Card Balance: Share your build!

[Nives]

Hi, everybody!

We've been discussing the balance of several cards more closely this week, and want to ask for your opinion on mechanics you think are currently making the game uninteresting.

Do you have a favorite build that would be perfect, but is too costly in mana right now, or cards that you like in description, but can't play without specific combinations? Tell us! :)

Current Discussion

• Discard is powerful, could use better distribution among smaller cards
  
• Burn decks take long to setup, currently lack satisfying finisher cards
  
• Building large decks makes harder to recover, discourages variety
  
• Collecting mandatory overpowered cards limits diversity in builds
  
• Choice in interaction with the Ash deck, to target specific cards
  
• Lifesteal is not suited for Pyrobomb or long-setup archetypes

[veversis]

Originally posted by incendia:

hey folks, I've been unable to play for several weeks due to a combination of a broken computer and a rather turbulent personal life however I've gotten things fixed and I'm really excited to check out sly and to see whats changed over the last few weeks!

So great, I am glad you come back to us give us your feedback how is our new things going.

[pathfinder]

Originally posted by incendia:

hey folks, I've been unable to play for several weeks due to a combination of a broken computer and a rather turbulent personal life however I've gotten things fixed and I'm really excited to check out sly and to see whats changed over the last few weeks!

Welcome back mate

[Occultist]

So I've tried to start the new game in this new fancy draft mode and got quite disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but at current state it promotes reset abuse.

Basicly, common cards should not be included in the draft mode, only class related. I'm sure it is possible to have an 'only common cards' scenario. Not sure if ash cards should be there too. Yet again, it's debatable.

Draft mode should promote archetype shenanigans, that's the whole idea behind it.

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I like the new animation, but personally think it is a bit too fast. And there are few UI/collision issues [ibb.co] with the debuff icons above the enemies.

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Since you actually listen to my rants and implementing some ideas and QOL stuff, I'm looking forward to sound effects update. Fireballs/rare or epic strike cards/critical hits - more punchy and distinctive, DOT stuff - more juicy. Some sound variety when it comes to different enemy types etc is something I'm looking forward too (Cannibals and ghosts both have same sound effect for attack cards). Also, a bit of voice acting after winning a battle could improve the immersion. Self-confident Sly could say smth perky, Lucia - few angry words etc. Or a winning theme (short sound effect) could be enough too.

Btw I wish playble characters had atleast 1 more stance in battle and 1 more casting animation. Current ones feel like a placeholder at this point.

Visuals and sounds could sell the game, especially these days, while good mechanics will keep people playing and sharing. I hope you'll find the right balance here.


P.S. buff the incineration, dammit! 10 mana cost is a bit too much.

[Ashedrew]

Occultist, hello!

First of all thanks for such detailed feedback! Each of your points is noticed and will be worked out with the team at the briefing on monday. Also you will get detailed feedback from me Thanks for helping us to make Deck of Ashes better :))

[incendia]

Originally posted by veversis:

So great, I am glad you come back to us give us your feedback how is our new things going.

Originally posted by pathfinder:

Welcome back mate

Thanks guys!

Originally posted by Occultist:

So I've tried to start the new game in this new fancy draft mode and got quite disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but at current state it promotes reset abuse.

Basicly, common cards should not be included in the draft mode, only class related. I'm sure it is possible to have an 'only common cards' scenario. Not sure if ash cards should be there too. Yet again, it's debatable.

Draft mode should promote archetype shenanigans, that's the whole idea behind it.

I got back to playing today and I played around with draft mode for a bit.

There are some inherent pros and cons with a draft system, on the plus side it does remove alot of the repetitive nature of the first chapter which is certainly welcome and I reckon its worth taking the good with the bad on this.

That being said I think the ommision of neutral card would likely just a bandaid solution for the larger issue of disparity in quality among neutral cards and to a lesser extent even the class cards.

The card pool is quite large for a single character and when the summer balance update hits I would imagine it might help to simply cut the chaff from the wheat and streamline the cardpool a little bit.
Additionally it might be beneficial to tune the drop rates for specific cards to help smooth out the aquisition both in draft and in the regular game.

Overall I like the draft mode in spite of its abusable nature and its worth noting that you can currently reset most of the games mechanics freely without penality simply by closing the game.
For the most part this is entirely harmless for right now but if there would ever be an inclusion of some sort of leaderboard in the future it would be neccesary to adress the potential for abuse.

Draft mode also makes the game quite a bit easier on average but if anything I would prefer that the difficulty scaling would accommodate draft because its still far more desirable to the alternative of normal mode in my opinion.

Edit: I really like the inclusion of the dungeons even though they might be a bit rough around the edges I think they're certainly a worthwhile addition to the game.

[Xuande]

Bought the game recently, just cleared on Martyr on my third run. I feel like far, far too many resources/gold/keys are handed out to the point you never have anything to spend them on. If you can get past Chapter 1 and you don't commit to Heroic Dungeons before you have an engine online, it feels like the game is already won.

Discard/Ash appears to be a broken archetype. By the end of my run, I was running an engine literally on mass quantities of Sacrificials, Discard Alls, and commons with "Draw 3" in their text. Flipping my Deck of Ashes to the Battle Deck didn't screw me, because I had enough filtering and redundancy. Anti-Discard mechanics like Succubus Burn didn't stop me, because I was 1-shotting every encounter that wasn't over 1000 HP. Mana Drain didn't typically matter, because my key card only cost 3 Mana and the rest of the deck ran at 0-2. I had five copies of Inferno running, just to make it even easier to spam crafting during Rest.

Pyrobomb: Feels too fair. You're not doing anything busted and you need a variety of tools to succeed, so variance ends up being your enemy.

Strain: After buying all of the cards with my win, I can start to see a payoff for this archetype, but it seems like you're reliant on non-commons or slow healing to get anywhere. I do use the -30% Strain trait, but mainly to save 6 HP per 5 renewed cards in the early game. I find it better value than Chalice, even in Discard.

Burn: Is there anything to this archetype besides the early game value of 5+Triple Burn? Duplicating Burn is too expensive, and a dead draw in many encounters. The common enablers for a big payoff are pretty weak on their own, and don't scale well into the late game.

[Ashedrew]

Hi, Xuande!

Thanks for such a detailed feedback! As i can see you explore the game very good, it's really amazing! To be honest, you are the first who tell us about the excess of resourses and it's very important for us, so we can make the game better. At current moment we are not planning to make online enginge, cuz we have lot of other plans about the game.

Burn archetype is simple and at the beginning of the game you will have mostly fireballs :)

Plans: first of all we want to release a new character. His name is Sly and he will have 3 cards archetypes + his own mechanics and story chapter. And I hope you will test it and give us your feedback :)

Btw we'll be happy if u leave the review about the game. All our team will read it. It's motivate us to work better and make the new updates every week

[incendia]

Originally posted by Ashedrew:

To be honest, you are the first who tell us about the excess of resourses

Well you know, not to steal his thunder or anything but the issues regarding resource distribution and the general issues with the skill trees have been brought up fairly extensively.

As it stands the only upgrades that are worth anything are basicly the upgrade that gives you costless refreshing on your neutral cards and the one that upgrades the amount cards available in the shop each day.

[Ashedrew]

Originally posted by incendia:

Originally posted by Ashedrew:

To be honest, you are the first who tell us about the excess of resourses

Well you know, not to steal his thunder or anything but the issues regarding resource distribution and the general issues with the skill trees have been brought up fairly extensively.

As it stands the only upgrades that are worth anything are basicly the upgrade that gives you costless refreshing on your neutral cards and the one that upgrades the amount cards available in the shop each day.

Got it, bro. And what about the last friday's update with a new upgrade system? How does it feel?

[incendia]

Originally posted by Ashedrew:

Got it, bro. And what about the last friday's update with a new upgrade system? How does it feel?

I'd still like to get a few more runs in but I reckon one of the major issues is simply that alot of the upgrades don't pull their weight


For the blacksmith the only upgrade that really holds any value in my opinion is the one that allows you to get a trait however because this is typcally a once per run thing I'd rather gamble on just hitting a trait via an event and if I dont get it that way then no real harm done honestly.

Similarly I dont think any of the herbalist's traits are really worth picking up.
Stat increases are largely not worth it in their current state, gold is already abundent and healing comes fairly cheap as is.

The ability to cure ailments would potentially be valuable but because the ash deck is consistent and the game encourages you to only play a fixed gameplan based on how many cards you can refresh after each single encounter you can effectively already rid yourself on ailments in a semi-permanent way.

The ash master comes out a little better but still the utility is limited, in my opinion the entire ability to buy a "get out of death free card" rarely comes into play and the way the game is set up you don't really benefit from respawning to much, if you were to ill-prepared to clear a boss battle then its likely a respawn isn't going to do much for you, additionally the difficulty is fairly low as of right now.

Refreshing neutrals for free is the best upgrade in the game in my opinion, discard especially makes amazing use of it to the point where it can get by on 0-2 refresh points per combat.

The ability to meditate for cards is rarely used early game and most decks besides discard really need their refresh points elsewhere.
Renewing epics for 1 would likely be good were it not for the fact that most epics arent all that strong.

And personally all the ash storm upgrades seem like a slow investment that doesn't really pay off in time, or possible at all.

Last but not least the merchant likely has the most worthwhile upgrades.
Rest points are inherently valuable and the quality of this upgrade will rely purely on its cost.
Getting more cards in the shop is also inherently valuable because your encouraged to stack common quality (mainly ash) cards.
lastly due to the low amount of worthwhile upgrades and the abundance of gold the traits related to resource management and sales aren't very valuable to the player.

[Ashedrew]

incendia, great tips, I got it! Thank you!

I will pass this to the game designer. So he will think about every tip u mention. And i will try to come back with the feedback about every point :)) thank you for helping us to make Deck of Ashes better!

[incendia]

Originally posted by Ashedrew:

incendia, great tips, I got it! Thank you!

I will pass this to the game designer. So he will think about every tip u mention. And i will try to come back with the feedback about every point :)) thank you for helping us to make Deck of Ashes better!

Thank you all for the communication you've been having with us here!

[Ashedrew]

Originally posted by incendia:

Originally posted by Ashedrew:

incendia, great tips, I got it! Thank you!

I will pass this to the game designer. So he will think about every tip u mention. And i will try to come back with the feedback about every point :)) thank you for helping us to make Deck of Ashes better!

Thank you all for the communication you've been having with us here!

No problem, mate! I am happy to do that It's our main goal to make the great game for you! :)

[shadeavatar]

Hi all

I just have finished the game on martyr difficulty, made it in second run. Generally the game is nice but...its so easy to exploit and make it brainless clicking machine....

Here is why:

You only need multiple copies of few cards (exept Non contact Combat all of them are commons):

- Cyclone of daggers
- Quick Throw
- Change of priorities
- Hand Tricks
- Non contact Combat + Dagger set

(of note i max all stats...)

All my fights was only about playing Change of priorities + Hand Tricks and all opponents were taking tons of damage from Cyclone of daggers or Quick Throw. At the end of Combat I was only putting Cyclone of daggers/Quick Throw into battle deck and watch how everything is dying.

Non contact Combat + Dagger set combo I made just to make game more diverse but in the end final boss fight was readiculous easy: I only had to click end turn button, here is why:

I put as much Non contact Combat as I could into ash deck - I ended up with 11 copies....At the begginning of final boss fight you get like 7 fragile cards,,,,,, when i saw that I was just laughing and few seconds later the boss was dead.....

IMO the easiest way to get rid of this exploit is to do few of this things in appriopriate combination:

- introduce the minimum number of cards in deck
- limit the copy number of one card in deck
- reduce the number of cards you can put back into battle deck

IMO your ash mechanic and "unplayable/ when draw do something" cards are fresh breath in card games but i think they should be an addition to other interesting mechanics you may have, not the breath and butter of the game because this turns the game into brainless clicking. At least that was my impression while playing with my deck.

I would love to see more balance in your game and more fun and playable decks encouraging to finish the game multiple times. I hope my feedback will inspire you, because your game has potential, so please dont screw this and do it right. I believe in you ;)

[Ashedrew]

Originally posted by shadeavatar:

Hi all

I just have finished the game on martyr difficulty, made it in second run. Generally the game is nice but...its so easy to exploit and make it brainless clicking machine....

Here is why:

You only need multiple copies of few cards (exept Non contact Combat all of them are commons):

- Cyclone of daggers
- Quick Throw
- Change of priorities
- Hand Tricks
- Non contact Combat + Dagger set

(of note i max all stats...)

All my fights was only about playing Change of priorities + Hand Tricks and all opponents were taking tons of damage from Cyclone of daggers or Quick Throw. At the end of Combat I was only putting Cyclone of daggers/Quick Throw into battle deck and watch how everything is dying.

Non contact Combat + Dagger set combo I made just to make game more diverse but in the end final boss fight was readiculous easy: I only had to click end turn button, here is why:

I put as much Non contact Combat as I could into ash deck - I ended up with 11 copies....At the begginning of final boss fight you get like 7 fragile cards,,,,,, when i saw that I was just laughing and few seconds later the boss was dead.....

IMO the easiest way to get rid of this exploit is to do few of this things in appriopriate combination:

- introduce the minimum number of cards in deck
- limit the copy number of one card in deck
- reduce the number of cards you can put back into battle deck

IMO your ash mechanic and "unplayable/ when draw do something" cards are fresh breath in card games but i think they should be an addition to other interesting mechanics you may have, not the breath and butter of the game because this turns the game into brainless clicking. At least that was my impression while playing with my deck.

I would love to see more balance in your game and more fun and playable decks encouraging to finish the game multiple times. I hope my feedback will inspire you, because your game has potential, so please dont screw this and do it right. I believe in you ;)

Hello mate! Thanks for the great feedback!

Now we are working on balance changes :)) And this info is necessary for us. Cuz before the Buck (new hero) release the game will be looked much more balanced and fulled with animations. This is our goal. If you have any ideas more how we can improve the balance please share it with us :)