Turin's list of worthwile balance changes

The buffs you mention sound like they have a lot to do with draw-spam. It's rare for me to get the right mix of buffs at the right time, even when I load up. And armor tanks your ratings? I'll have to take your word for that because I still don't do PVP. Even my mage usually carries 2-4 sets of mail, plus officer's harness.

What I don't want is for problems in PVP to screw up PVE.

I know frost reduces step as well as regular movement, so it should be possible to slow them down significantly while sliding off those extreme buffs. It still sounds to me like draw decks are the real problem here. Have you tried running one of these uber-warriors yourself? It might be a hoot.

 

Actually I don't think nerfing Nimble Strike will have any effects on PVE, since I believe most people have cleared the Campaign without using any equipments that has Nimble Strikes on it. Most of the items that contain Nimble Strikes are above epic (with only 2 rare exceptions, while one of the two is actually a staff), and none of them are easy to get. I have cleared the whole Campaign with club membership more than 3 weeks ago and constantly playing MP till now, and has yet to get a single weapon with Nimble Strike on it. I would say the card with the most impact on Campaign is Firestorm.

While changing this extremely rare card has minimal effects on Campaign mode, I would say this card is screwing up MP, as whoever has more access to this card possess great advantages to the others who don't. The details can be seen from many of the comments above so I won't say much more, but I really hope there will be a nerf on this card before, together or soon after the card draw issue is dealt with.

 

The most unfortunate effect nerfing nimble strike would have is that it would nerf hounds in campaign, which would make them lose much of what makes them dangerous. That's why the devs would have to be careful about nerfing broken pvp cards that monsters have (nimble strike and resistant hide are the two that come to mind), because making the campaign monsters too easy would be a shame. (This actually happened when lava terrain was nerfed from 10 damage to 8 damage in beta - the geomancer levels in campaign became a lot easier which was a bit unfortunate since they were among the most challenging before). I'm not worried about players losing access to it, campaign is perfectly doable with other strategies and I'm among the crowd that never saw it during campaign because it is extremely rare. That said, nerfing nimble strike would totally be worth gimping the hounds because it is making pvp a bit of a mess.

 

Considering how many enemies have skills that we can't get on our own gear, I wouldn't fear too much for the dogs themselves. The simplest part of this decision would probably be giving the dogs a card with the exact same effect but a different name, while nerfing the version that all the players own. Dogs, gnomes, or any enemy could probably remain functionally identical, and then there would still be a little wiggle room to have fun with this card on occasion in SP by using dwarf skills like Duck.
That said, I know that in a few of the SP maps this skill became instrumental to my plan, and I'm not sure what I'd have done at the time without it. Chasing down imps and whisps (doing challenges! don't forget we sometimes need "OP" stuff for that!) finally starts to feel fun and not frustrating when you've got this skill as a resource. Personally, in my SP adventures I really like that good gear choices allowed me to occasionally raise my effectiveness so that I didn't just feel competent, but downright badass.

 

These sort of reasons are why I worry about people wanting to nerf Nimbus and Mass Frenzy. Especially Nimbus is essential for a lot of PvE content, given how hard many enemies hit in melee. There's a lot of mobs that can kill you in one round and that's when you are doing them with full hp - then there's the 1hp challenges. After 7 weeks of play I still don't have any Nimble Strikes so I don't mind if that gets nerfed, though.

 

Yeah I was gonna say, could just make an emerald version of the card and put it in the dogs' decks.

I chased wisps with team moves... yeah, I dunno.

 

If I were going to nerf nimbus, I would make it so it didn't prevent damage done by your own team. Then it would still be just as good for almost all purposes for the campaign, but can't be abused with firestorm or demonic feedback. Alternatively make it less stackable with some item revamps (which would be great for MP but would indeed make 1hp quests harder). I don't think taking a point of damage or a turn duration or whatever off mass frenzy would do too much damage to the pve experience though.

 

Semi-penetrable nimbus?

Seriously though, that's the best idea I've heard yet to deal with nimbus. Firestorm decks can still hope for hide pulls but it wouldn't feel -as- cheesy.

 

People have suggested that about nimbus before, noting that Martyr's Blessing doesn't trigger on damage done by your own team

 

All the better

 

Altruism is the card nerfed before beta ending. Martyr's has been nerfed way before that. I joined the beta when its already nerfed.

 

I completely agree that nimble strike is way too good. That said, nerfing the movement would make it soo similar to dancing cut (but dancing cut is already a much weaker nimble strile). If it stays at 4 moves, the damage needs to be strongly nerfed indeed (to something like 3 or 4).
Stacking armor does not work at all indeed, it can be easily removed, and keeping too much armor in your hand nets little gain compared to the opportunity cost.

Concerning barge, I eventually found a situation where it could be useful, only to find out that my own zones of control would block me barging opponents where I want. It needs to at least be a free move push to be somewhat useful ( and do some other effect indeed).

Nerfing resistant hide armor would make most of the early 1HP quests much much harder(and all the missions against wisps), as they rely on heavy firestorm, unless some alternatives are introduced (a mage armor that would only grant fire immunity, another that would only grant lightning immunity and so on), but it might be needed in PvP because it makes mage vs mage very boring.

 

I found an old entry from the CH dev diary stating that Skaff (the MTG Skaff) broke Barge during playtesting, which lead to its nerfing. I'd be interested to know how he broke it, and whether a rebalance upwards is possible.

 

Regarding the chasing of whisp-type and imp-type monsters using nimble strike, I realize that it's mostly the mobility in the attack that I felt was important. When discussing important countermeasures against those types of enemies, the value of damage per attack becomes kind of funny because they have such low hitpoint totals compared to other monsters. The question goes from what combination of attacks kills them most quickly to what can I bring that will allow me to practically one-hit them when I can finally catch up to them in the first place. By the time you're able to equip something like vibrant pain, you're probably doing the Citrine Demon Portal, where these especially weak enemies have about 15 HP. That means ambushing a fresh enemy with nimble leaves them with 9 HP. Without the use of firestorm, that doesn't leave me with many reliable 9 HP attacks on my remaining blue-token gear that allows me to finish the enemy off. With a single firestorm to soften them up, that finally leaves a situation where a nimble+anything else I usually carry will allow me to finish off an annoying imp thing in one turn, hopefully before it can run away again. So I guess what I'm saying is that nerfing the damage from nimble by a bit wouldn't reduce this tactic's effectiveness much, but removing it's chasing ability would by a lot, especially when they start busting out all those cold attacks against you and stacking more than one encumbrance.