WindHunter

Is building, activating, then destroying a Shrine of Greed considered bug abuse?

I think saying that his Twilight deck works is like saying my Pure Shadow no-t3 deck works. Sure, it got to me to 12th on the ladder, but the deck was reliant upon an obscure gimmick with Shrine of Greed that become obsolete once everyone understood it. There was a similar case with Aaaaaabama's annoying Church of Negation deck. Once you figure out he isn't good at T1 and T2 and is just trying to stall for his strong T3 the deck becomes sub-par and he is ELO fodder on small maps where rushing is possible.

I'd love to if I didn't have other obligations that day. The harvesters or windhunters will have to wait.

Pure Shadow has a hard time defending in an even match-up versus Pure Fire. If you are wasting 100 power repeatedly on skeleton army you are going to lose multiple Wells by the time you take anything meaningful. Skeleton army could be useful right after a major shadow attack where you almost take a well, with skeleton army as the finisher, but in practice it doesn't work like that. Pure Shadow can't sustain long-distance attacks in early T2 against fire. In a close well situation skeleton army is worthless. I doubt in early T2 you could deliver enough corpses to a far-off base and do enough damage that you would be able to take the base without a minimum of 2, if not 3 skeleton armies. This would take a minimum of 60 seconds and put the shadow player at -200 power. The fire player should have no problem counterattacking and taking more than he loses. In late T2 skeleton army isn't worth it because you should be spamming harvesters before the fire player can get to T3 for juggernaut.

The looter ability is essentially a double-dip. If thugs kill forsaken (or any 50-power unit) they generate 10 power out of nowhere while the opponent loses his unit with 45 power going to void and with 5 power permanently lost. Now if the thugs themselves die, they send 54 power to the void and 6 permanently lost. This means a thugs that has killed a forsaken has more than paid for itself in a permanent sense. Except this was already true before the looter-change since the fire player had both a temporary positional advantage and a still-living unit while his opponent didn't not. Now on top of that, the fire player has 10 power that appeared from nowhere and which is immediately available to him in the powerpool. Power calculation wise, as long as thugs have dealt 60% of the damage to any 50-power unit before death, they have permanently paid for themselves. And if they kill 2 units, they have permanently paid for 4 50-power units. Any disadvantage a thugs player occurs power-wise can only ever be temporarily, as his opponent constantly loses power permanently from unit-lose while he gains power even while losing units. It violates the rules of the game and succeeded in ruining what was once a very balanced match-up between Fire T1 and Shadow T1. Making the same mistake with strikers would mean that no shadow player (or fire players without thugs/strikers) should even bother playing tier-1, because the match-up would no longer be winnable.

Since the game has been re-opened, and I have been benefiting from it myself, I thought I'd post my old tutorial on how to do King of the Giants solo so that people can have an easier time grinding during Open Stress Test and later during Open Beta/Release. Just one improvement on the video, if you move the construction hut to the side a few feet you can use one Resource Booster for all 6 wells by placing it in the center. Also, you are a bit less stressed micro-wise if you sent the first 4 ships left instead of the 3 shown in the video.

Radical touches upon a general principle above that I'd like to explicitly state: In T1 killing units is usually more beneficial than focusing down a well. This is true for a lot of reasons, (low total power pool, slow units, weak spells, etc.) but for these same reasons your goal in Tier 1 is often to create a snowball that can destroy all of your opponent's defenses and only then start destroying wells and monuments. Even with nomads you shouldn't be attempting burrower-oink style well destruction in Tier 1. You may end up with a slight permanent power advantage, but temporary power advantage matters more in Tier 1 and early Tier 2 and your opponent can easily punish your early over investment.

I enjoy PvE well enough but my primary love and reason for playing this game is PvP. I can't do that without a wide diversity of cards and a fully upgraded deck. I have no urge to grind for upgrades or cards for weeks and weeks just to finally be able to play some PvP. I think "grind walls" are only needed to hide holes in game playability which I firmly think BattleForge does not possess. You should be playing the game for the sake of the game being fun in and of itself, and seeing as such a large community invested so large an effort to bring a game back, I think we can all agree that Battleforge is an incredibly fun game. For this reason, I strongly ask our fearless leaders to not slow down rewards for the sake of those who enjoy grinding and instead focus on promoting what is the greatest asset of BattleForge, its fun and diverse gameplay.

Hello old friend, I'll have to decline the pizza but I will take the party. I'd love to get a few games in together once everything stabilizes.

When I got online I was only able to successfully complete the tutorial and 2 RPvE maps. Even so, I have enjoyed the small time I've been able to play and I am very thankful for the work the team has put in reviving the game. I'll keep trying periodic (hopefully getting to play a bit more) and even then I'll patiently wait for a larger server and more stability. Keep up the good work Dev Team!

I'd say prior to the last round of PvP balance changes we were looking at the most balanced meta in game history. Reverting the thugs buff would rebalance tier-1 which I would argue was essentially done. Tier-2 was looking decent, minus bandits. Even then, a few very small tweaks like Bandit Spearmen getting knockback resistance (please) and Bandit Stalker being given siege damage could go a long way to fixing the faction's woes without affecting other match-ups. PvP was looking pretty good overall. Some factions had obvious advantages but I don't think we had any obviously overpowered Tier-1 or Tier-2 cards/combinations that were ruining the meta. I'm happy to hear that our new Dev team will be focusing on buffing some obscure PvE cards first, as we will all be pretty bad at PvP when we get back into it.

Thank you good sir.

Good guide, only thing is it seems you forgot Executor exists (unsurprisingly).

Do I actually want to win this?

This is a card near and dear to my heart. I used it as a crutch to get 12th on the ranked ladder at a time where everyone said it was useless. Before I go farther let's remember what it does: Shrine of Greed: Tier 2, Shadow/Shadow, 100 Power Building Transfer half of the void pool to the power pool instantly. For the next 30 seconds, no void power flows into the power pool and any power that would normally flow into the void pool is instead permanently lost. This debuff means that for 30 seconds if you use a spell, lose a building, or let a unit die you permanently lose the 90% power that would normally be refunded. The debuff is so crippling it makes the upside, gaining half of your void pool instantly, not worth it. The lose of a single nightcrawler means permanently losing 54 energy. Lose two nightcrawlers and it is worse for you than building a power well and instantly destroying it. The issue is, the debuff is so bad that you will lose far more than 100 power in the 30 seconds it is active. But, did you know Shrine of Greed's (SoG) debuff is tied to the building itself? If you destroy the building immediately after activating it, you lose the 90 power bound into the building but instead get half your void power instantly. This is clearly a bug but it makes the card incredibly interesting to play and gives Pure Shadow a way to run an incredibly long t2. Rediscovering the bug from another Pure Shadow player Eljyn(?) is what vaulted me into the top 20. It lets you turn a match you are losing into a game where you have 2 buffed harvesters on the field. If you have ever played me and wondered why my micro is below every other top player's, reading this should give you a hint. For 1v1 PvP In my opinion the card is balanced. If given the chance I'd redesign it to bring back Pure Shadow's old school t2 turtle into Harvester or 5-card T3 without requiring the player to abuse a bug every game. Once someone knows you have this in your deck(or is given the impression), they can punish you hard when you build it. I typically had to go one Power-well down when I built it and if I didn't get major value the game was essentially over. It is a true high-risk high-reward card and fits well in the Shadow faction. For 2v2 PvP This is the important part of this post. The widespread use of this bug had a detrimental effect on 2v2 in the later years of BattleForge. The issue is that both you and your ally get back half of your void power instantly and only one of you suffers a -100 power penalty. In 2v2 where there is more power already in the game, this gives a team with a Pure Shadow member an unfair advantage in the mid-to-late game. Assume all four players in a 2v2 match have 1500 power in their void pool. One team is capped at +20 void power per second with 1500 in their void pool while the team using SoG pulls out 750 power instantly and still gets 15-16 per second. This isn't healthy for the 2v2 scene and as time went on and knowledge of the bug grew, more and more teams started incorporating a Pure Shadow member. And that's why I'm making this post. I've seen talk of balancing and if we are going to be making balance changes it is very important for us to look first at cards that hurt the overall playing experience of the PvP communities and this is a card we need to focus on first. Discuss.