Overall I like all the boss changes I have played with. The one exception is the Dread Kniggt and I am wondering what other people think. I like the concept that he and his guys can’t be pinned. But especially with the three hour cool down my concern is that he draws zombies away all the time in small groups so a lot of the the time he is actually not scary at all because you can follow the settlements he has blighted and burn the bodies with minimal resistance (because the undead are busy following the Boss but never catching him) and it creates a huge number of small zombie groups that you can pick off or use area of effect powers on. Maybe he has more force, can’t be pinned himself, and draws all nearby zombies to a common location when he spawns but then just goes and can’t be pinned. What do other people think?
Agree.
If you’ve got a few dark forest witches, a Dread Knight is great.
I think this is the real problem. lots of small groups of zombies are almost always good for the player because they’re super vulnerable to ranged attacks, and can easily be killed by larger units who can gain TONS of combat bonuses by cleaning them up.
Maybe he only draws units over x STR? That way he wouldn’t pull 1 or two bodies from a freshly blighted town?
Maybe he doesn’t even pull troops so much as dispelling all compulsion effects every 3 hours to all units within range…
Yes. The zombies are dumb so they always go where the Dread Knight is versus where he is going to be, which considering that only goblins and elves are faster than him mostly means they end up following him instead of ever “assembling the horde”. I like your idea about just preventing compulsion for units in three leagues. What if he did that, had more force himself, and maybe also buffed the zombies in three leagues (like Mighty General but with a range effect). I think that would be pretty scary. Lots of big stacks that you have to engage directly.
You know what would be a challenge? What if one of the bosses made zombies that are within one league explode after melee (like a mini version of the blighted dragon)?
This exactly. This was the first new Dread Knight I encountered, and while it was reasonably strong up-front, I was later able to send a couple armies through his “tail” and collect 10-15 combat experience on each of them. If I’d had a DFW, obviously I would have been in Mana Heaven.
I love what he does in concept; it’s just the presumably unintended side effect of creating a swarm of easily-dispatched followers that’s problematic. I spent a few minutes coming up with a couple tweaks that might improve the behavior:
- Only pull units with at least 300-500 base Strength. [This feels more like a stopgap than a real fix; in my mind it just reduces the severity of the problem without really addressing it.]
- Don’t pull units standing on Graveyards. [This one would actually work, but it reduces his initial effectiveness for sure.]
- In addition to the current ability, any zombies within 1 League are teleported into the Dread Knight’s army. [This doesn’t fix the long tail problem, but it does make the DN himself a lot more threatening. Rather than killing a modest boss stack followed by a long train of nothing units, players would have to kill a much more threatening boss stack, and the “tail” starts far enough back that they might have time to gather into legitimate armies before the players get to them.]
- In addition to the current ability, affected Immortals over halfway to their next waypoint teleport to their next vertex. [This is a somewhat crazier version of the one above, basically giving his train a mechanic for combining into fewer, stronger armies, as well as potentially allowing slower Immortals to catch up with the main group. This is my personal favorite.]
- In addition to his current ability, affected Immortals have their speed increased depending on how far away they are, with further units getting a larger speed boost. [Again, a way to help his followers group up with him and with each other].
That would be pretty cool. Like a blighted fire elemental or something.
I agree he sux right now, and I think we need to take a step back rethink him entirely.
@DrBwaa I like your idea of a teleport to him, and sure it makes him strong, but at the expense of the surrounding area.
He is a General right, he commands armies, what about if he made the zombies nearby smarter or more aggressive.
Zombies with his buff dont just move mindlessly to the nearest settlement, what about they charge at your armies if they are stronger and retreat if they are weaker. Perhaps they could just attack no matter how strong they are.
Would that make him scarier to face?
Teleport nearby units to him when he spawns. Increases the force of everyone in his army. He and his army are immune to move compulsions. Huge unit who can’t be pushed around coming at you.
Oh yeah, I do like the immunity to move compulsions but I think I want to do it properly rather than simply getting him to redo his every 3 hours. Needs to be a special trait like Elusive or the new Lurker
“Unstoppable”
Juggernaut.
The new Jester King certainly feels different. I might like it, but the change occured midway through our match and I already had two artilleries set up to explode him, so we only saw the power trigger once.
As for the resource bosses (Queen of Lies, Lich King, Master of Coin), I think they would work better by cutting your resource generation in half and growing stronger off the “stolen resources”. That would prevent them from utterly FUBARing players at the start of the game. (The Queen of Lies is probably the worst boss to start a game with because it cuts in half the # of initial settlements you can claim.)
Definitely saw this in a game that I’m in. She pretty much tore me in half for a solid chunk of the game on Hard.
However, we did manage to turn things around, and chances are we’re going to win.
Maybe it’s just that I have a particular taste for things insanely difficult, (My favorite games are roguelikes, and I borrowed a playstation from a friend just so I could play Dark Souls) but I feel like her difficulty is actually pretty on par with how I would want a “hard” game to be… which is y’know pretty friggin hard.
I’m not disagreeing with you: She increases the difficulty of a game a LOT when she shows up early… but so far I haven’t seen it be “beyond all repair”
So far JK’s ability has proven (to me) to be interesting, but not necessarily something that makes the game more difficult.
As you say, all the resource bosses are very strong if they appear at or near the start of the game. I doubt the creators will go back to a take-resources-away approach anytime soon, though. I’m sure that was something they considered when they originally changed these bosses from their original global thievery abilities, and I expect their current powers were chosen partially because rather than just doing things to the players, they give the players some choices about which cards, spells, and towns are important enough to justify paying the doubled price and empowering a boss.
I haven’t seen the new JK yet; I’m interested to see what happens there. If he has a bunch of stacks near him and gets near a heavily populated area, that could make things very interesting to deal with.
The Queen of Lies is stronger than most, though, since at the start, all of your resources depend on claiming towns. She can easily cut your gold & mana generation in half.
Perhaps the solution there is to start each player out with more settlements & a mana pool. That would solve issues with an early Queen of Lies and the slower start thanks to the new hero deployment rules.
She’s certainly the strongest of the three. I don’t think she’s problematically overpowered, though.
Shes not. She’s tough, but on my current Hard Volcanic Dust (and she appeared 5 hours in) she hasnt stopped us from making significant advances.
I though QoL made Volcanic really challenging, but in a good way. I’m not keen on all three at once though!