DarcReaver

Bonjour baguette.

Right now you just play the most potent/toxic combos from the BF era when it was taken down... I don't see much of a difference. But wipes are bad because grinding takes so long in this game and is so vital. In Diablo you can play without having to grind for hundreds of hours To make this work with BF you'd need to increase rewards to make players able to reach their full deck within 4 weeks or so maximum. Better booster collection would help though (uncommon single card, common card boosters, etc.)

Is that result of using Amii Monument for the 5th orb win condition? I tried to clear the map as fast as possible (without the monument) with a shadow/fire/nature deck and ended up with 17:2X:xx and it seemed to me like I could finish it in like 16 mins - but in no way in a shorter time because not enough power for that. Also how is it possible to take the power wells immediately? Whenever I try that the 2nd minion wave rushes them and ignores my archers on the walls... So I take them when the 2nd wave is engaged in combat already.

Fighting a twilight Dragon with t3 units is more challlenging than fighting it with a bloodhorn + regrowth. Or Jorne + Life Weaving. Rifle Cultists can annihilate whole creep camps with their grenade. Unholy hero triples regular units' damage etc. Even if t4 needs to be reached, in PvE you can easily use a defensive deck to protect your Amii Monument, and once you're t4 you can annihilate most camps without much of an issue. The only time this does not work is when you're against the clock, which is pretty rare.

Enlightment requires quite a lot of upfront power though and is very limited. I personally think the card is pretty cool, because it fits the nature theme very well and requires planning to use correctly. Monument is a whole other story though. Monument should be much cheaper and a t4 card, allowing more than 4 orb colors. I.e. pure shadow x4 + nature, or pure fire x4 + shadow etc. With a cheap cost this would make deck building more flexible.

Guess what? Age of Mythology EE and Age of Empires DE both went this way, the community left after roughly 1 year is less than 10% of the original player base, with only a couple of hardcore gamers left. In AoM I could easily find quickmatches within a few seconds. Nowadays I can search for half an hour and still get no game. https://steamcharts.com/app/266840#All AoE DE unfortunately has no player tracking, but the amount of lobbies open during 20:00 GMT (when I use to play) was originally at ~ 30 lobbies. Right now you have 2-5. Your statement is nonsense. Most ppl will play some pvp matches, get stomped by players with more upgrades/OP meta cards and notice that their units/decks/upgrades are not enough. Some will try to get better/try out other decks etc. But over time most of then leave and play something else. If the meta and game itself is stale and not enhanced over time this allows players to abuse weaknesses in the game mechanics that are unintended by the devs (like bugs in Crusade map for example) and this alienates most new players. Nobody likes to loose to bug or engine abusing or OP/broken card combinations. There needs to be a clear path: 1) time played <-> reward balance for 24/7 players and casual gamers : the rewards need to be big enough for players with limited time to enjoy the game and feel like they've achieved something. Also they need to be small enough that hardcore grinders do not get a huge lead over others just by being ingame all day. There are lots of ways to do that. For example quest stacking - someone who was not online for 3 days can play the 30min daily quest 2 times, giving him 2 boosters. This way he's only 1 booster behind someone who had spent 3 days ingame and grabbed the daily rewards. 2) card balance : The game needs to feel "fair". That means that a newer player needs to have the feeling that he could have won the game if he had played better or had a more optimised deck. If he feels that he got stomped because his enemy had more card charges, an OP unit card or more upgrades this will lower the motivation to contiinue playing. And the more this happens the higher the chance becomes that he'll leave the game. Which is the worst that can happen. In general there are too many useless/niche cards, especially for rare/ultra rare. Opening boosters is crap when you get a rare/ultra rare card that you cannot use in your decks at all (because it's too weak or has a useless effect in general) and that isn't even worth something because nobody wants to buy or trade it. I personally think this is the most important issue that needs to be fixed for BF to be successful in the long run. 3) Grinding mechanic for card upgrades: depending on the daily rewards allow card upgrades "faster", i.e. quest lines like "play 2 campaign missions and get a random fire card upgrade" 4) booster/market system : more different options to get cards, different types of boosters for example (i.e. "small booster", or "buy a single uncommen card for 50 bfp" etc.) These are just some quick thoughts and in no way relate to a finished concept. But for sure you need to have short time and long time motivation for the game.

Of course, it's impossible to make all cards viable. I've stated that myself in my post. But it's pretty sure to say that for every meta card there is at least one other card with the same or a similar role and orb/tier requirement. If you focus on those first you'll already have like 60 additional cards that can be used, which is easily a lot.

This issue is actually caused by bad card balance. If you have opened a booster, got an ultra rare card, 2 rares and 5 commons, and all of those cards are completely useless, the booster was a waste of time. I've opened dozens of boosters since the open beta started and the amount of situational cards that can never be used in competitive games was insane. It's just lame to open a booster, get a rare card and that card won't be useable in any deck because it's crap and doesn't serve a purpose. Once the core functions for this game are working there should be a collective about making certain cards viable alternatives to the most-used/required cards, esp. for pvp. In a second step the useless/niche cards should be revisited. Cards need to have a proper use. If they don't they shouldn't drop in boosters. If this is done the boosters automatically become a lot more "worth", simply because the cards themselves will be more useful. etc. etc. if that is done with like 50 cards you'll notice that there will be much more incentive to get boosters and get more balanced AH prices for a variety of currently overpriced cards. This is not about nerfing "meta cards", it's more about buffing other cards to provide viable alternatives to them. Sure, you won't be able to make a card like "Wallbreaker" a useful t1 card for fire (unless you play 100% of the time on Lajesh) but there are dozens of cards that can become useful with some minor changes. Examples: Shadow t2 decks: usually M/M unit is Nightcrawler. Making Eliminator viable you get 2 card choices instead of 1 for this slot (so it's double the chance to have a useful Shadow M/M unit in a booster) Natur/Fire : making the Twilight units worth their power cost to make them alternatives to core units like Ghost spears etc. Frost: tweaking some useless spell cards, especially in t1, and the towers (maybe based on my suggestion in the other thread) : And yes this should be done. Just because it's possible to play the game according to the old meta doesn't mean that there can't be improvements. And having multiple units that are equally useful in their role will do a lot. Phenomic even has done this themselves. They added units like Witchclaws as alternatives to the Dreadcharger, for example. If this is not done the game community will die relatively fast, with only a couple nostalgics left over.

I think the gold reward is too low. A card upgrade that costs 2000 gold or even more when purchased being transformed into 300-500g is just not much... Unless you're doing expert runs, but on the other hand those expert runs are a lot harder than an rpve 6-8 where you can get ~ 8k gold/hour without a need for a special deck.

If I remember correctly the "card upgrade" mechanic was included into the game by Phenomic to justify the large amount of common cards (and number of cards in general) in booster packs. This was mostly to satisfy the "collect cards" urge from players and to prevent thousands of unusable duplicate cards in player accounts. Since BF is f2p now it's a good question whether these grinding mechanics are necessary or not. I think removing those weird tokens was a step in the correct direction. When talking of rpve was included in the game to allow more grinding for upgrades since the token balance was weird and you ended up with lots of unusable tokens in pvp. So, yea, the sole purpose of rpve vanishes when upgrades are gone, because that's what rpve was created for. On the other hand if rpve gives some bfp depending on difficulty (And with a declining amount the more games are played consecutively) this would fix itself. The issue that I see is that the campaigns and missions are not that "great" to be played over and over again just for their storyline, especially not on the hard difficulties. So with removing upgrades you remove a vital reward mechanic for the pve part of this game. PVP would profit from this move though. Not having full upgrades is pretty limiting. Maybe it's an idea to put all cards at U3 per default but additional card purchases are necessary to increase the charges. This way it's still necessary to have multiple cards, but it's less unfair in pvp. The idea of having pvp rotational decks is cool aswell. Helps players with getting to know the game. The thing that bothers me the most is that many decks lack variation in terms of unit and spell usage. I mean even though the game has like 400 cards (or even more?) the amount of "viable" cards is relatively low. This makes many pvp decks pretty predictable. Even if you have many different splashes ranging from different starting orbs over pure/mixed decks the units themselves are the same and there are only a handfull of options that are truly viable - and that's the case from day 1. I still remember the day when they made War Eagles require pure frost. Before that the game was just centered around War Eagles. Other units like Night Crawlers or Assassins are present since ever. etc etc. Of course not all cards are designed or playable as pvp cards, but many could become viable with a couple tweaks. Having a stale meta for years is not good for the playerbase, because newer players are stomped by the experienced ones and leave in frustration. Some will learn, but this is only a small percentage.

Sign me in! (But I'd also prefer double elimination over single ... but ok)

Well even if it's intended to be used anywhere on the map, I doubt that the "corpse recycling" is intended (re-use the corpses of the 'dead' skeletons over and over again). Like stated before the effect itself is fine, but the way it is is just annoying, lame, unfun. I can't imagine the card is meant to be used on the same area with the same corpses dying and raising again and again.

Since there has been talk on Strikers: Why is the Looter ability considered overpowered? According to Discord the Formula is something like 0.20 x (power cost of unit) x (% or damage dealt). So if you kill a full health unit you get like 0.2 x 50 x 1.00 = 10 power. Considering you need like 20 seconds this is a power bonus of ~ 0,5 power/second, or 25% of a power well, or even less. With Strikers you can deal up to 50% of most M units, leading to 0.2 x 80 (for a swiftclaw) x 0.5 = 8 Power. For other units, like a Frost mage, it's 0.2 x 60 x 0.5 = 6 power (if you manage to not get knocked back at least). Overall I don't really consider these power bonuses so significant that they're broken or "op". You need 11 charge attacks to get back your investment cost of 90 power. If you take into consideration the void power after their death (90% back) you still need at least 2 charge attacks to gain power. For thugs it's similar, you either need to destroy 6x50 power units with a Thug to gain back its original cost or kill at least 1 unit to gain a power advantage. Since Thugs are S units and not swift this isn't that easy. And then you're still down ~ 50/80 power since Void restores slower. I do find Strikers useful and they're way more fun to use than Sunstriders. They fit the Aggression theme of Fire very well and their general performance is okay. Only thing that really bothers me is their high cost and the fact that they can be knocked back. This is especially annoying on units like Dreadchargers or Nomads. And that they can be killed by an Eruption upon spawn.

Ah fuck it, I'm giving up. It's just a waste of time to argue here. the card is perfectly fine, although it breaks the fact that Spells can only be cast nearby allied ground entities. But it's np since the card is weak anyways. It's always good to know it's better to have broken abilities and units available for usage if you need them! I really hope your car sales dealer will advise you the same when you tell him to fix your car's broken engine. "dude where is the problem? Just start driving a Porsche instead, it's engine is way better. Why would you want to keep driving a Chrysler? It sucks anyways, has bad handling and looks ugly. Only thing that it behaves better on crashes,But no decent driver does crashes anyways so there's no point to keep it for that reason". Or "no dude, if your car is broken just use the bus instead, it's better anyways." I'd be eager to watch how that discussion would turn out.

Quit this "the card isn't worth a deckslot" nonsense. I already stated multiple times that it's not about the absolute stats strength of the card. It's about the fact that it can be recast without nearby allied entities/ground units. Leading to annoying, permanent skeletons throughout the game at one of your bases without any way to stop it from recasting because there is no recast requirement except for power. And you can't tell me it's not possible to get 100 power from void+ 5 or 6 powerwells to keep casting it after the 6th or 7th game minute. Just fix the card by not allowing a recast without a ground unit nearby and it's fine.

Like I said before, the card effect itself is fine and you can handle it with CC, but that doesn't make the spell less lame from a gameplay mechanic. Bone recycling without any limit or counterplay is lame. The absolute strength of this card is secondary. Aside, I doubt that a single Enforce will destroy 3-4 S/M units with ~3.2-4k hp and 1.4k damage, within a 30sec time frame. And even a War eagle will not even kill 1 Skeleton with the screech, and maybe kill 1 skeleton squad during hte ability duration. Out of your other mentions only Forsaken and Ghostspears are proper counters. But even then. Ghost speards deal ~1.250 dmg against S units for 80 power. So a single ghost spear won't kill more than 1 skeleton warrior during its duration of 30 seconds. But this doesn't really matter that much because the issue is the recasting without requirements, not the strength of the Skeleton Warriors.

I don't like CSGO at all, just applying the weird logic applied by other people than me in this thread. Furthermore I just asked a legit question how to move my buildings away to prevent undead army to affect my buildings. I'm not salty in the slightest. So, according to your answer I am doomed to wait for 20 seconds until the corpses disappear, while the enemy can use the time and attack another powerwell while I'm waiting for the bone recycling: round two. Even if this does not happen I waste time to apply counter pressure. And if I use my units away for a counter attack he can re-use the ability without another shadow unit nearby. And even then, how does a combination of, let's say 2 master archers (100 power) help against 4k skeleton hitpoints? Ofc you can use master archer + Frost mage, or 2 frost mages, but this is more power for you than for Shadow, on the other hand at least one Frost Mage will eventually die from the Skeleton M damage. Most units that are good at defending/have CC or knockback suck at attacking (i.e. Spirit Hunters, Defenders, Frost Mages, Firesworn, Dryads etc.), so counter attacks are hard to do with units like that, making your spent power useless to apply pressure. In the worst case I loose a Frost mage, the master archer and have to repair a well with a Kobold trick, which is 160 power in total. 1 free night crawler for shadow to go hunt another powerwell. Once again I'm questioning the game mechanic of summoning units out of nowhere next to an enemy base. If this is fine then why isn't it allowed for i.e. flying units to spawn ground units or use CC spells? It's essentially a similar context, so why do you keep arguing that undead army is intended and fine to be this way and not a bug or oversight by the dev team that wasn't fixed in the past?

So how exactly do you mind or avoid corpses next to your base momuments or power wells? I guess I just should move the monuments away from the corpses to avoid Undead Army to be cast, right?

and alright we can do a proper calculation based on your assumptions: Shadow: Undead Army (100 power), motivate (25 power) for a +125% damage increase (-25% from 1 missing skeleton but the other 3 get +150%), roughly double damage Nature/Frost: Kobold Trick (50 power), Cold Snap (75 power) = 125 power. So same power, and will remove half the damage (15 second freeze). total damage on buildings: 600x 1,125 (50% of 2,25) = 675 damage on a well/monument. Since it'll be spread on multiple buiildings you need multiple kobolds to repair the building. In total = 2 Kobold Card charges + cold snap charge - 50 more power spent than Shadow and 3 card charges for 1. Which already is 50% of the next Army. Depending on your void level or void manipulation for Shadow you can also do a lot of stuff to keep casting it aswell if you need to. If there's CC involved I wouldn't apply motivate and save the 25 power though. Not worth it. Instead frost will have to repair/cc for more power than Shadow needs to summon the army. But completely independant of numbers. It's just a stupid and broken mechanic. It's just like you have a weapon in Counterstrike that can automatically aim for the head without the player need to aim - but deals lower damage than other guns with headshots. Nobody would argue that this is fine just because the AK 47 and M4 deal more damage with a headshot so pro's who hit with them will use them instead. If this seems to be impractical for pro Shadow players doesn't bother me at all tbh. If there are unhealthy game mechanics this allows for abuse. all other summoned units cannot play out cards next to them either. And that's for a good reason to prevent this.

Sure, hurricane them or Coldsnap them - while doing that the Shadow can just send 2 night crawlers to another base and destroy a powerwell while the CC is on cooldown. And even then having to use Kobold Trick and Hurricane is 105 power while undead army costs 100. Not a big difference, but one player uses 2 card charges vs. one. For Cold Snap + Kobold it's 130 vs. 100 power. So non-nature disadvantage is even higher. The easiest fix to this is to not allow cards to be played next to the summoned Skeletons, just like any other card, i.e. Corsair summons or Harvester/Lost Reaver summons. If you can counter the spell by killing all "real" units around the summoned army the card effect is fine, but like this it's just retarded.

You never used it, right? Right now it's like this: step 1) You create some corpses near a Power Well/monument step 2) you cast Undead Army step 3) the Skeleton Warriors deal damage to a structure, or summoned units. Practically immune to all direct damage except for CC step 4) the Skeleton Warriors die step 5) the Skeleton Warriors can be revived a 2nd time without allied entities nearby (That means: even if there is no other shadow unit is present they will still revive) step 6) the Skeletons die again step 7) the Skeletons can be revived a 3rd time, same as step 5) Step 4-7 can be redone until the card charges on Undead army are gone, because the skeletons last 30 secs and the card recharge is only 20 seconds. And usually 2 undead army casts are enough to destroy a monument + 2 powerwells. If CC is used this requires 3 repetitions. And using units to defend is not useful because Skeletons have 4k HP on Upgrade 3. Of course you can use a CC on them but a) this will cost you card charges and b) allows shadow to create a 2nd attack somewhere else where they don't have to fear CC. Frenzy Forsaken + nc + shadow mages, or a harvy that can't be oinked... etc If youdon't permantly CC them they will eventually destroy the affected base. So yes, this is a Problem. It's no risk at all. And it's abuseable in pvp. The issue isn't the effect of the Card (rise dead units) - that's fine. The issue is that this can be recast infinitely and independant of other nearby shadow units. This is like Shadow could keep re-summoning a phoenix with full hp/damage out of its own corpse when hitting a building instead of enemy units.

Doesn't excuse a design issue of the card itself.

Soo... why is it still possible to keep recasting the spell even without allied entities nearby? Making 4x Skeletons worth 200 power with 40% more effective health than a Harvester (660x1,5x4= 3.960, Level 3 harvester has 2800) for 30 seconds and 100 power is pretty broken. The issue isn't the spell itself but the fact that you can keep re-using it over and over again. It doesn't fit the "risk" element of Shadow because once cast it can be recast regardless becuase the skeleton corpses leave enough to keep using it. AoE and CC help, but the skeletons last 20 seconds, and due to their massive health there are no t2 damage spells capable of killing them, even a Wildfire requires them to stand in the flames for like 10 seconds and you can't hit them all. Same with Lava field, which can't deal more than 2640 damage, so you need at least 240 power to kill the skeletons. for that price the spell can be recast a 2nd time. Overall the spell is abuse and has no counterplay. Should be one of the first cards to be fixed.

I'm pretty sure that those numbers and texts are from text files and put over the 2d art. No developer with half a brain cell would create 2d art with texts inside that are prone to changing ... Plus it would make text translation a lot harder. Imagine you need to create a custom 2d art for each different language ... lol

I love how everyone is discussing/posting stuff related to gameplay even though there is not even the beta going on