lost this game - my opponent immediately used Whirlwind (preparing a thread on this one.. heh) which got his dwarf to relative safety - part of the problem the frost joltee has is getting out of line of sight of the mage so that he can avoid the inevitable follow-up encumber effects.
Movement is a crucial resource in a game with line of sight - I think that denial of movement needs to be ranked alongside or above card denial in power level. When I see cards like Short Perplexing Ray it really makes me wonder.. so card advantage is so powerful that it should only have range 3, but range 8 movement denial is just fine? Something seems amiss here.

 

Certainly it has an effect and can influence the outcome of a game... but then so can anything else. As for the card advantage aspect of keeping a warrior away, sure, but it also has the benefit of them getting that many turns to find the cards that are going to one-shot you with. They can hold onto some good stuff over those few turns.

As someone who has been playing a more finesse type game (ie. no warrior to rush in and just bash things) I've had trouble even after keeping the dwarf warrior locked in a corner behind a stone wall for 2 rounds. as soon as he gets out, I'd better have another one ready to go or here comes a sprint and obliterating Hack or some other combination of deadly, already planned out, movement and attacks. If, in those two rounds I manage to kill one, or even both of the other characters, I still find myself losing at least one character to the warrior before the game ends. I may win, but it's certainly not a sure thing.

Having lately started playing a warrior to really understand the other side of the fence, without anything to stop me I'm easily jumping on a prime target character and killing it in just a few hits. ( I'm actually in the process of trying to write up a post to start a discussion about warriors. ) YMMV of course, but my experience has been that without encumbrance, walls or major discard, I'm dead, with it, I have a chance. There is a reason many of the top players are running 3 warriors, despite all the encumbrance. To quote one, "movement builds laugh at frost"

 

The warrior/mage balance thing is a separate discussion - in this thread I want to focus specifically on the encumber mechanic. If mages are underpowered as a class, I would suggest making their other spells better or more interesting eg. Wall of Illusion could provide some defence when you stand on it. My point is that encumber is toxic in its current form, its inclusion in the game system cannot be justified by appeals to class balance.

Who said 3 warriors weren't viable? Hard counters to encumber exist but are somewhat rare eg. Arrogant Armor, Team Run. The point is that deck design revolves around encumber - lessen the influence of encumber and just maybe you make the game system more interesting.

 

In your opinion. But then that could be said about many specific mechanics. Taking all balance out of the equation, there's nothing inherently wrong with the mechanic. Taking card balance into consideration, there is a question as to the power of said cards because of the damage potential in addition to the utility. Taking warrior/wizard balance into considering (which was your primary example originally -- card advantage vs low range mobility focus characters) it's questionable.

And I disagree with this entirely. There are lots of people (now including me) that aren't even using wizards in their party. You do not have to build around encumber, for or against it. Sure you take some spells that will help against it, same as you do with terrain, big attacks, pushbacks etc.[/quote][/quote]

 

Encumber is a bigger deal than those other mechanics because of both the seriousness of the effect, and the fact that dealing with character attachments involves such a limited suite of cards (with low general utility - but that's another point). Comparatively, there are many more approaches when it comes to dealing with an Obliterating Bludgeon or a Wall Of Fire, say.

 

No it's not.

The seriousness of the effect? I don't know about you, but an 18 damage death by 2 step attacks (w/ 1 of the very easy to come by traits) is pretty serious. I just had a game where I played 3 elves vs 3 dwarves. my 2 elf wiz+priest loaded with encumber, lava, and mobility manipulation, and the other person played a pretty standard unimaginative 1,1,1 comp (Priest, Wiz, War).

He was able to sit in fire for multiple turns, freeze an elf and step attack me to death as soon as frost wore off. He even complained in game about encumber effects.

Encumber is a very frustrating effect, but there is also seemingly no point to having mages in the current meta game unless they're loaded with frost spells.

Not nerfing encumber because wizards are weak is the wrong move.

Nerfing encumber with no other changes makes wizards not worth an army slot, I sure as hell wouldn't run a wiz if we just straight dropped Frost spells. it wouldn't make any sense vs the king of this game, Vicious Thrust.

I understand you want to make this thread about how much you hate encumber, but if you want to have a good discussion you have to understand all of the factors that play into the current metagame before you can make a decision. Just throwing your hands up at Encumber effects makes the game Card Warriors™.

 

I watched the game! Of course, you'll recall that your wizard was unable to escape the vicious thrusts because he was under the effect of Freeze.
As for the good discussion, I'm working on it, consider this a thesis in progress.

 

Unfortunately, my player characters are limited so I can't experiment with other races/builds at this time ( Need more pizza for it), but the best suggestion(s) I've seen on the matter of encumber in my opinion is either place a cap with no matter how many you you stack together your still afforded 1 move and perhaps adjust other cards to freeze effect where it halts them ( in which case adjust the duration of the affect) and/or adjust the range of said frost spells. In all the games I play damage from frost magic in my opinion is less of an issue than its range coupled with it being stack-able on itself thus completely immobilizing most characters to the same effect as freeze/halt.

 

There is already a card that does this effectively called i think cave in but don't quote me on that name. As far as frost goes i think it needs to stay as long as step attacks exist and if you have such a big problem with it run more slides and pushes as there are plenty of those.

 

I'm just saying the mechanic should have a cap when you can stack it 2-3 times and for a grand total of encumber 4-6 which eliminates almost all movement altogether and also mitigating the need to use the more expensive/rare freeze/halt effects when you can "over encumber" to the same effect for double to triple the duration seems a little off to me no matter what you group you run. To me when it comes to frost spells the only issues comes from the over stacking and the exceptional range given the effectiveness of over stacking, damage of the spells seem fine. So perhaps either cap it or shorten the range and bump the damage to help off set the loss of range.

 

What if different encumber effects replaced each other instead of stacking with each other? That would still keep the important counter to vicious thrust, but stop ridiculous things like cone of cold plus frost jolt combining to make just about all normal movement useless for an entire two turns. It would also make more variety in wizard builds instead of just super loading up on frost.

An ice armor similar to resistant hide would be great too. And no, arrogant armor does not count because it has a significant drawback in that you can't get beneficial traits or damage buffs.

 

It already is like that. Any character can only have 3 attachments on him at a time. If your guy has lots of encumber on him, start throwing buffs and even other debuffs to get rid of the encumber cards. Even flame spit will do.

This is one of the best ways to counter encumber, it's a shame that this rule is so obscure. Another obscure rule is that if you hold down "ctrl" and click on an attack card, you can target your own characters. So you could target your warrior with bad luck if it meant getting rid of his encumber cards.

 

I think the idea of elemental resistant armor for warriors and priests would help but it should be resistant to only 1 type so as to not become OP.

 

Isn't arrogant armor still in the game? I hear so many people complaining about frost and it just seems like that would solve most of their problems.

 

Encumber is pretty powerful and somewhat frustrating effect, but I'm just not feeling the hate that some people in this thread are describing. In my experience, cold isn't anywhere near as dominate as some people are suggesting. I reckon I could count on one hand the times I've been defeated primarily by cold spells. (Maybe that just means I haven't played enough matches...)

There are many ways to deal with encumbrance, including push cards (Team Run), slide cards (Telekinesis), status removal cards (Purge), and plain old high-movement cards (Wild Run). And even without any way to directly counter encumber, it's worth remembering that encumber doesn't win games on its own - and so if you have the health & healing to simply live through it, then it might not be such a problem anyway. (If the enemy is spending their cards locking you down with encumber, and you're spending your cards healing - then as long as they aren't controlling the victory squares, you're even.)

For me, the main bad thing about encumber is it's a bit frustrating to play against, because it sometimes means you have to simply discard a bunch of good cards without getting the fun of choosing how to use them. But that isn't a balance issue. In terms of balance, I'm sure there are some adjustments that would improve things, but I don't see cold as dominating the meta-game or anything like that.

 

I think the biggest problem with frost cards is that the rules make no sense. To counter encumber, you need to know about all these obscure things:

For instance, how many newbies understand that encumber stops movement but not pushes or slides? How many people know that a character can only have 3 attachments on him at any one time? Also, high level movement cards such as wild run or sprint are pretty hard to come by. My brother has been playing this game through campaign and he got stuck at the frost sprite level (lv. 14 dungeon) because he did not understand how encumber effects worked.

I think most of the complaints about Frost would stop if there was more a tutorial in game explaining how it worked.

 

Well, cards like that aren't very common - but I'll forever remember the first time I tried using Freeze in a MP game:

I used it on an enemy dwarf, and I figured that would completely immobilize him so that I could burn him with hot-spot. For two turns I tried to pin him onto that hot-spot with various slide moves and so on, but he just kept moving off it. He had Wild Run, Sprint, Rushing Aura and Energizing Move.

After that experience, I'll never be able to trust that my frost moves will achieve the desired effect.

 

I've been meaning to revisit this thread to go over the main points again. This topic has been both contentious and complicated, with new avenues of discussion arising like hydra heads with every new reply. I think a clear restatement of the topic at hand is necessary.

I first brought up encumber not because I think frost magic is the most overpowered thing in the game or that wizards are overpowered. To tone down the rhetoric somewhat, I simply think that the way the game deals with encumber at the moment is unsatisfactory. It just doesn't have the right feel to it:
- It seems a little too easy to stop movement outright, treading on the toes of the halt mechanic. Basic movement values range from 2 to 4, with other movement cards ranging between 1 and 8. Encumber values range from 1 to 3, with up to 3 effects stacking additively on one character (along with any encumber from cards in hand for that matter eg. heavy armor).

Specifically regarding the infamous frost effects:
- Character attachments are relatively difficult to deal with. Just compare them with terrain attachments and I hope you see what I mean - the limit of one terrain attachment per square means that you can knock out a lot of nasty terrain with one smoke bomb, or replace the key squares with consecrated ground using bless. But the main difference is that a character threatened by dangerous terrain can avoid it with sufficient movement, and even turn it against his enemies using his own displacement cards (a really FUN thing to do). By contrast, you cannot run away from your character attachments, let alone fire them back at the enemy (short of having a reflective shield) - this makes them inherently less FUN.
One suggested counter to frost effects is to knock them off by casting 3 of your own effects on the afflicted character - this is a situational counter (meaning a last-ditch, when all else has failed plan Z), but not a practical or effective one, since you spend 3 cards to counter one enemy card. Knowing the enemies I've faced, they would chuckle evilly and simply cast their second frost jolt (not that hard to stack a lot of frost jolts in your deck as discussed elsewhere)..

- The combination of the brutal encumber mechanic, and the awkwardness of dealing with character attachments leads to a state of affairs I've described as "toxic". Did I mention yet that some of these cards have range 8 and can hit you on round one? I don't like such decisive effects being played out so early, see also the unholy wellspring powered fireball decks. I feel as if the game is getting away from the "fighting over a vp square", and degenerating towards "blow up the enemy at his spawn-point". Perhaps map design could be the solution?

- Telekinesis and the Team Move cards are the strongest counters available. Prevention is said to be better than cure, but ignoring the ill-effects altogether trump both (Purge, being a "cure", is not so great, just situational). Flavourwise I like the idea of using telekinesis to transport my dwarven warriors into melee range, but the team move cards seem like a bit of a fudge, a bone thrown out to keep encumber in check (what's the justification here, you need a warrior with a fancy helmet to yell at you so you can ignore your frostbitten toes?). I'd prefer a situation where encumber/frost is less impactful, and team move cards are still affected by a weaker encumber.

Regarding balance: it's the final stage of a game's design, basically tweaking the numbers. For this reason, I don't think that balance concerns are a high priority when discussing changes to a core mechanic. Rather you should finalise your core mechanics first, then balance later if necessary. For example, there is the notion that making encumberance more favourable towards dwarves will unbalance the game: maybe so, but I would argue that there are many other variables you can adjust to bring things back into line.