As someone who has played that type of deck before, it takes quite a bit of time and nora to set up all those barricades. What were you doing while he was sitting around wasting nora on relics?
he played it really well, killed a unit every time he used it. He was also using Ice Heart and wish on his champs so they where super hard to kill. I rushed his shrine early, after contesting his font, to force a transfigure once I knew he was spaming the barrcade combo. It just turned into a nipping fight with a ton of healing and camping. You know the foundation of fun.
I love that bg haha, kudos to him, well fought, sucks you got a D.C. The bg itself though is countered pretty easily.
I try to suggest very small changes because sokolov is more likely to implement them / try them out than big ones. Obviously id prefer ur way but I think the - 5 hp is a change that is likely to pass
The bg needs no nerf, Jesus of all the things broken in this game barricades ? It's like the one bg left that doesn't play the same as every other bg. Also just sit behind the barricades, if he can't reach you then what's the issue. They are as big of a nuisance for the person using the bg as the person playing against it. Changing this is ridiculous, it shouldn't even be a topic. -5 hp and you might as well eliminate the ability and spell, because it won't be worth it.
Yeah since barricades are "super common",and relics aren't an extreme investment that can be killed by a silly global ability.
The topic isn't really about barricades themselves, it's about the bursticade combo. I have played several games against Lightsmith (who started the whole recent fad as far as I know) and Kokone (who copied and adapted the deck a few days later). In both cases, the first few games I played were drawn out but not really challenging. This is because they were using it as a single-target kill with maybe a bit of upside, and they weren't fully taking advantage of the tempo gains. 1st case: A single barricade+snowburst is 85n. It deals 6*8 =48 damage to a single target, with a yeti spirit out (ps these things quietly remain one of the most efficient things in frost amp (pps frost amp is probably the top deck in pox ATM) and are excellent font contestors in meta) that pulls up to 56 damage against a regular non-tough/combat awareness champ. If you just use it this way it's an inefficient spot-removal with upside, but that upside creates a huge "skill-buffer" for misplays. Even if you somehow are bad at memorizing a single number or miscalculated the amount of extra damage you needed to bring a champ down to 48hp and left it alive, the target champ is still helpless, as the impeding snow makes it lumbering and if it somehow does survive it takes a full turn of not attacking the opponent to accomplish this. 2nd case: The more recent games against both of those players have been more helpless because they've now caught on to the general inefficiency of a single barricade + snowburst. If you instead save nora for one turn and have 120n to play with, you can cast two barricades and a snowburst. Depending on the opposing player's positioning, you're looking at a minimum of 48 damage to 2 targets at 60n per target, but that extends even more if there are other champs within 4 spaces of the targets. If the targets are within 3 spaces of one another, you can overlap the barricades slightly and bring the single-target damage up past 48. This takes 3 spells. With a 2nd snowburst in the deck, the combo's cooldown is based on the cooldown of the 2 barricades: 7 rounds. This gives the deck a baseline return of 2 60n kills every 7 rounds. Upside: On their own, the two case-uses of the combo provide a high-tempo effect (a 0AP kill) at varying levels of efficiency. Case 1 is slightly inefficient unless it takes out an 85n+ glass cannon, while case2 is efficient against pretty much everything. The high-tempo kills are good enough on their own (see drown), but the combo is a lingering effect (snowburst lasts the entire game) that sets the victim back 3-4 rounds just in terms of recovering their position to minimize the passive damage and ensure that the impeding snow doesn't interfere with their kills/contests. On top of the 0ap kill, the combo creates 90hp and an AoE-6 terrain disadvantage + the same effect on the victim's own warbanners etc. As a source of frost-damage and snow terrain in a split-ST deck, the bursticade player has access to tools that they can use to leverage the snow and passive frost damage (any IS champs can grab spot-arctic from orb of frostfall, for example) to gain further value over time. Mitigation: I think I will need to do some work to figure out the best way to position your champs against this combo, but even then we're talking about reducing damage from 48 to 36 and the bursticade player can still make strong plays with champ-summoned barricades. Effect on meta: ST is already the top faction, and now there is even more incentive to run it in order to gain ice eater/immune and not worry about all the snow terrain. Cheap-champ swarm decks should be able to reduce the combo's immediate value but I'm not sure how that will translate. Rushy decks will need to beat them before they draw the combo. Phalanx decks get shredded. It's still early for the deck, but it seems like it will be oppressive.