[Feedback] Not enough power tokens

Sure, that's a nice skill for a warrior, and deserving of a power token. I've yet to see anything nearly as compelling for a human wizard. I think the main issue is that any weapon that doesn't require two power tokens is likely to be terribly underpowered; likely adding six cards of filler to your deck.

 

Advanced Flexibility

On a sidenote, i do have to agree that the issue is that there are no (Y) Weapons, at all, there are only (C)(C), (C)(Y), and (Y)(Y), this heavily bridges the difference between non-token and token weapons.

I´ve found refuge in some very low cost or no cost weapons, staves and divines, it does takes looking outside the box, but i do think that (Y) weapons are still necesary, since they allow more competent builds without completelly jeopardizing your other good Token gears

 

Fair point about the wizard, but there are plenty of boots that require a power token that give wizards access to cards that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Of course we were speaking of warriors and their conundrum of having three weapon slots and an expectation to be a damage machine so I was trying to focus my example there. My point is that by swapping in a non-token weapon- say something with a lot of step cards/reach/penetrating/simple bash - adding some useful utility(even if low damage) in exchange for a strong shield with parry's and an armor with frenzy can actually be a better choice because you can increase the damage of all your attacks (including the underpowered ones) as well as increase your chances of survival and cycle through your deck faster to those devastation power token weapon cards. Also a lot of highpowered token weapons include some filler cards on their own, not to mention all the filler cards you're including with your other underpowered equipment, so doing the swap is hardly adding 6 filler cards that wouldn't otherwise be there.

One of most enjoyable aspects of this game for me is that the first and most obvious conclusion ie: warriors do damage, damage comes from weapons, warriors must always and only use the best most powerful weapons to be viable is not always the best solution especially when working in conjunction with the two other decks you build.

 

Gotta side with GregarFlazaer on this one -- my wizard has been rocking Advanced Flexibility since he got his first power token. I've never seen anything worth taking it off of him, and if I ever see a second one, my Cleric will be in the same boat.

 

I'm going to third this, it's probably the best racial skill in the game right now. A team of 3 humans with 3 Advanced Flexibility is pretty neat. Combined with Bless or Inspiring Presence it can let you cycle through up to 14 cards at the start of the turn easily, and the chance of drawing yet another Leadership from these is quite high. If the draw is good you can just keep it for a free mulligan on a subsequent turn.

I wouldn't really consider not running 3xHuman because of this now.

 

While this is an older post in this thread I think this is a serious syllogistic logical fallacy and shouldn't be glossed over.

"Balanced vs Balanced" is based on the grounds that all of the actions available in the game have a properly applied "card power" base and are built upon a foundation of appropriate counter play given the resources available to all players able to build decks.

something that is "overpowered" by definition has a lack of Balance. 2 things that lack balance (OP vs OP) cannot be assumed to have balance.

There may exist a case where the level of strength of builds are equal, but that does not assume balance because it cannot.

Understanding that a fun and competitive environment is what you desire in an online game, If you could have every single card in your deck have the ability to 1 shot kill the entire other team and the other player could have the same deck, isn't that balance?

Sure, technically the playing field is leveled, and you have a 50% chance to win! But that is not balance in the definition that we strive towards. This would be a case of semantics shifting, and an ultimately boring experience.

 

*the demon suddenly smiles warmly and pats the rat on his little fuzzy head*

 

I reckon the power token system plays an important keystone role in making the deck-building part of the game challenging and interesting. If there were no power tokens, or if there were too many power tokens, then the vast majority of items in the game would be essentially worthless, and the total number of viable builds would be dramatically reduced.

Furthermore, it plays a key role in MP balance. New players would be at a much greater disadvantage without the power token system, because they don't have access to all the high-power items. Under the current system it doesn't matter as much that new players only have a couple of high-power items, because they can only use a couple of high-power items anyway. A lack of items in the current system amounts to a lack of choice in builds, but the builds that are possible are not too bad. If the power token system was removed, a lack of items would not only mean a lack of choice but the limited options available would be relatively weak compared to the other players.

 

I have to agree that the token system adds greater strategic depth to the game since it increases the number of choices a player can make by adding connecting consequences between item slots. With tokens, my choice of weapons has consequences on which boots I can use, etc. Without tokens, my weapon choice is independent of my boot choice and only depends on the deck build I am going for. While that is also a fine game to play, it is not the one being offered by the developers, which ultimately increases player choices by paradoxically limiting the number of available item combinations. (Somebody may sting me on the mathematics of that last statement.)

I think what we are mostly feeling the lack of is items requiring only one token, blue or gold. One token items to me right now are more valuable than no token items. Having a deck of 30(?) cards of middle power is more desirable for me than a deck of 10 high power cards and 20 low power cards, especially when a successful Parry can completely negate that Unholy Wellspring/Mass Frenzy/Blind Rage/All Out Attack/Obliterating Bludgeon combo you just built up.

 

That's a good point. The shortage of one-token items means that in a sense we only have half as many tokens as we think we have.

 

Just to add my $0.02: I couldn't disagree more with OP. The token system is a terrific way to introduce interesting decisions into deck-building.

 

Keyser, I think most folks agree that the token system is great! We're sort of discussing ways it could be improved at this point. The most common suggestions are:

• Lack of one-token items (especially single-gold-token items)
• Deck "ROI" for investing a power token in a helm (or class skill, or boots, or armor) vs. a weapon

 

We'll see more gold-token items when they finish the higher level content (so far the only gold non-weapons are level 18). Unless you're talking about weapons, and there the devs seem to be assigning values to the tokens: 1 for blue and 2 for gold, so technically a single gold would be the same power rating as double blue.

 

Right, but it's still using two of your power tokens, rather than one. Maybe it could be an option to slot a gold token into a 2-blue-token weapon?

 

My impression is that the rough rule-of-thumb for tokens is that each token corresponds to three cards. With no token there will be three dud cards; a blue token will yield a set of three ok cards, and a yellow token will yield a set of three good cards.

So if there were weapons that required 1 yellow and nothing else, then I'd expect those weapons to have three powerful cards and three dud cards; whereas for weapons requiring 2 blue tokens I'd expect 6 ok cards.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with having 1-yellow weapons, but it might be a bit odd seeing weapons that appear to be both very powerful and very weak at the same time.

 

I mean no offense, but I think your impression is way off base. From my understanding, the distribution of tokens is very specific. If a piece of gear is above a certain level, it has specific tokens. For example weapons below 6 have no tokens, and other pieces below 8 have no tokens. So you could have an amazing level 8 epic armor that is tokenless, and a crappy level 7 common weapon that takes a power token. In this regard, item rarity has way more of an impact on the quality of cards on a piece around a specific level than tokens do.

Obviously as items go up in level they get better in general, but that hard break at specific levels can lead to some odd discrepancies in perceived quality of gear.

 

This is the part of the token/item level system that bugs me. There are 18 levels of items and only three different token requirements (for non-weapon items). With level 18 being the last threshold, you have level 7 items being interchangeable with (same resource cost as) level 17 items. Creating eleven degrees of incremental quality between items with the same resource cost makes the vast majority of mid-level items useless once you start getting 14-17 stuff. I just checked my current multiplayer party and outside of the weapons it's all lvl 6-8 and 15-17.

As far as I can tell, item level representing incremental steps in quality holds even for epics and legendaries, which is how you get no-token items like Skull_of_Savage_Iljin.

 

Honestly I could see the game having a LOT less total items and have more effort put into making each item distinctly different and useful for different situations. Then non-max tiered items might still have purpose in certain scenarios or for certain builds. Higher levels can have more generally useful sets of cards, and higher rarities could be clearly superior replacements of common items. Maybe then I wouldnt have dozens of random crummy commons sitting in my bags on the off chance they will be useful some day.

 

I think I would prefer the variety of having some weapons be one major token items (the first choice). The second option would make deck building more confusing for beginners and seems more disruptive to the way we build decks now.