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The Fire Worm Dilemma


The Aquanix

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Lets just be real here for a second...Does anybody even use this thing?

725756432_FireWorm.png.4d82a79d47e42f7c9074564d0c6b5a1e.png

A sad fate befell the Fire Worm, a card which on paper seems incredibly strong but in reality is much too fragile for its own good...

Worms in general have the consistent trait of being a mobile powerhouse with minimal survivability behind them, that much is certain with the Deepcoil and Core Dredge. But the fire worm...Oh why did the fire worm have to be so Flawed?

To sum it up briefly: The worm is lacking enough offensive strength to balance out its fragile nature, and i'll explain why.

 

Worms in general follow the general stigma of "Unique, offensive strength, but low survivability except on the move." Which holds true, but the fire worm is an example of card balancing not quite done right. The major flaw with fire worm is that it's not able to put out enough damage to make it worth using in the fourth era, its strength pales to other fire T4 cards, and even with cards weaker than it stat-wise such as the BOOM Brothers and Emberstrike, they have the advantage of cost-efficiency.

This begs the question: Why the hell is this a dominator and not an archer? But i digress.

One could argue that Percussive Birth and Earthquake make the card effective and stand out from other T4 cards but i beg to differ: Percussive Birth requires you to summon the creature RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR ENEMIES. For a card like Emberstrike this is a cost-effective burst damage summon given the cards lower power cost. But for the fire worm, it's just not enough to justify spending 210 power. Secondly, earthquake has a limited area of effect and while it CAN inflict tremendous damage, the main flaw is that it often knocks enemies out of the area of effect which heavily reduces the damage.

Compared to its other fire T4 brethren, the fire worm just can't compete...Even the fire dragon, which is similarly fragile: Has rage to make up for its weak survivability.

I propose three possible changes to make the fire worm more viable:

A - Buff the worms damage output even higher to justify the low HP or alternatively, give it rage.

B - Reduce the worms power cost to make it more spammable

C - Increase the worms attack range to be more like a sniper, alternatively simply buff its HP to be higher given it's status as a "dominator"

Given the worms incredible fragility, shouldn't it also deal massive damage in turn? That's the trait with fire dragon so why not this one? Buffing its damage output would seriously make the card more worthwhile, and would balance out with its low HP

If buffing the stats would somehow break the card, at least reducing the power cost would make it more spammable and perhaps more useable as a percussive birth unit.

Alternatively, buffing the range to be more like a long-ranged artillery could give the card some use even if it's damage output is not buffed. Being able to assault foes at a great distance would allow the card to stay further back from fights and its low HP would be less of a hindrance, only if foes got close could it then be a weakness

Obviously, you could combine both: Buff the damage AND the range, but in that case you'd have to mellow out the damage to compensate since, well lets be honest if the card had 6000 ATK and could shoot from 50m it would be pretty fucking strong.

 

What do you think?

 

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13 hours ago, The Aquanix said:

Compared to its other fire T4 brethren, the fire worm just can't compete...Even the fire dragon, which is similarly fragile: Has rage to make up for its weak survivability.

The Fire Worm is the ranged T4 unit with the best attack / power ratio in the game. Some cards might be arguably better but Primeval Watcher fulfils a different role, Fire Dragon needs to build up rage first and Magma Fiend suffers from low range, low hp and mediocre mobility.
Up until now I never played the Fire Worm so I can't evaluate how it plays ingame. But compared to other T4 cards it doesn't lack stats.

The main problem is IMO that it gets 2 abilities that require it to go right into the midst of battle. Percussive Birth is even worse on this card as it is dazed when summoned and does not have the hp pool to make up for that when it is being spawned close to enemies.

Still I don't think the rage ability is the way to fix this. It would make the card incredibly strong and put it into a role that is already filled by the Fire Dragon. Instead I propose to simply take away Percussive Birth and increase the range by 5m. Or give it an ability that lets it spawn undazed. That would be interesting too.

Neox likes this
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I use fire worm in my fire rpve deck and find it very strong, the stats are great but the ability is just mostly useless, i'd rather it have a more useful ability.

spawning undazed with percussive birth would be a good passive ability indeed.

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5 hours ago, Kaliber84 said:

The Fire Worm is the ranged T4 unit with the best attack / power ratio in the game. Some cards might be arguably better but Primeval Watcher fulfils a different role, Fire Dragon needs to build up rage first and Magma Fiend suffers from low range, low hp and mediocre mobility.
Up until now I never played the Fire Worm so I can't evaluate how it plays ingame. But compared to other T4 cards it doesn't lack stats.

The main problem is IMO that it gets 2 abilities that require it to go right into the midst of battle. Percussive Birth is even worse on this card as it is dazed when summoned and does not have the hp pool to make up for that when it is being spawned close to enemies.

Still I don't think the rage ability is the way to fix this. It would make the card incredibly strong and put it into a role that is already filled by the Fire Dragon. Instead I propose to simply take away Percussive Birth and increase the range by 5m. Or give it an ability that lets it spawn undazed. That would be interesting too.

I mostly agree. Rage is the wrong way for this card and it would not do anything to address the problems with this card (because Rage plays/scales best with high HP units). Conceptually, high damage doesn't mean much when you don't have the HP to back it up. The range of Fire Worm puts him into the first lines of combat... exactly where he doesn't want to be.

Taking this into account, its clear that giving it more range is the most sensible solution. Good range + good will promote hit and run tactics (for missions) as well as the role of a damage dealer (for battlegrounds). And if you consider its abilities, you can still use Fire Worm close to an enemy to deal strong damage, but it's a tradeoff. And tradeoffs are good aspects in the game because it makes you fall non-trivial choices.

I'd even consider making it 1 fire orb, as I think it would make a very interesting splash card for other factions. However, that's just the icing on the cake.

Edited by ImaginaryNumb3r
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On 1/20/2019 at 3:20 PM, The Aquanix said:

alternatively, give it rage

Not going to address the rest of this because others got here first, but just so you know, units with rage do 4x damage. So a raged fire worm would deal 1900+ per shot.

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On 1/22/2019 at 1:10 AM, Eirias said:

Not going to address the rest of this because others got here first, but just so you know, units with rage do 4x damage. So a raged fire worm would deal 1900+ per shot.

Is there only one form of rage? I think flame crystal on red affinity units only does up to double damge if i remember correctly.

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There are multiple rage multipliers:

1x/1.25x/1.5x

1x/1.5/2x

1x/2x/4x

Flame crystal is the first kind (double damage would be too strong on it). Also notice that units that can get to 4x have about half the base attack it would normally have.

On another notice, what's the worm's current range?

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Fire worm actually used to be one of the better T4 PvP cards before enlightenment was nerfed.  For one enlightenment you gained a re-usable mobile earthquake with a ton of ranged L damage.  The low HP wasn't too much of a problem because you could support it with heals.  It ended up being debatably better than enlightenment + earthquake because you didn't have to spend the 150 power for enlightenment each time you wanted to nuke a base; the downside was that it could be CC'ed. 

Fire worm was, of course, eclipsed by bloodhorn when the renegade expansion was released, but it still had its advantages when combined with roots.  I think this is just an unfortunate example of power creep, as bloodhorn is just plainly stronger and serves mostly the same purpose.

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On 1/23/2019 at 9:49 PM, synthc said:

Fire worm actually used to be one of the better T4 PvP cards before enlightenment was nerfed.  For one enlightenment you gained a re-usable mobile earthquake with a ton of ranged L damage.  The low HP wasn't too much of a problem because you could support it with heals.  It ended up being debatably better than enlightenment + earthquake because you didn't have to spend the 150 power for enlightenment each time you wanted to nuke a base; the downside was that it could be CC'ed. 

Fire worm was, of course, eclipsed by bloodhorn when the renegade expansion was released, but it still had its advantages when combined with roots.  I think this is just an unfortunate example of power creep, as bloodhorn is just plainly stronger and serves mostly the same purpose.

I'd say that rather speaks for the ridiculous power of Enlightenment and can't be conferred to Fire worm so easily :P. As for Bloodhorn, I'd say it simply makes the shortcomings of Fire Worm more obvious. Fire Worm would be a very useful card if you could utilize it as a damage dealer which isn't exposed to incoming damage at the front line (which is why range + maybe some damage would help a great deal).

On top of that, make it require only 1 fire orb and I bet there are a lot of decks that will find good use of Fire Worm. After all, we already got a fire anti-L T4 creature which requires 2 orbs (Magma Fiend).

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