Patch 12.9 first impressions

The "Last until Turn 5" scenario idea in the thread is also very good. We discussed about a very similar idea months ago, and it kind of slipped out of our minds because we had so many other priorities at the time, but now is a good time to think about things like this.
So, well... thanks for that too !

I do not like this idea. While cool on paper as the player suggested it might be problematic. So could it be a 300 AP vs a 400 one? then the 300 AP player should have a comp that manages to adapt itself to the 300 AP and i can image already the whines (omg i can't play my comp as i have to cut down this and that!). An interesting solution might be: 400 ap vs 400 AP with one team having all units buffed (ie: +1 to all stats). The problem is that this scenario should be played twice by the same players in order to be considered "fair".

i agree with insensitive being less random of course. An option to make it happen is that it resists the first spell automatically and it takes 2 turns to the "insensitive" shield to be refreshed. (this means that the skill has kind of an internal cooldown). Just be sure to make the same mechanic for ring of ice/mist. It is annoying when it is super well performing or the contrary. About flesh golem or zerg route...this is wrong. I won vs 5xHB skeleton warriors +3x gargoyles with lvl 5 priest + lvl 4 paladin +3x HB skeletons. I think my list isn't as zergy as the other

@DW: why the hate on the gargoyle? im fairly sure the wolven hunter/lion can do the same. Harboiled on skeletons is fine as without they are either legendary killers or simple swarm. Lion swordmen should not be used to attack but to defend. I think attacking with them is a waste.

@DW: why the hate on the gargoyle? im fairly sure the wolven hunter/lion can do the same.

nope - its exacly 20 damage

and its not exacly hate on gargoyle but a sugestion that +1 Tou would be nice both for war lion and the sparkling (along with +1 mov back for all this nerfs)

Harboiled on skeletons is fine as without they are either legendary killers or simple swarm. Lion swordmen should not be used to attack but to defend.

belive me im far from atacking with swordsman but when swordsman + lion (supported with regeneration) can't hold 3 skeletons attack (and die without killing even one warrior - and without visible misfortunes on both sides) then something is wrong ;P
and do not exacly wrong with skeletons

I'm not sure if Malice will say it on forum but he had lot of fun killing most of my band with skeletons only ;P

srsly - try lions with swordsmans + maybe valkyries and you will see - i played undeads all previous patch when they were considered to be 'weakest' now you can try lions. Would be extremely convincing if you also try to have fun with any lion company without archers ;p

well exactly 20 damage...then also skeleton warriors without hardboiled get bi-shotted by a mere fang but i do not ask a nerf of fang damage because of that

HB skeletons annoy you? try using the lion knight im sure he can handle 3 of them fairly easy even without support as they would deal him laughable damage.

HB skeletons annoy you? try using the lion knight im sure he can handle 3 of them fairly easy even without support as they would deal him laughable damage.

Not true. Tried it today in 3 250 AP matches and always the HB Skeletons could kill more or less easily the pala (lvl1), thanks to the bonus obtained for the fact they were 3 against one (and the enemy still had always a sufficient number of other units to target my other units - archers, guards or sparklings - without too many problems).

PS: in your example above of a match between Acheron players, didn't you noticed that there were 8 HB Skeleton around out of a max of 10 possible? Every high lvl player uses them since they can fit everywhere and are, as I said different times, a bit overpowered at the moment as the ladder shows (the developers can know better, since they can see every composition of the players in the ladder, so in the next patch or a nerf of the Skeletons or a empowering of the base units of the other factions would be expected)

[Jigoku]

Some food for thoughts :

There were never "5" nerfs for the Spark.
* Seal of Dellar'n cast frequency reduction for the magician can hardly be considered a Sparkling nerf. It's not even in the Sparkling tree, guys! Seal is very effective on Sparks, true, but that is still the case now. It is also very useful on Knights, Chimera, Valks, Swordsmen, Lions... just about anyone, really. You really don't need 3 Sparks for the Seal to be an useful skill.

* Sparks were never -ever- intended to cost 17 AP. It was a mistake due to their status ingame that made them pay less for the "Flight" attribute than what they needed to. 21 was their original cost, so stop asking us to revert back to their original AP cost, because we did (and it was not a nerf per se - just a bugfix).

* Devotion and Martyr are general mechanics. This will not (in the future) concern only the Sparks but just about anyone that can support magic users. Same comment for Faithfuls (by the way, this change affects the Ram too). Again, not a Spark nerf per se, though I recognize it does hurt the spark (by a bit only, but still).

* The Heal was a nerf, true. But the heal on the Sparks was completely off limits. A 10 HP heal that costs nothing, have no cooldown, succeeds all the time, and can't be prevented in any way... this was not right. Our error was not to fix it, it was to put it there in this form in the first place.
We reduced the healing ability to 5, tested it, and found it useful while not imbalanced. 3 sparklings could heal an actual Knight or a Chimera for 30 HP in one turn, that was just.. stupidly powerful. Now they can still do it for 15 HP, which is OK with us. Especially when the Chimera can heal them back for 20 HP each in the same turn.

* -1 MOV was also a nerf. It was needed, because of the Seal abuse but also because 5 MOV is more in the MOV range of the Lion army "philosophy" than 6. There was a mistake on our side here, though : this -1 MOV should have made the unit cost a bit less. We are looking into it.

So... 2 nerfs for the Spark, not even major, 1 bugfix, 1 nerf of another spell completely unrelated to the Sparkling (and still doing fine as far as I know), and 1 change in a mechanic - that also affects the Ram, by the way.

About the Valkyrie... the initial healing wasn't there in the first place. It was added in closed because we had a technical issue with how we wanted it to work, and we thought that we fixed it for this patch, but it didn't work. However, it is now fixed on our side, and the "3 turns" regeneration will work as intended with the next patch. This spell is a "Healing over time" ability, not an emergency heal that you cast on someone that is about to die to save him - it was never the point. Buffing a knight on turn 1 with a 3-turns regen before sending him in the heat of battle seems ok to me for that price - and still the same amount of HP will be healed (15), only not "on cast". Anyway that will work the way we intended it to work with the next patch, so it should be okay.

The Chimera healing itself, as well as the Necro healing itself, were not intended. We fixed that.

The Lion was the "healing" Faction, true. It still is. They still have the most powerful healing spell of the game; they have both healing abilities (not spells or miracles, but abilities) and healing over time that can be casted on just anyone in their team each turn. It is actually possible to put more than 6 units with healing abilities (amongst other things) on the Battlefield, right now, with the Lion. Try to do that with the other Factions.

"For the Light!" is the tool we wanted the Lion to have against Legendaries, because the Ram and Wolf had it, but the only hard-counter the Lion had against Legendaries were leveled Valks (you know, this useless unit that can deal 30 damage in one turn to any Golem, Skull, or Knight in one turn), and it didn't feel right. Also, "For the Light!" is an excellent way to deny Pursuit Movements (while dealing steady damage) to your opponents when your swordman is about to die.


About the Golem Insensitive ability... at the time, it was the only way to prevent stupid things like 2 lvl 1 Priest killing a golem on their own, while the Golem player could only watch his unit die. Not so fun, really. The RNG part of it is a whole other matter, and I will certainly post my thoughts on it on the other thread in due time.
What startles me, is how a Worg or a PoB can have the exact same ability always on thanks to a low level unit in their faction, but for these cases it seems okay for you guys. Just, not for the Golem. Also, raw damage of the Worg can go higher than that of the Golem (and it can be buffed in many ways), and it can actually use its pursuit movements, but the Worg is universally considered like crap while the Golem is perceived as overpowered. I get the high TOU / HB part, but in a meta where every basic unit can have the Ferocious attribute, it seems a bit unfair.

Well, we can still see the problems with the Golem and we will try to fix it, but we want to take a slower pace for balance changes now, so we'll need to ponder much more on these than before - plus, I'm getting tired of the uproar that comes with each patch; when we patch the game, it is usually to put all the hard work we did in it for you guys to have fun with it, and not read a litany of "That's it! I'm quitting" or "This patch killed the game!" because of balance changes that were in fact, unrelated to the patch in itself (which should fix bugs and add new features if there are any).
Our pipe didn't allow for the balance changes to be independent of these, but it should be.
And we will be working in that direction too from now on, in order to avoid what happened with the last three patches (according to the last patch first comments, I should have lost my job thrice because of what we did with the Lion ).



All in one, the fun fact here is that the Ram didn't even get a single buff, except for the Elite and Legendary AP cost reduction (which happened for every faction), but as far as I know, there were none in the Top 10 (it might have changed, though), so it's hardly a factor.
In the meantime, they got their fair share of nerfs; with the Curses, but also because their philosophy is to have the cheapest units of the game, so when we increase their cost, it's a very effective nerf.
But still we do not hear about it. All we hear about is the Sparkling getting a +4 AP cost at level 1 (now look at the AP changes for the skelettons and tell me why nobody complained about it).
Also, I still have to read anyone here complaining about the Wolf being "overnerfed" - even when they were hit the hardest.


But don't worry, Lion players. We did read what you had to say about the patch, and it will be taken into consideration. The "Philosophy" of the Lion army implies that they lack physical punch compensated by high magic prowess, discipline, and the most steady rolls of the game (favourable auspices and divine favor are here for that, to name a few), and because of that, their special is not a total badass unit compared the two others.
Those are valid concerns that we will look into (but then again... slower pace).

I do not like this idea. While cool on paper as the player suggested it might be problematic. So could it be a 300 AP vs a 400 one? then the 300 AP player should have a comp that manages to adapt itself to the 300 AP and i can image already the whines (omg i can't play my comp as i have to cut down this and that!). An interesting solution might be: 400 ap vs 400 AP with one team having all units buffed (ie: +1 to all stats). The problem is that this scenario should be played twice by the same players in order to be considered "fair".

Well, I never said we would use a 400 vs 300 AP army. This part does not sound like a good idea at all.
But the rest is. Usually, this kind of idea needs to be tested extensively before you guys can even see it.
So it won't happen for a while. In fact, you might never see it, depending on whether we like it or not with our intern tests (like many other features you never heard about).

Jingoku,

You use the Chimera as the example for lion healing capability, and you say Valk regen is good on a KoTL. If lion players are required to take the 2 most expensive AP units to take advantage of the other units in a 400 AP game then you have seriously reduced viable comps for them. That should actually be pretty obvious even from your own statements. I went lion, never played the mage/spark build because even before the nerfs I knew it was not right, and not fun. I played 2 games with them post-patch: 1 was totally decided by it being a surprise VIP match and invisible walls. The other one was without doubt the biggest drubbing I have ever had in this or any game of its type (including Blood Bowl).
I then made a Ram company (I had never used ram other than tutorial, but I had access to lots of troops because my brother played off this account for quite a while.) Those 2 games were without doubt the easiest wins I have had in DoW online. I made mistakes, was not overly familiar with using the units I selected or the abilities I chose, I thought the map favoured one guys build but I just rolled them. (interestingly enough my BP ET'd a Level 4 Kotl, and then OE'd a level 4 Mage. Kill the BP I hear you say, unlikely with the mage and knight being in so much trouble. All Faith points were provided by a HB martyr...) I also find the skelly archers are just as good as lion bows in many situations, plus far more expendable making them better quite often. I had 2 heal specced necros which I can see could cause issues some games but on balance will be quite OP.
1 of my necros can summon 2 MP and cast putrefication in the 2nd turn, no mana boost or anything.

I would easily be able to make the top 100 with Ram. I prior to this patch had only lost 7 games in total. I went lion, I did not use any heavily nerfed units except 2 Valks (lvl 1 and lvl 2) and an unlevelled spark as a fast moving assist plus extra body for a Valk's faith that is away from the bulk of the troops. I had a record of 13-7 for ranked games and the majority of the losses were a different build and my first 400 AP games.
I never felt I was beaten by OP units or builds, I did lose to mega-mage build once but I had no idea about the mage in that game. I beat convincingly (but painfully) the mega-mage build the other times I played it.
I never blame luck as if luck decides a game then I believe it was too close to begin with. Also you can't change luck so there is no point in looking at it as factor in defeat. Other things will have been done poorly by you or well by your opponent so that is what I look at.
What I am saying is I would like to see lion with many viable build options. I went a pretty 'weak' lion build pre-patch but used it well and I think it was often underestimated by my opponents. I was not looking for an 'I win" strategy I was looking to have fun. Lion is what I would want to play in this game and I feel they are now far too restrictive and underpowered in the majority of compositions.
I have a very good Blood Bowl record, I never went a full bash team in that, I also never complained about injuries, luck or even bugs, I also did not play safety-bowl(a minimum dice roll strat). I am not complaining about my build being wrecked, I am complaining about viable builds for lion being very restrictive. Like you even seem to think: Step 1 - Take at least a Kotl or preferably a Chimera... that is hefty at 400 AP

P.S: For the light needs to be activated and reduces TOU to 0, making it really only useful if the guy is close to death. Often units are not left close to death they are left dead. 10 AP, like I said that is a very questionable spend.

Thank you for taking you time to write this I really have been wanting an inside perspective on the last patch.

I can only speak for lion:

Some food for thoughts :

So... 2 nerfs for the Spark, not even major, 1 bugfix, 1 nerf of another spell completely unrelated to the Sparkling (and still doing fine as far as I know), and 1 change in a mechanic - that also affects the Ram, by the way.

About the Valkyrie... the initial healing wasn't there in the first place. It was added in closed because we had a technical issue with how we wanted it to work, and we thought that we fixed it for this patch, but it didn't work. However, it is now fixed on our side, and the "3 turns" regeneration will work as intended with the next patch. This spell is a "Healing over time" ability, not an emergency heal that you cast on someone that is about to die to save him - it was never the point. Buffing a knight on turn 1 with a 3-turns regen before sending him in the heat of battle seems ok to me for that price - and still the same amount of HP will be healed (15), only not "on cast". Anyway that will work the way we intended it to work with the next patch, so it should be okay.

The Chimera healing itself, as well as the Necro healing itself, were not intended. We fixed that.

I think you missed the nerf where sparks cant heal each other but that doesnt matter the question is what makes us want to take a sparkling now beside refilling the mana on mage, and now on a timer and only able to do it a 4 times before dieing. Its not even right to consider it to be meatshield, but wait its got amazing dodge! Like any archer would aim for one over something else in range.

The Heal of 5

I would like to write a small text on this concept of healing a unit for 5 hp. It is not viable. You see player are getting smarter, they know its not as simple as dishing out dmg on other units. Thery have to dish out dmg on specific units, whether that be mages, archers, lions, or even swordman. Yes I said swordman, not kotl because when a swordman is the only thing standing before say a mage or archers its becomes a primary target. When dmg comes in its not going to be 4-5 units getting hits of 5-8 its 1-2 units getting hits of 20-30 (especially with this new deployment system). You say "Buffing a knight on turn 1 with a 3-turns regen before sending him in the heat of battle seems ok to me for that price" yes it seems ok in your plans, but then you send your kotl in battle and the enmy just ignores him and goes for any other available units because they prefer not to get riposted by kotl hence heal is pointless. This would be clear to you if you played more lion I think, heals of 5 are not viable, players are just too good now. We need big bad heals like necros have, make the cost high i dont care (make the sparkle give up half its life to heal other unit for the same hp, if hes going to die make him at least leave with bang).

"For the Light!" is the tool we wanted the Lion to have against Legendaries, because the Ram and Wolf had it, but the only hard-counter the Lion had against Legendaries were leveled Valks (you know, this useless unit that can deal 30 damage in one turn to any Golem, Skull, or Knight in one turn), and it didn't feel right. Also, "For the Light!" is an excellent way to deny Pursuit Movements (while dealing steady damage) to your opponents when your swordman is about to die.

Good ability i like it but again like all those amazing abilities you keep reminding us of (incarnation of justice on valk) they are extremely situational and as players get better they start realising that they dint have do go with their big units to go kill some1 who just used incanation of justice or for the light, they can send their fangs or their skellys or even puppets because valk will take 10 dmg and swormd and 0tou. So yes it works but its value is becoming less effective eg. Players no longer hit my dying player because they know theyll get riposted, so now i use that skill only to keep my mage alive until the end of turn. Again if you played more lion this would become more noticable.

About the Golem Insensitive ability... at the time, it was the only way to prevent stupid things like 2 lvl 1 Priest killing a golem on their own, while the Golem player could only watch his unit die. Not so fun, really. The RNG part of it is a whole other matter, and I will certainly post my thoughts on it on the other thread in due time.
What startles me, is how a Worg or a PoB can have the exact same ability always on thanks to a low level unit in their faction, but for these cases it seems okay for you guys. Just, not for the Golem. Also, raw damage of the Worg can go higher than that of the Golem (and it can be buffed in many ways), and it can actually use its pursuit movements, but the Worg is universally considered like crap while the Golem is perceived as overpowered. I get the high TOU / HB part, but in a meta where every basic unit can have the Ferocious attribute, it seems a bit unfair.

Both those units are too much to handle for any setup that doesnt have at least 2 archer or e touch. The damg they deal and they dmg they can take is too large most setups. A Kotl is nearly 2 shotted by these guys, and as a mage player, my fights vs golem are a roll of the dice. If im lucky i have a chance, if im unlucky no chance.
Funny I dont hear nearly anything about chimera. Let me tell you about my experience with chimera. I was lvlingher and until she got her heal abilty she was a joke. Joke. Not enought dmg, not enough dodge or parry to compensate for that lame dmg. All in all I lost alot of matches geting her that ability. Then I realise that she has 270+ ap. well I can take a lvl 1 kotl with her, but then her heal heals only 1 person for 15, not even herself. ok we can take 1 valk 1 swrd 1 bow good linup until u see your oponent know s that yuour chmera wont 2shot anything mildly tanky/def stance especially if u surround her. She dies quiker than golem i feel from playing both,l but then again one has perma ring of ice the other has aura of sh*tyrion (im sry i couldnt help myself i am a child). Chimera not viable, rework needed i think.

All in one, the fun fact here is that the Ram didn't even get a single buff, except for the Elite and Legendary AP cost reduction (which happened for every faction), but as far as I know, there were none in the Top 10 (it might have changed, though), so it's hardly a factor.

I know its funny right ? I just healr ram players say that ram now is balance they need to work on wolf and lion a bit now, but they got nerfed a it too. Lots of top 10's were golems build though thats changing slowly I think.

But don't worry, Lion players. We did read what you had to say about the patch, and it will be taken into consideration. The "Philosophy" of the Lion army implies that they lack physical punch compensated by high magic prowess, discipline, and the most steady rolls of the game (favourable auspices and divine favor are here for that, to name a few), and because of that, their special is not a total badass unit compared the two others.
Those are valid concerns that we will look into (but then again... slower pace).

Who asked for this? When did any player ask for their spells to hit more often? we can specc for that in the tree for better rolls if we feel the need we have divine favor and valk buff, whoever asked for high magic prowess, discipline (i already find the roll advantage a great adv.) most steady rolls is not really seeing the real issues with lion. And the issue is that since the last patch we stopped the large nuke/snipe/healing faction and became the nuke/snipe faction. Our swordman need better upgrades, our valks need to be more than buffers/1 time in a week incarnation of justice saviors) they need to take hits or dish out more dmg. i already talked about the spark. our lions need to be more than crappy versions of gargoyles. I cant really peak for all but those are my thoughts.

@Jigoku great thx for the replay but you miss my point partialy - its not important for a lion players if perovious skills and stats was intended or not - it was all about - if a company as a whole seems competitive or not.

Believe me i know what is to fix skills to work as intended - but if they work some time in wrong way and worked nice - they should be replaced by something other. In other case its still nerf.

Of course i never defended their heal 10 ability because i considered 'healing ballas' as wrong. But all not-healing changes wasn't nice.

And as for Valkyrie - sames as swordsman she cant stand a fight alone with anything. Saying that only knight will (or should) solve my problems is not exacly solution even if the statement is true - with i doubt because of knight high ap price equal to army of skeletons.
Really high discipline won't change that lions lacks with damage for killing multiple hard boiled units. Maybe if Acc/Par would be more important ingame - parry ratio would compensate big difference between Swordsman/Valkyrie/Lion Vs Skeleton - but currently in all 2v1 and 3v2 sutuations hit chance is to similar on both sides.

But still we do not hear about it. All we hear about is the Sparkling getting a +4 AP cost at level 1 (now look at the AP changes for the skelettons and tell me why nobody complained about it).

But simply warriors pay off even now while sparklings cant win even enough tactical advantage for their life (and paying off it was never an option before).

Also, I still have to read anyone here complaining about the Wolf being "overnerfed" - even when they were hit the hardest.

Simply all Wolfen players dissapeared or switched to Acheron
but i put a list to weak wolfens in my opinion somewhere above in this thread

Thanks Jigoku for the long answer, very appreciated from my side.

I agree on everything you said, especially people complaining about insensitive and not considering other rng tool (if you noticed i made a thread specifically for those things).

Ram didn't get buffed as you said, yet many people switched there. It has always been powerful but i guess the players didn't realize it in time. Now that is played more...bam! Ram is OP. Certain skills for whatever reason are unpopular even though very strong. I'm probably one of the few wolf player using ring of mist as i believe that skill is amazing even if RNG yet i've to see players complaining about it....they are simply under the radar (like hardboiled skeletons...it seems only now they realized they are viable! i think we both remember people saying it was a useless skill for them )

The reality is that the average player likes armies that are easy to use and strong and they rarely go for something complicated yet rewarding. Lion and wolf attracted most of them as Mage+3xsparkling is basically autopilot on the first 2 turns (turtle+pump mana in the mage+heal) as it was valkyrie+archer+mage in the closed. Wolven had the fang/crossbowmen zerg or the warrior-mages/monk zerg...both cases required as much thinking as peeling a banana from the average player (mind you, they were not unbeatable, just too easy to use with few risks). Now that these "viable" comps require more thinking players switched to the other faction who can still affectively zerg mindlessly, which is ram.

Are you sure anybody ever said HB was useless for a skeleton warrior? In my experience (played since about a week or 2 after open beta started) they have always been present in Ram builds and usually more than one. 33 AP made them really cheap and tough, 1 more AP added Martyr and the damage from that was and is reduced by HB.
They were and remain one of the best value units in the game IMO, but I never thought they were OP in the context of the rest of Ram.
I never thought anything was OP barring the old mega-mage build (mainly because of its ease of win and lack of fun to play against rather than it being unbeatable.) I also thought running after casting was a bit much, and that change is harder on Wolfen than the others really.
The 'buffing' of Ram you talk about is not accurate, well misleading at least. The patch impacted on more play styles, more heavily for Lion and Wolf. That is what people see as ram improving compared to the only 2 other races available. Ram IMO was never weak, which means if you reduce the overall effectiveness of the others Ram by default is improved. That is a no-brainer really.