Massed Eldermages

Hello fellow Zombie hunters.

I’m very new to the game so please bear with me if I’m barking up the wrong tree. But I’m also aware that the game is in development and might suffer from play balance issues. I want to discuss what I think is one such issue.

In my first multiplayer game, Celestial pools, one player has more or less won the game single handed in less than a day:

As you can see Qpona has a deck made almost exclusively of Mage cards. This turns the Eldermages into mana volcanoes (5 mana per Mage within 3 leagues)! And in turn the High Elves become nukers extraordinaire when you have a mana pool approaching 1000 mana.

Now, I’m not at all trying to discredit Qpona here. He/She’s found a very cool way of using the mages to full potential! But it’s overpowered. The game is over after less than a day, now it’s just a matter of waiting while the nukes fall.

Being so new to the game I can’t claim to have ideas on on how to fix this. I’ll leave that discussion to those more experienced, I don’t even know half the cards in the game! But I think it’s important to think of some refunding opportunity or similar if cards are severely nerfed. You shouldn’t be punished for being clever :wink:

Thanks for such a great game, I’m having so much fun!

Cheers,
/Grond

Qpona has spent a LOT of money on Blight! Getting that many Eldermages is no small feat.

I would love to see a bit of a lateral on Eldermages’ powers – perhaps linking their mana generation to the number of forests in a given area rather than the number of mages (so its not scalable). Or make the Eldermages’ mana generation on a percentage chance for success – like Gold/Crystal miners.

Oh crap Qpona… They’re on to us! (Well mostly you, I don’t have that kind of eldermage power yet)

/Obliviate

Elves have been great at generating mana for some time now.

I believe Jay already has an item on his Trello board for nerfing the Eldermage.

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There is something to be said for this. He has a lot of the hard-to-get, powerful cards; it took a lot to get that, and now he is reaping the rewards (something that should continue to exist to an extent). It does have this side effect though, and feels like it leads into a pay-to-win situation some. (If you don’t want to grind it out, just spend money on coins and draw until you get a collection like that.)

Qpona had only a few High Elves in the game I played with him, and he used them to very effectively protect a mana pool another nearby player wasn’t making an effort to protect. I was very happy with them there. :smile:

Yeah like Eshal said the trello board does mention nerfs for Eldermage and Dealer.

[Here is the link to the trello board so you can see more information][1]

That being said, I think that High Elves should get a small nerf as well the more powerful they are. A 10 league radius is extremely strong if you can get a large amount of mana. Maybe the more mana you have and the more powerful the High Elf attack will be, the smaller range it will have. So say once you hit 100+ Mana, the range turns into 8, 200+, 6 and 300+ it becomes a 5 range attack.
[1]: Trello

I’ve already nerfed the Eldermage and the High Elf, along with some other tuning to various cards. These changes aren’t live yet though.

We’ve also been discussing some ways to limit or constrain some of the cards, which I believe Jay is planning to put together a brief to put on the forum soon. So say tuned …

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I’m not saying there shouldn’t be great combo opportunities. On the contrary, it’s part of what makes the game interesting and fun. But there has to be a balance since at least for me a great part of the fun is to try and make do with limited resources.

I can totally see that Qpona must have spent a lot of time and/or $ to get all those elves. That’s why I think it’s important that nerfing must be made while keeping great supporters of the game happy.

One idea is to allow a one-time refund of cards that get nerfed in their original Hero coin cost. There’s an online RPG, Path of Exile, that uses a similar practice this when they change the game radically. Your heroes have a large skill tree where you assign points, but once you’ve done that they are more or less locked. But when a major game upgrade changes the balance, you are allowed, once, to re-build your whole skill tree. Works really well.

I like the idea of a long range spell, it’s just that it gets overpowered when you have “too much” mana. One idea is to make the spell cost a % of your mana pool rather than a fixed amount. The spell is called Mana burn after all!

or the cooldown increasing as you get more mana

Or an even more radical suggestion make it set your mana to 0 and balance around that (maybe like a storm friars or dark witch attack)

I like the set mana to 0 idea…

Perhaps change the ability to be.

Make a Ranged attack 5 times your current mana, range 10 leagues. Mana cost: Current Mana total…

This way it’s the same power but it costs all of your mana to cast it.

Also, change Eldermage card type away from mage, (Maybe to something like ‘Elder’) so they don’t count themselves for the mana generation.

Actually, I think that might be a really good idea.

Sorry y’all, that was my strategy. While I did spend money on the game not as much as you might think. Grinding the single player levels sometimes claiming a elf settlement will let you recruit a card for 1 hero coin. Grinding those levels you can build up elder mages and high mages.

I suggested giving more zombie heroes iron hide (cannot get killed except in melee) and having a new zombie lord that eats randomly half of all valor, mana or gold every 12 hours. It would also have iron hide. Depending on how much mana, valor or gold captured it would spawn a variable amount of monsters (golems?). This would make things a bit more difficult all around and would make storing up a lot of mana/gold/valor dangerous.

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Also I would agree with Dex: while I’m not mad/understand the game is in beta if you are hoping people pay for cards I would recommend being very careful when nerfing them. A reward of hero coins would be good if you do nerf them and makes sense. I’d suggest not nerfing cards whenever possible but making zombies stronger/better to make player strategies adapt a little more.

Also I would suggest making the high mages range 8 instead of 6 (down from 10) OR the eldermage power to affect mages within 5 or 6 leagues. The only reason I suggest that is it seems elder mages have changed to only give 3 mana per mage instead of 5. The eldermages have to stick close to the high elves to be effective and if the range of high elves make them need to get close in large maps then elder mages range should be larger to make them more versatile (or high elves have larger range)

I disagree with giving people hero coins back for nerfing cards; the game is still in beta after all. Secondly, I’ve played a lot of games, inevitably it happens in pretty much every MOG…

Players find a strategy which is clearly superior to others, they get tired of losing to said strategy so they decide to play dirty as well. They invest all their time and energy into building towards that strategy. Eventually the developers catch on and nerf said strategy; player community wines like a bunch of babies because they invested so much time/money/energy building towards that single strategy.

After seeing it so frequently now, I never try to chase those fad strategies; you’re just asking for #ButtHurt in the end.

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It is in beta and you are trying to get players in the door and not lose them. Players who pay money for getting cards could feel frustrated if the cards/strategy gets nerfed. It is something that is done other places true but from a customer experience it’s better to not nerf cards but evolve zombie lords/things outside of player cards to deal with overpowered cards. Players feel slightly less frustrated that way and it feels more like a new challenge to deal with as opposed to something taken away from players. It’s a psychological trick but I’d say important. I’m not saying I’m mad, I’m clearly rather invested in this game. But players dropping because of it is bad for the game/community/the creator.

TL;DR I’d still be careful nerfing cards and just because other games nerf whenever doesn’t mean it’s good customer experience

I would generally agree with being cautious with nerfing cards, but I think in the case of eldermages & high elves something needs to be done & possibly something dramatic

It’s already been done actually, it seems like eldermages are cut to 3 mana per mage from 5 and distance of high elf mages is cut to 6 from 10. Still think new zombie lords are the key as it doesn’t really fix the problem long term, if I get enough high elf mages and eldermages I can overwhelm regardless. Zombie lords that are unkillable except in melee, take a percentage of mana/valor/gold and spawn constructs based on amount stolen is a good percentage fix that automatically scales. Just my .02c and I’m perfectly happy being wrong :smile: