[Feedback] Comments on Balance Changes AFTER Playtesting

Please only submit to this thread IF you've playtested several matches with/against the cards you're commenting on.

If you want to speculate/rage/commiserate, please go to the megathread.

 

Some preliminary thoughts to confirm the major problems people have pointed out:

Harness Stacking
Usability - your hand gets very big. This makes the interface troublesome on medium-sized monitors (I'm using 1366x768), and probably unplayable on small monitors.

Limited / narrow counterplay - There are only two good answers to an impenetrable shell of harnesses: Sundering Strike (which primarily on epic/legendary items) or boiling armor. Penetrating attacks deal too little damage to kill effectively.

Cause Fumble / Defender's Block
Even though you need four legendary items to stack a priest with 9x CF and 2x DB, once you do the game becomes very silly. If you stack two priests, melee attackers might as well forget trying to hit you. There simply is no counter except "play wizards". War Cry can only purge one character and no character can hold more than two anyways.

Flash Flood
Still no direct countermeasure in terrain cleansing. Telekinesis can help if the opponent hasn't plastered the map two-deep, while smoke bomb can suppress easy casting.

Unlike Wall of Stone, wizards can attack through water terrain, which renders it highly-asymmetrical.

 

Lots of problems and hard to figure out solutions due to how many elements were changed. Would love it if the list of changes were halved or even quartered before everything and then some went through.

Also, in addition to everything above, Vampires are insanely strong now -- they were decent before but now with the nerf to other things they are even more deadly.

 

Also, I've had limited success (against various builds) with what I would deem a "universal-hate" build:

Melee Suppressor
Elf Priest

Mage Suppressor
Elf Wizard

Armor Suppressor
Elf Warrior

Mage Suppressor uses smoke to keep wizards down. Melee Suppressor uses 9x Cause Fumble and 2x Defender's Block to suppress warriors. Armor Suppressor goes in for the kill.

I should also note that these battle have all been very silly, very close, and not generally fun because I'm confined to repeating a particular anti-X strategy for the whole match.

 

I played a vamp build for a bit, and they're actually incredibly weak because they have no penetrating attacks for warriors/priests, and wizards can hide behind flash flood.

 

So far I've used water wizards (flash flood) which were pretty amazing on these set of maps, in fact the only time I lost was to you in our second match neon, which I suspect was why you had that smoke bomb counter ready in your sleeve, good strategy overall a very viable deck, though I couldn't hope to replicate it on regular server with the amount of legendaries it was packing

Tried out some 2 war/1 priest frenzied quick scuttlers the other night and, while the quickness aura + quick scuttle + oblit combo is just as amazing as it sounds, was a bit too draw dependent to pull off reliably, this was only a few matches though so might have just been unlucky draws (wars had those scuttle.socks but think I drew scuttle like 1 time total)
Also cause fumble is really good now, like maybe too good, for the range it has with no required facing, I'm sure ppl cursing the priest just chillin way back saving my warriors from oblits with no effort

 

I'm assuming the Harness and Cause Fumble changes will not go through. As it would reduce the game to a super boring binary state of armor vs armor removal and block vs block removal.

Also, they are priests so if Flash Flood is problematic they can equip Wings of Faith. Plus, there are many more ranged vamp stuff now so reaching over one spot isn't so bad.

 

Figured this would be a good place to post the decks we using on test serv

WATER WIZARDS

Macpatle
Level 4 Human Wizard

Deadly, Deadly Staff
Staff Of Chask
Twizel's Water Talisman
Twizel's Water Talisman
Wallbuilder's Bracelet
Rod Of Palver Pree
Prillith's Robes Of Pain
Lt. Buckwell's Boots
Trainee Command
Focused Electromancy

3 x Spark Generator
1 x Force Blast
1 x Hot Spot
1 x Arcane Shell
1 x Walk, Team!
1 x Vulnerable
2 x Path Of Knives
6 x Deadly Spark
1 x Telekinesis
1 x Bloodied Block
3 x Punishing Bolt
2 x Pushback Parry
1 x Officer's Harness
1 x Wall Of Fire
2 x Flanking Move
7 x Flash Flood
1 x Stone Spikes
1 x Slowed
​

Lokaz
Level 1 Dwarf Wizard

Blue Destruction
Dianon's Staff
Twizel's Water Talisman
Twizel's Water Talisman
Rod Of Palver Pree
Rod Of Palver Pree
Hylithia's Robes
Lt. Buckwell's Boots
Trained Toughness
Electroporter Novice

1 x Toughened Hide Strips
2 x Hot Spot
1 x Unstable Bolt
1 x Spark Generator
2 x Stone Spikes
4 x Deadly Spark
1 x Spark Inductor
2 x Telekinesis
3 x Officer's Harness
1 x Able Bludgeon
1 x Dimensional Traveller
1 x Toughness
1 x Chain Harness
6 x Flash Flood
2 x Flanking Move
6 x Arcane Burst
1 x Arcane Shell
​

Bokdrung
Level 1 Dwarf Wizard

Heartripper
Blue Destruction
Hand Of Wicna
Asmod's Telekinetic Chain
Rod Of Palver Pree
Rod Of Palver Pree
Prillith's Robes Of Pain
Lt. Buckwell's Boots
Trained Toughness
Advanced Levitation

2 x Hot Spot
1 x Hover
3 x Path Of Knives
3 x Stone Spikes
1 x Toughened Hide Strips
4 x Telekinesis
6 x Punishing Bolt
8 x Arcane Burst
1 x Toughness
1 x Chain Harness
2 x Flash Flood
2 x Flanking Move
1 x Officer's Harness
1 x Arcane Shell


Unfortunately this deck is chock full of multiple copies of legendaries so while it worked a charm not really going to be easy to make at all. :/ Too bad though was pretty fun.​

 

Ok, with that assumption vamps are overpowered, equal even to warriors stacking oblit + AoA.

 

What's the feedback about the limit draw for people who are testing it? I'd like to know if it's as bad as it sounds.

 

It isn't that bad. We tested it before with the speed tournament (Rare or lower quality items). Granted, that isn't the best, but it gave a good idea on how minor it was (only problematic for Dwarves with Parry / Battle Cry / Toughness).

For the actual new server, I've only run into it once or twice. Nearly every negative trait is worse, it is harder to stack them due to the change on Trembling Staff, and there are much more OP things at the moment. Cause Fumble / Defender's Block lets you draw cards, but generally the enemy won't have enough attacks to cause you to not draw any.

 

Trembling Staff has been nerfed, ok. But the main point of the trembling staff is that it was a good tokenless staff, allowing you to use the tokens elsewhere. Now WoW is tokenless (Sensate's Ring with WoW + trait + else) so you use good staves (Staff Of Winter, Heartripper, Illusion, etc...) and the tokenless Winds Of War.
Wizards are even more OP then I initialy imagined.

 

You mean GoW (Gusts of War). It was already a very strong item in restricted formats (Peasant) and now Sensate's Ring is insane. And yes, Wizards are very strong -- but I still feel that Priests got the upper hand with Cause Fumble, Defender's Block, and buffed vamp stuff. Especially considering how strong of a counter Smoke Bomb is to an all wizard team.

 

Priests are now much stronger against melee, but against a 3 wizard team, cause fumble is useless and so are most drain attacks, because I imagine it's pretty hard getting close to a wizard with a priest and his limited movement and when he's facing 3 wizards packed with encumber, GoW, Toughness and with other superb defense as Flesh Flood. The only buff that matters in that scenario is Defender's Block and you can only have 2 of them. And since a new meta with lots of wizards is expected, and priests are no good anymore even for card advantage, I don't get how anyone can choose to use a priest now.

 

Priests were never great attackers to begin with. Draw priests are certainly weaker but Mass Frenzy priests won't change much.

 

MF would be the only reason for priests to stat IF melee teams don't choose to equip arrogant armor. And Arrogant Armor will be very necessary in the new meta.

 

2 wizzs + one priest is good. You can stack some harness on the wizzs then the priest cast savage curse and now WoW does 5x2 damages or Fireball can do 8x3. It's the warriors that are useless, even those built with an anti-wizz concept in mind.

 

Played about 7 or so rounds and I did have a few round where my traits (~7 across all my characters with an average of ~3 per) managed to almost burn through all my card draws at the start of a couple rounds. Which could be devastating if I was still planning on playing with Martyrs Blessing or Elven Maneuvers. It wouldn't be so bad and I think they would still get the same/intended effect if the draw limit was per character instead of for the whole team.

I also noticed that while there are ways to deal with the Harness stacking. When you did encounter them, if you didn't have any way to immediately remove them (Sunder/Boiling) at your disposal assuming it wasn't blocked or parried, then watching harness stacks resolve was pretty darn boring. Especially when the game decides to take longer than normal on a roll or two.

 

Yes, these rolls could be fastened up with clicking, I agree.

 

Hand of Melvelous is now only one damage worse than Glasod's Dark Skull. That's a very poor deal for a minor token.

I'm not sure I'll have as much use for Shuddering Relics in comparison, especially since a vampire build will likely have spare tokens for a Bleneth's Frenzy Skull or something close to it. I'm not sure how to weigh the trait with the new draw limit. I seem to be short of drains at crucial moments when running HoM, but maybe it's too early to tell. Plus I'm used to generous splashes of Martyrs blessing.