Patch Notes: July 1st, 2022 Discussion.

Link to the patch notes: Click me!
Link to the spreadsheet: Click me!

Feel free to discuss the patch here! What are your thoughts and opinions on it?

 

Not very good. Seems like more changes from ppl who don't play the game. Overall I think the changes have been garbage, but especially since dom took over. Also many of the good changes the past year have been reverted; the alt damage revert was over done, it should have only been removed from champions where it didn't make sense to have the alt damage. Nothing important is being addressed, and deck diversity has significantly died down to where not all themes are viable, and many are weaker than even a few months ago.

I have multiple accounts fw only with very high % wrs, so this isn't a balance whine, as overall I think FW has a couple of competitive decks. Overall the game is becoming more polarized tho, and it's just because things aren't accurately costed due to incompetence, or the design is just garbage. For example, why does cursed temple cost 35n for nora link and +1 damage, when there is no precedent for that? +1 global damage never costed 35n, and it's not the only example. Why is bone mine still 40n? No1 is using it and it was effectively taken from the game and never addressed again. If you look at ruby catalyst, it's 25n for a scaling hp font contest tool that can be a nuke, yet it isn't talked about? Cleansing temple is 20n and gives premonition 4. The list goes on.

Anyways, I think zombies were nerfed hugely, I had actually created a deck that started to use zombies effectively pre nerf, and I won't speak to their current state other than they look like garbage; dead fairy looks cancerous, but you can't build a deck around it, similar to how you couldn't with old fleshweaver. In noob play zombies might be unstoppable, so congrats on that I guess.

Any chance someone else can give a try balancing? Most players ive talked to seem to agree, I'm not sure how the echo chamber is now adays tho

 

shut up

 

Don't worry I'll leave the game in your hands, I find the audience for this game is too feminine for me.

 

I thought Bushido was being really harsh until I tried to put together a competent Zombie deck and was left scratching my head. You need to look at the themes as a whole. Are zombies cheap meat, are they ZA swarm machines, are they disease spreaders? If I go the disease route to take advantage of Hunter: Disease, I have to give up achieving ZA. If I go ZA focus, the Hunter Disease/Rabid route is gone leaving a lot with useless base abilities and removing the ability for spike damage that is necessary to get swarms. So instead, they're just kinda an unfocused mess with no real direction. Fleshblight is a great example. Rabid + Hunter + Manic can get you a swarm with good playing and a little luck, except he wouldn't have ZA. If you go with ZA he's totally useless other than giving you +1 zombie on the field. I'm not really sure what you're doing with Cursed Temple, but I can tell you +1 global damage and +15 nora is certainly not going to help things.

Altar of Votaev - Nice, you took a fun, janky relic and killed it. It's main purpose was the CD reduction, nobody gives a f&^k about battlemaster or motivate. If you were going to build around it, you needed 2 and you needed them to be cheap drops so the tempo hit didn't keep you from spamming cheap DE. Again, I thought Bushido was being overly critical but if you thought this change was a buff, yikes.

I'm not sure what's going on with Moga. You've added a lot of mobility so they can hit and run, but with the increased mobility they'll quickly move out of Overseer range. Plus, they'll still be one-shot while doing pinpricks of damage. If you use Ghern as your damage-dealers with Moga as support/harassment, then your expensive Ghern that need a bunch of support around them die and you're left with a bunch of useless moga.

Upgrade paths should be ways to tweak champions to your playstyle and battlegroup but instead you've put very similar upgrades in each path or made it so there really isn't a choice on how to build the champ. For example, if I have to pick some flavor of Leap for Moga Babbler U1, just put some flavor of leap on base. You've basically wasted a whole upgrade line.

 

Rorschach here. I do appreciate the feedback. Some things I want to personally clear up:

The relics: These were a test. If you don't know, we don't have a private beta test server. So when I wanna do some experimenting, I just have to release things to live. I'm a firm believer in better safe than sorry to an extent. I've already heard some feedback on altar so I've made some notes to correct that at a later date. Same goes for Cursed Temple. To put it simply though, it was a test run to see what would stick and nothing really did.

Zombies: I'm unsure of the variables on your side, but when I change stuff I go back and try to put at least 20 games into what I changed to get data. I've done that with zombies, went 16/4 overall. Now this doesn't mean I think they are "fine" but better than what they were prior. I agree with your statements to an extent. They need a bit more tune up and focus into a certain direction but overall I'm happy with the core to the changes done. Prior when I tested it was abysmal results and that has since improved. They will be getting a revisit in the near future but overall I think it was a move in the right direction, though they still can't stand up to higher tier decks that sometimes dominant rank. This is just the struggle of balance and competitive gameplay amongst the smaller community we have.

Moga: I am unsure on these notes. I personally have not been able to test these yet but some players who I respect their judgement and opinion have reported to me that they feel good and they highly enjoy the changes. Both actually asked if I could tone down a few of the changes because it feels over done. I'm going to take this one with a grain of salt but I'm still gonna document it to look at at a later time and day.

Upgrade Paths: I make upgrade paths to correlate with a simple design. A pathway should have a common goal, be it mobility/defensive/offensive. I also dislike upgrade paths that swing widely in cost where one choice is +8 nora while another is just +1. Unfortunately it stifles creativity most people in this current game will choose the cheaper option because efficiency overtakes fun and adversity. This has led me to sort of "meta" proof upgrade pathways where they don't swing so widely but stay in a range that is respectable(usually 2-4 nora but not always it depends). Your complaint on the "You wasted an entire sprue for just different forms of leap". I see the point you are trying to make behind it, but I think I will disagree with it to an extent. I am unsure if you are familiar but around roughly 45-50% of the game's upgrade tiers that have yet to be touched by any changes are simply "Resist: X dmg tier 1-3" or "Leap ranks 1-3" or simply just a singular option(Yes I am aware of Infected Zombie having only 1 option in U2. It will be addressed at a later time, it was a quick fix due to oversight on my part and I take responsibility for that). So having 3 forms of different leap actually goes into the idea behind take what you want. Regular Leap(cheaper and mobile), Glorious(able to help with control of your opponents units) or Elusive(help for survivability if you plan on using him as a side font getter/invader). I hope this kinda clarifies the idea behind that process. If you don't agree with it, I do apologize but it is just what I do currently to help with making these things not break the game(which can still happen I'm not perfect).

To wrap this up in kind of a nutshell, I don't know if you ever joined the Discord or watched the YouTube videos I've put out. My main goal is to get all themes playable and competitive to a point. I've played every theme for at least 20 games to get some insight but I'm not a genius nor a prodigy. I'm a average player with 14 years of experience. I'm passionate about the job, I put a lot into it to try to make things work/good but it doesn't always pan out. If you join our discord, you can talk to the community and in the future help me out more. We usually take about 2-3 months to do a patch and in that time I work with the community to try to work out all the bugs. Unfortunately though paper versus play are vastly different, and also sometimes the community doesn't chat/help as much as I would like which leaves me high and dry to just decide by myself. I appreciate your feedback, just remember no one is trying to sabotage the game or destroy anything or tarnish anything. Just trying to find the right area for every little theme which is actually very intimidating at times. We got some great news recently which you can explore more in the discord.

To conclude everything, I agree that Zombies need some more love and they will eventually get it. Your points made that they feel a little everywhere is valid, and I tend to try to fix that on the second go around. How am I going to do that you may ask yourself. Tell you the truth, I'll cross that bridge when we get to it. I'm not a Dev and I'm not on any payroll. Just a volunteer guy working as hard as I can while maintaining my real life which is a juggling act on its own. What I'm trying to get at is, we are working a lot on this game because we love it just like you. Have some patience and faith.

Very respectfully,
Rorschach

 

Lol you literally do the opposite of whatever I say just to spite me despite the fact im by far the most experienced FW player, and I'd argue the best, although there really isn't much competition. Write a nice long essay on why you're right even though everyone with a brain (maybe none in the discord) knows you're wrong.

Also it was a leap in the wrong direction, not a step in the right one.

Worst part is you know I'm just being honest judging by merit. Read the first post: beth was doing a better job balancing is my opinion. And I don't think much of him.

 

I appreciate the explanation and response. I've been around since the beginning, but since development stopped I generally pop in every few months, see if anything new has happened and disappear again for awhile. I'm not a competitive or hardcore rank player, I'm more of a casual tribal player. What originally drew me to this game was the distinct faction themes and unique tribal subthemes within each faction., something which I think the game has largely gone away from. Seeing the big changes to 2 beloved OG tribes made me fire the game up again and start building decks which is where I ran into problems.

You'll note I didn't say anything about the competitiveness of Zombies. To be 100% honest, I have played zero games against real people with them, just the AI. My problem was that I got discouraged and couldn't get a good deck together around the zombie subtheme. I tried doing a mix of rabid/hunter disease guys but I was almost never able to get 5 zombies with ZA on the field since I often had to choose between zombie or disease upgrade line. I tried going ZA with some disease focus and while I could hit 5, it often wasn't the "right" 5 that had 1-2 rabid, a hunter and 1-2 beater/tanks to lock up a champ and get that last it. I tried going straight cheap-meat ZA but when all the upgrade paths are basically the same nora cost and there is no way to lower the cost to the next lower 4/9 CD, it was strictly worse than just Good FW or Cheap FW.

Which brings me to my next point. Yes, I know many upgrade paths are just 1, 2, 3. That's the point. Often, it made you choose between lower CD, compromise or best but higher CD. Take Moga Assault Team. I'm not going to pick deflect because the CD is too long, leaving block or dodge. Which one? I dunno, who cares. 1 of each? Now for U2, I'm going to pick MA. You have to. The other 2 only bring nora cost to 70. Throw Axe is redundant and MA>Blitz. A -1 base cost or trading Throw Axe for anything that's -4 cost (Resist Physical 1? I dunno) would have given him options.

I totally take back what I said about Babbler, I love the little guy. A variety of builds from 39 to 45 nora cost.

I get your point about the relics. Besides, with the limited playerbase testing live is a good way to probably get some data. But you killed my Deep Elf Spam deck man! I can't constantly harass with a never-ending stream of cheap, annoying deep elves without 2 Altars and I definitely can't do it at 35 nora each.

Since i come and go I tend not to be on discord as I never follow the convo. And I certainly wouldn't accuse you of sabotaging anything. The only people who even know this game exists are the people who are passionate about it, care about it and want to see it keep going.

 

you don't need 5 zombies with ZA, just 5 zombies. ZA is just a swarm effect. Keep ZA on a ranged unit or something with high damage. Honestly you don't really need the swarms, they are just an added bonus. Zombies just don't have a lot of good units, and the remake made it worse.

 

If you don't mind me asking, what was your deep elf spam deck?

 

Who are these players and what specifically do they want toned down/what are their concerns? Feel free to dm me if you don’t want to post on forums.

 

Ya, I realized later its 5 zombies needed, not 5 with ZA. I still often can't get 5 on the field with the 1 with ZA in the right spot to swarm. I'll keep playing with it but might ditch trying for ZA and just focus on disease. I already blew a ton of shards so want to make something out of it.

 

A bunch of 65 nora or less Deep Elves, Maxx, 2 Altars, 2 Retributions and some other random spells. Like most of my bgs, it's not terribly competitive but is fun. I've been toying with the idea of ditching Maxx and going /FW for the sac spells, Maxx is cool but kinda useless for anything beyond deploying a free champ once in awhile

 

You should just play skeletons or lich, zombies lack competitive units. Any sort of late game deck needs healing or free hp to be competitive, and only lich has really good healing and free hp in fw. Dead fairy is op, as is moga at 57n, but there's nothing else in zombies that's really strong. The only thing it has going for it is muta stalker with distract, but you can play around what u need distract for (mainly nkd) with LOL and oblivion hex in liches. I usually only have 1 or 2 units with za, honestly it's not that important to winning a match.

 

Probably gnomes / guitarape.

 

You'll have to get in touch with Rorschach on Discord, as that's where he mostly resides.

 

I get everyone loves discord, but the best way to make the game seem like its not abandonware and dead is to have its forum not have most recent posts from 2019.

 

shut up

 

who's beth?

 

That's Beth, my autocorrect just changes his name to Beth.