Altar of Chaos

[UltDragon]

I have mixed feelings about Altar of Chaos, it has a huge potential but not that good play wise.

I built this deck around it:

1. Build 4 Altar of Chaos in a circle pattern
2. Build Furnace of Flesh in the middle
3. Spawn 5~6 Cultist Master
4. Then use his ability and the altars with Nightcrawlers, repeat 4 times.
5. Spawn 1 Lost Warlord and activate Revenant Doom.
6. Go to the enemy base with 1 Lost Warlord, use Life Weaving so he won't die easily.
7. Cast Frenetic Assault on the enemies.
8. Put 1 Nether Bomb near enemy camp, cast Shield Building on it.
9. Two options: use Retreating Circle or Let the Lost Warlord die, so you will have ground presence with the revenant and maybe put another bomb or spawn another Lost Warlord.
10. Continue feeding the altars.

The first problem is positioning the bomb, as it collides with any enemy entity, it won't be optimal and will miss some of them.

I could also walk away with Lost Warlord, but the 10 sec timing when baiting the enemies is a tight one, for all the casting and micromanagement needed.

You could say Shield Building isn't needed, but most T4 enemy bases will have long range artillery (Passage to Darkness) or will be out of range of the bomb (rPVE bases).

Compare with Worlbreaker Gun / Comet Catcher, where you can just click in the middle of the base without risks. Now Comet Catcher can almost cover the rPVE map entirelly with a good positioning.

And finally, the damage of the bomb would be splitted into friendly units in range, making it less effective. It also disencourages its use when playing with teammates, what if they walk into the bomb?

 

Idea for a rework, Inspired by the abilities of Necroblaster + Nasty Surprise:

"Activate to create a 25m radius ritual zone within 300m range. After 5 seconds all own units within range will be killed and 200% of the current life points from those units will be dealt as damage to hostile and friendly entities within range."

That would be a heavily shadow themed ability, highlighting the sacrifice theme.

Now damage wise, if want a fast clear, just send 4 T4 units, like Overlords = 4 x 4000 x 2 = 32 000 damage, but with a huge cost.

 

Edited April 12, 2022 by UltDragon

[WindHunter]

On 4/11/2022 at 8:33 PM, UltDragon said:

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And finally, the damage of the bomb would be splitted into friendly units in range, making it less effective. It also disencourages its use when playing with teammates, what if they walk into the bomb?

Idea for a rework, Inspired by the abilities of Necroblaster + Nasty Surprise:

"Activate to create a 25m radius ritual zone within 300m range. After 5 seconds all own units within range will be killed and 200% of the current life points from those units will be dealt as damage to hostile and friendly entities within range."

That would be a heavily shadow themed ability, highlighting the sacrifice theme.

Now damage wise, if want a fast clear, just send 4 T4 units, like Overlords = 4 x 4000 x 2 = 32 000 damage, but with a huge cost.

 

I think the current mechanic for Altar of Chaos is a good one and fitting to Shadow as a faction, though I can understand both the current frustrations with using it around allies as well as its current strength. I would prefer suggestions which help to alleviate some of the current issues without wholly reworking the card from scratch.

For some more transparency from our side: we as a team are not interesting in promoting any of the superweapons (Comet Catcher, WBG, and Altar of Chaos) into top tier strategies. Given their very long range (infinite in the case of Altar), they are strategies which the map itself cannot hope to "counter" as they can be placed in permanent safe areas and activated even if the player were to lose of all their orbs. While this is not so much of an issue in RPvE where there is a constant timer, it is an issue in campaign maps where timers usually do not exist and where enemy positions and objectives are often static. 

Additionally, the vast majority of overkill damage from spell effects does not overflow to damage other targets in BattleForge. While this is an ancient and well-known bug (at least in PvP), we recently developed a fix for the bug. Cards like Altar of Chaos with very high amounts of single-target damage are affected particularly negatively by the bug. I think fixing this bug to allow for full damage overflow combined with some minor changes will do a lot to improve Altar of Chaos to be good, but still niche.

[You will win with me]

On 4/12/2022 at 2:33 AM, UltDragon said:

The first problem is positioning the bomb, as it collides with any enemy entity, it won't be optimal and will miss some of them.

I could also walk away with Lost Warlord, but the 10 sec timing when baiting the enemies is a tight one, for all the casting and micromanagement needed.

 

You can just place the bomb and then force the enemies in the bomb with nether warp (ice)    😈