I didn't see a place for this to be discussed, and I would like to see what people think about PVP balance. The last few nights I've played a ton and gotten my epic chests, and so I know a bit about the metagame, but that's also the extent of my pvp experience. Anyway, I could clearly be wrong, but I'd love to discuss this with people! Also, I'm Powercow in game but I'm a doh head, so I didn't match my forum account to my in-game account. Right now, a beefed up version of the dwarf starter pack seems to be pretty dominant. I'm not playing it and have a good win rate, but I really don't have a good win rate against that particular party. This is essentially a bunch of obliterating bludgeons, rageblood daggers, the 'pay life draw cards' spell, and other attack enhancements. The cleric enhances the warriors, the warriors unstoppably murder you with endless enhanced penetrating attack cards. Overall, I think that rageblood dagger might be too good for it's rarity. Particularly the vicious thrusts... they just do a lot of damage for a penetrating attack that also lets you move. This is particularly true because impaler is almost certainly the best warrior skill right now because of the higher availability of good strong penetrating cards over those with the bash or chop keywords. Because of the bug/oversight/whatever where move/attacks couldn't be encumbered, what should have been this party's primary weakness was pretty hard to exploit. I think I'll start carrying some frost and I suspect that will help now, although this build is still going to be pretty darn hard to stop. I've seen a few decks that use illusionary wall to just sit on the victory point, but that shouldn't be hard to deal with once they are "Can't sight through" rather than "Can't sight into". Because almost everybody who has one carries obliterating bludgeon, I think it might help the elf wizard be a more viable choice if she was bumped up to 18 hp rather than 17, as I've lost mine a number of times from full health to that card. I'm probably going to replace her because her extra mobility just isn't worth that vulnerability in a metagame that's full of it.
Whit the new build encumber should work. Try again, now I think that a lot of step-cards decks will have some trouble.
So, after last night I can say I think that one small change has shuffled up the metagame significantly. Encumber is very powerful. Before, all the parties I had trouble with weren't running a wizard at all, and now wizards have received a significant buff as they're the primary encumber appliers, and they rely mostly on staying away from things to survive. I went for the epic chest again last night and didn't see any one party type dominating. (Also I decided if you can't beat them join them and bought the dwarf starter party just for the rageblood dagger =P). I played some really epic games, and also beat Steve Rowland like 5 times, which he doesn't seem to hate me too much for.
