Recently, it is highly debated whether Elves are relatively weak in MP games and what are the causes. Some of the discussions were interesting and convincing to me, for example: 1. Too many obstacles and difficult terrain in new maps. 2. No good Elf racial skill combination. 3. HP disadvantage Thus I went on collecting statics of races ratio in MP games, which you guys may be interested: Total teams: 50 (150 characters) among MP players rating from 1200~1600 (my rating is around 1350-1450) ..................Warrior.......Priest.........Wizard.........subtotal...................................................... Dwarf............23...............10...............22............55 (37%)............... All dwarves team: 6 Human.........30...............28...............17.............75 (50%)...............All humans team: 10 Elf..................6.................6.................8.............20 (13%)............... All elves team: 1 subtotal.... 59(39%).....44(29%).....47(31%)............150.......................................................... Well, I was somehow amazed by the result while I imagined that dwarf would be the most used species. On the other hand, the 13% of Elf means less than 1/7, which means you may not see any Elf in a 6 characters game, averagely. Therefor I started considering if the Elves need some buff for their poor supporting rate. I believe everyone is familiar with the scene that a dwarf warrior plays tons of nimble strikes and slashes the pitiful elf wizard. Another important thing is that I believe a racial-balanced design can offer Card Hunter more diversity. It makes me excited when I see a new build and astonished by the creativity of my competitor. Yesterday I met one guy played a lot of Path Of Knivesand Winds Of War, though it may not be as powerful as the nimble strike decks.
I assure you, the higher you go past 1450 rating, the more dwarves you will see. (Speaking as somebody who is usually hovering around 1500-1550)
First of all, elves make pretty poor wizards : Their strength is mobility, but it is not that necessary for a wizard : a human wizard usually has enough mobility, and its racial support skills help much more than the elven wizard one (true, elvish insight is a great card, but I'm not too psyched about trading 8 HP and sprint team for this card), and a dwarven wizard can take a few hits for the team with either duck or toughness, and his higher HP. Elven warriors (and melee oriented priests) can make better use of the mobility, the problem is that nimble strikes (nimble strike is easily more reliable than putting quick run in your deck, and hoping for a good attack card) and team move make that mobility redundant : You usually end up with too many movement cards as an elf warrior, and not enough defense. The new maps certainly do not help, as the difficult terrain makes dashes even more redundant. Elves low survivability (not only the hitpoints, but the lack of defensive racial abilities) makes them unreliable. They can die very quickly due to a bad draw. They could work with either more hitpoints (but that would be boring), or replacing the racial skill cards with something more useful that would do more than allow them to close the distance to get instantly killed (like an elves only improved version of dodge?)
I can't agree with you anymore. The dwarves are tough for their racial cards like Duck and Toughness, the humans also get good auxiliary cards like leadership and dash team. A trait-like dodge would be a great buff for elves and maintain their characteristic of swiftness. Or maybe make all their move cards have some chance to CANTRIP?
Current (terrible) maps probably also have an effect. Unless I'm mistaken, in at least two of them humans can Run on the first spikes while dwarves stay behind the spikes, which gives humans a big movement edge.
When you say chance to cantrip, are you referring to the MTG version or the card hunter version of cantrip? Because drawing as part of moves would be a pretty cool mechanic. If it triggered off step cards it would be even cooler from a thematic perspective, but without a nerf to step it would also be insanely OP. A racial dodge sounds pretty good too. Dodge irritates the crap out of me at 4+. I definitely agree that a racial skill adjustment would go a long way towards fixing elves.
Well, I was wondering how to exhibit the swift, cunning characteristic of elves and buff them. So there came the idea of "hit-and-run". Drawing while moving may be feasible if the probability is set very low as 1/6, and the step cards must be excluded.
Early on in development the Elven default movement card was Scamper, rather than Dash. At the time this was incredibly powerful, since you could only target characters in front of you, and Scamper is great for sneaking around someone since it ignores zone of control. At the time characters also didn't turn to face an attacker, so an Elf could skip behind an advancing warrior and fire off several attacks while their victim stood there helpless. We first addressed that by switching the card to Dash. Later we changed the facing rules so that being stuck with your back to an aggressor wasn't such a problem, which makes me wonder if Elves should go back to using Scamper. Thoughts?
I wonder if that might be too powerful. The problem is, I would love to try it out, because it's tough to say for sure with the hp being such a liability.
Only some speculations. I believe that can increase the ratio of elves in MP games for they can arrive the VP area by only one move. It may also offer some tactic diversity like a nimbused elven warrior scamper in, and start to chop.
I think the change from run to scamper would be great, however I don't think it alone would be enough to put elves on par with humans and dwarfs. With this change and another boost to elf skills, elves might finally become viable alternatives to the other races.
I truely cannot say without testing it first. It would remain somewhat map dependant (although escaping from ZoC is always useful), but that would give them something unique (but then, elvish mobility would be even more useless than it is now), and it sounds fun to try.
I think it's a good idea to try it out, Scamper has so much potential in terms of tactical play and it feels much more fitting for elves since they're supposed to be more agile and evasive in my opinion as opposed to just faster which is the only thing you get with Dash.
I think switching Dash for Scamper is a bad idea. Not because it would be too powerful, but because it would restrict multiplayer mapmaking by a lot. Any map with a significant amount of difficult terrain becomes an elf map, any map without becomes a human/dwarf map. Furthermore one of the most interesting tactical elements of cardhunter is zone of control. Having a whole race ignoring that aspect would cheapen the experience. Finally it would make elf wizards worse and elf warriors/clerics better, even though wizards are the ones that need help.
what about using this (taken from wikipedia): "Elves do not sleep as most other creatures do, instead falling into a four-hour restful trance. Consequently, elves are unaffected by sleep-inducing spells and effects, and are able to remain active far longer than other races." maybe add some cards that instead of stunning, would make chars sleep (works same as stun) and elves would be imunne?
I dont know if that was me, but im loving my wow+pok build. been using almost a month now,thats huge since usul i change builds every 3 days . today fought againt another one, its nice to see diferent builds
How about making them face their enemies when attacked to show that they remain highly alert all the time? (Maybe too OP when combined with Dodge?)
I don't think that changing dash into scamper would do much to correct imbalances between elves and the other races. Unless maybe free move and teleport ignored encumber. Frost wizards would be a counter to the dwarf step warriors but elf teams could be a counter to frost wizards (maybe). I play an all elf team though and I'd definitely miss the move 4, one of the elves' few strengths and distinguishing factors. The other strength is insight, and I have a sort of niche build that leverages it. That's even why I play an elf mage, even though for most purposes it's a terrible decision (and the move 4 for running away from warriors is totally trivialized by nimble strike). Having the elves get a gold card as the default move would also be a bit strange. An elf skill rebalancing to make them more useful is the only way that I can actually think of to fix the problem. As an elf player, I'd love to see some more interesting options than "all skills are either 3x move cards or 1-2 move cards and insight". I want to see, for example, quick reactions, scamper, quick step, counterspell, acrobatic flip, hard to pin down... some of those desirable cards that only show up on limited items (similar to how the desirable sprint, team shows up only on helms but humans can get it and dwaves can get war cry/frenzy aura). Remove most of the "boring" move cards (dangerous maneuver, walk, run) and replace them with "interesting" cards and that alone will make elves a viable race. Oh, also, replacing some of the super-punishing drawbacks that saddle many elf skills (cowardly, loner) with more tame ones (wimpy, squeamish) would help too.
