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Lost Soul Passive Buff


Gnougnou

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Hi everyone,

I'd like to hear what you think of the Lost Soul passive, which I believe, at least in PVE, is totally worthless.
While Stoneskins get a 15% and bandits get 15% life steal for free, Lost Souls have to pay 75% of their price to stay alive 25s longer.

Let's get over some costs :

  • Lost Dancer : Cost 70 - Passive cost 55
  • Lost Wanderer : Cost 80 - Passive cost 60
  • Lost Vigil : Cost 160 - Passive cost 120
  • Lost Grigori : Cost 200 - Passive cost 150
  • Lost Spirit Ship : Cost 240 - Passive cost 165
  • Lost Warlord : Cost 260 - Passive cost 195

While some units like Lost Spirit Ships or Warlord could be borderline okayish (but I would still not buy the passive anyway), all the other basically carry with them a useless skill. I mean, at the point where you can buy a Lost Grigori, can't you just wait for 50 power and buy a brand new one instead of a 20s ghost ? Revenant's blessing, which costs 80 at level 3 (90 otherwise), will let you play your cards a little longer as long as you stay in the aura. Let's say you spawned 2 Lost Spirit Ships and bought the passive on them. If you use Revenant's Blessing, you paid a total of 410 (Passive+RB)... For what ? Ghosts that cannot escape a circle ? Can't you just spawn 2 Lost Grigori instead ? The more I look at it, the less I see how this passive can possibly be worth it.

The only place where I can see this passive useful is PVP in clutch situations. Maybe some PVP insight on that passive would help.

Anyway, if not breaking PVP, I would love to see this passive tweaked or changed. For instance, maybe the price could decrease with card level or something (I would probably still not use it at all tho', but that would make it at the very least worth it).

One idea I had, which would make this passive really worth it (imo), would be that the unit respawns as a ghost, but cannot go above 50% HP or something, but stays alive forever (until killed). Or, the unit respawns, but with 10% HP and needs to be healed. Or the unit respawns as a ghost (until killed) but cannot be healed. I mean at this point, anything that makes it worth it to pay 75% of the price.

What do you guys think ? Have you seen lost soul using their passive at all ? I haven't, ever, but I'm not playing PVP so I might be missing some important facts :huh:.

 

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Lost Soul deck give you access to Shadow deck, and therefore to great void power recycle.

While Spells feel underwhelming, @Treim managed to create a cool deck for rPvE, where he used Revenants only, kept them alive for ~4 minutes and used spells like Ethernal Storm to wreak havoc upon enemies.

I wish this playstyle got buffed/reworked, though, to make it more pleasant to play.

 

Also, since you need to press a button to activate it, it's not passive but active ^^

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12 minutes ago, Dallarian said:

Lost Soul deck give you access to Shadow deck, and therefore to great void power recycle.

While Spells feel underwhelming, @Treim managed to create a cool deck for rPvE, where he used Revenants only, kept them alive for ~4 minutes and used spells like Ethernal Storm to wreak havoc upon enemies.

I wish this playstyle got buffed/reworked, though, to make it more pleasant to play.

 

Also, since you need to press a button to activate it, it's not passive but active ^^

That's indeed pretty interesting. I also, like you, think this is maybe a bit to clunky to play and making it more accessible could be better.

Yeah I know this is an active, but I referred to it as "passive" because it's the faction's skill on all cards. Also, once you bought it, you do not have to do to anything else :D. I'm myself a huge fan of real passive, as I consider most actives to be either too expensive, not worth it, too cumbersome, or all of that.

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While the ability is underwhelming overall, you at least got to remember that the cost is refunded into your void power pool and with easy access to void manipulation for Lost Souls you can get that power back very quickly.

I think the problem here is more so about the nature of the ability as it is an effect that only does anything after you died already, which might help you recover a situation but that is 2 big if‘s in a situation where you still obviously made a mistake. That just does not feel very rewarding at all.

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4 hours ago, Treim said:

I think the problem here is more so about the nature of the ability as it is an effect that only does anything after you died already, which might help you recover a situation but that is 2 big if‘s in a situation where you still obviously made a mistake. That just does not feel very rewarding at all.

I never thought of that, but you are right. This passive is based on the idea that you are going to either kill your unit on purpose (to maybe gain the 25% damage from Revenant's blessing), or that you are going to make a mistake. It's like a very expensive car insurance that gives you a supercar for 25s if you crash yours... Nobody in their right minds would buy that, or crash their car on purpose...

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  • 2 months later...

I think something that could actually bring back the real units from their lost souls would make their ability great.

Like a building that you can send your souls into and get the actual units back. Maybe make it so that it costs some power to get them back, or make the building itself quite expensive so that it's not straight op. 

F. e. if it would be a spell it would be too strong i think, especially for PvP. But a building takes time and power, and your opponent can just destroy the building. 

what do you think? :)

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  • 2 months later...

 

I do strongly agree that this faction trait need rework somehow...

It only make sense if some of the lost souls has "on death" effect... , or some synergy with the revenant.

Possibily the original dev has further edition to complement it but, well this trait just suck as it is.

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23 hours ago, Homerun said:

It only make sense if some of the lost souls has "on death" effect... , or some synergy with the revenant.

Well there's revenants blessing and ethereal storm wich both synergise with revenants. I wonder if anyone has ever tested and wrote down numbers after testing ethereal strom with diferent amounts of revenants, on paper it seems strong. (either take almost no damage or do heavy over time damage to oponents). Personally i find these things more interesting than stonekins boring 15% deff buff or twilights weak transformations. Bandits lifesteal also isn't really exciting, it rarely makes the difference in a fight, 15% isn't enough to change anyone's playstyle.

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1 hour ago, SunWu said:

Well there's revenants blessing and ethereal storm wich both synergise with revenants. I wonder if anyone has ever tested and wrote down numbers after testing ethereal strom with diferent amounts of revenants, on paper it seems strong. (either take almost no damage or do heavy over time damage to oponents). Personally i find these things more interesting than stonekins boring 15% deff buff or twilights weak transformations. Bandits lifesteal also isn't really exciting, it rarely makes the difference in a fight, 15% isn't enough to change anyone's playstyle.

I am aware of those spells,and did not mention them because the interaction is quite bad. As some one already mentioned, the trait only make sense on melee unit, where they are usually expected to die first. 

revenants blessing ,most fight end under 30-40 seconds. This spell would be much better only if it increase the revenant life even by a tiny bit, 3-5s so you can move them around.

ethereal storm : it's hard to keep revenant alive, so this spell is useless in regard of the cost. The only revenant you usually have is the T4 lost evocation.

 

 

Edited by Homerun
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1 hour ago, Homerun said:

I am aware of those spells,and did not mention them because the interaction is quite bad. As some one already mentioned, the trait only make sense on melee unit, where they are usually expected to die first. 

revenants blessing ,most fight end under 30-40 seconds. This spell would be much better only if it increase the revenant life even by a tiny bit, 3-5s so you can move them around.

ethereal storm : it's hard to keep revenant alive, so this spell is useless in regard of the cost. The only revenant you usually have is the T4 lost evocation.

 

 

Well you don't wait till a unit dies by enemy fire, you kill it yourself...kill a few units to get a maxed out ethereal storm, spawn new ones after that. With voidmanipulation, 2 LLS, 2 Lost Dragon and 2 lost warlord affinities you definetly have enough charges. And to be clear, i don't think these combos are superstrong, i just think they're on the same lvl / a little stronger than stuff like lifesteal, adamantium skin or twilight transformation. They all don't do that much, revenants at least look good. And i'm not against buffing revenants neither.

Edit: you also don't need dead XLs for a good ethereal storm, T2 revenants for example have the same effect. So in theory lost souls have a good way to make use of otherwise useless lowtier units lategame.

Edited by SunWu
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  • 3 months later...

Hope you don't mind me reviving this thread. Didn't want to make a new one, and I had a lot to write so I didn't post it on discord since it'll just get lost. 

The problems:

I think the reason why "Revenant's Doom" (the resurrection ability) feels so bad to use is because the units themselves aren't worth the cost of temporarily bringing back. The original devs clearly wanted to give the players the ability to use LS units. But there's an issue with that since the PVE enemy LS units were too powerful, so they compromised by giving us nerfed versions of them and slapping on "Revenant's doom". 

The lost soul spells are also quite underwhelming because they promote amassing lost souls units / revenants which typically get overshadowed by frost or shadow options (e.g. using shadow phoenixes, nightcrawlers, darkelf assassins, mountaineer, ashbone pyros, overlord). 

No one really cares about Revenant's Doom on T4 since you have so much power and ppl just spam LSS. Although the T3 LS units have their unique niches which CAN make them worth reviving in certain situations (lost vigil having incredible range and defensive abilities, lost horror being unmatched in fighting squads, and lost grigori being very versatile), T2 LS feels very bad to play outside of lost shade spam and is very power inefficient at low power (you don't much power to work with at lower tiers), hence no one really wanting to revive these units / play around "Revenants Blessing" (spell to create a zone where revenant death timer is frozen).

T2 LS: (I'm going to neglect examining stat power ratio since I'm not experienced enough to analyse that) 

Lost Dancer: I don't know where EA was going with this. I understand that the pve enemy version of this is too powerful to give to players, but this is just a mess. As a ranged archer, having an ability to cast a corpse explosion centered on top of you just makes no sense. You would either need to run your archer up to the enemy and hope it doesn't die before you can cast it, or you have the lost dancer be your last unit and hope your enemy surrounds you, but at that point you would've traded your army for the chance to kill theirs. 

Lost Wanderer: Again, the pve version of this is very powerful as it can grant aoe shields to its allies, so I understand why they limit it to a single unit at a time. My problem with this unit is that A) it's melee, and B) it can't cast the shield on itself. I will admit that I do not play PVP so I do not know if it's a viable unit / core to any niche strategies like lost wanderer + defenders (I would assume people just ran ice sorceress). But from a PVE perspective, it just feels bad to play since you would need to have 2 lost wanderers out to shield each other, have the lost wanderer stand back and only shield at a distance, or have the lost wanderer shield a fellow melee unit and flip a coin to see whether it the enemy targets the lost wanderer or the shielded unit.

Lost Reaver: A powerful S counter that might see use in some decks or possibly pvp against some matchups (I still think people would rather use frost mage, darkelf assassins, or shadow phoenix). Personally, I think that the ability doesn't really fit it and that the devs just slapped it on because the pve enemy version had it. You shouldn't cast it in close range because it locks you in animation and makes you take unnecessary damage. 

Lost Priest: Feels like they just wanted to add it because they had an enemy version of it. At first glance, it looks like it was designed to be a strong "cheap" support for dealing with multiple enemies, but when you look at it further you realise it's just not worth it. Here's an example why: Let's say you have a... nox trooper left over from t1? It states that it does 50 damage every 2 seconds. 

  1. You pay 60 power to summon a lost priest.
  2. Then another 50 power to debuff up to 5 enemies for 20 seconds.
  3. If you use a red affinity red priest to debuff 5 enemies to take 35% more damage, that's 67.5 damage every 2 seconds. A bandit shaman in forge has 550 hp, so that will take 9 shots to kill. If you take in M damage bonus typing, that's 101.25 damage every 2 seconds ((50x1.5) x 1.35) so 6 shots.
  4. During that 20 second debuff duration, it will take 12 seconds to kill 1 out of 5 targets.
  5. ???

Now I understand that was a strange example fight and that the point is to use it in larger engagements, but why not just have a snapjaw for a one-time 75 power cost and have a stronger effect when focus firing? Shadow and frost do not have multishot until T3, so the only reason you would EVER use the lost priest ability would be if you just got lazy and never focus fired, or admittedly if your units were being knocked back and you had to stand ground-or if you REALLY wanted to nitpick, if you wanted to use aoe abilities like a shadow phoenix dive, aura of corruption, lost dancer necro explosion (lol), or frost mage cone. 

 

If you wish to commit to playing around "Revenant's Doom", you have to first summon the units, then pay the ability cost, let your unit die, and then optionally cast "Revenant's Blessing" to support a LS unit that typically can't function on its own. That's too much power and commitment at lower orb tiers. Looking at the list of problems above, it just makes more sense to stick to shadow or frost units at T2, or just summon more T1 units and brute force with motivate / home soil. If you want to make "Revenant's Doom" more appealing without completely reworking the entire faction's gimmick, you would need to first make the units more impactful, and also make the ability more accessible to use. 

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My suggestion: (these suggestions are under the assumption that switching abilities with other cards is possible)

  • Make the ability free or cheaper but with more limitations to not make it overwhelming in pvp. No one wants to pay that much for a temporary revive.

Sure, a free / cheaper temp revive has been suggested before, but there's a reason why I'm suggesting it again and it's because of one thing: Souls. Being a frost multicolor faction means that LS units have high HP pools, which means more souls. I understand that this could be incredibly broken in pvp since that's incredible stat cost efficiency, even if it is temporary. Which is why I suggest implementing some counterplay around this, such as applying a vulnerablity debuff like how buildings under construction / recently teleported phase towers take increased damage, and reducing the temporary revive duration but increasing "Revenant Blessing" charges to compensate. It wouldn't matter whether the revenants die too quickly, because their main purpose is to generate souls for the Lost Souls faction to manipulate.

  • Reworking the current T2 LS units to revolve around manipulating souls. Soul gathering is a very underutilised ability, it would be nice to have a faction dedicated to it.
  1. Lost Reaver: Replace Lost Reaver ability with Lost Dancer necro explosion: As a L unit, Lost Reavers have a high HP pool, making them very powerful targets for necro explosion. Being in the frontline also means they are in the thick of combat and in the vicinity of any souls from fallen enemies. Having a free / cheap revive means that a Lost Reaver can use the souls from its own death to fuel the ability. Although this may seem powerful in pvp, you could make necro explosion cost a considerable amount of power to force the player to commit, and make it its own counter by making revenants take more damage and be the primary target of the necro explosion, hence absorbing the brunt of the damage with its large health pool. 
  2. Lost Wanderer: Make Lost Wanderer a cheap frontline tank unit and make its ability like lost converter so that it absorbs souls to cast a weak area ice shield. Alternatively if thats not possible you could try dumping Lost Priest debuff ability (with a soul cost / cheap power cost) on it to make it a strong disposable support. 
  3. Lost Priest: Replace Lost Priest ability with Lost Reaver ability to use souls to summon Lost Crawlers, essentially becoming a conditional T2 cultist master. I don't know how viable Lost Priest is as a ranged unit, but being able to contribute damage and summon its own meatshields sounds appealing.
  4. Lost Dancer: ...honestly I got nothing. Stat tweak? giving it multishot instead of super long range? I don't use it so I don't know how viable it is. If the card text is right, the siege affinity could keep up with other options like burrower. I reckon someone could come up with better suggestions for this card than me. Maybe give it the ability to directly cast Befallen's Curse for a power cost at target location within range? Enemy lost dancers have the ability to disenchant. Seems fitting.
  • Revenant Blessing: Revenant Blessing is in a weird place. It's kinda useless at T2 since no one uses LS units outside lost shade, and units tend to die before the duration runs out. The green affinity healing is also miniscule at T3 and T4, making its only use to extend revenant duration. If you implement the above change and make revenants free and shorter duration, you'd probably need to increase the number of charges.
  • Lost Vigil: Could do something similar to lost spirit ship where it can destroy an own building and use the life points to spawn an ethereal structure to buff itself. Might be too strong though.
  • Lost Horror: Keeping with the previous soul ideas, it would be neat to make it a portable soul splicer without buffs / healing. It could farm souls with its multishot, collect the souls, then share it with other units. Could be implemented to support future LS units that could be added (like Lost Souls shadow insect / Lost Souls Necrofury)

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TLDR:

  • No one gives a damn about temp revive on t3 and t4 since you have access to powerful units and spells, you'd just summon more units.
  • current T2 LS options kinda suck because EA wanted to give us LS units but pve enemy LS units are too op, so they gave us nerfed ones and slapped a temp revive mechanic on it.
  • LS spells are only worth using if you use LS units / revenants, but there's little reason to use them over mono cards like overlord, shadow phoenix, mass t1 units > LS t2 except for lost shade
  • LS T2 sucks so no one wants to temp revive them. Make them usable and people might actually want to temp revive them.
  • Make temp revive free but lower duration (reduced revenant duration doesn't affect T3 or T4 since those units are quite strong and typically only used in pve and no one really gives a damn about temp revive then when you can just summon more units) and make them take increased damage to make it balanced for pvp. Free revive = more souls. More souls = more souls shenanigans. 
  • Make LS T2 work around souls
  • Lost Dancer is bad because its a ranged unit with a corpse explosion, which means that it has to be the last unit alive before you cast it. Put it on Lost Reaver. L unit with high hp pool that can corpse explosion the things it kills, revive, then corpse explosion using its own souls? I see this as an absolute win. Make necro explosion cost a lot of power, and revenants take bonus damage to make it balanced (so it tanks most of its own corpse explosion in pvp).
  • Lost Wanderer is bad because it's a "support" unit that wants to melee but can't shield itself, which means that it shares aggro with the thing its shielding. Repurpose the lost converter code so that it can use souls to autocast a weak area ice shield, or let it cast lost priest aoe debuff via souls to make it a disposable support.
  • Lost Priest debuff to take more damage is only useful if you're too lazy to focus fire. Give Lost Priest the Lost Reaver's ability to summon Lost crawlers. T2 cultist master with souls LETS GOOOO.
  • No idea for Lost Dancer... Multishot? Stat tweak + let it cast Befallens Curse? I'm sure someone can think of something better.
  • Shorter revenant duration + increased damage taken = suffering. Increase Revenant Blessing charges and find another way to make it more appealing to add to the deck. 
  • Give Lost Vigil the ability to recycle buildings and use the life points to spawn an ethereal building like LSS.
  • Lost Horror + soul splicer corpse gathering / sharing. Planning for future LS soul shenanigans.
Edited by Lywingho
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