I briefly explain worms

[NOTE: This is a post that I made in the council forums a few months ago, and which I am re-posting in GD so that other people can see it. I have edited it slightly to make it more accurate and clear.]

Recent Changes

Change to Necrosis: This is fine. It shuts down non-worm Putrid Creeper decks, which is fine; it stops splashing and experimentation with non-worms in worms, which I personally dislike but is probably fine; and, of course, it puts a -1 SDZ penalty on Bile Zombie, which is the most important thing and also a good change. The Necroweave OTK becomes much harder to pull off, and Biles come with a higher cost in the mid-game. [One very important thing about the change to Necrosis, however, is that SDZ no longer decreases when worms die outside of the zone. This makes the deck notably easier to play, less map dependent, and more able to play aggressively in the early game; it also makes Creeping Harvest a worse pick on Putrid Creeper.]

But, speaking of those higher costs...

Nerf to Bile Zombie: This is probably ok. Bile Zombie remains the most efficient AoE when it gets the chance, but the big deal here is changing the min CD of BZ from 2 to 3. The +15% cost certainly hurts as well. Neither the above nor this change are enough to actually shut down BZ, but they stop it from becoming laughable pressure to the extent that it was previously.

Nerf to Chattering Maw: Inclined to say that this was a dumb change, but whatever. I never thought Chattering Maw was that great: it didn't fill any real role within worms' larger game plan. Sure, it could put some alright disruption on the board, but I only intermittently played the one that I did run.

Buff to Twilight Creeper: Beautiful. It's not a strong rune, really, and I guess it isn't even better than Rotmaw, but Initiative + Constrict on a worm is a damn great idea. Impatient also works well, despite being surprisingly hard to trigger. Obviously, there is space for worms to develop outside of Initiative (Short Lived was supposed to be that, but hey), and Twilight still doesn't cover the obvious on-spot duelist role that worms want but maybe should or shouldn't have. Really support this redesign.

[Preface: Terminology

There's a term that I am going to use here, and which I let slide undefined in the council post, but which some players may not recognize or understand: "stagflation". Stagflation refers to a particular gamestate possible only with worms, in which the worms player has exceptionally good SDZ growth, but has few to no champions on board, where their opponent has several.]

SECTION 1: Intro

This section is my real motivation for making this post. To be blunt: most people on these forums do not have a clue what -- if anything -- makes worms a powerful theme, how to fight them, how to play them, how to change them, and even then, those people who do have some inkling of sense about this theme have it only piecemeal. I could be wrong about these things as well. But at this point, some space for ignorance or mistakes is a given, and beyond that space, I know the most about worms. I understand this theme. I get it better than anyone else. So here we go. This post is going to be a giant mess of information; there are cleaner, shorter, and prettier ways to talk about this, but I am aiming to be thorough and efficient with my own time rather than elegant here.

SECTION 2: The Parts of Worms

This story needs its characters:

Necrosis -- What makes worms what they are. It is broken: it lets players do things outside of the usual rules of the game, i.e. deploy champions beyond the normal deployment spaces (this is powerful, but it is not near as good in-and-of-itself as many people seem to think, and can do more harm than good if used poorly). Necrosis also doesn't decrease without the worms player choosing so, which mean that it is broken a second time over: it provides a permanent form of advantage with which the opponent cannot directly interact. That is also rare.

Putrid Creeper -- It can stay on the board. That matters a lot. A whole lot. It is the only worm that can stay on the board by itself -- with Worm Lord, Organs/Mutation, and Consume it is a one-worm army. [Note: Reflecting Creeper has risen in my estimation, and I would consider it the other reasonably durable worm.] It will be the last thing on the board when the huge messy cluster-firk that is a protracted worms engagement ends. Worms crutch on this champion to maintain lasting board presence (which I will explain more later, given that it seems unintuitive -- why would worms need board presence when they can deploy everywhere?).

Phantasmal Creeper -- The second biggest player in the worms "I'm a real champion!" arsenal, but hardly flashy. It's astounding, and telling, how little the people who whine about worms mention Phantasmal Creeper. This is also the unit that second-best uses Necrosis; Portal means that Phantasmal can actually use SDZ after being deployed, which is unique to worm champions. That this is a big deal demonstrates how mostly-unimportant Necrosis actually is to most runes, despite breaking a bunch of rules.

The Goo -- All the other worms are an oozing pool that holds things together. Yes, they have distinct roles, and plenty are good, but none of them are cornerstones like the other things listed here. They do nothing special for the theme.

Bile Zombie -- Best for last. Here's the deal: Bile Zombie is the number one most powerful and most important piece of worms. Everything that worms do right now depends upon this rune existing and being used in a certain way. Most of the abstract terms I am going to use like "space control" or "stagflation" are mostly about Bile Zombie. [Those terms can also apply to Chattering Maw, if a worms deck chooses to use that rune frequently.]

So to recap: Putrid and Phantasmal [and now Reflecting] make the core of the worms board, while the goo fleshes out the field. Bile Zombie is the rune that makes SDZ a live fire zone.

SECTION 3: The Triangle of Interaction (SDZ)

There are a lot of things to say about worms, but the most important thing to emphasize is this: the triangle of interaction between SDZ, Bile Zombie, and real champions makes worms what they are, and none of these pieces operate in isolation. The biggest mistake people make when discussing this theme is that they attempt to attribute the totality of worms' character and power to an individual element of that trifecta. The first step to talking about all of this, though, is talking about SDZ.

Having a larger deployment zone allows a player to generate effective AP; champions do not need to walk up to the fighting lines. Deploying forward, however, is only good when a player is winning: once a player starts losing an engagement, deploying forward gets rid of a natural defensive effect in Pox. Normally, outside of worms, if a player loses an engagement, they have to deploy their reinforcements back at a font or a shrine, and the enemy has to spend AP on movement rather than damage. This naturally reduces the amount of damage a losing player will take -- even if they are still recklessly throwing champions into an engagement. Deploying forward into a losing engagement grants the opposing player effective AP on their champions.

Even when deploying directly into combat lines, the effective AP is more a matter of tempo than it is real presence. Champs get the bonus AP once, on deployment, and that is it. Once they're there, worms champs are on average worse than other theme units and have less inter-champ synergy. These are not design issues, and I do not bring them up with a negative connotation -- it just explains why worms have a rough time in flat-out engagements with a bunch of units on the field.

It also allows a player to deploy directly into otherwise-safe opposing fonts. Again, this is related to real units...

SECTION 4: The Triangle of Interaction (Real Units)

The character of the units available to worms does a lot to influence and control their playstyle. Contesting opposing fonts, for example, is not near as good as some people would assume; most worms units lose pound-for-pound against the other champs fielded by meta or themes. Worms champions have few defensive abilities and limited damage output. Just check their melee lineup: everything in the 50-80 range sucks at dueling. Reflecting Creeper would almost be good, except for its RNG value. Putrid, Blood Fiend, and Bloodworm have potential, but Putrid depends on some level of support for tanking and healing, and both it and Bloodworm are too expensive to treat as split-drops. Blood Fiend can work, but it is extremely vulnerable to champs with minor movement abilities or things like Deflect. In addition, it gets destroyed by any form of Distract. For these reasons, split contesting fonts with targeted deploys doesn't work well in worms [as a general rule, although it can be strong in certain situations].

But Phantasmal Creeper is great. Insanely good rune. Portal is nuts. All that stuff I said about SDZ not generating AP? Ignore a bunch of it when it comes to this specific champ. It almost doesn't matter how crappy the body -- if it can generate 15 or more AP in movement every turn, it will be good. Having a fair defensive ability helps, even if it gets frequently cut through by the increasing prevalence of Magic and nerfs to Ethereal.

The durability of Putrid Creeper is something that I emphasized earlier, and it matters because of how the board state often plays out. Worms have the capacity to be an incredibly destructive deck, both to themselves and the opponent (thanks Bile Zombie!). Having a CD 3 AoE that does a bunch of damage means that a worms player can toss over half of their nora into bombs, for as long as they like. While not efficient enough to destroy opposing champions at-cost (thank god), it is enough to consistently level the field of both players to a few stragglers -- massive damage to the opponent, huge cost to the worms player. (I'll get around to what this means for the deck's resource curve later.) In brief, this destructive power means that worms want something -- anything -- that can stick around on a mostly-clear board and just exist. Controlling space doesn't matter if there is nothing to do with it.

In short, the real units in worms establish the actual potential of the theme within the broad framework that is Necrosis. This reality is a limited version of its theoretical maximum. Likewise, the power of worms champions sans-Necrosis is below average.

SECTION 5: Bile Zombie

Bile Zombie brings everything together. This rune by itself is not enough to make a deck incredible, nor is Necrosis, but when brought together by the thread of worms champions, Necrosis and Bile Zombie make the deck tick. Bile Zombie performs two key roles: it turns SDZ into something directly valuable (eAP and font control are too nebulous to be worth the effort by themselves), and it subsequently controls space by threatening that kind of damage. Without Bile Zombie, worms need to assume an especially defensive posture in order to avoid having their front pushed in by decks of even middling aggression. Bile Zombie is the one rune that generates enough advantage for worms to win against opponents of similar skill. Sometimes it can do this by not even being played.

Bile Zombie also happens to apply a strange pressure to the deck: it makes worms very, very good at pushing a low-resource environment after they have reached late-stage growth, but not before. This has some strange implications for how worms should be played and what their resource curve looks like.

SECTION 6: What proper play looks like and why

Here are some signs of bad worms play:

• Tossing out Bile Zombie when heavily behind on board. This leads to stagflation.
• Moving beyond the Shrine Deployment Zone to be aggressive. This risks curbing growth. [No longer true with the most recent version of Necrosis.]
• Missing triggers of Worm Lord. This is an optimization problem that curbs growth.
• Engaging in a continuous fight at their SDZ front. This makes poor use of the AP-generating effects of SDZ. [May be an acceptable course of action if the worms player is making very specific deployment choices.]

Here are the stages of strategy for a worms player:

1. The game begins defensively. A worms player should avoid engagement at extreme cost, potentially giving up mid-font wholesale to avoid risking a champion death. The benefits of defensive play will, in theory and if executed well, out-pace early-game losses on nora or positioning. Without SDZ growth, worms are a terrible deck after the changes to Surge. This defensive stance has two purposes: first, it keeps worms alive to maintain some board presence, and second, it prevents a reduction of SDZ to worm deaths. Ideally, no fighting happens during this phase. Champion deploys should, perhaps counter-intuitively, be destructive rather than durable; Blood Fiend and Eye of Serkan make good picks. The idea here is to apply counter-pressure -- the more damaging the potential beta-strike, the less likely the opponent will want to attack (keep in mind that they would have to expend some AP to move forward). Destructive units help control some space in front of the worms field prior to BZ and SDZ coming online. LOSS RISK: MID. STAGFLATION RISK: LOW. [Note that, again, because of the changes to Necrosis, the need to be defensive early in the game is lower. As such, worms can more reasonably play an aggressive game and will need to give up less board presence. I still think loss risk is MID because they are vulnerable to the bevy of tempo options pervading the current metagme.]
2. The mid-game is when worms start moving forward and skirmishing. This stage will depend heavily on the opposing player's deck and actions. If the opponent is building up and hanging back, then worms will comfortably inch forward, take ground, and potentially fiddle with mid-font. If the opponent is playing aggressively, then it is the worms player's job to be even more defensive to deter attacks. At this stage, deploys will include more of the worms core -- if Phantasmal Creeper hasn't hit the field yet, getting one or both out is a good idea, and there should be [at least] one Putrid Creeper on the field. Damaging options become less relevant, but still serve as important deterrents. Reactive play is the name of the game, but worms have more options now that their SDZ should establish an actual fighting field, and they don't need to depend as much on posture. At this stage, unlike the previous one, it becomes acceptable for a few worms to die, so long as they are within the SDZ. [Conversely to those advantages, the mid-game is also where worms are most vulnerable to getting rolled over by combination tempo plays.] LOSS RISK: HIGH. STAGFLATION RISK: MID.
3. Mid-late game is where the game gets intense. The board will either be a huge stand-off or a total mess, depending on how the mid-game panned out and the predictions of both players. At this point, worms should have Bile Zombies completely online, and it will be up to the opponent to figure out how to handle that -- either they can keep getting pushed back, find some phalanx defense like Blockade and push through, or they can try to charge their way through the red zone. Because BZs are online, it is very easy to stagflate, and worms can actually lose here: if the opponent has been roughly maintaining their game plan of either aggression or buildup through the first two stages, they could have a shot at closing it out here. If they don't, however, the opponent will either give up or move into the final game stage, and likely lose there. Here, deploys should be highly reactive to the space available, and will often draw more from the deep worms bench. LOSS RISK: MID. STAGFLATION RISK: HIGH
4. True late-game. Worms, if they haven't lost, are in one of three states: massive stagflation trying to claw the game back, grinding forward after a rough mid/mid-late game, or winning handily. The situation in which worms have not gained SDZ but are winning on the board is not included here, because it will only happen against bad opponents or bad decks; worm units are not powerful enough to pull that off by themselves. At this point, worms should have sufficient SDZ to cover all reasonable areas of combat, in addition to having SDZ coverage into the opposing back fonts. Phantasmal Creeper generates so much board presence at this point through Portal that maintaining fonts for even a single deployment becomes a trial for the opponent, and Bile Zombies threaten any sort of clustering. So long as the worms player maintains a careful posture with their Putrid Creeper, at least one Phantasmal, and one or two other units just to control area and provide backup, the worms player should have it in the bag. An advantage on board can eventually grind into direct bombs with Bile Zombies, or even the OTK combo. LOSS RISK: LOW. STAGFLATION RISK: MID.

[As a final note about stages of the game, if the worms player ever stagflates, their loss risk increases significantly in the event that the opponent recognizes the situation, or the worms player continues to play into stagflation, or, especially, both.]


It's all word vomit, but it's done now. I'll take questions or comments if anyone has some.

@Ray Finkle

 

briefly adverb (FEW WORDS)
using few words or without giving a lot of details:

Haha just kidding, good read.

 

Do you have a TL;DR paragraph?

 

Worms are good because of complex interactions between their various chief parts -- Necrosis, Bile Zombie, and a few real champs. The shortest version that still functions as an explanation rather than a summary is parts 2 through 5.

Basically, everyone insists on trying to explain (and complain) about worms in a few sentences, and that just won't work.

 

Fw forums ?

 

This isn't really for FW players' sake.

 

necrosis needs to -1 deployment area when a necrosis champion dies, no matter where they are when they die.

being able to deploy almost anywhere is how worms win, simple as that.

 

So what do you feel is an appropriate nerf to worms that keeps them competitively viable but also tones down their strength a tad? You've played a lot of worms as far as I know and that means you probably have an idea what is too strong, but at the same time I know that can also make somebody biased. You seem like a decently intellectual person so I believe you can give about as non biased of an opinion as anybody could that actually plays the deck.

Personally I feel that bile zombie may need a small nora increase but aside from that I don't believe I have the experience with or against worms that I could give any more ideas for changes.

 

Soooo give BZ a new model and make it a worm?

 

so why would you make it so they cant do that?

 

My immediate response to this would be --

Sok isn't looking to change them right now, so I'm not pressing for changes right now. With very few exceptions, I defer to his inclination on these things.

As for the kinds of changes that would be appropriate to worms, that depends on a lot of things. Part of my trepidation with suggesting anything, ignoring whether Sok would actually implement it, would be that few people play worms, and even fewer play them in a way that I think at all represents their potential. Like Sok said, we have a lot of subjective feedback, and I have my own experiences, but we aren't running on a lot of data here. Chattering Maw and Bile Zombie both just saw potent nerfs; I have played worms only a bit since then. This is not to say "Oh, worms might be trash now, who knows!", it's to say "I am still confident worms are a solid tier 1 deck, but I'm not certain enough about where they stand now to make strong design arguments."

And really, I think the issue of worms is one of design as much as power: the main reasons some people hate worms when they fight them is because the deck seems to do some broken stuff (which it does), but I also like that worms mess with the boundaries of the rules. It's what drew me to them -- not necessarily that they are powerful, but that they are weird and different. Preserving that weirdness in some functional way has always been my priority when talking about Worms as a theme.

I do have a few concrete thoughts about the kind of changes that I think Sok could implement if he wanted to nerf worms while preserving their thematic integrity, but I am not going to bring them up now for a particular reason: I do not want to be seen as implicitly advocating for that kind of change when Sok is not looking to change Worms at present. It would be giving a direction to the aimless disdain for worms floating about, and I'd rather not lend it some sort of legitimacy like "Well, Kal plays worms and he said this so he sort of supports doing it." No -- I am not for any changes to worms, and I am not against any changes to worms. Take my formal stance as this: Worms are a unique and exceptionally powerful deck; as a result of their uniqueness, they can be frustrating and unorthodox to defeat; at the moment, their evident strength is exacerbated by (very understandable) community unfamiliarity. My first interest in further public discussion about the theme is information, not argumentation. I want people to know how to play the deck, how to play against it, and how it fares in various matchups -- that's my goal right now.

 

Necrosis is the worst skill in the game, hands down. You should have Necrosis while the champ is in play. When it leaves play the Necrosis effect should shrink by 1. Only then does the damn thing make sense. There is no counter to Necrosis. You can outplay it by spreading your champs out to avoid getting spammed, but eventually the Necrosis will reach your deploy zones / shrine.

I understand the theme of this slowly-creeping rot but the low CD necrosis spam BS sucks

 

Why is this even an issue ? Are worms this strong right now ? The only issue I ever hear about is bile zombie which is pretty easy to avoid when you see someone playing worms.

 

A thread about fw isn't an fw topic ? If they wanna learn about worms they can head to the proper forum for it lol.

 

don't forget he must have necrosis too

 

3013 words is brief? I'm not sure I want to see an in-depth analysis from you!

 

Came to see Kal's definition of brief. Wasn't disappointed.

Stayed to ask what you do vs blockade champs? Because I've always felt they were the most effective way to counter worms.

 

lose

 

This thread is small time. This is how you explain worms:

A unique theme idea Sok made but had a lot of problems balancing so at one point, they decided to let remove all of the downs and keep giving them ups while fine tuning the champs until they became cancer forever.

THE END