Discussion: Winter Patch of 2016

How does "Bloodless has been renamed Eternal" improve the game mechanics? Are you guys just making changes for changes sake now?

 

The purpose was to make the name more intuitive as to its purpose: preventing Sacrifice effects. Some of the conditional effects may also be removed to make that more clear.

 

I am really not a fan of BOTH factions cleansing emerald belonged to being changed. Now all my SL and SP decks are invalid. Two of the factions I played most.

If anything, if it HAD to be done it would've been nicer to swap the EFFECTS of the two relics. If somehow you absolutely needed to. That way I'd have lost access to cleansing in wrath, but my deck's wouldn't be invalid, and unable to be loaded into games.

The said, protector has vastly more cleanse than wrath, leaving wrath with one good cleanse option left made it competitive. I fear a tendency to give protector positive abilities and wrath negative abilities will lead to a lack of balance. Why? because well, that's how things were when the game first came out, the factions were all wildly different. The faction bonuses were stronger and mattered more and each faction tried to exploit it's very narrow scope of play. Since then though most factions have gained access to basic gameplay tools like healing or cleansing or repositioning or dispel or anti-summoned. This was done on puporse, and to walk it back seems a bit counterproductive. Especially if only the solutions are limited, without limiting the problems. If anti-summoned abilities got restricted to only one faction it would likely harm the meta even worse than things were on release. Back then even if only one faction had a strong counter to a strategy, usually only one other faction could abuse that strategy also.


TL;DR If I log in to play on patch day my decks should all remain valid and load into the game client and start a game. Sure maybe the effects of all my runes are different and the deck doesn't work the way I want it to. However, it should load. This cleansing emerald change meant decks wouldn't load. Plenty of users, ESPECIALLY on a playstation would suffer a change like this and assume the game was just buggy and broken, not having read through an indepth changelog. Note: I actually don't even own impairing emeralds because they're awful.

 

Cleansing Emerald was literally never an SL rune.

 

Oh well my SP deck was definitely broken, that's the deck I actually tried to play. I guess it was previously SP/KF although it was hard to remember since when I looked at the item it was: KF/ST... i'm having trouble determining what it was before.

Even with that error my point still stands. It's bad form to break the loading functionality of previous valid decks, if you don't have to, especially in a new client. Although hopefully that's why they did it now.

 

The big change u all missed

 

I too am a bit critical on the removal of cleanse from wrath and the removal of dispell from prot. Although i love the thematic idea.

Here is my reasoning :

This in theory means wrath will be counting on super champs to get things done. Because of the little ability to remove their buffs. While this means prot will be hinged upon removing the big champs, or their debuffs.
If a wrath unit does become debuffed their ansers are to run away, or wait for it to wear off. And prot usually has bad ansers to super champs unlike fw for example.

Their are more, many many more effects that can be cleanses then can be dispelled. Dispell is just much more situational.

I would have liked to see cleanse turn into relieve for wrath. This would mean they still have the ability to do so, but in a more thematicly agresive style( i dmg myself to help a friend)

 

i dont think "the removal of cleanse from wrath and the removal of dispell from prot" was a good change, seems stupid to me.

cos superchamps, cos ... well how will i dispel all those kf annoying spells, vines etc.

 

not all games feature a wrath faction vs. a protectorate faction

 

i strongly dislike...

AoV buff

SoTM - calling it now, wasnt nerfed enough

Magnetize spell is junk now, no one used it for relics (hardly any relics are made of metal btw!, but equipment is), its always been for anti-equipment, but now it only effects relics and no equipment is destroyed even on the target wtf. i wouldnt mind as much if relics were taken out of it and it only effected equipment on the target and in the aoe.

fleshweaver witch - pure overcosted junk now. cant heal, transfer life will kill it and it only has 42 hp and cant heal itself.. disease breath will be lucky to do 5 dmg. all its upgrades are dubious and Bane Shift, you even threw in a stictched upgrade, why?

deafening aura - ok i understand a couple people may have complained about it, but its junk now with reduction of dmg from 3 to 2 and range from 3 to 2. its been destroyed!

 

AOV, It's new give it time.

Sotm. It''s still strong, it's not going to be bleeding anuses now.

Maagnetize, SL already has an anti equip spell called Reforge, changing magnetize increases spell diversity allowing reforge to be ran more, and makes a really strong spell (that i personally always included in my SL BG's along with Draconic benediction quickening and warbanner) less strong.

Fleshweaver, swap in zombies can certainly have uses for those slow lumbering champs, if you dont like transfer life dont use it. If u dont like anything on it, don't run it

 

tornado spell already kills relics, why on earth would anyone run magnetize now instead of that? no no nope. reforge effects target, magnetize is an aoe, how can yoou say they are the same. when i get bogged down by a ton of equips on my guys i can bunch them and magnetize them otherwise all my champs are just about worthless.


re fleshweaver, theres very few options that work. has 8 dmg. swap is decent enough if you want that admittedly the rest are not. its run in zombies so no need for elsari coven even.

 

• Fixed an issue where the spell Bullseye's effect would incorrectly lasts 6 turns instead of 1 - Thank god

 

Reforge is bonkers, and was already bonkers. Too much versatility at too cheap a price.

 

Zeal: Defense should be +1 per trigger

My reason is the cost difference between def and dmg in the general formula. Also, def just ramp too fast with zeal.

 

It was over the top and widely spread, especially the fascinate + deafening combo... To give you a comparison, it costs the same as Choking stench, seems to be balanced now.

 

it seems that any rune complaint by even just one player, even if it was then shown to be not valid... was now turned into a nerf by the devs.

 

I've been kvetching, in hushed tones, about Deafening Aura for ages. It was always an incredibly strong ability, good on almost any champ that got it, much like Shroud. Blame it on me, if you like, but Sok did nothing wrong.