April 2017 Tuning Discussion - PRELIMINARY

[Sparton_LOTB]

1. With the proposed changes to the prisoner, IMHO, you are making him a 4* toon. I really think if you go forward with these changes to him, he should be changed to 4*. Otherwise, if you want to keep him 5*, what you've proposed isn't the answer. I don't have him, just for the record.

We have no plans to change the rarity of characters.

2. Question. With the DDog changes being proposed, does anything counter the passive? If one has immunity or invisibility active, does that counter the remove beneficial effects passive from applying to those toons? If the whole team is invisible, will it still remove all beneficial effects on up to 2 toons?

The only real answer right now (other than killing it) is the Prisoner, because nothing else has Passive Block.

3. Like many others have suggested, please be gentle on the AoF. He's been nerfed hard already, and while he is present on some teams, he isn't widely used. For full disclosure, I currently use him on my defense, but I never went tauntfest. I refused to shard the SSD.

You're not accounting for attack team usage, but even if you only account for defense team usage, he's still the go-to Warrior to the exclusion of nearly every other non-Eddie Warrior in the game.

Ultimately, the adjustment here to his Attack is not that substantial; he's going from effectively tied for best maxed out Attack in the game to being higher Attack than every character that isn't basically tied for highest Attack in the game (from approx 1750 to approx 1500 at 5 star level 100). We really are just trying to give other high-Attack-focused characters a bit more of an edge without power creeping everyone else above him.

4. While I like that your enhancing the nomad, in his current state still very risky. You'd have to use mirage last and hope to get invisibility active on toons. One way to get him more into arena is to ensure that after you use mirage, invisibility won't go away if a toon attacks that SAME round. Otherwise it's a big gamble and not worth the risk.

We definitely don't want to change Invisibility in that manner, as there's a high risk of something unintended going through (either a bug which causes more problems or a possible OP combo when trying to abuse Extra Turns). He can be a bit unreliable on defense, but we nonetheless would like to see him more on offense and defense, and these changes we think will help push him in that direction.

However, I must say that it looks like you're turning PvP from a tauntfest into a trollfest. Unless there's something I'm missing, the troll will be in everyone's defense team since siege and passive aggression are being nerfed. This simply is not a viable solution. It will put those without a troll at a huge disadvantage before the battle has even begun.

We definitely expect him to still be a popular character, but the reduction of free damage from his shields will mean he's a more passive and defensive character, and the increased reliability of other passives means we hope to see other defensive options be potentially more synergistic with your team depending on what characters you're planning to use.

Also, in the preliminary notes under skill changes, one entry states "wickerman dog". I'm guessing that should read "wickerdog of night" since he's the only wickerdog I know with the heal skill, right?

Whoops, good catch. We'll make sure that's correct in the release patch notes.

Voids
They proc near 100% of the time, that's the real problem.

There's definitely a bug where augments like Void Shields are proccing more than we should, and we aim to fix that as soon as possible, but it's a tech issue, so I can't make any guarantees.

That said, we feel that even if that were in order the real threat of Void Shields is it's removal powers while also reducing damage to your characters, so we feel that softening the reflected damage is an appropriate action to encourage use of other purple talismans.

With that nerf (AoP and prisoner) every defense team will bring a red troll ... Is anybody think his reflect shield should be remove with the same update? (just for say, i have a troll, and sacrifice another one, but i think he will ruin the game in pvp)

Yes! I'm glad someone else is on the same wavelength here. After reading through the posts, I was quickly coming to the same conclusion that you did ─ Troll shouldn't have a reflect shield, or any damage-inducing shield for that matter, due to the difficulty in countering him now. The devs should consider making the Troll a completely defensive character (which will still have a LOT of use), rather than a hybrid of the two where his passive can also wreck serious face. Get rid of his damage shields, but keep his defensive ones (maybe even buff the defensive ones ─ whatever makes him more balanced). Sounds like a good solution to me!

Removing his Reflect Shield as well was definitely considered, but realistically, damage from Magma Shields on characters who survived was way outstripping the damage that reflect shields could ever hope to do. We feel the random allocation of 1/3 of the time having a damaging shield instead of 2/3 is a fine place for him to be in.