Some questions, probably easy answers (I'm not being sarcastic, I just know you have more experience than I do): 1] Playing against FW, "player" notice the bonus and it causes them to lose? 2] Playing as FW, "player" notices the bonus and it causes them to win? 3] How many turns would you say the typical game lasts? Is it long enough for the FW faction bonus to noticeably affect the game?
Can you rephrase the first two? I don't understand the question The third question is where I fundamentally am right in the debate between kalasle and I over the FW bonus a few months ago. Let me give you a condensed version. Competitively, you are more likely to press your advantage with low to mid cost (under 75) runes. The drawing mechanic discourages high cost runes, since playing them (and then losing them) early will not allow your bonus to gain real (in comparison to say having +10 hp) value until much later in the game, which is a long time to go at a disadvantage bonus wise. The average game can vary. FW has many tools to make the game last longer, such as tome of hate which can discourage shrine chip damage, curse tomb which can generate nora when in a defensive position, and skull of decays which reduce healing. The problem is, the 3 previous tools I mentioned are not competitive. So what you are left with is a faction that relies on runes such as broken bones, gravetender, wandering zombie and some low cost units which can gain competitive advantage early and help stall the game. However, those tools also do not provide an adequate competitive advantage, so most of the time you will see FW crutch on spells which help stall the game out longer. Dark rising is a great example of such a spell, doom, hungry dead, and despoil. All in all, games are too hard to generalize for length, but they are decided pretty early. Most of the time my bonus isn't what decided the game. It can work by not allowing the opponent to make a comeback, but you sort of need to be in a decent position to start with - in particular developing the board into a highly favorable position or owning more fonts than your opponent. You probably have more experience than me btw
I think the problem with FW is that the unique champions are so very terribad! General Korsien and Sarinda are just extremely overpriced champs that would never deserve a place in any competitive FW deck! Yes, yes, I know that this wasn't the direction that the OP was going for, but it's my take on the FW problem.
1] When someone plays against FW, how often do they notice the FW faction bonus making a big impact, and how often could we really say that they lost because of it? 2] Same situation, but playing as FW and winning instead of losing. That is, how often does a FW notice their faction bonus making a big impact, and how often could we really say they win because of it? It looks like you sort of answered those questions already, but any more info on it would be nice. Lol wat. I guess your "join" date is later than mine, but you definitely play more often than me.
Ah, that's a good question, but it's pretty subjective to each player. I'd be actually interested in @MogaBait answer to that, since he is top player (and in all honesty he is smarter than me) . My take on it is that I can play FS-Fw split at a pretty competitive level, and I always feel the FS bonus is useful, and the FW is useless in those splits. I think that I can see the FW bonus working, but in the back of my head I'm thinking that I wish I had a different bonus. I can't say I can fairly judge this, because I don't have the muscle memory of other factions, and I judge most of my gameplay on feelings, only doing math for short term plans. Because It' A game. Getting off topic, there are grandmasters in chess who only have "decent" fundamentals as well, the orange headed yt streamer. People playing against it probably don't care except when people are able to spam the same unit over and over again (like skeletal bezerker or broken bones). Which is extremely rare right now, especially with haunting spirit nerfed (probably the single largest FW faction nerf since I started, aside from maybe lerper and doom) Also, I have mad respect for you, you answered a lot of my questions when you first started posting, and have always been very cool to me so I appreciate that alot. Cool to see you back in the discussions. I haven't been playing alot because I'm moving, and working at a new job, but I'm going to do some serious YT analysis and streaming with @Gnomes who is bringing to light the state of some things, and honestly making the game interesting.
The problem with FW is its a borefest for everyone involved in any game where FW is involved in any way shape or form.
FW has always been the faction with effects that aren't "kosher." It's part of the uniqueness of the faction. I am not sure some of the things listed in the OP really qualify though. At the same time, what got listed was described as "versatile" but 3 out of the 5 had to do with Loss of Life damage that bypasses defensive abilities. And let's not pretend FW has "remained the same." I am tired of people making Bane Shift like this up. Every faction has gone through a great deal of changes. If FW has "remained the same" it'd still have Revenant/Sac Altar wiping half your board, Super Surge Spirits, every deck would have still have UT and ToH, Possession Cliff Diving wouldn't be getting removed, Ghost/Incorporeal would still be 100% immunity to everything but Magic, Gravebind wouldn't be one per turn, Coven will still be basically perma Curse, Eradicate/Stunning Wail would never have been touched, FW AP Denial would still be a thing, Death Nova: Skeletons wouldn't have gotten nerfed, Doom has been nerfed... I mean, the list freaking goes on and on. Apparently this is a "couple minor nerfs." This is basically the same kind of list as every other faction. So in regards to the bonus (which has been discussed a lot over the years), it's somewhat fundamental to the nature of humans that bonuses like FW's and IS's is considered "weaker" than more overt bonuses like ST's or FS's. When you can concretely say "it did X in this situation" it's a much clearer cause and effect. The idea of being to get units back faster is quite abstract, and hard to quantify in real game terms. However, we can look at historically what occurs when champions ARE being spammed for various reasons: they generally get nerf called. Of course, these champions have to be good enough to see play FIRST before spamming them even matters - but it's happened time and again with units that have Immortality such as Crystal Phoenix or Lich King. The ability to bring back key champions, particularly if they have on deploy effects or large board presence is arguably powerful in the right circumstances. Another example is Bile Zombie where the low nora cost combined with the bonus makes it function almost like a low CD spell. You are always capped on nora, but as with many things in strategy games, having the option always be available rather than being stuck doing what you have left is quite important - it's why draw, fetch and other mechanics are so prevalent and generally considered powerful in many card games. ~ There's been many ideas for the FW bonus over the years, but it's difficult to get any kind of consensus as many FW players really like the bonus and many others dislike most of the suggestions even if they don't care about the current one. Another point of discussion is that FW's rather passive faction bonus is combined with similarily hard to quantify font bonus' DMZ (which thematically extends to a lot runes). The combination of the FW bonus giving the FW player more options, and the DMZ restricting opponent choices, creates a dynamic that no other faction really produces (as is fitting for FW's general "breaking of the rules" design) but one that is hard to see the real effects of on a turn to turn basis. One of the only ideas that I have liked re: suggestions for the FW bonus came quite a long time ago and that was the idea for the FW bonus to simply negate opposing bonuses which thematically fits well within FW's aesthetic. There are both technical and design challenges related to this, but it'd certainly be more of an easily measured impact than the current bonus.
Well, this has never, to my knowledge, been specifically designed to be the case. I mean, maybe it was technically true due to faction bonus or whatever, but I have never heard this idea being articulated by developers during Octopi/SOE/DOG nor have I personally ever designed/balanced FW champions with this in mind.
I agree with all of this (and the list of nerfs). It forever confuses me how much people get frustrated playing against FW. Sometimes I see why, but those reasons get taken away via nerfs. At the moment, I don't feel like FW is dominating, many people just don't like playing against it. I can understand disliking playing against it, I myself easily get frustrated playing against certain FW battlegroups, even though I love to play as them. FW, to me, is like a bit Blue in MTG. It's very rare that people "enjoy" playing against a super versatile controlling opponent, even if they win. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like you get to really "play". But still, I think FW is better than that. I don't think that those kinds of issues can really be fixed without completely changing the whole idea of FW though, or "Deleting FW from the game" (which would be... bad). I wish I knew an answer, but it's something that I'm fairly content to just let it be alone. Just gonna say, ew. It sounds neat in terms of lore, but... That seems like gameplay wise, it would make things... Stale? Boring? I dunno, as usual, I am still more of a fan of the current bonus. It feels right, and generally, if FW is played correctly and doing well, I feel like the bonus affects the game.
I've never felt that FW champs can match other factions in terms of value or efficiency, themes like zombies might be efficient but they lack the hard stats to go toe to toe with just about anything. In FW you need to break your opponent down over time or you'll just lose out to superior HP/DEF or DMG stats. Of course stuff like ED changes that but without those spells FW would just be an easy win for anything even slightly aggressive early on. Honestly always thought the problem with FW was their 'anti-fun' ways, it just sucks to be hit with stuff like Doom.
I don't think it makes it boring - in fact, having to deal with the fact that my champs don't have the usual +4 DMG or +1 SPD seems interesting, but in general though, design principles tell you that these kind of "negation" effects aren't as interesting or interactive as "additive" mechanics. A variant on the same idea would be that the bonus DUPLICATES the other player's bonus - but that's not FW's flavor.
TL; DR I don't like the idea of cancelling out bonuses cause factions like ST, KF and UD are balanced around them and would get ****ed in most cases. What if instead FW would copy the opponent's bonus? or maybe some kind of global Vitality of Destruction (+2 hp on each death)?
Just dropping by to say bonus negation would make FW tier 0 because FW is already getting a quasi bonus from getting bullshit overpowered abstract effects you cam't easily put a nora value on in order to make up for the lack of a straight up combat bonus. Really, the only problem with FW is that exists and it should be deleted from the game altogether tbh smh.
