Lost Souls and RPvE

[Redmark]

In my experience of facing Lost Souls in RPvE as opposed to any other faction, (except maybe for Nature in difficulty 10), at least half the playerbase does not know how to solve the encounter and end up either getting absolutely demolished with no counterplay, or quitting immediately when they realize it's Lost Souls.

Is this a collective "git gud" situation or is the faction simply overtuned? Many people playing RPvE do not even take the proper precautions if they were to be up against Lost Souls, no Incredible Mo, no Global Warming etc. Too many lobbies have resulted in multiple players quitting because they weren't prepared for whatever was to be expected.

[Fimion]

Which rPvE level are you refering to? On Adavanced++(formerly known as lvl 9) some people struggle with Lost Souls but they rarely get demolished. On Expert Lost Souls are just right in my opinion they are challenging and sometimes require teammates supporting eachother but they can be beaten relatively easily even with a random group as long as they are not completely clueless. On Expert+ on the other hand Lost Souls can be VERY hard especially when you have Lost Vigils at T2 you need very experienced players to win but its the hardest difficulty and it should be that way in my opinion. 

What bothers me the most about rPvE is the inconsistency of the difficulty of each faction in my opinion each difficulty level should have its own "sub difficulties" for example:

Difficulty1: Bandits and Stonekin Bandits

Difficulty2: Nature, Twilight, Fire and easy Lost Souls maps

Difficulty3: hard Lost Souls maps

New and inexperienced players who just quickly want to farm BFP and Gold probably would be happy if rPvE would become easier but it would defilitly hurt the long term fun. As soon as a player has all the cards and upgrades he wants the only thing that will keep him playing are challenging maps. For me nothing is worse than those easy bandit maps where you dont need a strategy or support your teammates you just spawn some units and cast some spells and you will win. Usually when i play with friends we just skip those maps.

Edited February 14 by Fimion

[Chibiterasu]

Most people play rpve not for beating a challenge but for simply farming gold and bfp. And why bother with spending way more time and effort on beating lost souls when you can simply restart? Same with incredible Mo and global warming. Why waste deck slots for a potential encounter when you can simply restart with an additional deck slot? And even if you don't have that mentality, when you play with randoms, it's almost guaranteed that at least one of them will either quit immediately or isn't experienced enough to beat the map.

But the root of the problem is that Lost Souls is simply stronger than the other factions.

[Fimion]

16 hours ago, Chibiterasu said:

Most people play rpve not for beating a challenge but for simply farming gold and bfp. And why bother with spending way more time and effort on beating lost souls when you can simply restart? Same with incredible Mo and global warming. Why waste deck slots for a potential encounter when you can simply restart with an additional deck slot? And even if you don't have that mentality, when you play with randoms, it's almost guaranteed that at least one of them will either quit immediately or isn't experienced enough to beat the map.

But the root of the problem is that Lost Souls is simply stronger than the other factions.

Ok first of all which difficulty level are you talking about? Most people who just want to farm gold and BFP play Advanced++ and on that level Lost Souls can be pretty tough for inexperienced players but most of the time they will still win. I cant remember ever playing with a group that restarted a match just because they encountered Lost Souls. Yes sometimes a player loses his T1 if he gets attacked by multiple Spellbreakers for example but that rarely happens. Also the Incredible MO is always worth a deck slot its not just a card for Lost Souls maps.

Now lets talk about Expert and Expert+ those levels are for very experienced players who are looking for a challenge especially on Expert+ most players there are definitly looking for a challenge and are not just farming gold and BFP sure sometimes players join who are obviously not ready for that difficulty but it is the hosts job to kick them.

PvE in general has already gotten much easier than it was during EA times because the Skylords team has buffed alot of cards and factions as a whole. Pure fire for example was completely useless for harder rPvE maps back in the day. You could only cast Bloodthirst on a single unit for example.

The only real solution in my opinion would be to give players the option the choose which enemy factions they want to play against but i have been told that that is not possible. Maybe someone has a better idea but making rPvE even easier would be a big mistake in my opinion.

 

Edited February 23 by Fimion

[dojo]

On 2/14/2024 at 6:18 PM, Fimion said:

Which rPvE level are you refering to? On Adavanced++(formerly known as lvl 9) some people struggle with Lost Souls but they rarely get demolished. On Expert Lost Souls are just right in my opinion they are challenging and sometimes require teammates supporting eachother but they can be beaten relatively easily even with a random group as long as they are not completely clueless. On Expert+ on the other hand Lost Souls can be VERY hard especially when you have Lost Vigils at T2 you need very experienced players to win but its the hardest difficulty and it should be that way in my opinion. 

What bothers me the most about rPvE is the inconsistency of the difficulty of each faction in my opinion each difficulty level should have its own "sub difficulties" for example:

Difficulty1: Bandits and Stonekin Bandits

Difficulty2: Nature, Twilight, Fire and easy Lost Souls maps

Difficulty3: hard Lost Souls maps

New and inexperienced players who just quickly want to farm BFP and Gold probably would be happy if rPvE would become easier but it would defilitly hurt the long term fun. As soon as a player has all the cards and upgrades he wants the only thing that will keep him playing are challenging maps. For me nothing is worse than those easy bandit maps where you dont need a strategy or support your teammates you just spawn some units and cast some spells and you will win. Usually when i play with friends we just skip those maps.

I disagree. There is already a game element that lets you choose difficulty, and that is the slider. There should not be a random element that makes a chosen difficulty level 2+ levels higher because of the faction you get. People already play around what you call sub difficulties, because it is not what they signed up for. I can understand that you have gotten used to it, like most of us, but that still is not good game design and i would not call it a feature either.

I am not sure what is even possible today, but it would be better if Lost Souls would be selectable, this way the game could acknowledge the higher difficulty and reward accordingly. It would create a scenario where people get get what they want to play, and those who want the extra challange also get a little more reward out of it.

 

[Fimion]

37 minutes ago, dojo said:

I disagree. There is already a game element that lets you choose difficulty, and that is the slider. There should not be a random element that makes a chosen difficulty level 2+ levels higher because of the faction you get. People already play around what you call sub difficulties, because it is not what they signed up for. I can understand that you have gotten used to it, like most of us, but that still is not good game design and i would not call it a feature either.

I am not sure what is even possible today, but it would be better if Lost Souls would be selectable, this way the game could acknowledge the higher difficulty and reward accordingly. It would create a scenario where people get get what they want to play, and those who want the extra challange also get a little more reward out of it.

 

What exactly do you disagree with? What you suggested is very similar to what i suggested.

[dojo]

On 3/8/2024 at 6:15 PM, Fimion said:

What exactly do you disagree with? What you suggested is very similar to what i suggested.

You are right. I understood your "On Expert Lost Souls are just right in my opinion" as if you are fine with the current system, and must have somehow completly misinterpreted the rest of that paragraph as explaination and not as the suggestion you made. Sry mate, my bad. I like the your idea to add sub categories.

Edited March 13 by dojo

[Vrizz]

The thing with LS is that people try to play it with faceroll strategy like other factions while it requires proper tactics and specific behavior. I agree, many do not know it and do not look at the details.

1) Lost Dancers - spread your small units with F. E.g. one pack of Imperials can tank 1 dancer forever, so you can freeze lane (e.g. 2-player rpve).

Lost Dancers - apply a debuff, so if you wanna go with Harvester and Life Weaving, you have to cast LW first and undead army FIRST. If you try to go in and get debuff applied, Harvy will die like a piece of meat.

2) Lost Vigils - CC, clear buildings, then kill the Vigils. Trying to fight them with proximity of spawner/towers is useless.

3) Lost Manabeast - pull away from other units or tank it and kill as last, as it leaves a healing buff.

4) Archers (with long range) - send something in melee, so they lose big dmg.

5) Lost Dragons - have Incredible Mo yellow mode or worst case, try to have more melee units and take Dragons down first. Or micro your army so only 1 range unit gets hit, not the whole stack.

6) Lost Crawlers - they fucking explode when they die. Why 80% of players just stand in it? They ALWAYS explode, not sometimes. I understand taking the explosion first 5 times, but is it really so hard to figure out and move?

Above things require some micromanagement and thinking. But those small details really make a huge difference and make LS very doable. Those are just some critical things to have in mind, not all and I am probably not aware of what I am not aware. ^^

Edited March 30 by Vrizz

[JH24]

On 3/30/2024 at 8:30 PM, Vrizz said:

The thing with LS is that people try to play it with faceroll strategy like other factions while it requires proper tactics and specific behavior. I agree, many do not know it and do not look at the details.

1) Lost Dancers - spread your small units with F. E.g. one pack of Imperials can tank 1 dancer forever, so you can freeze lane (e.g. 2-player rpve).

Lost Dancers - apply a debuff, so if you wanna go with Harvester and Life Weaving, you have to cast LW first and undead army FIRST. If you try to go in and get debuff applied, Harvy will die like a piece of meat.

2) Lost Vigils - CC, clear buildings, then kill the Vigils. Trying to fight them with proximity of spawner/towers is useless.

3) Lost Manabeast - pull away from other units or tank it and kill as last, as it leaves a healing buff.

4) Archers (with long range) - send something in melee, so they lose big dmg.

5) Lost Dragons - have Incredible Mo yellow mode or worst case, try to have more melee units and take Dragons down first. Or micro your army so only 1 range unit gets hit, not the whole stack.

6) Lost Crawlers - they fucking explode when they die. Why 80% of players just stand in it? They ALWAYS explode, not sometimes. I understand taking the explosion first 5 times, but is it really so hard to figure out and move?

Above things require some micromanagement and thinking. But those small details really make a huge difference and make LS very doable. Those are just some critical things to have in mind, not all and I am probably not aware of what I am not aware. ^^

I just want to say thank you for your very detailed reply. This is really helpful. I got my first random LS PvE map yesterday (Advanced++), and it was very different from the other maps I got before. I stayed in the game to see how far I could go. I couldn't take the third orb because there were Razorbarks there. (With the spikes)

I remember the Lost Dancers especially being difficult, even more when they came in groups. Your tips will help a lot for next time.

 

Edited April 6 by JH24

[Vrizz]

On 4/6/2024 at 12:49 PM, JH24 said:

I just want to say thank you for your very detailed reply. This is really helpful. I got my first random LS PvE map yesterday (Advanced++), and it was very different from the other maps I got before. I stayed in the game to see how far I could go. I couldn't take the third orb because there were Razorbarks there. (With the spikes)

I remember the Lost Dancers especially being difficult, even more when they came in groups. Your tips will help a lot for next time.

 

Wow, thanks for saying this, I am glad this helped you anyhow.

 

If you find difficulty with any sort of the map, you can send me replay and we can watch it live on Discord and I will gladly suggest things to specific moments. Some are mechanic-knowledge, some are micromanagement and some are deck design based. I like having versatile decks that can face all kinds of shit - paralyzers, vigils, Mark of the keeper, evil eyes etc.

 

I am also growing motivation to actually record comprehensive LS guide that will show how much easier it can get. I really dont want LS nerf.