Hero Changes and Tuning

I feel like as long as the bounced heroes refund their costs when returned, this would be a great little quirk.
“For my first trick, I’m going to nuke that stack of zombie orcs. Then for my second trick, I’ll make half my army disappear!”

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I’m also in favor of this nerf HOWEVER I think something @DrBwaa said raises a more interesting/broader issue:

I remember hearing talks of limiting the number of copies of a single card a player puts in their deck, and I think this is maybe something to consider. Literally EVERY CCG I’ve ever played does this and for the exact reason that @DrBwaa suggests… sometimes a good card is just too good when you can run a billion of them.

Dealers are similar. I don’t have a ton, but I’ve seen @Aran pull off some pretty silly shenanigans in large games by being able to generate an insane amount of gold by having more than 2 in play.

I think if cards were limited in a certain sense, a lot of these balance problems would be moot. Lil Wizard wouldn’t be so tough if I couldn’t drop 4 pennons in a row followed by a wiz.

Just a thought.

For the tournament especially I’m keep to impose a card limit, no more than 2 or 4 cards, and a minimum deck size of 20 or 40.

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Whistles innocently i don’t know what you mean
The bigger the game the more useful dealers will be, esp when you can get them out in numbers.
Setting a card limit to your hand would solve this but i think

I don’t think the LW bouncing heroes back to hand is that good an idea, i can see a few issues.
What happens if there are no goblin towns left (this is what i expect will happen in the 12 player nightmare game)
Also it is open to exploiting, if you are using dealers then the LW would also allow you to generate gold.
Add to the the possible chance of it affecting other players heroes and i think its more hassle then its worth.

If i might suggest an alternative:
LW does (X) x 50 damage when (X) is the number of nearby heroes.
Basically he is a magical cheerleader being egged on by the other important people nearby.
By himself he can only hold a little magic but with the others cheering him on he tries to pull more and more power into himself… sounds a bit dangerous to me :slight_smile:
Now to the point… how about you add this to him:
Has an (X) percent chance of dying from the magic he unleashes when (X) is the number of nearby heroes

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I like @Aran’s idea as well, and he does raise an interesting point about what happens if no goblin settlements are left.

why wouldn’t he burn gold? It would make sense thematically with the other mages that grow based on a resource? 5x the number of heroes? 10x?

Maybe totally different math like "total cost of all heroes/10?

I would love to see terraforming heroes in different races

Human farmer makes plains

Dwarven engineer makes mountiains

Orcish salt sower makes deserts

Elvish druid makes forests

Troll dredgers make swamps

Goblin demo squad blows itself up to do a str x attack and make plains.

Interesting idea. The benefit different races would derive from some kind of terraforming are rather unbalanced though. For Elves (Forest Dryad) and Trolls (Marsh Warden, Hydras) it would be very strong, maybe even OP, for the other races I don’t see much of a point.

On the other hand, zombies benefit very strongly from their terrain buff, so letting them spread it could be interesting. A new kind of boss that spreads terrain of a type maybe?

In general I think it would be fun if there was some dynamic change to the map as a game progresses.

I think as long as mana costs for such an ability were balanced as well as the cooldown for such an ability, any race could get to try to strengthen their position. Another thought would be that using the ability makes the change happen in 1 day of casting it. So it can’t be a quick solution to a problem, but rather a well laid plan.

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A few changes went in this week (some of which have caused some issues, but this should be resolved when the cards drawn before the change have been destroyed).

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Big fan of this, except for the blighted Dragon change. It’s not clear to me why either part of the change was made, but both changes seem to make blighted drags much less of a threat. Now you can just keep a stack at bay with tree whisperers until the problem takes care of itself. And even if you do get heroes caught in the blast, they have basically no chance to die. As BDs were basically the only legitimate threat to mortal heroes, it’s disappointing to see one of the game’s most unique foes lose its identity like this.

What if they were made immune to pinning/pushing, etc?

yeah, that would make them very scary indeed!

It would make them scarier (as with any big Immortals), but if anything even less unique. What made the old Blighted Dragons so compelling was that they, alone of all enemies, posed a serious threat to Heroes, even those with ranged attacks. By removing their death effect and changing their damage to scale with the target’s population like everything else, they become just a stronger Blighted Gryphon in most situations.

Without a reason to keep heroes out of danger (forcing players to make tough choices about army strength vs hero value), there’s no reason to develop a different strategy to deal with BDs. The same old “send our most-buffed army to meet them” or “stand at the side of the road and kill them with archers and Little Wizards” tactics become the best way to deal with BDs, along with everything else.

At the end of the day, I just think this iteration of the Blighted Dragon ability just isn’t very interesting.

Totally agree. It was huge team-building fun to concentrate on the threat of the old immortal dragons. Now, instead of being a problem that would grow over time, it’s one that will eventually resolve itself. And IMO, it’s important to keep a high bar for hard core players. (I also think in Nightmare settings you might increase the overall number of souls.)

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We wanted all the AoE attacks to be consistent. With no chance of chaining deaths, we didn’t think exploding on death was very interesting, so we decided to take when the dragons would explode out of the players hands. They are still fast-moving, flying, massive, and will take out entire armies if they explode near your armies before you kill them. If you have humans or elves, you can move them around, but it will still be hard to manage due to their movement.

I like to imagine what it would be like to having them flying through your Orcish lands (the most common situation). You can’t control them, you have huge army stacks that you rely on for your strength, you can’t outrun them, and you have to get up close to them to attack.

Try playing a game against them and see how it goes.

So just started a game of Volcanic Dust, one of the quintessential dragon games:

Six hours in, already one dragon exploded. It’s definitely a nerf to the most challenging (i.e. fun) unit in the game.

I promise, “exploding on death” was very interesting.

I don’t get it, guys. They don’t die on explosion. It’s Unstable Flames which explode and make other mortals and immortals to suffer around. May be it is that, what you didn’t understood?
Because I definetly don’t see change in dragon numbers, when they explode. (Thoug, I don’t see change in other being numbers around when they explode too…) Also, in huge dragon stack, there’s deffinetly a super small but still a chance to kill one of them by thoat explosion. So far, my enemy dragon stacks of 10 dragons simply never reducend in count even after like 3 or 4 explosions.

They currently do die when they explode, but it could be a better idea if they don’t die when they explode. So they would just have a chance to perform and AoE attack every X hours, but you’d still have to kill them. Then they would be very unlikely to kill themselves.

I’d like to have another look at Zombie dragons in the next few days. I do want him to continue to be one of the scariest most challenging units in the game. There we just a few “broken” things about how they worked before. The chain reactions didn’t work like people expect and the on death trigger was not very effective because its a little too easy to pin them in place and shoot them at range.

Right now thier area attack does not scale based on the number of zombies in the group, so I would like that to change. So if you have one zombie flying around it not really all that scary, but if there are 10 it will kill almost anything.

I wonder if it would be intresting if they fired thier power every time they were the target of a spell. Encourage players to try and take them out with melee.

This could be really ugly – but how about a small area effect that fires every time a player uses a mana cost spell?

Otherwise, a large, fast, tough unit that is immune to pinning would be an epic fight.