When you see stuff like Shield Block, Parry, Laser Block, you may start thinking "Okay, what can I do as a warrior to counter that?" You can... hit from behind. perfectly valid. You can start using Tricky Stabs to give your opponent slightly less chances for that block to happen, but no guarantee. When you run triple warriors and your opponent constantly spams Impenetrable Nimbus (hello Sirius) or Force Field, you can still have some prevention in your deck, like Purging Strike. With right amount of luck, you can just kill one of three troublesome units that way. But a single Parry can stop that from happening. Such is beauty of counterplaying - it will usually work, but given right circumstances, it may just... not work. So why in the world there's nothing we could do about Penetrating? Less of a problem when you equip tokenless Reliable Mail or Monster Hide armors, because it's, well, a tokenless armor. You don't pay for that armor on the warrior, so don't expect miracles. But it does hurt major token armors. Especially already weaker in their qualities than the above mentioned ones, Mimetic Armor and Spiked Platemail. These are weaker than Reliable Mail and Monster Hide because of the fact they have an additional effect. But because of that, they cost more. Spiked Platemail, true, also is on a tokenless armor, yes. But there's no justice for Mimetic Armor, poor thing is only on major token stuff. I've already proposed one thing in regards to the Penetrating mechanism - rework it a bit. Make it a Sundering Strike, but without removing the armor it procs on. This way, the damage from penetrating would remain unchanged, but the penetrating would receive both nerfs and buffs: - Now Barbed Platemail/Spiked Mail and Mimetic Armor/Crown are legitimate counters to attacks, as they kind of should be. + Penetrating has a chance to knock off a Frenzy Aura and Horned Plates, ending the endless war of penetrating damage. + You get to see what kind of armor your opponent has almost risk-free. The last thing is probably only a buff to high-end players, using whatever they see as a way to get to know your opponent's deck, but regardless, it is a buff nevertheless. Note the fact that this way, Penetrating damage is still the go-to way to fight against Reliable Mail, Cushion, Monster Hide, etc. Which is mainly why it's used today. The biggest offender here is Double-Edged Sword, no doubt, with whopping 18 penetrating range 2 damage and 2 Step 2 attacks. So it could get a small nerf. Not a major one, something that would give other Impaling Stab options, like Assegai or Powerpike, Laser Spear, Flashing Longspear, etc. chance to shine. You could introduce a range 2, damage 11 normal attack. Mighty Stab or something. I was thinking about mentioning an idea of mine focusing on all armors having Force Field-like charges and amount of hits to remove them, but i'll kinda scratch that for now, way too crazy.
Except penetrating is counterplay. It's counterplay to armor, so what you're asking for is counter-counterplay, which seems like a bit much. I would also note that while one pays extra for certain armors, penetrating attacks also cost more than their non-penetrating counterparts. Lastly, if you're looking for a counterplay solution to penetrating it already exists in the game: Adaptable
So is Purging Strike and Tricky Stab, and that's why I listed these examples prior to going straight to the topic. While yes, they are more expensive and do less damage, the fact that they are not weakened by Cushion/Reliable Mail, easily buffed and even self-buffed and, the most used ones at least, range 2, makes them overall more valuable, especially when you consider the entire Double-Edged. And the fact that you can equip 3 of these swords also kinda adds up. A 33 hp dwarven warrior (which is a lot, I agree with Rob on that, way too much) has an access to tokenless skill with 2x blind rage. We also equip the minor token martial skill with impaling stab and, I dunno, something with sparkling cloth armor. That's a lot of mostly impossible to block AND impossible to neglect damage. Yes, for the most part it's Impaling Stab's fault that many a person don't run any interesting armor cards and just stick to reliable/monster. However, Penetrating is still a counterplay where the counterplayed person is helpless. In case of Tricky Stab there's a chance their blocks actually hit, in case of nimbus spam, you can still hit them after a good purging strike. But when you have any cool, expensive armor and your opponent impaling stabs you? You're done. Just like that. There's no card on anybody that could make your armor not useless. Or render opponent's attacks not-penetrating. It is a counterplay as strong as tricky stab is - your opponent doesn't have 33 impaling stabs in his deck, if you're willing to go with Assegai then your warrior gets to have 9 penetrating range 2 attacks at most. So if you happen to get a lot of these in 2 turns, then yes, Adaptable stops a lot of damage. But if your opponent gets them every 2nd turn, then it is kinda useless. Compared to how penetrating damage counters armor, where an armor user can't make the armor they have relevant again, ya know.
This sounds interesting. Personally, I do think there's a slight problem, but I don't think it's with Penetrating as a whole. I find that most cards with it cost the user reasonably for the ability to ignore armour entirely. However, there are exceptions. The two I have in my mind are Impaling Stab and Frenzy Aura. Whenever I have a look at the line of stabs, I tend to find that Impaling Stab is a massive outlier. So much that it makes all the other penetrating attacks (which seem to show some consistence with each other at least) seem almost entirely useless. That kind of thing rarely means anything good. Sometimes I think that Penetrating Stab and Impaling Stab could even be merged into one card, perhaps, with a damage value inbetween? Frenzy Aura has exactly the same quality as Horned Plates (that's right, no plus-minus adjustments there) and does so much more with almost literally no downside (well, it has one fewer point of armour, but seriously). Which, again, makes Horned Plates pale entirely in comparison. Even the items with it tend to be better in general, which means that similarly to Penetrating Stab, Horned Plates is practically never seen. I don't have much of an idea here (not that my ideas have ever been any good), but Frenzy Aura having that armour roll adjusted to 3+ could possibly make sense. (I also had this rather wonky idea that Frenzy Aura would add Minor Erratic Damage and would lose the Keep keyword on low or high rolls, but that's just way too dumb.)
Right, but you're missing the point. Purging Strike counters something that is not already itself a counter, but you're asking for a counter to a counter. If penetrating is specifically to counter armor, than to ask for it not to be able to counter armor is against the whole point of its design. It would be like saying: "I pay tokens to fit Nimbus and Force Field into my deck, and then someone comes along with Purging Strike and messes the whole thing up. And look, there's no counter to Purging Strike, therefore we have a problem. Purging Strike needs a counter where it can't always purge my Nimbus." But the whole point of Purging Strike is to counter things like Nimbus, just like the whole point of penetrating is to get around armor, so it doesn't make sense to undo what they are designed for.
Lemme stop ya right there. The problem isn't that there should be a counter to a counter, no. Notice how I mentioned the fact that you can do something against purging strike: Block it. Just as you can have your block proc on a tricky stab, these aren't impossible to imagine situations, nor impossible to create. However, at this moment, it's impossible to have your armor, even by a tiny bit, matter against penetrating. In any way, shape or form My solution would still render the Reliable Mail, Monster Hide, even Cushion, Grounding Plates, etc. entirely useless, as Penetrating would still disregard these, and, therefore, counter armor as intended. That IS good. What isn't good is the fact that the effect-armors, as I'll call them from now on, including, you know, Mimetic Armor/Crown, Barbed Platemail/Spiked Mail are twice as useless. You pick this specific armor, because you want to take a risk with a less safe roll in exchange for some effect that it gives. Given that none of them are guaranteed rolls, that would kinda also buff all the harnesses minus the officer's. Both of these are in slightly underused spot.
Except then its not your attachment that is getting around purging strike, its an additional card. Guess what, the same block that will block purging strike, will also block penetrating attacks. So if a block is the counter to purging strike, then blocks are the counter to penetrating. Problem solved. Why does the armor need to counter its own counter? The attachment certainly doesn't. If you're argument is more this, that "effect-armors" need some more love, I have no problem with it. I just don't know that the way you go about doing it is changing penetrating. Ultimately the reason that "effect-armors" have in some sense lost value is because "standard-armor" got a boost with the recent expansion and is seeing more play, enough that consequently penetrating is being run more than it was pre-CM making "effect-armors" less effective as a result. Personally, I don't know that that makes penetrating problematic.
I agree that 'counterplay' problem isn't the right lens through which to look at this. But regardless of that, changing penetrating in the way described does sound potentially interesting from a gameplay point of view. It would also open the door to other balance options, such as penetration limits. eg. "penetrating 2" ignores the first 2 points of armour it encounters, but any further damage reduction is applied. With changes like that, armours which "prevent all damage from type-x" would be more intuitive. The damage prevention could be viewed either as a special additional effect of the armour (which in the proposed system would be triggered regardless of penetrating); or it could be viewed as 'infinite' damage reduction, which just goes beyond the numerical penetration limit of all penetrating attacks. (In the current system, I think its weird that penetration ignores all armour effects except that very specific effect. I don't like inconsistencies like that.) In any case, although I think this stuff is potentially a good idea, I don't expect that it will be implemented. It's a change which would require rewriting various card texts, rebalancing cards, rewriting sections of the tutorial, and re-educating players. All that stuff is achievable, but the developers would first ask "is this worth it?" and "are we sure?". My guess is that although it's a good suggestion, it's not quite strong enough to justify the extra work. But it's not up to me! I'm just speculating.
