So ranged attacks no longer pay valor. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, since it drives more melee combat, but it’s significantly diminished the combat value of the base goblin and elf units. I suspect that the point was to promote melee combat, rather than to nerf ranged combat. Perhaps the mana cost of ranged attacks should be reduced in response. Without earning valor, the overall value of a ranged attack has diminished, so it would make sense that the cost be reduced to accommodate the drop in value.
Do you mean that ranged attacks don’t cost valour or don’t earn valour anymore?
Because they still earn valour (just checked it).
We’ve not been earning valor for ranged attacks in our current game. I’m not sure where it’s posted, but one of the players said that they confirmed that this was intentional behavior. We’re in “experimental mode”, so that may have something to do with it.
Yeah, now that “can only deploy 1 hero per settlement every 6 hours” is part of the standard rules, the new Experimental ruleset is “ranged attacks no longer earn you Valor”.
And yes, I agree if this rule becomes part of the standard ruleset, the mana cost of ranged attacks should decrease.
I think the value of ranged attacks was simply too high, and thins brings it more into line with melee. Ranged attacks cost mana, sure, but so do many special melee attacks/buffs. Plus, ranged attacks bring with them no chance of danger.or depletion of the unit.
My feel is that the mana costs are generally fine as they are, even with the no valour nerf.
I really worry about the Goblins here, especially in higher difficulty levels.
Particularly in the early game, Goblins rely very heavily on ranged attackers like the Little Wizard to generate enough Valour to take settlements. Their archers simply aren’t strong enough in melee to use as early-game combatants. I worry that without gaining Valour from ranged attacks, “Goblin” players will be forced to use some other, more combat-ready race (Humans, Orcs, Trolls) as their de facto main race until much later in the game.
Obviously some branching out is expected, but I would hate to see the Goblins relegated to midgame gold farms. I’m picturing a hypothetical two-player map with a river down the middle, mortal Goblins on one side and Zombie Orcs on the other, and I’m frankly just not sure it’s even possible for the Goblins to win. How would they ever get enough Valour to even capture all their settlements against units much more numerous and over twice as strong in melee, even outside of their native terrain?
I certainly understand the reason for this experiment and I like it in a general, don’t-look-too-closely sort of sense. I’d just feel a lot more comfortable if someone could tell me how Goblin players are expected to survive the early game without pretending they picked some other race for two days.
Haven’t played a round with it yet, but the change seems to complicate gameplay without a good reason. With the changes coming to blind justice and high elf type units to instead spend all of the resource they are using to do damage the issue of valor feeding into future ranged attacks is already gone.
Have those changes actually been confirmed to be coming? I agree, only one or the other is necessary, and doing both would cripple units like the Justice or High Elf beyond the point of usefulness, but I wasn’t aware that Jay had committed to making those changes.
It wouldn’t be both. We were just discussing the no valour for ranged and we are not convinced about it. There is definitely a problem that needs to be tackled with the Justice and High Elf, and it will most likely be a solution more specific to them.
If you are planning these changes then i think a halfway point would be safer.
Ranged attacks produce half the valour and justice/high elf use half of the resource when used
We’ve decided to leave ranged attacks as having the same valour as melee.
High Elf and Blind Justice will consume 10% of the resource they are powering off, which means they will effectively have no gain, apart from killing zombies. We might need to tune it up from there.
Sounds great!
Edit: not that I think Goblins need nerfing, but what about the Little Wizard? He operates on sort of the same principle. Since it costs 2 valor to draw a card, if he’s getting 8 valor from an attack, he can buff his next attack by 4 cards. Should he be returning some cards in your hand to your deck?
If you want to promote melee as a good option when compared to ranged – why not buff the value of experience? 1 xp / fight is pretty measly.
Make it 5 xp for the survivors. From a narrative standpoint, zombie fighting veterans should be the guys and gals you turn to in order to make headway against the zom hordes.
I think this is mostly fine, since there is a hard limit on his power (the number of cards in your deck).
Moreover, the player benefits more if (s)he plays those cards instead of holding them in their hand, which decreases the Little Wizards power over time.
It might still work with a deck specifically built around the Little Wizards, but i’m not sure how effective it would be.
Buffing xp might work, but it would change the power balance in the players favor in the later stages. I think it would be preferable if we could find a method which affects as few other systems as possible, to reduce the complexity of that method.
I noted in the thread on hero tuning that the Little Wizard could do something like POW = 1 x number of Gobbos on the field. Or 1 x Gold in hand (to complete the troika of Justice and High Elf). Whatever route, I’d like to move away from the metagame effect of ‘cards in hand’ – too easy to abuse and not particularly setting appropriate.
I’ll agree. The Little Wizard has problems. He can be buffed directly via hero coins. In a tight situation, you can spend your way out of it.
It is tremendously effective. I saw a guy with a very cool Little Wizard deck stomp his way across the entirety of Fountain (on Hard I think) as the Goblins a couple weeks ago.
I don’t in any way think it needs to be nerfed, but I do agree that the mechanic feels pretty metagamey. I also agree with @Praetorian that a gold-scaling attack (even without the huge range of the Justice and High Elf) would feel better for him and create some interesting trade offs.
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That would seem like a good solution.