Long post inc Abstract: FW is in a pathetic state, targeted unfairly by over-zealous and emotionally unstable mod -devs due to the righteous power of Dicem0ney and his natural charismatic presence that the forces of evil fear edit: original title : Dicem0ney, the best fw player of all time, has determined that FW is not viable Firstly, let me start with this: we are in a clear death benefit meta, moreso than any point in Pox history I know, and FW can not compete even now. This is a telling sign of how poorly balanced FW is. Bonus: FW's bonus is underpowered, but it is not UN-savable. The issue is, the suggestions being passed to "strengthen" FW clearly show near 0 understanding of the game theory behind the FW bonus. Firstly, it can be (nearly) directly compared to the SP bonus, and it is (nearly) strictly a worse version of that bonus. This is due to the way card draw mechanics work. As many others have said, FW bonus was balanced with 20 cards in mind, and now we have 30. This is a significant nerf to the utility the bonus offers. I wont beat a dead horse, but for beginners, check out the post i made in fw discussion explaining very quickly how to understand what 60% cd on runes truly means. Hint: it doesn't just benefit you when your units are on CD. I suggest asking me how to make effective FW runes. It doesn't involve giving units void shield, buffing zombies through terrible racials, or giving units last word. Themes: Every single FW theme is bad. Yes, all of them. But that is kind of OK: 90% of themes in this game are weak. This is just poor design, but I won't say it alone is the cause of FW's unplayability in the competitive environments. Here, I will list out all of the themes, and say why they suck (yes, they suck). Liches: Weak to global summon kills / relic kills, and runes are overall quite weak aside from a 1-3 standouts. Spell set is poor, equips are decent. VERY one dimensional (everything is attack magic so you lose to 1 salaam deploy). Weak to death punishment as every other FW theme is. Eternal sandbags the best FW combos. Worms: if the enemy has font eruption or eroding winds, you lose the game. They are also weak to death punishment (tariff). Lastly, the units themselves, kind of suck (which would be fine if the first two points weren't so important) Skeletons: weak synergy, nearly 0 racial cohesion, too many 1 rune answers to summons, very weak late game on tempo decks, very weak late game on long decks, you are better off with meta Witches and Witches/Vampires: Curse is a very weak debuff, the bonus does very little for squishy melees, the racial cohesion is non existent (better off with meta) , the spell / relic set is very weak, not enough pain curse, very bad runes, foul rite is better off just regular death bene / meta, very few undead synergy. Please note I am including vampires with witches because the strongest way to play vamps is as part of witches. (maybe worms...i guess, it sucks). Zombies : weak runes, zombie apocalypse is a detriment, disease amp is weak (thus disease theme sucks), poor synergy Other themes: trust me they suck. Even spirits. Don't feel like typing out why right now. Power level: This is the most important piece of the essay however: what is really keeping FW down is that there are certain, very overpowerd things in this game that can punish ALL fw decks and make shutting them down as easy as adding a few runes. This is mainly because, since FW has so many bad runes, they depend on some cheap meats that can be game-endingly punished. Here are some things that make FW near unplayable - SP - the entire faction is literally "just better" but if i had to nitpick at a few over the tops, aspect of chaos (overload), hyaenid dream crusher, voil. Seriously, you could increase cost of all units by 10% and still not see fair games. Their entire set need lookinng into, and maybe they should have a flat 4% increase across the board. They really should not get an extra 4% discount on death imo. UD: Maxx. This unit punishes death better than anything in the game. nothing can compete with when a unit dies, you gain 70 nora. Even SP struggle against this rune. it's just not a fairly designed rune. This rune has allowed to stay in the game at it's current state for as long as it has, due to UD players historically not including it. Really quite simple, but as Dicem0ney has known, this rune is completely imbalanced. Stitched: Stitched do exactly what FW wants to do, but better. There is no way to out cost arise and a summon combo. This combo will always make FW not viable, because you are always better playing stitched due to the one combo. Jellibrium: another theme that has had a pass for far too long. They can deal 20 global damage at 35 nora cost, thanks to reckless command. They are able to completely invaldiate the FW bonus because it does not lower the CD caused by their racial passive (very few things in the game can remove a bonus btw, this is one of them). On top of this, they get teleport for free, and currently have the best planar disturbance rune in the game. On top of this, they have actually received many buffs, and currently have the strongest meta runes in game within FS to sprinkle in (looking at boghopper bull). SL: Really SL is almost impossible to play against. They just don't see much play, but many things out class FW; their summons are more resilant (they have relic summons), their swarms are best in classs, they have very high defense (in many ways also out classing FW bonus, similar to ST), and they have things like sunder hellion, tairiff, and norahex + death charge if they want to have 0 skill and still win against every single FW deck. Spell Set: This is really a post for another topic, but the FW spell set sucks. Maybe even more so than other factions, although all factions have really bad spells right now. If I am being very generous, FW has 5 viable spells. If I am giving my honest opinion, they probably only have 2 or 3. Relics Their Relic selection is quite good on the scaling over time, but the issue is that relics can be invalidated with 1 deploy from SL or SP, or 2 spells from ST. This has become less of an issue since ST is not played as much, and there have been slight love taps on SP and SL that caused trigger and aoc to not be seen as much. But the issue will rise again, its just a matter of time (like how stitched and Maxx were less flavorful for a very long time, despite being overpowered). The other issue is that, their font contesting relics are actually very bad. Right now they only have bazaar and statue of xulous. This is a very big deal for FW; many of their strategies need to hold off a font for a few turns to work, due to the slow nature of the FW bonus. They are missing a basic fundamental to even compete. It seems odd to me that many other factions have such good font contests.
top tier ud fw kf sl mid tier sp fs low tier st is note that every single bazaar is viable and this lis is somewhat nonsensical in the way it compares support abilities, as support abilities work inherently differently within factions (example, if TOH didnt exist, FW's bazaar would be mid tier)
no, you are just a control freak as seen how you let Markus's topic stay up with "everyone calling for nerfs is cringe'. Double standard much?
By saying that FW was designed when decks were 20 cards, you logically win any attempt to justify otherwise. I played that time of 20 cards and FW made all the sense, it was won by attrition. It's time to join forces as FW to ask for a buff for the faction to affect spells as well so they have at least one impact late game.
I think the current devs never played poxnora when you could put points to each stat using the individual experience points. You could have 10 speed champions for +4 not each point. Well, from that time is when the decks were 20 cards, I do not know who brainless I do not adjust FW. PS: I loved that system, you had a pool of many skills to customize a champion. And it gave you the advantage of having 10 copies of unique champions because once skills and stats were put on it, they were irreversible. Commercially, it was not only viable, it was a gold mine, to have 10 different icefangs. They were stupid for sure.
For me its funny when ppl say "but fw has a lot cheap meat" no we dont, we have units same as everyone elses, the thing is that our cheap units are rally bad, have lumbering, short live, cant heal, etc, our good units cost as much as 90 nora with only a relic to heal them and a 15 hp spell, and you have to prepare the play, i hear everyone saying "fw is fine" but no one is playing it not even trolling, and this is not me asking for a "nerf theirs buff mines" ive never been to good at this game what should i know..... but those are my two on the matter. Sorry for my bad english its not my first language
Yeah, being a cheap meat really isn't an advantage. Especially since most of them have low speed, you only net out if you somehow get an early font cap the opponent can't respond to, which is very very rare. Being a cheap meat is simply another champion that has a slightly better synergy with fw bonus (almost negligible once you understand fw mechanics(
