blu manchu... plea for change

Well, Major downside of WWE and especially WW is that opponent gets to play first after that. If even slightly prepared, he can easily take advantage of new positions. While WW/WWE player might in general be better prepared, losing one card and giving opponent option to react first is surprisingly big disadvantage.

Sure it might sometimes be annoying, but it also can be fun. Like when your perma-encumbered warrior with Obliterating Bludgeon lands next to a wizard.

 

What's the most time-efficient build if you don't care about your ranking?

In other words, I know I'm eventually going to win half of my battles regardless of where my ranking winds up sitting, and (let's say) I don't particularly care what that ranking is. What's the quickest build/strategy to "farm" MP? Something like Firestorm? Big damage warriors? Something else?

I have yet to play MP, fwiw.

 

Tripple DPS wizards. Win or lose, you will do it fast.

 

I agree. As said in previous posts your only effective and practical answer to to WW builds is more mobility, or (to a minor degree) long range attacks.

The problem is the WW player's priorities are: 1) evading direct confrontation 2) camping VSs. That's why the WW build is usually used with a wiz + 2 war party (or, alternatively, double priest). He can most likely keep the WWing wiz somewhere safe while the other guys camp on VSs. If anybody makes it close enough (either to VSs or your chars) you just WW more. It's an almost trivial strat to execute right.

Hilariously enough, with the huge amount of WWEs a player can have in his deck, he might even manage to catch one of your guys alone, slaughtering him while his companions are desperately trying to catch up. Since a smart WW player will save his cards for when he really needs them, and can selectively opt to use WW or WWE depending on the situation at hand, she has an amazing control over the flow of the match.

Long range sparks and other long range spells might help, but truth is you still need to get your own wiz in a favorable spot to get LoS and, you guessed it, you'll likely be WWed around almost instantly.

In my (humble) experience, tons of mobility is the only reasonable way to react to a heavy WW player. There are several problems with this though: really high mobility builds are very hard and costly to put together (you need lots of rare / epic or better items for a build which is really serious about nimble strikes / sprint teams / team moves and the like). And your opponent will likely make you waste the vast majority of your moves anyways, it's not like you can make much to prevent this from happening. Also, if you go for more mobility, you're prob going to sacrifice on dmg (the WW player can camp more easily) or on defense (the WW player will have a easier time WWing you). The WW player, on the other hand, is spending his tokens and gear slots exactly on what he needs: more WWing potential.

You're basically put in an instance where you're getting the shorter end of the stick regardless of what you do. You can't just save your movement cards for a couple turns and do nothing meanwhile (your opponent is scoring a victory point after the other), you can't mindlessly rush towards his guys (he will WW you around and most likely escape you until he gets himself in a favorable position again), you can't win via sitting on the VSs yourself (you'll get WWEed almost immediately).

While, on the other hand, you can have a whooping 14 assorted WWs (5 WWs + 9 WWEs is the max) for an actually decent cost of 5 minor tokens, and you only need rare items, as epic+ gear is not even mandatory for the build. You can even put a working, if less effective, WW build together by only using a couple rares + a bunch of uncommon items. And the WW player can afford to save most of his move cards to escape your grasp whenever he gets an unlucky WW. He's not trying to track you around the map after all, but only to camp the Victory Squares.

So yeah, even if you go for a build specifically designed to fare well WW, the game will usually be decided mostly by luck alone. I.e. the WW gets two unlucky WWs in a row and he's likely done. The game will be very boring and frustrating regardless, no interesting tactical decisions being involved, no clever positioning going on, you just hope WW backfires, that's it.

I don't even know why such a card should exist at all (at least in its current implementation or as long as you can so easily stock that many in a deck).

I might start forfeiting WW games altogether. Not because I can't win those but simply cause I regard them as a huge waste of time, given how long and un-fun they tend to be, even if I end up winning :\

Oh, and I will also admit WW probably is so annoying / effective because of how Koi and Lions are designed. The build is definitely less effective on temple and dojo.

 

Erm, you are missing the point. I did not list all the counters. I'm not asking you to build 3 x chars with 30+ blocks when your opponent's deck has 30 WW/WWEs. I'm not telling you how to counter it. All I'm proposing is to rationally look at the problem and consider ways around it. That will open up possibilities which you've not considered before. So whether the experience sucks or not, is entirely dependent on you. For instance, now that you know the max number of cards per char possible. What if you considered max number of counterspells ? Or winds of war ? Or nimble strikes ? Or deadly sparks ? Or firestorms ? etc. That would help to put the gameplay into perspective instead of banging your head against a brick wall.

From personal experience, playing against WW/WWE decks does not suck for me. I switch to a more patient, poker-like play and try to setup for 1 hit kills. If you've used wwinds a lot, you'll start to see patterns and how it throws the char around which is exploitable (to a certain degree). Also I want to correct a misconception. Flimsy block does not suck. Those who know its effectiveness, know it. Those who don't, don't.

Everything above is solely my opinion, there is no personal attack/flame/troll. Feel free to disagree but do not turn it into a flame war. Thanks for reading.

 

Nah, no worries Phase, this is a very well behaved (and fun!) exchange of opinions.

However I feel like I need to stress this for the 3rd (or 4th?) time already.

I'm not saying the build can't be countered. Not saying it's the most OP strat ever.

I'm saying WW games suck (my opinion ofc) I'm also saying I find it strange the devs put a card which so easily breaks some of the underlying principles of the game (strategical positioning) in favor of a purely luck based outcome. I'm irked by the fact WW/WWE probably are the only two cards in the game which don't make the game more interesting.

That being said, I can agree with most of your opinions. But those are not really what I'm concerned about really.

Also, you're looking at the thing from a very limited perspective. Most people can hardly set up for 1hit kills, for instance: AoA, 20dmg attacks and most other cards which prove to be effective in reacting to a WW build are not that common among most players. WW builds, on the other hand, can be put together relatively easily even at low levels of play.

 

Well, that's true that it does render an aspect of the game moot. This can be illustrated quite easily on the Astral Shrine adventures in the SP campaign. Nothing trivializes those more than WW cards.

 

Completely agree on this. Largely cos (sob sob !) I was on the receiving end of those during beta.

Just a bit of early beta history for those who care, most of the often-talked-about builds (turtles, wwinds, inf draws, terrainers, burn, mill, monkey warriors etc) were created by some of the early beta testers way back in the beginning. Some were documented and others witnessed and felt by devs firsthand. I think they are also responsible for a ton of the cards which the devs pulled and major item re-balances. So fret not, the devs are aware of your pains.

 

We keep talking about "WW cards," but I feel like WW and WWE have very different interactions with the rules. I agree that WWE "literally breaks the game" with regard to invalidating movement and positioning, but normal WW feels very different to me. Its symmetric effect is definitely random, but it's harder to use strategically, and you're using your turn throwing a bit of luck at the board position, which seems fine. To those saying these cards don't make the game more interesting: the whole reason people play games with luck elements is that luck does make games more interesting to them. Of course, some implementations of luck are bad (for example, dice chess), but we're playing a card game because we like shuffling and drawing, right? And we play blocks and armor that only work sometimes—I feel like the die rolls on those cards are fine, and don't hurt or compromise strategic play. Similarly, WW adds another luck layer, a temporary one, a symmetric one, and while it might mess with some solo quests I don't see how it damages PvP.

I might be alone here, but I think that having firestorm, volcano, and whirlwind as cards that don't require line of sight and hit the whole board IS interesting. Those three cards alone complicate the game severalfold. They increase the diversity of board positions possible, they make the meta more fun. By all means I'd be glad to see the wind cards be a bit higher quality (and thus appear on fewer, rarer cards, and be harder to spam), but I feel like having a whirlwind cast once every few games is fresh and cool.

 

Just had a thought - I wonder how the WW, WWE and firestorm would work if it was only within a certain range from the caster (like 3-4 or so, but still no requirement of direct vision), rather than across the whole board? What I hate about those decks that people don't have to worry about positioning when using those cards and tend to cowardly run into a corner and spam these cards. If there was range involved they would have to worry about how they position their troops and couldn't just firestorm someone from the other end of the map, although the core mechanic would still remain unchanged.

 

I wish I had known that... I just bashed it with a semi-normal party.


I think that WWE and WW should be replaced with a card that has a similar effect, but instead of moving the player some random place, move all in a certain range in a more maze-ish effect (move x spaces, flip facing randomly, Stealthy) . It'd still be the fun card it can be today in most positions, and isn't quite as spammable and roulette-like. It'd be kind of like what happened when Fireballs became Ember Sprays in my mind. Most importantly, it'd make the card more fun to play against and more fun to pull off properly while still containing a hint of the d% roll attitude that inspires its being.