Dwarven Control Wizards

I'm also leaning towards Lankin's Orb over Bewlin's Baffling Bauble as the token SPR item. SPR is often a card you can camp on, since the range means you're generally going to be holding it for some time. As such I'm not sure a third copy is more useful than Cone of Cold as a one of. Especially for the Wizard who isn't running a Frost Staff.

Of course they're both legendary, so in practical terms the correct answer is to use whichever you actually have.

Torn on Locket Of The Gale vs Blood Locket too. Blood Locket should be better, but Winds Of War is such a broken card that having to put up with the Ember Spray might be worth it.

 

Today is the third day in a row my Kyburz Market has an Electroporter Novice for sale. I'm now convinced the calculations regarding it in this post paint an accurate picture, we were just unlucky earlier.

The average daily chance of getting one has trended downwards a little bit while I've followed it. After 19 observations it's 31.75 % (down from 32.44 % at 9 observations), which still produces a 99.524 % chance of seeing at least one within 14 days.

The numbers are the same for all other Uncommon level 6-11 items in Kyburz Market so we know what to expect when hunting for a Lunging Spetum, for example.

 

In my opinion, wizard staffs are in general poorly designed. If I were to rank the available staffs in my inventory from most useful to least, Trembling Staff would occupy the top or one of the top spots, along with a smattering few others (the cold staffs, volcano staffs, maaaaybe the gimmicky staffs with parries or nimble strikes). 95% of the staffs in my inventory have such a bad usefulness to cost ratio that I can't imagine using them in a high-level deck. This means that by default, Trembling Staff is one of the best because it... lets you cycle away the card draws which normally would be taken up by crap you don't want.

When comparing the classes and which card slots carry key powerful cards:
Warriors get a bunch of their best cards on their weapons (damage and step attacks, obviously).
Priests have a pretty even mix of key cards on weapons and divine items, especially since divine weapons have at least 2 utility/spell cards on them.
Wizards get a mix of mediocre cards on both their staffs and arcane items. All of their items have a bad usefulness to cost ratio. Only a few standout examples exist, such as Runestone.

To me it is telling that the only wizard build that I really found to be both effective and consistant was the hard control / trait spamming build shown here.

 

The problem with Staffs is that Wizards just don't do that much damage.

Now, on the one hand they shouldn't do too much damage, because with their range and control it'd be silly if they could hit like Warriors. The issue arrises though that Staffs are mostly itemized to offer damage cards... Cards Wizards generally don't want. Consider Deadly, Deadly Staff, the Wizard equivalent of Vibrant Pain. Why would any Wizard want to use that when Staff Of Winter has only eight less damage in total and offers encumbering effects on every card?

They wouldn't of course and until you can find a way to make pure damage cards more appeal to the class Trembling well remain a top tier pick.

 

So I tend to agree with your assessment of the better wizard staffs. There's a limited number of really good staffs made up of the various encumber staffs, a couple with volcano, the trembling staff, and maybe a couple more mostly legendary options. Changes to cards will of course always impact these valuations, for example the fireball staffs were considered very highly until fireball was nerfed.

But, that seems comparable (in terms of the number of items available) to the options available to warriors. There's still a limited number of good options available. Infused Greatclub seems to be highly favored for damage output vs token cost (compared to the legendary Hackmaster and Bludgenator), then there's a few good step weapons (where I tend to include the Bejeweled Shortsword), and then a few good no-token weapons (plus the Beater). There's a couple of decent parry/block options too, depending on how you value those (much like there are for staves).

It seems to me that wizards and warriors have a similar number of great weapons to aim for. Wizards just don't have much in the no token or single token realm, leaving only the trembling staff. If warriors had a similar no token weapon (at a similar rarity) that included 3 neg traits it would likely be popular as well.

 

When you are talking about wizard damage, you can't really ignore the effect of traits - even tokenless Electroporter Novice can add +3 to the damage of every spark while cold spells have no such option currently. Of course encumbering effects tend to be far more valuable than that extra damage, especially in PvP.

 

Spark Trait cards are super unreliable. Not only can you only have at max three of them, but nearly any high rated Wizard will be running 10-14 traits in their deck, which frequently lead to stuff getting pushed off as you filter through them. I've had first turns where I drew through more than a dozen traits between my three dorfs before the game proper even began.

And keep in mind, I'm not saying that Wizards don't deal enough damage, or that they need to deal more. Only that they tend to get their damage through oblique manipulation of the battlefield, rather than just, "play card to reduce target's health." Because of that, and because Staffs tend to favor direct damage in itemization and tend to be Token hogs, Wizards want to avoid them as much as possible.

 

Sticky Slippers could be useful in many situations, especially now that there is more WW/WWE out there, but I've really grown to like Teleport Self and I cannot really live without it any more. I'm guessing that while Sticky Slippers would be awesome against some teams, Greenguard Boots is just better all-around item.

If you happen to test Sticky Slippers, please let us know how it goes.

Yeah but deck thinning and good cards usually go hand in hand. Most items that have negative traits, also have some awesome cards to balance it out. It's the basic philosophy behind these control wizards: you take tons of "bad" traits so you have a thinner deck and better cards.

While it is true that Squeamish can be bad, situations like that are so rare that I don't think "not caring" is the wrong expression. I've played this build a million times and only once have I lost a match because of Squeamish. Squeamish has prevented my attacks many times, but usually when that happens they are dying anyways so it doesn't really matter. And you can still use Flame Jet because it ignores Squeamish.

Yep. Like I said before, Trembling Staff is one of the key item here. It's funny because at first glance the item looks terrible, and the zero cost only strengthens that belief. But when you use it, you realize its true power. 3 traits is no joke.

I was testing Locket Of The Gale at some point but I dislike Ember Spray so much I had to switch back. To me it seemed like it always popped up at the worst possible time But yeah.. extra Winds of War could be worth it.

 

Man, so if you were ever thinking about trying Control Wizards now would be the time. The next map rotation looks outstanding for them.

Just look at these!

http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Crundyup's_Bridge_(Ranked)
http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Ice_House_(Ranked)
http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Melting_Glacier_(Ranked)
http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Woodhome_Blizzard_(Ranked)

 

I guess I get to use that 3rd bauble after all.

 

i can already taste the tears

 

My first reaction too was that these are pretty wizard-friendly, but I'm not that sure any more. The one with the bridge looks like it would be great for wizards, but the others could be difficult.

I think that Halloween maps were a lot better for control wizards. First of all they had tons of open space and difficult terrain that usually helped the wizards. Secondly each map had multiple squares that had line-of-sight to all VP squares. This latter is a huge advantage to control wizards because the opponent cannot cap without being a target. With some of these new maps, the opponent can cap without being a target, unless you split the wizards (which is usually really bad).

Hopefully I'm right and melee can still put up a fight, or even dominate in certain situation. It would be boring if everyone just switched to wizards or anti-wizard wizards.

 

This is part of the problem I have with rotation-based meta. Of course there are always exceptions but on the whole we have a paradigm shift every new rotation. "This set is good for wizard-based decks, this set is good for warrior-based decks" rinse/repeat. I would have thought a better approach would be to have rotations that don't favour one construct, do have maps that can be good for different builds, contain more maps overall and thus favour good overall deck construction and good overall tactics rather than the reliance on stacking the zeitgeist. If you are going to have the meta-heavy map rotation then the rotation needs to be a lot shorter in duration than it currently is.

 

I agree, for a long time now I wanted either the rotations to be shorter or incorporate more maps in them.
I don't mind changing my build a bit every now and then but having a theme that favours heavily a specific build makes it less fun , maybe eventually it will make the devs rethink some stuff if in fact what we all assume will happen will indeed happen with the new maps.
on a side note - when are the maps that finally favour my beloved priests coming out?

 

for what i seen of the maps they seem wizard friendly, so lets see next monday what happens

 

I don't really disagree with any of this, I'm mostly just jazzed that this rotation will be better than the current one, which is just awful for Control Wizards.

Nothing in the upcoming set looks even remotely so bad as Gladius Single, which is almost an auto-loss for WC unless you get some crazy luck.

 

That gladius single...urgh..i really dislike it (almost as much as koi pond note: used warriors back then. guess with my new build atm, i would love it ) but funny enough usul i manage to rake many wins there...weird. i will miss gladius wall, my favorite of the bunch

 

I'm still using a pair of Greenguards, since I only have two sets of Slippers, but I am loving them. The uptime on Immovable is pretty favorable, thanks to trait stacking and having only one or two of three Wizards thrown for a loop by WWE makes the spell a lot less damaging.

 

As many complaints as there are about overpowered builds, I'd think people would be happy to see map rotation to make different builds more / less powerful.

 

There aren't any overpowered builds (that I've encountered). DCW is perfectly beatable, if you have the correct counter. Most people run 2 warriors on the current maps and that's a problem for when facing DCW. Only a couple of tbarges run it anyway, so it doesn't even matter either way.