Zero Token Racials... AKA How humans are screwed over

I think you can figure from the title what I am going to say, but here it is Humans have no good 0 token items.
I have started using no item for the default 3 walks as it is better than any of the items for 0 tokens.
Granted they are not all terrible Advanced Guidance has 3 good cards if weak and slow and the 1 Epic Untrained Tactics is great if you like Unreliable Block.
Compare those with Beginner Toughness as a common or Apprentice Ferocity as an Epic for Dwarves; for Elves Cautious Mobility or Untrained Footwork (the Epic comparison). Of course the Elves and Dwarves both have Legendary Items for 0 tokens, but Legendary items are too rare to compare.
Tell if you agree with this comparison, or if there is something I am missing out on... or that you like Vulnerable, Slow, Unreliable Block and Wimpy.

 

Well... I like Vulnerable and Wimpy and think it's totally crazy to prefer Walkx3 over Novice Command, Trainee Command, and, perhaps most importantly, Novice Guidance ...

Jump, Soldier! is mad hax

(Of course, there are no tokenless human skills on par with Raging Battler/Apprentice Ferocity, but that's a bar we don't want to meet, generally speaking.)

 

I never use tokenless.
Not because they suck, because some of the token skills are auto picks.

 

So if you dont like Vulnerable you are screwed. I use novice command a lot but Vulnerable against a wiz is a death sentence.

 

I sort of agree. I don't like Vulnerable. Sure, you can cope with it in most instances, but it can also lose you games randomly.

I'm one of those players who like a balanced deck, and the idea a game can be lost because the wrong card was picked at the worst possible time irritates me somewhat.

Case in point, I've been using Novice Guidance on my human wizard for a long time and, while Jump, Soldier! surely is an awesome card, I also found out having it in your deck is not worth running the risk of drawing Vulnerable just as the enemy wiz is preparing to burst my wiz out of existence.

I now use Untrained Flexibility, which I don't consider a great item, but I still find far more preferable than losing random games b/c of Vulnerable.

 

I'm not running token-less skills on my human wizards, but I found Superb Guidance to be helpful for wizards at times, especially on these maps. Sometimes just bringing the Block into play was enough for someone to hold off on attacking.

Untrained Flexibility was a go to for awhile as well, but pulling Slowed in Round 5 when I need to move a wizard was not fun. I now have two wizards running Tactics to bring an extra trait into the mix, and one running Inspired Command for some Inspirational Thinking when I need it. I've found myself wanting to spend a token on skills instead of boots, so it works for me.

 

Why not? Cautious Mobility was an addition as powerful as those skills, but it needed to be to allow elf warriors to compete with the other high-tier class/race combos. The most viable humans, clerics, probably want to stick to support skills, so why not add a really powerful tokenless skill that complements human warriors/human wizards?

Unless you're planning on nerfing those skills down the road, in which case... cool!

 

Cautions Mobility is great, to the point hardly everybody uses it on elf warriors. Probably a tad too good too! (yes, I do use it myself btw).

Elven Maneuvers prob needs its duration lowered, or its quality being upped to Silver.

And I don't even want to mention the Blind Rage madness that's been going on.

I love how the devs are trying to throw new/better/more interesting Racial Skills into the mix, but they might have gone a tad too far. Not whining about it, as long as they continue balancing items available for the slot as they go forward.

 

I dont get why Vulnerable has to be so present, it is on Trainee Command, Novice Command and Novice Guidance. Feels like a joke, dwarves got the hp advantage and tokenless skills that add to their sturdiness, humans get theirs sabotaged.

This might also be the place to wonder about duration 3 on elven maneuvers and tip my hat to any movement asking for a reduction to 2.

 

I will say that I really like some of the new racials like Tough Charger, Wariness and the new and improved Wild Trickery.

But there is a real issue here...

Dwarf:
Untrained Ferocity > Tough Charger I mean really. Tough Charger is so good. Untrained Ferocity isn't even a bad skill!
Stout Charger I LOVE this skill when I first started playing. Block any 3+.
Novice Ferocity (2x Charge on a class that actually NEEDS mobility)
Beginner Toughness (Two keep armors and a parry?? Come on!)
Untrained Toughness (Yet another Parry! Not great otherwise.)

Apprentice Ferocity > Raging Battler
We all know what these skills do. Leave them alone for now.
As you can see, dwarves have no drawback skills except for ones with 2X Blind Rage. Weird huh? Actually, dwarves have only a small selection of low-cost skills but they are all pretty great.

Elf:
Apprentice Evasion (terrible but hey, two smashing spins... woo!)
Wariness / Untrained Insight / Apprentice Insight (Skip /+ Scouting Run)
Scouting Run with optional Dodge? Sign me up.

Cautious Trickery (Scouting Run+ Elven Trickery + Shuffle)
Two great cards for the price of a Shuffle.
Cautious Mobility (Two Elven Maneuvers AND Scouting Run?? OP as heck)

Pacifist Trickery
Risky Trickery
Epics with Elven Trickery+Flanking Move on a drawback budget.

Untrained Evasion (Slippery)
Novice Insight (Pathfinding)
Drawback skills with Superstitious.

Untrained Footwork Epic
Wild Trickery Legendary
Perilous Agility Legendary

All move, all the time. At leas there are some cool cards here.
Sure elves have two skills with drawbacks (superstitious) but they both have gold cards to compensate.

You have a wealth of skills with the almighty Scouting Run and/or Elven Trickery, and of course if you can't decide there is always Cautious Mobility. Since hey, that skill isn't ridiculously strong.

Human
Beginner Guidance > Advanced Guidance
You can ignore Beginner Guidance since at least Advanced Guidance is half decent.

Superb Guidance / Apprentice Guidance (What is WITH all these Unblocks?)

Novice Command / Novice Guidance/ Trainee Command
All Vulnerable, but at least they have one or two good cards.

Untrained Flexibility Retreat/Flanking Move/Slowed
Even with the improvements, this skill is in the "meh" department.

Untrained Command Shuffle Team/Attack Soldier/Flimsy Block
It's not terrible, but it's not great either.

Untrained Tactics Epic (Lateral Thinking/Subtle Parry/ Unreliable Block)
Draw cards, draw another card maybe, Unblock? It's pretty awful compared to other racial skills that cycle.

So every tokenless human skill essentially has a drawback in the form of:
-Unreliable Block. I would rather have Wimpy and vulnerable attached than this one card in my deck.
-Slowed
-Vulnerable
-Wimpy
Except for Untrained Flexibility and Advanced Guidance, two skills which are so utterly unexciting.

So there is a legit premise behind all this complaining.

Two asides: 1, I miss the tactical play behind the old Slowed, since you had to save cards to get rid of it.
2:, Unreliable Block is such an awful, awful card. Except for that odd time you face Reaching Swing in campaign, which is still not often. This card should be 5+ , or keep the old flavor but add a bonus when it actually triggers (Draw a Card? Move 1?).

Note: If you know your math, you know there is a huge difference between 5+ and 6+, or any other two minimum rolls for that matter.

 

To respond broadly to the concerns in this thread, I'll just say a few things that I think are true about A) the way the game is now and B) how BM wants the game to be. Bear with me as I'm sick

A. The Way The Game Is Now

• Racial skills aren't the only factor in race balance.
• Assuming that the base stats of the races aren't perfectly balanced, racial skills should in theory compensate for this by being unbalanced in a balancing manner.
• Traditionally, dwarves have been the best race—their poor movement stats were easy to compensate for, their racial skills were the best, and their high HP made them no-brainer picks for warrior and wizards characters.
• This, in combination with a squeamishness surrounding changing existing content, was the thinking that led to elves getting a ton of bonkers skill items in AotA. Traditionally the underdogs, elves were given Elven Maneuvers and Elven Trickery as bombs intended to push them (this was before my time on the team).
• Somewhere along the line, we began balancing existing content, and a number of the new elf abilities were brought into line, as were step attacks, one of the keys to dwarven supremacy.
• For most of the time since launch until around the first balance update, humans weren't talked about all that much. It was occasionally noted that their skills weren't as good as dwarves', but no one's were, and their balanced hp/movement was actually quite useful—and they got played plenty across the class board, unlike elf wizards and priests.
• That dwarf skills were the best across the board, that elves had both the most skills and the most unusable skills, that humans had the fewest interesting skills for campaign play—these factors led BM to reevaluate all racial skill items. We changed a lot of items and added a ton of new human skills, and the situation for humans and elves is probably much better than it was a year ago. So I think we've done work in the directions people are asking for.

B. How We Want The Game To Be

• Blind Rage and Elven Maneuvers are both tragically undercosted. These cards are not representative of the power/quality ratio we want to see in low-level racial skill item cards.
• Humans have nothing equivalent, making it hard to make items on par with Raging Battler/Cautious Mobility types. This is okay in our book because we don't want to set the bar there.
• There's basically no 'fair' nerf to the aforementioned traits other than making them serious drawbacks, because a trait with no other effect than being a trait is worth roughly a B- (low-grade silver, like Inspiration) by our estimation. Blind Rage and Elven Maneuvers are paper and bronze, respectively, and as such shouldn't really have an upside. But they do.
• Part of the ongoing development of a game is fixing whatever's a problem. But another part is not fixing what isn't a serious problem. In general, players take nerfs poorly, especially to rare cards. Some of you may remember when a couple vampire attacks got buffed for no reason—and then I tried to nerf them, to bring them in line with the rest of the cards in the game, and some players cried about their Bynzers. Though Spear of Darkness is strictly better than Able Stab (like, 2x better), there was no real evidence that it was warping the multiplayer format, so we caved to the complaints and reinstated the unnecessary buff. The point here is that sometimes we are going to err on the side of not taking things away from players.
• We'd like to deal with any issues with humans by printing interesting and fun racial skill items for them in the future—not necessarily as 'good' as Raging Battler, but, you know, real options. We feel we've taken a massive step in this direction already and our goal is to stay the path.

IDK if any of this will have been of interest, but I hope it helps some.

 

As I always do when non-trivial balance issues are concerned, I'll plain out state I'm fully aware dealing with this sort of things is no easy business. I can also see how the dev team might not want to go crazy with the nerfs/changes, if at all possible. I think Blue Manchu has been doing a pretty good job up till now, all things considered, so I have no particular reason to think it won't be the case with this other matter too.

Interestingly enough, I don't think the real meat of the issue is how powerful Blind Rage & Elven Maneuers are per-se, but rather how they specifically fit in an already dominant (and very scary) strat. War-builds (3xwar, 2xwar-pri, 2xwar-wiz) relying on high mobility + other shenanigans pack a hell of a punch even w/o the "offending" skills/traits.

Things get worse when you can't properly respond to that because hitting the enemy provokes even more moves/attacks being drawn (Elven Maneuvers) or when even an otherwise laughable attack gets a serious dmg buff (Blind Rage). Add to that, focusing all of your firepower on a single target is not a very effective strat either, because of the popularity of Aegis of the Defender (which will also cause more card-draws).

Ofc, traits also come with the added benefit of further condensing your decks.

So yeah, it's not really how OP the new skills are (although they prob still are on the "too good to be true" side), but rather how they synergize so well with an already effective and quite honestly abused strat.

 

Thank you I appreciate you taking the time to craft this response.
I think my disappointment comes from the last changes to the Human Skills and creating the new Guidance tree. I think the -, soldier cards are all interesting and great for a support priest which humans were already the kings of so it wound up buffing a strength, but I think it actually took away some interesting options. My first problem is I can't remember what the skills looked like before this change, but it doesn't change my wish there was a 0 token without a compromise.
I would be happy to see more Shuffle, Team and have been disappointed with Block, Soldier. I know the Block, Soldier gives you a Block AND it gives you the flexibility to choose who has it, (or can be used to try to draw a block ironically) but you lose a turn in doing so which is great as a stalling technique, but it gives away a card in hand and normally I would avoid blocks with a 4+ roll. On my go to Human Skill for Warriors Superb Command (which yes requires a token) I miss having Shuffle, Team. Not a good closing card, but awesome for dealing with Volcano or Terrain attachments which can mean 24 points of damage avoided which coincidentally cannot be blocked.
I think I already made my point in my initial post, but for 0 token human skills you are stuck with a slow playing or a below-par card. You have 10 choices 2 are not bad, but slow you down, Advanced Guidance which has 3 playable cards the are Block/Attack soldier which slows your play or Untrained Flexibility which is a rare and you have Slow and the inconsistently useful Retreat. Then there is 1 with Wimpy which is not terrible unless you are trying a high mobility low damage build, one with Flimsy block which is not a good card in MP since it is dead against all Melee teams 99% of the time, and only blocks the low/no damage spells. Of the last 6, 3 have unreliable block which is a dead card 90% of the time or Vulnerable paired with the most desirable cards, which I know makes sense as a trade off but Vulnerable post balance is a big penalty and if you are a low level SP player (which was a factor in the new Human skills) it is particularly bad.
None of this address the additional issue that there are no positive (or mixed) traits for humans at low levels. Blind Rage which I know is a separate issue is clearly OP for its card value. If you lost the attacks instead taking damage it would be a bigger trade-off worthy of being so low level, but that is probably too severe. Similar for Elven Maneuvers but for that perhaps it should be a 1 and done like Sure Strike but keep the duration of 3.
Okay spent WAYYYYYYYY too much time on this. DEUCES!

 

Thanks for the well-crafted response

I understand the hesitation in making balance changes; you can't please everyone! Have you and BM put any more thought into adjusting character HP progression/gaps? I remember you mentioned this was not being strongly considered a few months ago, but maybe it's worth reconsidering now? This solution has a number of benefits that I can see:

• Limited retooling/effort: no need to change tons of cards and mechanics. Just adjust HP progressions!
• Global balance solution: putting all the race/classes on more even footing would mean you don't have to do more solutions like the Elf skills in AotA.
• Minimal backlash: As long as race/class combos don't wind up with less HP, I don't think players would have any issue with more HP for certain races/class combos.
• Combined playtesting: With EttSC coming up, you could combine the playtesting for balance changes with the other new content in the works.
• Behind the scenes change: If the new HP progression rates aren't super intuitive, that's okay. In SP I don't think many players care exactly when their characters gain HP, and in MP all that matters is where they are at 18.

 

It's something that's never too far from my mind because people occasionally request changes to the hp divides on the forums and I pay attention to every suggestion made on the forums. That said I'm not sure it's a "solution." It would change some numbers ... and then what? The more hitpoints elves have, the less of a reason to use humans, broadly speaking. Folks have suggested all kinds of different models for how hp should be differentiated between the races and classes, but none of them seem 'better' or 'more balanced' -- just different. *shrug*

That's an interesting impression. The guidance skill items couldn't have possibly taken away options, right? Since they're strictly additions to the game? As for including some of the new cards on existing skills, we generally replaced things like Cautious Sneak or Walk.

Not to nitpick but some numbers in your post are wrong, too. Shuffle, Team! can at most prevent 16 damage from lava, not 24, and Unreliable Block fails 83% of the time not 90. Your general points are correct but if you exaggerate enough times you end up painting a picture that's way worse than reality

 

The thing that gets me is that Unreliable block will never work vs anything electrical/hard to block, and usually that means arcane damage too.
/Strictly speaking, Unreliable block is way, way worse than Wounded Block. Even if Unblock has a purpose for existing, it is the bane of my existence.
It is probably the last bad card in the entire game.

Lol, just realized:

OMG UNRELIABLE BLOCK TRIGGERS 83% OF THE TIME NERF NOW

I know you meant it doesn't trigger, but still. Sigh.

PS: zero token skills are not the only place where humans are screwed up.

 

Good catch

 

We knew what you meant. I hope you feel better soon.

You don't consider that a valid purpose?

Elves have Slippery and dwarves have Blind Rage. Humans should have a suitable trait in their skills (and no other race's skills) as well.

 

Welp we all know that humans need a great card like Unreliable Block to go alongside Lateral Thinking... that has been obvious from the start.

Heck, nerf Lateral Thinking back to the way it used to be. Give Unreliable blocks a chance.

 

Without racial skills, dwarven HP gives them a distinct advantage because the only way for other races to compensate for low HP is with armor. Guess which race has the most armor cards? Dwarves! More than half their race skills have armor, while humans and elves get none!

I've been thinking about balancing the races by changing which cards are available to each.

Dwarves (sturdy but slow)
Keep: Shrug It Off, Blind Rage, Charge, Brutal Charge, Immovable, Toughness (but remove the card draw)
Lose: Reliable Mail, Parry, Duck, reduce numbers of other armors
Gain: Cautious Sneak (maybe add Free Move), Dangerous Maneuver, Smashing Spin, Obvious Maneuver, Superstitious, Loner, Clumsy (?)

Humans (teamwork and hand manipulation)
Keep: Leadership, Lateral Thinking, Inspirational Thinking, new guidance cards, battlefield trainings
Lose: team moves
Gain: Duck, Elvish Insight, Elven Trickery, Scouting Run, Cowardly

Elves (fast, both movement and drawing)
Keep: Slippery, Elven Scamper, Elven Maneuvers, Pathfinding, Skip, Leap
Lose: Loner, Superstitious, Insight, Trickery, Scouting Run
Gain: team moves, Parry, Dwarven Battle Cry, Forward Thinking, Wimpy, Combustible