[Suggestion] Control Wizards are a problem

nah, I'm not paranoid. Just stay away from management preaching...gives me a blistering headache everytime I read one and I've been here for a whole 12 mths.

 

Yeah, let's all calm down a bit. A few posts ago I wrote that such paranoia just poisons the community, and here we are.

Back to topic (yay!)

Board control is a viable strategy and needs to stay. I currently don't play control (see my build in another post) because I think it's painfully slow and I just want to bash and fry my enemies. Still, those decks have their place in the game. Any good deck should be able to beat a control deck.

Note how this is different from card drawing, which was an annoying meta-strategy.

Overloading traits for deck reduction and cycling is another annoying meta-strategy though. It's effective, but it just abuses the questionable game design decision to have nearly every drawback draw a card. If anything, this is where I would apply the balancing wrench. I'll post a suggestion later.

 

There are already a lot of things you can do to counter control wizards, and this should be taken into consideration when discussing their balance. Trait cycling, high mobility (e.g. greater than 2), purges, shrug it off, arrogant armor, free moves, the immovable trait, hard to pin, weak blocks, push moves (such as "dash, team" or your own Winds of War) are all effective responses to control wizards. Terrain cleansing seems pretty lackluster, though.

I usually win when playing against Control Wizards, and I do it using a standard Warrior/Wizard/Priest combo. Usually, I can get my dwarf right in their face and keep him there, using purges, trait cycling, immovable, nimble strikes, winds of war from my wizard, and team moves like "Dash, Team." If you're getting completely locked down, I feel that that means you're not properly preparing your team to play against map control effects.

 

Yoyo, I agree with what you say about being immune to movement effects after being rooted, makes sense and opens the door to more counter-play. In regards to bringing priests up to par, I think it would be more fun to bring the wizard and warrior down to his level but that's just me.

Ludic I also agree its important to keep in mind the current counter-play options to control wizards, my only gripe is that it almost becomes a forced option. In effect restricting your real choices when constructing a team. This is my reasoning for thinking its still a problem.

As to whether or not the interest in Flaxative's peasant mode is proof that people prefer the earlier stages of pvp because late game is unbalanced is debatable. I of course do agree with Scared, but that notion aside I think having peasant mode official would give newer players a fair playing ground to experience the MP side of the game at its best. They could graduate to the big league whenever they feel ready as Elshafto suggested..


Phaselock... I am trying hard not to make you look foolish so let me just say that your last post is simply ridiculous and I don't think your doing yourself or BM any favour by keeping it up. If you step back from the emotions associated with my 'perceived attack' on the devs you will actually see that I am trying to help this game reach its potential. I am trying to be constructive. I'm not crying victim/reporting you but what you have done in the last couple of posts IS cyber-bullying, undeniably.

Bottomline is, this is a forum. If you don't agree with what I say and feel strongly enough about it to post then argue the point. Don't resort to misquoting and throwing insults, it's petty.

 

Here is what I'd suggest as quick fixes:
Replace Runestone Squeamish with Fright?
Maybe also reduce Winds Of War range from 6 to 4, that card seems a bit too powerful.

I agree though that excessive traits are a bit boring to click away and try to keep up so a longer term plan might be reduce the self-replacing ones like others mentioned. That would make wizards worse all around though so should be careful with that.

 

FYI, I just reported you. No further comment as I am not a mod.

 

Sad kitteh is sad.

Plz don't make
him more sad?

 

I was wondering when we'd get the first," you're just bad at the game lol," ( :-P Ludic) however that is obviously not the case. Everyone here plays the game at a very high level, and mostly we're just concerned about the game remaining viable in the long run. As Martin K has posted in his thread, the metagame key to control wizards is trait cycling, While I would prefer more powerful priests with more options, his method has the upside of not messing with the ability of wizards to stay away from warriors, while at the same time making them play by the same build rules as everyone else. I'll post a more detailed reply later in his thread.

 

Perhaps my comment was a bit unfair, YoYo. Control Wizards are certainly very powerful (and thus if anything was to be nerfed, they would be a justified target), but then so is rushing down enemies with push moves and buffed nimble warriors. However, people aren't just talking about how Control Wizards are powerful, it's that people are also talking about it being unfun to play against. When a player gets outplayed by an aggro deck, or walled off a control point by a strong defensive formation, they usually don't feel as dissatisfied with the results as if they got completely locked down by Control Wizards and slowly bled to death while they're immobile. There may well be a point there... if Control Wizards is successful, it completely restricts your choices such that you effectively are *not playing* for some time. A completely encumbered warrior, for instance, just kinda sits there, waiting, hoping to get some card to free himself or for the duration to run out. Once that happens, there's no real counterplay going on there. You're not doing anything or making choices while you just pass repeatedly waiting for your saving cards to come up, and of course there are many that won't find that enjoyable. Instead of giving you new (though more difficult) choices, it just takes away choices altogether and potentially leaves players more or less out of the game. With Control Wizards, when you've lost, you lose slowly and painfully. It's important to keep this in mind, because this would remain a problem regardless of whether Control Wizards are a top tier build or not (save that if it weren't a top tier build, you wouldn't have to play against it as often), and must be examined alongside the issue of how Control Wizards can become more balanced by prospective nerfs. What nerfs might make them more interesting to play against, or possibly even more interesting to play?

Contrast with a game where the devs make creating counterplay a core design point, like League of Legends. In that game, there is no shortage of map control, slows, stuns, terrain obstacles, pushes, pulls, kiting, action denial, and so forth. However, none of these features ever feel like they take a player out of the game. In almost all cases, players *the abilities are being used against* are given new and interesting gameplay options to pursue when that ability is introduced onto the field. There isn't ever a time where you feel this slow "death by degrees" thing going on, even though a control-based laning phase skirmish can take 10 minutes. A key idea with the game design concept of counterplay is that players can be feeling satisfied even as they're getting their butts handed to them.

So maybe a good question to pursue would be, how can we make the state of *being encumbered or controlled* more interesting, much like, say, the state of being walled out by strong blocks is interesting (because blocks have built-in mechanics for counterplay; you can do things like pursue flanking options, bait a turn, try to trigger the blocks by leading with weaker attacks, all kinds of things. This makes for much more compelling play with blocks than if blocks merely blocked attacks in all situations the roll was successful). What would make having cold or winds used against you be more fun?

One possibility would be to do something about purges, cleanses, and other situational cures, in ordr to try and foster more active and interesting defensive options. As is, it feels like something you really have to draw at the right time, in the right matchup (terrain cleanses, for example, are very much a "dead draw" unless you're in just the right situation, and thus are omitted from most decks), and even when you do, the control wizards can usually just reapply the effect as soon as you remove it (save for Arrogant Armor, of course).

 

While the following article is on MtG, not Card Hunter, the strategy types remain the same. It makes for a good reading.

Aggro, Combo, and Control

https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/academy/22

 

That's a legitimate point, but the reason I went with priest buff rather than a straight nerf is that it has far less moving parts. It'd be simpler to bring one class up instead of taking two down.

@ Martin, interesting article, I was wondering about the cards, are they all playing legacy??? Cause that format gets really weird and combo heavy, And then I saw it was written in 2007, so i suppose those decks are legacy now :-D. But a lot the principles carry over, if warriors are aggro then they do best in the first couple of turns before their opponent draws their good stuff. Control wizards are obviously control, I wonder if trait cycling would put them in the combo category as well, or maybe instead of the control category. Anyone else read it?

 

I don't think the trait cycling makes control wiz classify as combo. It just means they're running a lot of Think Twice.

Some equivalencies, I think:
Combo = old draw builds back when they were legal.

Also, strategies that rely on winning with All Out Attack or Talented Healer.​

Aggro = 2+ warrior rush
Control = 3DC
Midrange = most 1/1/1 builds
Aggro-Combo = my vampire build



Worth noting though that since 2007 when that article was written, the magic devs have decided that aggro-combo-control is a false trichotomy.

 

First i want to say i haven't played multiplayer for a while, but I did my fair share for quite some time, so bear with me. In this tread it seems the emphasis is on nerfing the cards that control wiz' has access to from a basic class PoV. But I think something to consider is the race balancing as well : I was playing 3x control wiz in the beta, and it never struck me, or I believe anyone in the beta, as OP. It was winning regularly, but wasn't dominant( and it was before some ice spell nerfs). Main difference with today? I was playing 3x elves. Relying on mobility rather than dwarven tankiness seemed to change my winrate alot. So maybe, if there are things to be changed, they might take races into account, and not only classes.

 

I think that most people on this topic are talking about the new age control wizards that are usually some variations of this build. They are based on the idea of trait cycling, and have cards like Trembling Staff that make them unique. You didn't have that build in beta because if you did, you would have seen how OP it is. The second I started using that build, it almost felt like I was cheating. It can be beaten of course, but the relative power and insane consistency makes it very dangerous.

So it's not the whole concept of control wizards that is the problem, it's the trait cycling control wizards and some of their main cards like WoW. Then there is of course the question of whether or not WoW is OP by itself, or it being too easy to obtain with Runestone and Blood Locket. In other words, does the OP nature come from the card or the item? It's a complex issue for sure.

But yes, races are a part of the problem too. Am I reading this correctly, are you saying that elves actually helped your winrate? If that was the case, things were pretty different in beta. In current meta you see elf wizards very rarely in top-100 because they die like flies. The basic mobility advance that elves have means pretty much nothing when you have non-racist cards like Team Run and Nimble Strike which let dwarves move at the same speed. And of course we now have maps that are considerably smaller which makes kiting almost impossible.

 

Indeed my build wasn't exactly the same, I didn't run trembling staff. But everything else was close to that. Besides that you misunderstood my post, the elves probably didn't help my winrate at all. What I meant is that those OP build might be only viable because dwarves can wistand alot more of a beating than other races. I couldn't afford the damage amping traits on the staff f.e

 

Why are people contributing to this thread if they have no experience of the current meta? It's plainly obvious OP could only be applicable to the DCW trend. In any case, I just auto-resign vs the DCW deck. I don't know what those who play for fun and also care about their ranking do. Not play, I suppose.

 

Get lucky.

 

Dude, I'm always hoping to get lucky.

 

While I'm entirely about skill. For example, last night Alet Zhav was so impressed by my mastery of the game, he gave me a Party Leader Hat.