Redundant Cards

Shaman Priestess and Elder Shaman fill the same function.
Same with the Cyclops Priestess and the Cyclops Priest.

The only difference being that Shaman Priestess/Cyclops Priest operate on already existing graveyards, while Elder Shaman/Cyclops Priestess are done in anticipation of losing a settlement.

A Cyclops Priestess blesses settlements in a 1 league radius, for 8 hours, such that only 50% of the population rises as undead. Whereas the Cyclops Priest, in a 2 league radius (for half the mana!!) reduces every battlefield graveyard by 50%.
This is essentially the same effect but, in my opinion, the Cyclops Priest is better, as it can be used aggressively as well (and has a larger radius and a cheaper mana cost).

The same applies to the Shaman Priestess and Elder Shaman.

The Elder Shaman can ignite every single civilian in a population, killing them all instantly, and preventing the undead from taking them, reducing the gravesite produced by 100%.
Whereas the Shaman Priestess can do the exact same, but to a battlefield graveyard, and at range (1 league).
Though the Shaman Priestessā€™ ability costs 12 mana to the Elder Shamanā€™s 4, it still seems like the Shaman Priestess has the unequivocally better ability, as it can be used aggressively, and can also fulfill the exact same function as the Elder Shamanā€™s.

In a game like Blight where there are very few cards, the overlap in their abilities is very much felt. I feel like some alternative abilities should be proposed. I would prefer to keep the aggressive cards, as they are the more useful ones (the Shaman Priestess may be the orcs best card!).

The Elder Shaman does not in any way sound redundant. Iā€™d use him and the priestess if I could. Thereā€™s plenty of times I can remember where having him would have helped me a lot more than the priestess.

I do confess that sheā€™s probably the best card the Orcā€™s have, not that Iā€™ve seen them all or anythingā€¦

What is the difference between a zombie horde capturing a settlement and then having the priestess immediately raze the graveyard, and a zombie horde capturing a settlement and having no graveyard produced? I donā€™t think there arenā€™t uses for the Elder Shaman, only that there are a limited number of cards and that he and the priestess have very large overlap.

Flavor-wise, I like the elder shaman a lot. I never take him as a card, however, as the cases where I would prefer him over the priestess are very, very limited.

Maybe an elder shaman can also raze a mana pool, preventing it from creating a boss? Still very situational, but at least gives him something to do that the priestess cannot.

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IMO, the primary difference is that Elder Shaman is cheaper in gold AND mana, and heā€™ll mow down the entire population of soon-to-be immortals without any rising up. His opportunity cost is a lot less. At the start of a match, when youā€™re having to do scorched earth tactics, youā€™re not going to have much mana and gold to waste-so the ES has an advantage in early game.

You use Priestess to clean up already spawning dead nests (Offensively), you use Elder Shaman to quickly burn out populations right before they get slaughtered, on a discount. (Defensively).

I do agree with you though, they could easily bake both abilities into a single unit and then make the other do something more interesting.

Right, I think weā€™re on the same page. I recognize that there are special use cases where each card excels, and youā€™re right that the Elder Shaman is cheaper in both gold and mana, which gives him at least some edge over the priestess (unlike the Cyclops Priest/Priestess, where I would argue the Priest is unequivocally the better card and completely replaces the Priestess except in the most fringe of situations). When Iā€™m selecting cards to take with me though, I would rather take more Shaman Priestesses and increase my odds of drawing her, rather than take any Elder Shaman. I feel the Elder Shaman needs some additional utility to make him feel worth taking over a Shaman Priestess. Simply being a cheaper but worse card isnā€™t a strong enough reason to me.

I feel about the same. Elder Shaman you take when you anticipate losing ground (expected on harder difficulties), and you have to draw the card when you can actually use it. While Priestess can be used regardless, in any situation, to similar effect.

It almost makes me wish that the cards in our decks had some sort of ā€˜initiativeā€™ score that made it more/less likely for certain cards to be drawn earlier or later. Some cards are really bad if you donā€™t draw them right away (think like Elven Berserker), or if you draw them too late-while some cards work for the entire game.

On the initiative idea, I think awhile back the idea was floated of selecting your starting hand. And then after those first 5 itā€™s random draw.
This would be especially useful for those cards that you really only need 1-2 of, but you ā€œneedā€ them. Like a griffon horn for the dwarves.

Choosing your starting hand would make Elder Shaman tons more useful.

I personally think the Elder Shaman and Shaman Priestess are different enough to make them both worthwhile, even if the Elder is admittedly harder to use. He used to be able to blow up Mana Pools, which made him much more valuable. I think if that ability were reinstated, or if his strength were upped to make him more valuable as a fighter (sensible as to be useful heā€™s always right on the front lines), heā€™s be right on par with the Priestess again.

Now, the human pair I canā€™t argue with. Yes their functionalities are fairly different, but the Priest is better in basically every practical situation. There was a thread about buffing the Priestess a while back; Jay agrees that sheā€™s underpowered so I think thatā€™s likely to improve in the future when the devs figure out a better identity for her.

Personally I think that the elder shaman has one more advantage over the shaman priestress that we more active players might be overlooking: He can be spawned at the scene, immediately burn the village, and leave. For casual players who only log in every 12hours or so, this might make him more practically useful than the shaman priestress in certain situations because with him you can use him way ahead of time.
In periods I were I couldnā€™t be online very often, I noticed that cards like the shaman priestress can run into immortals and be slaughtered relentlessly during the period where I just couldnā€™t log in. For people who canā€™t micromanage, she does need to wait near a graveyard for a while, after all. Sure, if the settlement you need to burn is just one league over, this doesnā€™t apply but in other cases it does.

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For my part, even with the higher cost i find the priestess Ć  little more versatile than the shaman. You are kinda happy to draw one in all game phase. Orc have a lot of good stuff to put in your deck you always want to draw. They are pretty similar, the difference is minimal. Maybe the shaman could have another mid/late game purpose. Or a defensive like inflicting some damage on immortal that attack for X hours after (city still burning).

Thinking of ideas to make the Elder Shaman better, building on Bobs idea, is he could use an additional defensive benefit to purging population. Goblins can burn population in the same way with the mad pirate, but at least they get gold for it. Orcs donā€™t get anything, which means itā€™s almost always better to wait and see if you lose the town first.

What if a percentage of the pop the ES roasts became some sort of defensive units? Possibly immobile or temporary, and obviously only a fraction of the strength you would have had training them all as Orc swords. But it would have a tangible benefit.

I am thinking of like, he could summon ancestral Orc Spirits or Fire Elementals. His ability is even called ā€˜Flaming Sacrificeā€™

Sacrifice to what? :stuck_out_tongue:

What if it gave a defensive bonus? +1 per 100 killed from the dead bodies being stacked up like a wall?

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I wasnā€™t too enthousiastic about the whole ā€˜changing the elder shamanā€™ thing because I liked the idea of people having to do what is absolutely neccesary to stop the blight including burning their own people. But this idea, this idea! Burning corpses and using them to build a wall against the udnead, Iā€™m loving the grim darkness of it!

Iā€™m still working on putting together a comprehensive suggestions postā€¦but this issue is something Iā€™ve thought about quite a lot so I thought Iā€™d just put in my 2 cents.

FIRST THE ORCS. I really like the both the Elder Shaman (ES) and Shaman Priestess (SP), but have a couple thoughts, mostly in agreement with previous posts and suggestions.

SHAMAN PRIESTESS ā€“ 12 mana is kind of expensive and by the time Iā€™m 1 league away I often just say the heck with it and park her near the graveyard from a safe direction and wait until they move. All that being said, she is a common card so I donā€™t think a change is necessary.

ELDER SHAMAN ā€“ Here I would really like to see a bit more utility for a rare card. I think either of the ideas already mentioned are good choices.

  1. Allow him to burn mana pools. Makes him a uniquely situational but cool card and imo makes sense in both game mechanics as well as lore when contrasted with the elven Pool Priestess.

  2. Allow his burning of the population to have some added benefit. If it were to generate gold/mana per soul, that would be kind of cool, but would also overlap a bit with Mad Pirate (albeit perhaps the ES were to have a much smaller gain ratio and he kills everything)ā€¦but Iā€™m not sure I care for that. If we were to go with option 2, Iā€™d suggest that burning the population just immediately trains a single orc swordsman unit (perhaps all 50 orcs in the unit if there are enough population, but less if there arenā€™t enoughā€¦to avoid exploits of burning a 1 orc population settlement to yield a 50 orc swordsman unit).

SECOND, THE HUMANS. Here I really think a change is needed. In this case we have two rare cards that have a nearly 100% overlap, as opposed to the orcs where a common and a rare have a somewhat overlap. This problem is different (and more pressing) since with the orcs I mainly just feel the ES is undervalued and under functioned.

CYCLOPS PRIEST ā€“ Good card as it is, no need to change imo.

CYCLOPS PRIESTESS ā€“ Card needs total rework imo. Two suggestions, first one is easier to implement, second one is an interesting new mechanic that Iā€™d prefer but would take balancing across several considerations.

  1. New function would simply be to buff all humans within a certain range, finding a balance between amount of buff and range in accordance with her ā€œrarenessā€. One league = medium buff, 2 leagues = small buff, only humans on site = large buff. Problem here is that it overlaps some with spirit shamanā€¦But I was envisioning her only buffing humans with no negative buffs.

  2. Orā€¦ a new mechanic (and I like this one) is that she targets a graveyard within one league, and does damage to existing immortals standing at that graveyard as a function of how many bodies are in the graveyard. Balancing here would be key, but imagine a stack of 1k zombies takes a settlement and there are 200 bodies at the graveyard of that settlement. Forget about exact numbers (balancing needed), but lets say the Cyclops Priestess would do 200 x 4 damage to the existing 1k stack at that same graveyard location. I think this is cool as it forces you to get her close, but she could do significant damage in special situations where a stack is on top of a large graveyard. In same cases, you might deploy her at a settlement about to fall, escape, let it fall, and then take out the stack with the graveyard bodies.

What to do with the graveyard bodies is another point to consider. three choices:

  • a. Bodies stay in graveyard, no change.
  • b. Bodies are burned, similar to orc Shaman Priestess (but she is a common card remember).
  • c. And I like this the mostā€¦she actually raises the graveyard bodies as undead zombies, but they would ā€œfightā€ the existing zombie stack (immediately resolved in the form of a ranged damage attack). This would mean that her ā€œdamageā€ would have to be significant, since she is in effect, raising the entire graveyard. I think this makes the most sense from a lore perspective ā€“ She raises all dead bodies to fight in a quick, single battle against the already pre-existing undead at the same locationā€¦but after the attack, everyone there are undead bad guys again though. I think this could have interesting ramifications that Iā€™m not sure I can completely quantify yet since it would also mean that you could use her to actually completely raise a graveyardā€¦if you wanted to for some reasonā€¦maybe we would in some cases???

Again, this idea would all be about balanceā€¦does she just target 1 graveyard? Does she do all graveyards within a league? How much damage? What happens to the bodies? Keep in mind her use is situational since a graveyard with no zombies on top of it is useless to her.

Anyhow, those are my inputs/ideas, thanks for reading.

One Man Wolfpack

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The more I think about the proposed Cyclops Priestess mechanic, I think it wonā€™t work if she just raises the graveyard bodies and does damage to the pre-existing stack since in the end, she probably raises a heck of a lot more bodies than she killsā€¦

So what about this:

CYLOPS PRIESTESS
Righteous Undead
Select a Battlefield Graveyard within 1 league and raise all bodies into immortals. If there are immortals at the graveyard location already, they do immediate battle with the immortals that were just raised. Restores in 21 hours. Costs 10 mana."

It would still introduce the interesting affect of being able to raise a graveyard entirely even if no other immortals were there. It is implied but not explicitly mentioned that the ā€œgoodā€ zombies that are just raised are only good for this very first battle and afterwards behave just like all other zombies.

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Hey @Valhallan, cool idea!

I really like the risk reward mechanic it introduces. You raise them, they do thier bidding, and they you have to deal with whatever is left.

Iā€™m not sure if you ever read any of the old threads, but we do have plans to allow you to level up heroes, and when you do you choose either a righteous or corrupted path for them. When you choose corrupted path, you draw on the undead powers to make you stronger, but it carries a risk.

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