Shouldn't runes that are more rare be definitively better than the more common ones?

This may seem like a dumb question. I understand the developers want to have a systematic approach to nora cost. Maybe the best approach would be to give the increasingly more rare runes an increasing amount of nora benefits without the additional cost. This way the rarer runes are indeed worth more. (e.g. uncommon could have an additional 10 worth free vs the common while the rare ones can have an additional 20 nora worth free.)

I have the Angel of Restoration which is a legendary rune so I would expect she should be quite powerful. I would think she should be able to defeat any common, uncommon or rare rune without any difficulty. It takes 800 shards to get her. I got her in a trade.

She has a base of 9 damage, 6 speed, 2-4 range, 1 defense and 46 hit points. Her abilities are nice, but nothing special. Cost 88.

Now compare to the 'Uncommon' Elven Druid.

He has a base damage of 11, speed of 5, 3-5 range, 0 defense and 46 hit points at a nora cost of 74. He has the ability to transform into 3 other forms.

Or compare to the Elven Mage. He has a base damage of 10, speed of 6, 4-5 range, 1 defense and 41 hit points and assorted abilities for 70 nora.

I can get either of the latter 2 for 8 shards. Is the Angel of Restoration really worth 100 times either of these?

Even compare to the 'common ' Elven Bard. She has a damage rating of 8, 5 speed, 2-4 range, 0 defense and 40 hit points and very good healing and the ability to boost all friendly champions' combat for 71 nora.

 

No, they shouldn't. End of thread.

 

What Boozha is trying to say is that by having rarity determine power it undermines the integrity of a free to play model. It encourages people to have their decks comprised of only the rarest runes in order to compete.

 

I miss the days where if someone dropped a Bone Elemental, the best way to take him down was a Fiorn. Back then, Exotics meant something.

 

I just blinked the stupid things back then.

 

They were great, and terrible times. Back then, Exotics meant somthing, now I could really care less about a Leg, Also, I miss bases.

 

Even setting aside a Free To Play business model, having the rarer runes be objectively stronger than more common ones vastly reduces the potential variety by shrinking the number of viable runes.

 

Only thing i agree with here is legendaries not being worth 800 shards, i could see legendaries being worth maybe 600 shards or 650. Having to sacrifice 200 ronin commons for a hyaenid witchdoctor makes me a little sad.

The devs are only hurting themselves by not making shard values a little better and or creating a Mass shard button. What i do like however is how rarity no longer= power was a step in the right direction. I for one look at legendaries and always think they should have some signature ability that's not overpowered but flavorful. Even if they don't get a sweet ability how about making legendaries have bases @Sokolov @Moles people would pay a lot of money to have bases back even if only on legendaries.

 

Not really. What you do is restrict what games you can play which runes. You have the open play which allows runes of any rarity. I would expect players who have been active for a long time and who have lots of legendary and exotic runes would play there while the less experienced players would play in the levels that don't allow for the rarer runes because they don't have them. I think it could lead to more interesting games between players of roughly equal skill levels. You could restrict it to say 1 rarer rune of the next rarity in the more common level game.

You have the 'exotic' play which allows exotic runes and those more common. Similarly you have 'common' rune play in which you have to use only 'common' runes to play and other levels which allows runes up to 'uncommon' or 'rare'. I don't think it would be very difficult. Use a little imagination. The level of play limits the rarity of the runes used. This is critical; Rewards would be the same regardless of which level you play. Over time players would gain the rarer runes as they do now. There's no reason why that would damage the free to play model any more than the current game does. It would encourage players to play games that mesh better with their experience. What destroys any model is having inexperienced facing and getting consistently destroyed by experienced players.(Granted there's nothing that precludes amore experienced player to create a battle group that meets the proper rune limitation and playing in the more common levels. That's fine because he would have the same restrictions.) Again there's no damage to the free to play model.

The single player campaigns would be rated for particular level runes for interesting play. You probably wouldn't need to require the restrictions as you would for the pvp games. The immediately available campaigns should be rated for common or uncommon runes . The more difficult campaigns needing rare, exotic or legendary runes would cost gold pieces earned in game. Here you could reduce the reward if you play runes more rare than the rating of the campaign.

I can imagine a system that could work quite well. If done right it would not ruin the free to play model at all. It could actually make it better. Even if I as a relatively inexperienced player happen to get a legendary or exotic rune as a reward by luck, granted I probably wouldn't have much opportunity to play it (unless I wanted to take my chances in the rarer rune competition or single player campaigns.) I always have the option to trade or sacrifice it in order to get runes that are what I'm looking for. Or I could sit on it until later.

Right now I see no value of legendary runes versus the more common types. Why bother with the different rarities if it doesn't mean anything in the battle or the game?

 

Rarity applies to collectability of the runes. The poxnora community isn't large enough to support a tiered pvp system like you are proposing.

There are a number of other free to play games that make rarer cards more powerful. They often have a variety of packs that you can get with the in game currency, but get much more expensive when you have a chance to get rarer cards. Those games often lose a vast majority of their players in a short time after starting the game.

 

Not at all if you employ the general strategy I described in post#9. As it is the number of runes is actually very confusing. It may be better to allow lesser experienced players to concentrate on a subset of all of the runes (the common and uncommon ones) rather than being distracted by all those rarer runes.

Have an early morning so bye for now.

 

Please provide a substantive argument as to why rarity should be directly linked to rune power, beyond your sense of intuition and right and wrong. Consider the context and history of Pox -- why would tethering rune power to rune rarity advance Pox, or fit in with its design? All design choices have costs. Here are some easy ones which your case should address: splitting the player base, damaging the free to play model, and narrowing competitive diversity. If you do not think these will actually be problems, explain why. If you suggest any other compensatory changes, such as modifying the ranking system or rune market, each of those changes should have a subsequent explanatory passage. Essentially, all changes face some amount of inertia, and they need a sufficient rational push to move.

 

This game does not have a sizable enough player-base to split it further. More to the point however, if players wish to use a limited card set, that option is already available via social agreement. An example would be DMr's tournaments, which involve a complex banning system.

Voluntarily creating sub-divisions is perfectly fine. However, forcing such division would be unhealthy for the game.

It would still kill much in terms of diversity and creativity as well. Even if you have "Common/Uncommon brackets" and the like, you're still operating off of a very limited rune-set. Not as limited as the "Legendary/Exotic brackets" subset perhaps (due to the difference in numbers of rarity), but still very limited.

Basically, you're saying you want to cut the game into small divisions, and quite frankly that cannot be supported properly by the number of players that play this game (which is maybe slightly higher than the number of people that played Infinite Crisis, a game which announced it'll be shutting down imminently).

Let alone, there are not enough new players that such people could reliably play against each other.

By limiting the rune pool you limit variety, creativity (and the joy of watching iPox play interesting decks).

Aside from this, you're also basically getting new players used to a completely different meta than what they'd play if they actually stuck around long enough to earn a modest collection. While obviously some skills would transfer, the reality is that the greatly different meta would undoubtedly cause issues for them when moving up to the next bracket of rarity. By focusing only on a sub-set of cards, you will miss out on some of the more important interactions that can occur with an "open" or even merely higher-rarity-based meta.

What's more, all their old cards, the ones that they played with and earned the higher rarity with, the ones they might have gotten attached to, picked out favorites among, and so on... those all become worthless Shard fodder once they get ready to make the next step (well, not all perhaps, there aren't that many Legendary Relics you can put in your deck after all, let alone spells or equips).

Lacking variety is bad for a number of reasons:

As mentioned, it limits creativity and diversity, which are some of the main selling points of any TCG. It limits the Meta and makes it far less fluid, thus, more likely to become stagnant (and thus boring).

From a business standpoint, while they clearly don't get as much from C/U/R for the most part (compared to E/L/Li investments), DOG would, I'm sure, like it if people spent money/shards on those cards regardless where possible.


While I do support the notion that Exotics and Legs should, for the most part, be impactful, I do not support the notion that they must be strictly better than lower-rarity runes. I also think that there are plenty of other ways to have that Impact. There are no C/U/R Heroes for example. Heroes can/do often have unique or powerful abilities/combinations. They are almost all large, high-nora-cost champions that have a large impact as a single unit. Not all of them are considered particularly good, and some are rather geared towards specific themes (especially Split Heroes), but they have impact based on their mechanics, lore, and/or in-game nora value, all without being strictly better than lower-rarity runes.

Another means of differentiation can come in terms of complexity. Elven Mage is a fairly simple rune, particularly compared to something like Fae Oracle, which has much more complex interactions and positioning requirements.

These means can bypass the need for strict power advantages (in terms of per-nora value) for higher rarity, while still, ideally, giving satisfaction in playing them.

 

So imagine the new player's frustration if they were consistently hit by 28Legs BGs all the time, now the only matter is the lack of experience. 20 Legz = 16000 shards. Standard thematic BG -> far, far less. Boghoppers can run without any Legendaries, Bull can do his job as well as Toad, Fury and Spitters perform well in the range department.

Legendaries aren't the runes that are stat-wise superior, Legendaries/exos are very often important part of themes - think of them, as they are generals or specialized units rather than fodder. Boghoppers Legz comprise of:

Blackhand - difficult to assessment, went many changes, part of his design was to include non-FS abilities(he has or had Merciful, CA:Ranged, Elusive Leap), he is a specialized unit, that very often gets omitted in standard builds, yet when someone tries to build some weird dedicated BG, he can be the one to be picked

Finlord Neophyte - lots of healing and cleanse(Cleanse was something very very missed in FS in certain times)

DM Outlaw - Phantom Dash and Brand of the Outlaw as a signature ability, dedicated pure Bogga Hoppa DPS

Neuromancer - in his greatest times, he was the psychic theme enabler to the point, ppl were begging to make him firk

Legendaries aren't the PUT-ME-EVERYWHERE-BECAUSE-I-AM-SUPERIOR. Legendaries are hidden bombs that may trigger in special builds. Mostly Legendaries are I-AM-THE-THEME like Draksar High Priest, BUILD-A-BG-AROUND-ME runes like Elder Murkwurm or simply I-HAVE-THE-ABILITY-NO-ONE-HAS-IN-MY-FACTION like Boghopper Blackhand or I-HAVE-MY-OWN-SIGNATURE-ABILITY-THAT-NO-CHAMP-IN-NEXT-TWO-EXPANSIONS-WILL-HAVE-EXCEPT-ME like Basilisk Templar.

 

pox is free to play?

games that use pay only packs in a competetive environment really aren't using a freemium model and if they are it's a pay to win model.

pox has numerous free entry points, but considering the entry point to play pox in pvp would be somewhere around 1000 hours of pvp play I don't currently consider it an actual free to play game, just a game that has free options to supplement your collection.

 

You were saying here how newer players should focus on smaller easier to obtain runes.

By having these uncommon and common runes as good as the leg ones...

But by using a rarity = power approach, players join, lose, focus immediately on the rarer runes.

Also, rarity = power also stagnates trading.
Where the rich trade to the rich while the poorer players get annoyed at a lack of 'meta' or 'playable' runes.

 

Honestly, we had this all before. I'm not very verbose about this because it is a complete non-debate. Rarity = Power would be bad for the game and for the playerbase, and at best a short-term gain for DoG.

 

I think there is a lot to be said for the rarity = complexity argument, but not for rarity = power.

So a legendary rune would be ability heavy or have unusual abilities but not be strictly better than a common.

 

Pay to win is dumb. $$$ already wins everything in real life

 

No.