Balance Changes

[ImperfectHarmony]

I don't know if this got answeared before but I just wanted to ask, if their will ever be any balancechanges. Right now I think it's kind of sad, that only half of the t1s avaiable get actually played and t2 opens up a lot of boring/onesided interactions aswell. I know on EA the players started threads in the Forum (I think it was called watchlist) about op cards and I think something like that would be cool, because everyone could participate in a reasonable discussion.

[Chimaka( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

Balance changes might happen, but in a future, when game is released (probably). Before that happens, there are different priorities, which do not involve any balance changes alongside with new game content (cards and expantions).

[Raxaaa]

plz buff harvester!!! XD

 

no, but it would be great to see more nature and frost in t1. thatz true

[Emmaerzeh]

agree its super boring to watch. there are only 3 matchups for 90 % of games . fire -fire . shaddow-shaddow. and now its getting crazy fire -shaddow.

 

[DarcReaver]

On 5/16/2019 at 10:11 PM, Karl Lavafeld said:

agree its super boring to watch. there are only 3 matchups for 90 % of games . fire -fire . shaddow-shaddow. and now its getting crazy fire -shaddow.

 

Nature isn't much interesting either ... S units are hurricaned and melee units ensnared, most of the time that's about it because Nature rarely destroys wells in t1. And later on you get perma healed deep ones or (even worse) stonekin cancer.. 
I'd rather play against Shadow mages with nether warp or shadow frost.

Edited July 3, 2019 by DarcReaver

[IDonZalog]

Well, that's a lot of fire fire and shadow shadow I agree with. But there are many fire shadow players I can not agree with. I think the game is well balanced and it still depends on the ability of a player to win the game.

But yes some cards could be made better so you can play them.

regards

IDonZalog

[SunWu]

6 hours ago, IDonZalog said:

Well, that's a lot of fire fire and shadow shadow I agree with. But there are many fire shadow players I can not agree with. I think the game is well balanced and it still depends on the ability of a player to win the game.

He was talking about shadow T1 versus shadow T1, shadow T1 vs fire T1, etc, not about T2. I think the game is relatively balanced, too, but not perfectly. Wich is pretty much the consensus among most players these days; Lost and pure fire a little too strong, pure nature and bandits a little too weak. When we focus on T1 only it's no secret that frost and nature are the underdogs.

[IDonZalog]

Ok, we're talking about t1. But that does not change the fact that some cards should be made more playable.

regards

IDonZalog

[Kubik]

Do you think there is any card that no one uses?

[IDonZalog]

3 minutes ago, Kubik said:

Do you think there is any card that no one uses?

Basically, all cards are playable . But some cards are not used because they are not good enough. Radicalx did a new topic about this , but can not find it at the moment.

regards

IDonZalog

[Ultrakool]

Every card has their niche use but there will always be a meta at the highest level of play.

It mostly depends on matchups of their relative decks

[RadicalX]

I'd argue there are a good amount of cards, that don't even have a niche use due to really poor design. 

EA didn't really understand alot of game concepts. An example would be the importance of bound power which led to very poor balancing choices between buildings, spells and units. Like Amii Monument wouldn't be as overpowered by costing 390 bound power with 0 abiliy cost compared to the current 250 bound +140 toggle, which even returns the full amount of the ability power into the void (which means it's completely free in any void manipulation deck anyways). 

This is the thread I once made to talk about some cards, that could be buffed without touching the balancing by alot (I improved the list by now, so the thread isn't fully up to date though). Also there were alot of dead abilities that could be statbuffed or even reworked (Colossus has probably the worst ability design, because some people simply expected PvP would go to T4 back in 2009). 

In terms of PvP the major problem lies within some cards being overpowered, especially T1 towers like Mortar and Phasetower. Frost T1 got a hard hit by a questionable homesoil nerf, that was aimed to shut down Frostsplashes in higher tiers without getting a healthy compensation buff for the weakened T1 in return. I made a threat, that revolves around that topic, aswell. 

To add something for the nature T1 part, I do think that the faction gets shut downed, because you lose early fights and split engagements without the proper ability to trade in return as base trade threats get shut downed by turrets. I also do believe, that Thugs do have an unhealthy ability especially for extended trading in Fire mirrors, but that is something else. 

In T2 there are also factions that are overperforming (like pure Fire for instance) or underperforming (like Bandits for instance).

 

PvE:

Splash decks just overperform here and pure decks are completely dead in a competitive environment. Only a few cards are really worth to play and usually end up being used in splash decks with Enlighment. This eliminates the need of synergy between teamplayers to play the most powerful combos like having one pure fire player for Batariel and a Shadow Nature player to support it. Right now everyone can do everything on his own. Almost every speedrun strategy nowadays revolves around Enlightment -> Batariel -> Buffs or oneshotting specific bosses with something like selfstacked Mutating Frenzy. Voidmanipulation and power funneling are additional problems in that regard. 

 

If anyone likes to discuss balancing in any way, feel free to hit me up on discord, the forums or ingame. I'm looking to find overall balancing issues and work on potential solutions. Having many opinions about certain cards may help me to get a bigger picture as I would like to see how different type of players do experience the game. I'd like to present a full set of ideas once we get to a stage where balancing changes may be a possibility. Any help would be great here!

[Emmaerzeh]

I would like to participate in balancing for pve cards.

Kind Regards 

[IDonZalog]

26 minutes ago, Karl Lavafeld said:

I would like to participate in balancing for pve cards.

Kind Regards 

We are here at pvp cards. Sorry

I can only agree with RadicalX. It would do the game well in the future if you can play more cards. It also becomes more diverse and not so monotonous. Some cards are not even traded in the market because you just do not want to with that. We all know that it is not easy to please everyone but you should try it.

regards

IDonZalog

 

[ndclub]

Balance of Battleforge was so close to my heart. The closure of it actually made me go off to make my own games to balance. I would normally love to discuss but do not know much time I could actually spend.

I think it is pretty funny that there was no mention of frost t1 strength. They had a sudden disadvantage on the randomly generated maps that were bigger.

That being said T1 was the most balanced part of the game but of course not perfect. T2 was close but things really start to break down in matchups and things like bandit were laughable. T3 was quite a mess balance wise and you were literally punished by not having certain orbs.  

[lmNewb]

I have done massive amount of 1v1 games and 2v2 games i have reached the rank 1 in both back in the day, my main tire was nature T1 cause its strongest, 2nd id place Shadow T1 then fire T1 but if the map is short id like to place frost t1 in at the top, its not only about cards layout of the map must be considred if its narrow or wide open, how much space there is for microing units, at t2 there is plenty of balance and counters for everything, t3 i dident even have in my 1v1 deck for wider t1 and t2 options, t3 in 2v2 is all about comboing like netherwarp and tremors can nuke 2wells and 1 orb pretty good for example there is so many options, but the games tottaly balanced only colour lacking is bandits.. 

[Showaren2]

2 hours ago, lmNewb said:

I have done massive amount of 1v1 games and 2v2 games i have reached the rank 1 in both back in the day, my main tire was nature T1 cause its strongest, 2nd id place Shadow T1 then fire T1 but if the map is short id like to place frost t1 in at the top, its not only about cards layout of the map must be considred if its narrow or wide open, how much space there is for microing units, at t2 there is plenty of balance and counters for everything, t3 i dident even have in my 1v1 deck for wider t1 and t2 options, t3 in 2v2 is all about comboing like netherwarp and tremors can nuke 2wells and 1 orb pretty good for example there is so many options, but the games tottaly balanced only colour lacking is bandits.. 

Game totally balanced?... Timeless One alone destorys an abundance of matchups...

[Loriens]

10 hours ago, Showaren2 said:

Game totally balanced?... Timeless One alone destorys an abundance of matchups...

Phase and Mortar towers, Shadow Mage + green Nether Warp, Mountaineer, Juggernaut, Twilight units, Lost souls units, Church of negation deck on huge maps, Curse Well...
Fire Nature t3, Nature t1 vs Frost t1, Frost on some maps, instant t2 pure Shadow against Nature T1, Bandits deck...
Yeah, balance is definitely very good

Edited July 15, 2019 by Loriens

[DarcReaver]

12 hours ago, Showaren2 said:

Game totally balanced?... Timeless One alone destorys an abundance of matchups...

My guess is that some ppl base their balance judgement on the fact whether or not they win the majority of their games...

Generic statements like "back in the day I had XXX" are useless anyways.

I see 2 main issues : 

Main issue 1 is that the game suffers from a couple of cards having no proper counterplay concept. This mostly applies to cards like Curse Well, Church of Negation, Phase Tower, Mortar Tower and spell cards like Wildfire, Nether Warp, Undead Army etc. Those cards do something and other decks rarely have an option to stop it from happening. 

Main issue 2 is that some cards do too much at once, rendering all other options useless. Examples are : Stormsinger (swift, ranged, tanky along with Anti Air ability), Burrower (Swift, tanky, siege, playable with many splashes), Night Crawler (swift, cheap, sick damage output, playable with many splashes) etc. there are quite a few more but you get the drill.

This leads to many potential units being not used, simply because they're less effective.

Since these units overperform, an easy way to counter them is to use Crowd Control and spells. Which makes mixing nature splashes relatively powerful. Note that not every nature deck is "too strong", but it's an easy way to fix sloppy errors during a game. The whole stonekin faction seems to be built around this (knockback on almost all units along with cheap healing spells), and fire-nature are considered the most "balanced" decks in the game (although personally I'd disagree).

It's of course not possible to give every card a spot in competitive pvp, but there should be at least 2-3 viable units per required unit role. The current amount of cards per colour would easily allow this. And for some colors it is possible already.

Edited July 15, 2019 by DarcReaver

[MrDanilov]

On 7/3/2019 at 10:00 AM, DarcReaver said:

Nature isn't much interesting either ... S units are hurricaned and melee units ensnared, most of the time that's about it because Nature rarely destroys wells in t1. And later on you get perma healed deep ones or (even worse) stonekin cancer.. 
I'd rather play against Shadow mages with nether warp or shadow frost.

Agreed

[MrDanilov]

On 7/15/2019 at 11:11 AM, Loriens said:

Phase and Mortar towers, Shadow Mage + green Nether Warp, Mountaineer, Juggernaut, Twilight units, Lost souls units, Church of negation deck on huge maps, Curse Well...
Fire Nature t3, Nature t1 vs Frost t1, Frost on some maps, instant t2 pure Shadow against Nature T1, Bandits deck...
Yeah, balance is definitely very good

Mountaineer seriously needs a rework to fix his bug and balance his stats. Not sure what u really mean by twilight and lost souls units... I would really disagree with juggernaut being unbalanced, he's strong, yes, but u need 3 fire orbs for him, he'd better have a good attack, otherwise it's not worth it because u miss out on things like building protects and crowd control. Church of negation is also fine in my opinion, needs 2 shadow orbs and support from kobold trick and nether warp, has a lot of good ways to counterplay and if you're talking about "huge" maps it's only on 3v3s, where it's more pve than pvp and needs totally different decks. Curse well I never liked, I would honestly remove it because it ruins 2v2 games in my opinion and is just boring to play with and against.

Fire nature is nowhere near weak, especially in t2, its t3 is usually very small because it needs the slots to have its power, and still not weak if played right in t3. Frost vs nature, rarely ever seen this matchup, but I bet it's pretty balanced. Frost t1 is definately bad is some maps, but doesn't mean u autolose, there is nothing much that can be done about that atm, removing maps, buffing frost t1 units or giving frost a swift unit neither seem like good options. Instant t2 pure shadow vs nature t1... this is what is called matchups, some cards are stronger than others, different colors have their advantages and disadvantages... as simple as that and doesn't necessarily mean it's unbalanced, need to learn how to play around it and understand what the color u play against can do versus u, and what u can do versus it.

Edited July 18, 2019 by felkin
fix one letter :)

[SunWu]

On 7/18/2019 at 8:29 AM, felkin said:

Not sure what u really mean by twilight and lost souls units...

He probably ment units like lost dancer, lost wanderer (wich has seen some play though), twilight minions etc - S/F relies on shadow and frost units while F/N relies on nature and fire units. But even stonekin and bandits can do fine without their respective faction units, wich just shows how much strong splashable cards there are.

Concerning frost vs nature T1, i don't know if there's a better way to play this, but if the optimal play is frost mage spam, this macthup is outright stupid in terms of balance.

If mountaineer gets a nerf, pure fire gets buffed and fire/frost nerfed, i don't think that's good. In situations like this combinations of changes are needed, otherwise some matchups will turn out worse then before if you only look at the ,,problematic'' matchups. (In this case mounty vs fire/nature or pure fire).

[MrDanilov]

 

 

 

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On 7/19/2019 at 7:51 PM, SunWu II. said:

 

Concerning frost vs nature T1, i don't know if there's a better way to play this, but if the optimal play is frost mage spam, this macthup is outright stupid in terms of balance.

If only played that way, it's definitely boring

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 7/19/2019 at 7:51 PM, SunWu II. said:

 

If mountaineer gets a nerf, pure fire gets buffed and fire/frost nerfed, i don't think that's good. In situations like this combinations of changes are needed, otherwise some matchups will turn out worse then before if you only look at the ,,problematic'' matchups. (In this case mounty vs fire/nature or pure fire).

 True, but what I meant is fixing the bug and lowering his stats, depending on how much of a buff he got from fixing his bug.