Vibrant Pain.. and how to fix it

Most people know that there is one item in the game that is seriously overpowered. I am of course talking about Vibrant Pain.



Vibrant Pain is just an insane weapon. Not only does it have zero drawbacks or weak cards, it packs 6 copies of one of the most powerful cards in the game, Nimble Strike.

Nimble Strike

Nimble Strike is much more powerful than any other step attack. Lets look at two of them. Vicious Thrust and Dancing Cut.



As the stepping range increases to 3, the damage dealt decreases to 4. This makes sense. But happens when we increase stepping range to 4?



Damage increases?! This makes no sense. Golden rule should be this: The shorter the range, the higher the damage. This rule should apply to everything from step attacks to spells. This way deckbuilders are forced to make the decision between mobility and damage. They should not have both.

And how is Nimble Strike's quality rating not gold? I mean you can step twice as far as with Vicious Thrust, yet you lose only 1 damage in the process? Anyone who plays a warrior in multiplayer knows the huge importance of those 2 extra steps, especially with encumber cards thrown into the mix. And speaking off encumber, even Freeze, the ultimate encumber card with Emerald quality rating does not stop Nimble Strike, almost nothing does.



The 6 damage that Nimble Stike does might not sound like much, but in reality, with all kinds of damage buffs like Mass Frenzy, it's not that rare to see a dwarf warrior jumping around the board dealing 10+ damage to helpless elven wizards.

I think that Nimble Strike needs a nerf. But if Nimble Strike has to stay as it is, then Vibrant Pain definitely needs a nerf.

Vibrant Pain

Here's how warrior deckbuilding works for anyone who has Vibrant Pain:

1. Take Vibrant Pain
2. Think about what kind of warrior you want to build
3. Take rest of the cards

I mean this is how it goes. Why would you not take Vibrant Pain? What would be the possible scenario where some other item would be better than Vibrant Pain? Sure it costs two yellow tokens but the power and versatility of the item is worth it every single time.

The developers probably wanted to have this one seriously overpowered item, kind of like the "Holy Grail" of Card Hunter, so that it would encourage grinding and make people buy more pizza. I guess it makes sense from a business standpoint but it also hurts the multiplayer when one item is so superior to others.

Vibrant Pain is bad when you don't have it, because you are at a disadvantage against anyone who has it. But it is also bad when you do have it, because it's more fun to win based on skill and not your superior items.

My suggestion for new Vibrant Pain



I have replaced one Nimble Strike with Trip. Theme-wise the idea is that with all this crazy jumping around, sooner or later you will trip and fall down. The card would still be very powerful but now it would have a downside, just like most other items have.

That's it. I'm interested in hearing what others think so feel free to discuss. Thanks.

 

What is this formula? Reaper's Scythe is lvl 18 legendary with a cost of 2 yellow and it also has a drawback card: Blind Rage. Well, at least half of the card is drawback Besides, any kind of formulas can be bad because they completely lack common sense. All items should be evaluated as a whole, not whether or not they fit a specific formula.

 

Yes, but that was the point I was trying to make earlier. Items should be evaluated as a whole, not based on some inflexible formula.

For example lets compare these two items, one real and one imaginary:

Vibrant Pain (real card)


Dancing Star (imaginary card)


So if I understood correctly, since both these items have 6 copies of silver cards, both should have the same item level and rarity, right? If that is the case, then why is the first one so much better in both range and damage? Vibrant Pain is much better than Dancing Star no matter what this "formula" says.

The thing is that there are not that many card rarity levels, and it could be difficult to find the right level for each card. This means that some cards are basically right in the middle of two rarity levels, and the devs need to give it either a lower or higher level than it actually deserves. This is why any kind of formula will automatically fail and common sense should be used instead.

Only way to make the system work would be to make all silver rarity cards have the same exact relative power. For example you could simply switch the damage of the two cards like this:


Buffed Dancing Cut


Nerfed Nimble Strike

This way it would make more sense and the "formula" would work better.

 

The main problem is indeed the fact Nimble Strike is rated as a silver card when it is at least gold in effectiveness. I guess you could nerf Vibrant Pain by taking away a few Nimble Strikes and adding some worse silver rares, like Barge or Shredding Strike.

 

Nope, card rarity also matters, it's not only the 6 silver cards thing. If you look at say Hefty Stout Club you can see that bronze common card does 6 damage with 1 range while bronze rare does 8 damage with 1 range. So rare cards are allowed to be better than common and uncommon cards. Nimble Strike just takes it a bit too far.

 

I think the problem is the card levels and rarities were originally related to single player or something. There are cards that are just so much better in context to multiplayer but don't really have too much impact in whether or not a single player level can be beaten. Examples of these cards are Nimble Strike,Hard To Pin,Short Perplexing Ray. Anything that can be overpowered in multiplayer needs to be looked at before it becomes such a problem that it drives people away.

 

IMHO NIMBLE STRIKE should deal 4 damage. That's it.

 

You know I've been playing Card Hunter for about 6 weeks now and this is the first time I noticed that individual cards have rarity too (the letter at the bottom-right corner of the image). So yeah, thanks for teaching me something new.

To me this makes very little sense though since individual card rarity is meaningless to players in Card Hunter since we get items, not individual cards. I guess it's like this because regular CCG's have card rarity, and the devs wanted to make Card Hunter similar even though it's kind of weird and confusing.

So if I understood correctly, the true power of a card is a combination of the color and individual card rarity. A better system would have been to just get rid of card rarity and just use colors instead. I mean how difficult can it be to tweak all the cards a bit so that they all fit in one color category?

But this is fundamental game design and very unlikely to change no matter how long I rant here

This is probably true to some extent but I think that Nimble Strike is still pretty OP in SP as well. In those quests where you fight soft mages, you can easily clean the board with one warrior and Vibrant pain because the mages cannot run away. The power of Nimble Strike is just more obvious in MP because the AI is not always that smart in SP so it doesn't really matter what cards you use.

 

Card rarity is simply defined as how rare a card is. It is not related to its 'power'. From developer's diary: http://www.cardhunter.com/2012/10/card-rarities-2/

 

Yes, that's what they say but that's not how it is currently. Like Mirkel said earlier:

Hefty Stout Club is a perfect item to show how rarity is related to power. It has 4 different kinds of Bludgeons and in both cases the rare is better than the common. Not just different or more complex, simply better.

 

The chop attacks are the same. Chop, Weak Chop and even Strong Chop are commons. Makes sense though Strong Chop is more complicated than the first two. Clumsy Chop is uncommon. Makes sense. Obliterating Chop is rare which makes zero sense given that it is as complicated as Chop and Weak Chop.

TLDR, Obliterating Chop should be common but is rare. Even Obliterating Hack is common.

 

The game is called Card Hunter and if someone got lucky and got a Vibrant Pain, he should reap the benefits and earn his awesome ranking in MP, which grants him incredible riches and opportunities.

The amusing part is, that the op posted a thread about control wizards and how awesome they are but complains here about something which might be dangerous to him.

 

So, does this mean you think lunges (step attacks of 1) should have damage of more than 7?

Well, you do have this card, granted - it's only bronze but it does the job quite well and you can run multiples on one priest - Entangling Roots.

I agree with you on the major point, however - that everyone that has it builds around it.
This defeats the purpose of creative, different builds since as time passes more and more people get it through luck or randimar's and eventually the top rankings will be controlled mostly by VP holders (which is starting to happen right now).

 

Idk. Four VP points seem exponentially harder to get than 2 because of push moves and also you'd have to stay alive. Or am I just a scrub?

I'm not him but why not if it's a silver card.

 

My bad. by VP I meant vibrant pain and not victory point.
As for the second point, you don't think that changing all step 1 attacks to damage higher than 7 will have a crazy effect on alot of weapons and will make the warrior class very overpowered?

 

After a quick look in the wiki, it looks (to me at least) that rare cards are usually better than equivalent non-rare cards. There are numerous examples of this, and only a couple of examples of the contrary.

So we now have this system where rare cards are usually better but not always. It's just confusing and unnecessary. Why not just make it consistent and either make all rare cards better than equivalent non-rare cards, or just get rid of the rarity symbols altogether? I mean sure it tells us how often a specific card is put on items but why does a new player, or anyone else for that matter, even need that information?

What does the name of the game have to do with balance in multiplayer? I mean isn't that the goal here? A fun and balanced game where certain people do not have huge card advantage over others? Would you like to see a game where everyone in top-10 just "got lucky" and looted Vibrant Pain, and everyone else does nothing but try to find Vibrant Pain?

And about me complaining about something which might be dangerous to me.. that is just silly. First of all my build does really well against Nimble Strike - there are many cards that are much worse. Secondly, I am not a child who is looking for unfair advantage. If I was looking for advantage, why do you think I posted the deck in the first place?

I like deckbuilding, and I would like to see a 100% balanced game because that way I can try out different kinds of builds. But with items like Vibrant Pain out there, I cannot really do that because I need to counter Nimble Strike somehow or I will lose every single time. The counter I am basically forced to use right now is the control wizards.

Balance issues in this game can be seen simply by looking at my rating. I have played this game for 6 weeks and I am currently #2 with a rating of 1728. Is this because I am awesome? No, of course not, I make tons of mistakes. I am there because I am using a build that counters the popular card draw very well and uses tons of overpowered cards that have great synergy together. Anyone could do it with this same build, and that is indeed a problem. But with my build the problem is individual cards like WoW and Short Perplexing Ray, not really items. This topic is mainly about an item, Vibrant Pain, which many people agree is the most powerful item in the game, therefore is the first that needs a nerf.

I would be happy to see all the overpowered cards nerfed, including the ones that I personally use.

Well, there can of course be cards that do less damage but they should have a paper (or whatever it is called) card color and low cost to signify that. And the basic rule of a thumb should imo be: Long range, low damage or Short range, high damage


Example 1
Wizards who avoid close encounters by running around the map and bombard enemies from long distance with low damage spells.
Wizards who go head-to-dead with warriors by using Toughness and high damage spells.
Or anything in between

Example 2
Warriors who are mobile and use low-damage step attacks to stab enemies in the back.
Slow-moving and hard-hitting (range-one) tank warriors.
Or anything in between


Vibrant Pain enables players to basically have best of both worlds by having warriors that both move fast and do a lot of damage.

 

Ofcourse it is!!! don't ever sell yourself short, buddy!