Axeraiser's Council Chamber.

Nice to see people discussing breathing life back into legs. This makes me happy.

 

- Careful to some it's treason... "psst come over here and we'll talk of playable LEGs in the future...hush now someone is coming..."

 

Ive never seen this openly discussed, I just made a thread about it to get other Council members opinions on it. With Legendaries being added to the forge with the next expansion I don't see why buffing some of them here and there in future patches would be an issue.

 

- I respect your courage...I will pray for you in the afterlife.

 

I will pray for you also

our council guy, axeraiser be thy name.
thy buffs get done, thy nerfs not come
to legendaries as it is to commons.
give us our dwarfs for our daily skirmish
and forgive us our OPness,
as we forgive those who whine against us.
lead us not into split bg-ness,
and deliver us from wrath.
for thine is the nerf hammer,
the buff-maker,
and the ISisOP torchbearer
forever, amen

 

Good news! My Aspect shall rise again!

 

10/10
Nicely done!

 

Thoughts on a change to Barbarians ? The Savage rework was pretty bad in my opinion with the Stone Clan one really being the only useful one. What sort of new racial / change would you guys like to see to barbarians ?

 

Just spitballing here but what if the chieftan/clan mechanic was kept but reworked and simplified. Barbarians are split into clans or can have a choice of clan via upgrades. Being part of a clan has a small defining bonus such as:

Clans:
Blood Clan: This unit has +1 Damage. If a Blood Clan Chieftain is in play it gains an aditional bonus (Rend 1?)
Stone Clan: This unit has +1 Defense. If a Stone Clan Chieftain is in play it gains an additional bonus (Tough 1?)
Storm Clan: This unit has X. If a Storm Clan Chieftain is in play it gains an additional bonus (Wind Aura/Shock 1?)

Chieftains:
Blood/Stone/Storm Chief: While this unit is in play, other members of the Blood/Stone/Storm Clan gain an additional bonus. If there is at least one other member of the Blood/Stone/Storm Clan in play this unit also gains the additional bonus.

Clan Unification (New Ability on Bastion): This unit counts as a Chieftain for the Blood, Stone and Storm clans. If another member of any tribe is in play this unit also gains their additional bonus.

Rebalance units as needed but it makes the clan abilitys useful on their own but stronger with a chief.

 

The Wind Aura on Storm would be a little too much. Like the direction this is taking.

 

Think so? I would think Wind Aura would be the most useless overall as it is largely dependant on your opponents deck. If they have no flying units it is a complete waste but on the flip side be very very strong against decks like Voil or Fae.

 

Honestly I don't think they need a specific racial because frankly all of them have been bad and/or abuseable. They need the current elf treatment combined with the older savage abilities like bravery, barbaric assault, and such being more prevalent. Next sprinkle improve damage and speed among some theme enablers. Finally clean up the majority of the champs off kilter designs, and maybe tweak the current warchief abilities slightly and you would be much closer to a viable theme.

For a starting point, change the warchief ability from affecting the champ its on to being an AoE buff of maybe 4 spaces at a set level. For example, stone clan war chief would work like this:

• War chief - Stone clan: Friendly champions within 4 spaces that share a race with this champ including this champ gain 1 rank of tough. Every time a friendly champ dies the rank of tough is increased by 1 to a max of 3 ranks.

Next fix the internal synergy of the following champs:

• Barb elite: replace power atk (which doesn't combo with execute) to pummel or something else that does
• Barb exemplar: either give it back a more paladinish kit and said class or replace martyrdom for something useful and not weirdly out of place like vengeful to synergize with my version of war chief.
• Interrogator: punish is both an upgrade and on base.
• Mounted hawkmaster: replace the rend line with something like evasive 2, retreat 2, and hit and run (despite increased functionality this is almost a nerf since the minimum cost will be driven up)
• Plains savage: find a way to make rider not such a sandbagged expensive ability for a subpar champ both before and after the first "death"

Next go through and look at the theme enabling champs and find a way to incorporate improve speed and improve damage for starters.

• Sarng Herder: replace boost beast 1 with improve speed for example. it would give her a spot outside of just a beast heavy barb bg and wouldn't adversely help a split beast bg.
• Barb commander: replace battle leader which I don't see fitting on him and replace it with imp damage.

Finally look at all the champs with only 4 abilities. Sprinkle the bravery, barbaric assault, brutality, abilities on them. There are currently 11 champs that only have 4 abilities (not counting drawbacks) and most could use some love to get that second look to be included in a bg over some of the more meta champs. (I didn't include the paladin theme barbarians in this count or discussion cuz they all need to lose barbarian and become just plain old human again.... they done got civilized at some point).

 

Wind Aura is most of the time Useless, or Overbearing. The fact that I would be paying for an ability that I wont get to use 80% of the time. Is a bit of a turn off. Even still, IS doesn't have much Impending Terrain to combo with it. At most we could expect them to have to obey the maps Elevation. Still not something I want as a Racial.

That being said, I do usually have a Wind Generator in my IS bgs as one of my Wild Runes, for Chasm Fonts/Cliffing.

 

Good points. I am hesitant to suggest Shock though especially if Rend is available to the Bloods. Would Gale be too much? Would give some intresting control. May be overbearing if multiple units all get it though and blow stuff around. There is just a limit of Stormish abilities.

We could get rid of Storm and bring back Beast clan. There are a lot more beasts than lightning wizards and Boltdude can just be shifted into Stone.

 

Hell no to Gale. It would by far be too much. Kinda like the Shock idea to be honest. Provides some alt damage, what little it does. As for Blood Clan.... Rend is everywhere, heavily resisted, and most tanks have Tough/Regen to mitigate DoTs now. If you still want that route I might suggest Gore instead. It will at least bypass Tough, and Resistance.

I honestly wasn't saying that I liked the abilities given for all of your suggestions, just that I liked the way you suggested they be implemented, and that Wind Aura would be an issue.

 

- I like the brainstorm happening and when I have more time I'll put something more coherent together. I will say this though, I am hesitant to promote a "within X spaces" mechanic for barbarians because I feel it forces them back into a phalanx-y direction which Ironfist already has in spades and better... trolls/paladins/constructs.

- Having said that it doesn't mean we can't have Warchief's help other deploy barbs in some form. I also think warchiefs should benefit from and give to other barbarians deployed with perhaps the specific clan matching could give some minor extra benefit. I worry dividing the faction by warchiefs too rigidly limits design space for decks. So either the benefit has to come from "other" barbs in general and matching warchief to clan gives some nominal benefit or something less suffocating. Either the buff is too strong and it will force deck building a certain way, or the buff is too weak and no one cares anyway and we will need additional champ/relic/spell/equip based synergy injected.

 

I think the starting point should be pinning down a playstyle for Barbs, how do we want to see them play? From that point a racial can be thought about.

At the moment I play them as a series of buffs. Mostly beasts, with boost beast, battle master, defender/shroud and macadamize giving pretty healthy stats / surviveability.

I personally like the idea of Barbs being low cost and relient on each other. It seems to fit. I think making the warchief/clan concept work would be too complex under the new direction.

 

i love how baskitnutcase a known IS hater is agreeing to this font bonus nerf. axeraise If you nerf the slowest faction in pox and make it even slower you might aswell let me know now and F**** pox im out, and I am pretty sure many IS (real IS) players will do the same. You would be destroying IS ' only thing keeping them in competition
zealots opinion, but who better to comment on their faction

 

Pretty sure the font bonus is the biggest draw win factor IS has. Nerfing the font bonus is a must to attempt to achieve balance.

 

WRONG, the reason that was implemented was because IS has too many 5 spd champs and can't keep up with ANY faction without it