Does anyone else think the 20/20 "Gorge: Gain 1 lifesteal" unit is a bit too powerful

[Anonlove]

Once you set him up he is an unstoppable monster, all he needs is either of the morsel generating units behind him and he pretty much wins boss fights by himself, tanks a floor by himself and has very decent damage output . Even if you don't have them the basic morsel generating cards you get when you start a game with the clan is enough to lock down a floor uncontested with him.

The only way the game can kill it is to one shot the unit before it can attack back, and that just becomes less and less likely as you get more damage shields and health ups on him not to mention the fact you can just use the morsels to block shots for him in case he needs to heal back to full at any point.

Anything that doesn't one shot him is just there to heal him back up. The 'champion' unit is nothing compared to him.

[AncientSpark]

No.

Gain 1 lifesteal is on par with other gorge effects (Multistrike, Damage Shield, etc.). What it boils down to is that all gorge units are overpowered once you get them setup, but they are vulnerable during startup and they don't solve the problem of AoE. If you don't solve those two problems, you will die to random mob chip (albeit bosses are usually straightforward, barring you don't run into the stealth boss).

The champion is among the strongest of the Gorge units because he ramps up damage much more quickly, which allows you to get into range of killing enemy front-line much more quickly, plus Champion has option of grabbing Trample (option for AoE) or Architect (allows additional capacity for faster Morsel scaling or other utility units). Attack with gorge is infinitely more valuable than Lifesteal at all moments except for towards the end of the fight, especially because Morsels are random and you cannot expect to get enough attack from them unless you have the very good Morsel cards or you are generating Morsels very quickly.

[Dlanor]

Gorge as a mechanic is very strong, but at the cost of setup.

If you want to talk about OP, you probably want to look at Overgorger. It starts out especially weak, BUT it gains +2 attack per morsel eaten for the rest of your full run, it is not hard to get it past 200 starting attack before the final fight. If you find any decent Upgrade gems to give it good keywords like Quick, or get good buff spells like giving it Trample, you can make it strong enough to win a 1 on 1 fight with Seraph after taking out the waves of minions it sends your way. Morsels and spells can easily provide it with health to survive hits, lifelink to heal itself, damage shields to avoid getting hurt to begin with, it's an absolute monster.

Even overgorger doesn't absolutely need a nerf though, if you want to win with it you need to devote the entire run to buffing it, in every single fight, and if you mess up and it dies your progress is set back because it stops getting buffed and if you devote yourself to it too much, you might just be dead now.

[GAIN CITY]

I heavily disagree with ancient spark. the champion is the worst gorge target by far and it can easily get out paced by both the lifesteal and the damage block variants for boss rushes, as though it does scale potentially infinitely, it has tons of trouble getting setup and adding to this, is just outclassed massively by the damage spill champion variant that takes extra space.

Yes, lifesteal is insanely broken, and its not hard to see why.. there are counters fundamentally for the other types of gorge in one way or another, and though they can be overcome from just stacking the hell out of them, its still a massive trial. heres some examples

damage block - very weak to multi hit bosses, as well as enemies that explode on death, a friend who plays it says there is a boss that can have multi-hit 12, i've not seen it yet on tier 7.

multi hit - not a tank, if a strong boss destroys your frontline, it will die soon after.

but thats sort of the issue, lifesteal has no counters, no boss hits THAT hard, and even in the really hard hitting turns i'd struggle to think of a time a minion would just up and explode, but there in lies the issue. if the minion doesn't die in 1 hit, it will full heal, or at the very least, outpace the damage dealer with ease in most situations.

my honest opinion of umbra is they need major retooling to their mechanics. trying to play them as a support to another faction more often than not ends with some stupid cheese like spamming the 0 cost cards that destroy your mana pool over and over again to auto win the boss phase, or gorging the ♥♥♥♥ out of one floor that can clear everything mindlessly, and gets setup nearly instantly. compare this to slayer demons and its... insane, slayer requires setup and carefully managing the board state where as this... jesus. turn off the brain, stop trying to do cool stuff, throw your champion up top up top to catch stragglers, and just murder the mid floor.

So far getting morsel master + morsel maker + any good gorge minion is an auto win. thats not even getting into the concept of just having a 0 cost deck and burning your mana to hell.

my runs so far have been the following:

Trample champion with lifesteal mods - 10 stacks left, first room victory.

Damage block minion - 39 stacks left, second room victory.

Damage block minion - 79 stacks left, first room victory.

I honestly wish i could say a single one of these were close or challenging but it really doesn't take much to break this faction.

Edit: reading the thread i get the feeling people aren't really... abusing the faction to the best of its ability. You really dont need to snowball consume to make an absolute tyrant of a unit, hell, you dont even need gorge, you can literally skip the factions core mechanic and still break it with buffs, because gaining +8 damage block +24 rage every turn is jawdroppingly unfair.

tl;dr yes lifesteal is broken, but the entire faction is insanely broken, so... i dont think lifesteal by itself is that massive of an outlier (you can also just ducktape lifesteal to your trample champion and have it solo every single boss forever)

[AncientSpark]

Originally posted by GAIN CITY:

Yes, lifesteal is insanely broken, and its not hard to see why, which i dont think ancient really gets into. there are counters fundamentally for the other types of gorge in one way or another, and though they can be overcome from just stacking the hell out of them, its still a massive trial. heres some examples

damage block - very weak to multi hit bosses, as well as enemies that explode on death, a friend who plays it says there is a boss that can have multi-hit 12, i've not seen it yet on tier 7.

multi hit - not a tank, if a strong boss destroys your frontline, it will die soon after.

Lifesteal's counter is that it's the worst in early setup. Compare Lifesteal and Damage Shield. Damage Shield and Lifesteal are the same before the first gorge as neither have triggered. But if you haven't rolled HP on Morsels on Lifesteal, Lifesteal will not protect you from getting oneshot from the 2nd gorge or the 3rd gorge or the 4th, because enemies attack first. If you were in danger of getting one-shot before the Lifesteal, then you are solely dependent on Morsels to get you out of one-shot range, unlike Damage Shield which will partially help you scale once you gorged once. Yes, you can possibly upgrade HP on the lifesteal guy, but if you prioritize HP over offensive abilities like Multistrike, now you're further delaying scaling on your lifesteal guy to be able to bust through formations adequately.

Lifesteal is closer to Multistrike in terms of safety. Multistrike has the advantage of scaling much faster to the required attack though, and has the ability to present possible AoE as well. The multistrike guy also is inherently MUCH stronger than all of the other gorge guys in early gorges, as 25x2 damage is much faster startup than the other gorge guys.

but thats sort of the issue, lifesteal has no counters, no boss hits THAT hard, and even in the really hard hitting turns i'd struggle to think of a time a minion would just up and explode, but there in lies the issue. if the minion doesn't die in 1 hit, it will full heal, or at the very least, outpace the damage dealer with ease in most situations.

20 HP is not that uncommon to burst through. You keep thinking of when the lifesteal guy has eaten like 10 morsels, which no one is really disputing that the lifesteal guy is good into. But before you event setup, there are formations that burst up to 30-40 and your lifesteal guy has to take a while to get to that point without upgrades. And if you upgrade HP, then you're delaying the attack required to bust through formations.

Here is what you have to remember. Defense alone does not win Monster Train. Period. It does not matter if your minion is immortal except specifically against the boss. If you don't have the abilities to kill all minions somewhat safely under most Trials, it doesn't matter how fancy your boss kills are, you are not snowballing fast enough.

morsel master + morsel maker + any good gorge minion

Yes, because you totally get those cards every run, early enough, and always draw them early enough in the fight to setup conveniently *eyeroll*. I can show you the Umbral run I just did on Ascension 15 where I ran over the boss with 2000 attack champion (Kindle + umbra's Spike card, with the X pact and tons and tons of energy, just eat a miner to death), but that's not representative of every run, period.

[GAIN CITY]

Originally posted by AncientSpark:

Here is what you have to remember. Defense alone does not win Monster Train. Period. It does not matter if your minion is immortal except specifically against the boss. If you don't have the abilities to kill all minions somewhat safely under most Trials, it doesn't matter how fancy your boss kills are, you are not snowballing fast enough.

its almost like having a trample champion that kills everything that has been widdled down somewhat can win the game. its also.... very easy to find hp buffs in stores to get setup, and hunting specifically for a large stone and hp buffs is a must (and easy to do) because once you get to around 50 hp dying becomes very difficult, and buffs become very easy to fine. The trample champion literally gives you the early game to make that build function.

Kinda insane that you think defense alone (with a unit that hits for insanity and tramples up top, and a really beefy line that still does around 100 damage) isn't enough and think easily the worst gorge option (i.e. the champion) that screws your early game massively is viable, considering that option maims both attack and defense pretty hard and kneecaps your deck building massively.

[AncientSpark]

Originally posted by GAIN CITY:

its almost like having a trample champion that kills everything that has been widdled down somewhat can win the game. its also.... very easy to find hp buffs in stores to get setup, and hunting specifically for a large stone and hp buffs is a must (and easy to do) because once you get to around 50 hp dying becomes very difficult, and buffs become very easy to fine. The trample champion literally gives you the early game to make that build function.

Kinda insane that you think defense alone (with a unit that hits for insanity and tramples up top, and a really beefy line that still does around 100 damage) isn't enough and think easily the worst gorge option (i.e. the champion) that screws your early game massively is viable, considering that option maims both attack and defense pretty hard and kneecaps your deck building massively.

If you buff HP, you are further delaying your setup, as I've said. You can keep getting HP all you want, but when you have to snowball 300-400 damage between 3 floors, then you're taking chip damage on Pyre to setup. It's not trivial.

As for champion, I didn't say Gorge Champion is the best champion option, I said Gorge Champion is the best Gorger. There's a difference; Trample Champion is generally the best option for taking Champion. If you go for Trample Champion, as you've said, then yes, this is a big option for covering early fight for scaling and is generally the default choice for Umbra if you haven't seen anything good in your initial deck selection (Gorge Champion as an option tends to be more if you want to cover early fight with your second faction).

What you're essentially proposing is that you run Trample Champion to salvage gorgers awful startup, which, yes, that is what you should absolutely do. But the fact that you are thinking that way, as I usually do for Umbra as well, indicates that Gorge is NOT all powerful, because it takes an absurdly powerful early game unit to even make Gorge units consistent unless your deck is extremely good.

Mostly the issue with Umbra isn't Gorge, it's that Trample Champion is too good at covering early fight. But that's a very VERY far cry than the OP claim, which was that Lifesteal Gorger (or gorgers in general) are overpowered. If the thread was saying "Umbra is OP because of Trample Champion + Gorge in combination", then I would be agreeing with it (and that's a much easier fix than your "proposed retooling"; just nerf Trample Champion). But that's not what the original post was at all.

[GAIN CITY]

Originally posted by AncientSpark:

As for champion, I didn't say Gorge Champion is the best champion option, I said Gorge Champion is the best Gorger. There's a difference; Trample Champion is generally the best option. If you go for Trample Champion, as you've said, then yes, this is a big option for scaling and is generally the default choice for Umbra if you haven't seen anything good in your initial deck selection.

What you're essentially proposing is that you run Trample Champion to salvage gorgers awful startup, which, yes, that is what you should absolutely do. But the fact that you are thinking that way, as I usually do for Umbra as well, indicates that Gorge is NOT all powerful, because it takes an absurdly powerful early game unit to even salvage Gorge units to be viable.

Mostly the issue with Umbra isn't Gorge, it's that Trample Champion is too good at covering early fight. But that's a very VERY far cry than your original claim, which was that Lifesteal Gorger (or gorgers in general) are overpowered. If you made the thread saying "Umbra is OP because of Trample Champion + Gorge in combination", then I would be agreeing with you.

Umbra's issues is the mechanics don't function at all how they should. its such a rotation reliant deck in such a snowball driven faction that you will always be in a bad spot without trample, and thats why it exists. I'm willing to bet most umbra players will die picking anything other than trample the moment their deck rotation just doesn't line up well and they get overrun and ruined because their minions were all out of order and their spells did nothing.

Umbra has the awful existence of being super rng reliant to get going with card order, and having god awful cards that without setup can literally do nothing in certain spots. I think Gorge is honestly the worst of the three variants by a mile because of the commitment you put on it the moment you draft it. not only are you passing on every other gorge unit (alternatively, you still run them, and either the gorge unit or your champion gets gimped) you are essentially saying your defenderless deck, needs to sustain itself, and if your champion dies you just lose. even the space variant offers you the ability to still function normally with an added benefit of an over flowing floor.

Gorge also doesn't even need setup if you just draw lucky, maker + gorge unit can literally function from turn 1 to the very end with only minor leaks that both trample and space variants can cover.

i honestly dont see a single aspect of umbra working in a good way, from their gorge mechanics, to their (insanely broken and poorly thoughtout) ember mechanics, to their morsel summoning cards that really dont mesh well to support other factions (and also... barely do anything, gotta love my 1 mana, sometimes get 1 mana later spells). compare umbra to the other 4 and they just really lack the ability to interact with other factions well, and also have super polarized gameplay when played as a main class.