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Lost Wanderer


dougfir

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There are a few things about lost wanderer which make it nearly unplayable, or extremely situational.

It would be nice if the shield given preferred units in the same group, then if all units in the group are already shielded apply it to random friendly units.

The shield animation/passive ability also interacts badly with healing from buildings and wells.  Similarly it makes it nigh impossible to pick up a gold chest.

The healing was already listed as working as intended in the bug reports, but I feel that given cold/shadow T2's relatively limited healing and that it relatively rarely shields the intended target,

seems to make it really hard to justify playing the card.

 

 

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Hm yeah Lost Wanderer is not easy to use or rather annoying. What makes him worse than shamans is that as you stated he shields units completely random and not the ones with low hp first (not 100% sure if that´s correct but I think he doesn´t have preferred targets right now). Also if you command him to attack, he wont even use his shield ability when its ready again.

Your idea is an interesting one - that Lost Wanderer would first shield every (other?) unit that is in the same group as him, and only if there everyone already has an ice shield, he starts shielding random. But that does sound hard to implement. 

I wonder tho if it would help already if he would act the way that shaman acts and always tries to shield the unit with the lowest health.

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Yeah, I'm not exactly sure whether it is truly random, But i've failed to notice a pattern.  One other thing I have noticed is that, when *other* units are around they can't open gold chests either, I didn't test if he causes other units to have the same building healing behavior, but that might make sense if he goes into combat mode when shielding, and in turn causes other units to go into combat mode also?

 

Edit: It doesn't appear to be the case that other nearby units are affected by healing in the same way they are during gold chest pickup.

Edited by dougfir
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Gold chests are receiving a change which will allow them to be opened even if units nearby are currently occupied doing something else (like shielding their allies). 

In terms of Lost Wanderer, I agree he could use some love. We can likely make his targeting prioritize units currently without shields. I do not think making it prioritize units in the same group is possible. 

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On 2/11/2023 at 5:38 PM, WindHunter said:

Gold chests are receiving a change which will allow them to be opened even if units nearby are currently occupied doing something else (like shielding their allies). 

In terms of Lost Wanderer, I agree he could use some love. We can likely make his targeting prioritize units currently without shields. I do not think making it prioritize units in the same group is possible. 

Cool, gold chest interaction isn't super important, I just wanted to note it as affected by the unit because it is a weird interaction.

One thing I've noticed since starting this thread is that you actually *can* control who gets shielded by lost wanderer.  I'm not sure prioritizing unshielded units would help with what I wanted, since I had a front line of a T2 Lost reavers, with a backline of skeleton archers, with the Lost reavers pulling the camp, so before running in I wanted shields on the reavers. Preferably without having to keep the backline out of range of the wanderer.

I totally understand that same group mechanics might not be possible, it was just an idea.  It may very well be that grouping mechanics are available only to the interface, and not the units themselves.

The way you can control who lost wanderer shields is via right click.  In the forge, spawn a lost wanderer and 4 other units.  (4 units to ensure that at max 2 shields there are 2 unshielded units to choose from).  Select the lost wanderer (left click), with the lost wanderer selected hover over an unshielded friendly unit, the cursor should change to a '+'.  With the cursor a '+' when you right click on the unshielded unit (you cannot apply a shield to a unit that currently has a shield), the sword "slice" of combat sound should play causing the next shield to be applied to that unit.

I'm not sure ways we could make this mechanic more discoverable, but it does actually give you some control over who gets shielded.  It seems perhaps weird that this isn't an "active ability", although that would actually make it require an additional 'z' key press, or button.  Anyhow, thank you all for the feedback.

Edit: I notice that there is possibly a reason to avoid making this an active ability,  currently if you have lost wander + some number of units in a group and you select the entire group, if one of those units does have an active ability you can still select which unit to shield while reserving the 'z' key for activating the ability of the other unit in the group, which is actually pretty convenient.

Edited by dougfir
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On 2/11/2023 at 10:55 PM, dougfir said:

I'm not sure ways we could make this mechanic more discoverable, but it does actually give you some control over who gets shielded.

Oh well that was nothing new to me, my problem with Lost Wanderer is that he doesn´t have preferred Targets himself like shaman does. Shaman somehow (almost) always wants to heal the unit that has the least hp left /most damaged one - when you set shaman on "hold" (F-Hotkey).

Lost Wanderer doesn´t care and just gives shields to anyone if not ordered otherwise. And that ordering is quite tedious if you want to have your army shielded.

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