The dead horse is back. Buff FW. too powerful/underpowered, IS worst bonus to, TLDR ... blah blah blah. O.K. that's all well and fine but that still doesn't change my perception that the FW cooldown bonus of %60 doesn't suck or at least is deceptively sucky. The undead have been getting the progressive shaft and I want to make it known. So sit tight for a wall of story text In the beginning you had 15 runes you could put in your bg along with a healthy dose of nora. It was pretty common for you to have the nora to actually field all your champs throughout a game. If too many of them died at once though the cooldown would allow FW a window of opportunity to come back in the endgame. WHY? Because you wouldn't be able to keep applying pressure through deploying more champs since they were on cooldown. You also had the champ leveling system which allowed you to add just enough stats to your champs to make them just under the nora threshold for CD. This was the golden years where the bonus mattered and was effective. Then comes a myriad of changes that effectively chips away at it until we have the joke that it is today. 1) 30 rune docks make it almost impossible to run out of champs to deploy even with standard cooldowns. This basically gave everyone 50% champ cooldown. 2) Upgrade system changes make it so that champs can't be optimized with respect to the CD bonus. The only faction whose bonus relies strictly on the nora cost of the champ makes it very awkward and sometimes frustrating as it is left entirely up to whim. Your key champ at 65 nora? Too bad design recked yo. 3) Nora ratios changing in respect to champions also effected the bonus. With more expensive champs relative to nora acquired it doesn't matter if your champs come off of cooldown if you can't pay to redeploy them. This also takes into consideration the hits to nora generation which in itself is really where the power is not the CD. 4) Loss of boon of the undead which in general has been a good thing as it shaved 4 nora off which could effect the cooldown bracket but this was mostly counteracted with champs the board becoming more expensive. While this does impact every faction it does so more for the faction whose bonus depends directly on champ nora costs. So now we are here where the bonus really only effects roughly %30 of the champs noticeably and of those champs only a handful actually synergize with that bonus. That small select number of champs make FW cling so hard to the cooldown bonus and others hate on it that simply the discussion of it has been toxic. I notice the discrepancy and I want to talk about it for possible solutions if there are any out there. Be it new bonuses, a change to the current bonus, or perhaps even a change to how champ cooldowns actually work.
Another thing I'll complain about that may be relevant (or not) is how there are consistently other abilities in other factions that effectively get better cooldown reduction then the bonus. How many FW champs have the 2-4 nora resurrect which puts champs CD to 0? What about Transmission Relay or Altar of Voltaev or restore life? Craft reducing equips to 0 CD? Not in FW. Can't have nora generation there either otherwise that bonus may actually be useful. BAH I SAY BAH!
I'm going to be THAT GUY again and say that there is not a problem with the FW bonus and thus no solution to be had. When people discuss the FW bonus' effect on units like say serkan, they always say well you dont want him to die so how is it useful for him to come back sooner. What people don't realize is Serkan benefits from the bonus just as much because other units do, in more ways than vengeful. the bonus allows you to have a consistent front line of cheaper champions that can use there utility or impact the game more often because of the FW bonus. which allows the units like serkan to continue to do there role whilst being able to be consistently supported by the other units you can continue to recycle. It's all well and good to say that FW's bonus benefits them less now thanks to those changes you mentioned but if i recall back in the days you mentioned early on attrition got a ton of hate because there was pretty much nothing you could do about it, as someone who primarily plays it now i can say it's definitely still a viable playstyle (because the FW bonus works). If you must insist that FW needs buffs though im all in favor of 36% off non champion unit cooldowns or extra reveals per turn.
The faction bonus is an issue which the devs have refused to touch because change upsets people. Also lot of people hate on FW so any idea of a buff or good change will probably be unsupported. I actualy recently started playing zombies because they are one of few themes which can make use of bonus. Spamming affilicted corpses and fleshblights is fun and all but faction bonus should provide more. Worms are among my favorite and most played theme for the reason that necrosis actualy makes the bonus useful. All it takes is one crazy strong racial and the bonus seems like it actualy exists. You are just afraid of change.Stop standing in the way of progress and help us make Elsarin great again.
Thank you Themacca for your participation in this thread. I'd argue that you'd be able to maintain a frontline of meat regardless of the cooldown bonus simply because everyone has a GLUT of champions. This is the real deceptive part. Yes you can spam broken bones for the 3rd time but notice that you still have a lot of other meat you could have played instead. This leaves the faction at the whim of the efficiency of %30 of the champ base. What if all low cost champions got the carrionling treatment and were not efficient? Broken bones at 40+ nora?
If I were allowed to pick bonuses on any BG regandless of it's faction, I would NEVER choose FW becase there is net stats grow with KF, UD and ST. I say remove them all.
Yes conditionals will help in the discussion. I love how 'yes the bonus is bad but we need to trade something else for compensation'. This isn't a kidnapping or a ransom. If there is another unrelated aspect of the game that needs fixing then by all means fix it but by bringing it up as a ransom doesn't really help either side. If boon of the undead was still on all champs people would chime in 'oh but boon of the undead'. Replace that with X: mechanic now. Sure the bonus is bad but don't change it unless we remove zombie apocolypse from all champs because I hate zombies. Bring it up in an I hate zombies thread.
I remember a time when CorpsE was seriously thinking about changing the FW bonus to simply: no factions have bonuses. The rage was palpable because of how much 'those' factions crutch so hard on their bonus its sickening. Another thing I forgot to mention: With the revamp all champs are now for the most part paying for their abilities and stats respectively so the old notion that 'FW champs are simply more efficient' goes right out the window along with boon.
Yes that is true but it's not simply just any champion you need sometimes it's that specific one. for example death guard. @TeaScholar has a thread for his BG where he only runs 1 of each of his champ because it allows him to have the utmost utility. If i were to support any kind of change to the FW bonus it would need to be an add on and nothing more because otherwise we're just changing the last unique faction to be like the others. So as i previously mentioned extra draws per turn say 2 for FF+cooldown could allow us to use fewer champions and thus the FW bonus is more useful as we are given more utility via the supposedly powerful magic elsarin was known for.
I would prefer they remove split faction bonuses first and then go from there. Then again Im tired of seeing champs made in k'thir with 5 speed because of the bonus, then they end up Bane Shift in splits. I'm tired of seeing ud with a bunch of 10 damage champs and ironist is just over there laughing, it's time to take every faction back to its roots.
I was pretty much joking, but the truth is, FW's flavor is having a lot of things that bypass most existing counters. I don't see how that could be easily reverted to balance with a stronger bonus. I know where you're getting at when you talk about FW bonus: it hinders the faction in the ways that it can be played, despite the fact that it helps a lot in the specific champion niche that benefits from it. I've said it a lot in these forums: FW has been built around its bonus; and unlike other factions, the champions were made efficient enough for that to happen, as opposite to other factions that have their "buffed" stats slightly reduced so they don't end up too powerful. I'm against changing the FW bonus simply because it would take an insane amount of changes to do it right, and even so I'm sure that the most important ones woud be avoided because of that clinginess to the past all Pox players have. In a nutshell, everyone welcomes buffs, but nobody want nerfs even if they obviously mean balance. To me FW is a pretty inconclusive faction that is everywhere and countering everything with its relatively weak but efficient champions along with brutal synergy among champions, abilities and its bonus, and it's like that simply because it has never been tried to give it a true identity when the chance existed. When people complained about Impervious, LoL appeared and spread everywhere. When superchamps became a thing, Soulstrike and Doom came up. When those things weren't quite enough, the faction got dispel. It has cleansing, healing, spot removal, buffs and debuffs. This topic is just so hard to touch that I can't help but joke about it, because there's just no way to talk about FW bonus without mentioning other bonuses as well, and everything snowballs very quickly to a point that even consider changing bonuses would sound counterproductive. So that's it, although I understand how its bonus hinders the faction, I also believe that FW is just too powerful to simply have anything better without some crazy nerfs flying around.
I was summoned. TL;DR Keep bonus, add +5 or +10 bg deck space as part of the bonus Indeed I did make a thread about 1x bgs before. And I still live by it. Every meta FW bg I've run since then has been a 1x bg of any given kind, with exception to themes. The premise is that, in order to make the most advantage of FW's bonus (because of the change to 30 size builds), one has to out-diversify their champ build to simply have more options than the opponent. And if a champ dies, they come back quickly so you should only ever need one, and be skilled enough of a player to efficiently put that one unit to use. And this goes back to other factions champs and bonuses too. FW's advantage at this point, if there should be one, is that we have more choice, more reactive options to counter what the opp. deploys. That's if you use a bg with 1x diversity- that's when it sticks out most and is most efficient. Regardless, on one hand, Yobanci is right to beat this dead horse so long as FW continues to decline in power&efficiency. But I'm not convinced that we've actually been getting the full brunt of the nerf stick lately, so Banci needs more meat on that argument. On the other hand, if the devs were to, say, idk... only buff FW, and leave well and good alone, I'd say yeah- leave that bonus where it's at. But there might be a way to keep the same bonus as it is now, just reworked a more efficient way. Then you could use the same 1x strategy. Maybe they could keep CD reduction as it is, but add + 5/10 BG space? I think it would be cool and add to the diversity advantage without directly making champs on the board OP. FW's difficulty is that you might have more options but you will still have the same level of nora use as the opponent most of the time. But I know this would probably be too change-intensive for the devs. Part of me honestly wants FW to actually continue to be difficult as it has always been, simply so that people don't jump on my undead bandwagon
