Shaman - my initial thoughts

[JohnnyBazooka89]

I played a few games with Shaman, and here are my thoughts:

1. Cards with Soul Siphon only catch souls when they are in your hand, which is extremely frustrating and not fun mechanic. I would 100% prefer if they were catching souls always, but had smaller numbers to balance them. Buildings with Soul Siphon are fine, because they work all the time and they feel much better to play.

2. Pool of cards for other characters is now filled with garbage. Only Shaman can use souls properly, and cards with souls are almost useless for other leaders. I don't know what developers plan to do about it. I'm very surprised the passive of the Shaman is not just the basic thing for all characters, and then Shaman would just get more Souls - that's one solution for this problem. Right now adding Shaman literally makes all other leaders weaker. This is a very serious problem for the balance of the game, and it should be addressed as soon as possible.

[flex]

I guess soul siphon's meant to prevent redraw or combo with steal/forge.
The extra cards really do seem to make it harder to get reuse/specialize/work combos, but totems and graveyards are pretty cool.

[JohnnyBazooka89]

I don't understand what do you mean mean by redraw or combo with steal/forge.

And about cards - not only the pool was increased, but the cards like Altar, Graveyard, Summon Pit, Shrine, Enchant and many others are completely useless for all other 4 leaders. That is a big issue.

[cainboy]

Originally posted by JohnnyBazooka89:

I don't understand what do you mean mean by redraw or combo with steal/forge.

And about cards - not only the pool was increased, but the cards like Altar, Graveyard, Summon Pit, Shrine, Enchant and many others are completely useless for all other 4 leaders. That is a big issue.

I'm prettys ure what flex is getting at is that because soul siphons only work for deaths while the card is in your hand, its more advantageous to not redraw and wait till everything is dead before casting the card.
*(I got around 900 gold from a single Forbidden Trade use)

Soul Siphon cards work well with soul siphon cards, and are easily usable with every other leader. Being slightly less effective at the start.
Example: No Temples: Shaman is 100% better than other leaders with soul cards.
1 lvl 2 Temple: Shaman is 33% better than other leaders with soul cards.
**(Bazaar does the same to Merchant, Arms to General, Engineer advisor/demolish2 to builder, university to scientist, and now Temple to Shaman)

I've only done 1 round with Shaman, and lazily let the game go around wave 45, and coasted to roughly wave 55 just so that I could unlock everything in 1 go, so I havent played with the unlockable cards gated by shaman lvling, and so i cant quite judge certain thigns like Altar....
like do the buildings still keep building souls? in which case this is awesome!
Some of the cards added are awesome.. or at least can be awesome depending on soooo many things... Like does a soul siphon keep its souls if you specialized it?


I'm super excited about trying a lot of the theory crafted combos here, like omg.

I do however want to point out some flaws here:
-There is no clear number value shown for souls gathered, *(dont know about buildings yet), so this really sucks to know how effecient using X at the time you look at it is.
-The inflation of cards may add an awesome new mechanic and playstyle to the game, which is perfectly fine for the main game, Most of these cards do not scale super well, *(while some I think may be Meta changing) so Nightmare is going to suffer.... Even more so with the sheer volume making it harder to set things up in time.
-Most of the added cards combo insanely well with each other, but not AS much with previous cards which while its nice it adds a new way to strategize, it feels like it alienates itself from most other cards.


EDIT: Buildings can show souls gained !
BOOOYA!

EDIT 2; SWEET CHRIST! Stone Elementals have 0 cost.
you could have INFINITE 9999/9999 stone elementals now? @_@!!

EDIT 3: Warehouse boosts soul buildings production, needing less souls per use.
-Soul calling was having a weird effect of not giving the proper amount of souls to buildings, but this MIGHT be explainable with souls X Soul calling Y + Shaman boost.
may need to test that more.
-Specialize'd Soul Siphon cards retain Soul lvls on use.
-Bloating hurts bad. still not impossible, but dang.
-Havent checked another leader, but Shaman starting with another card also impacts early game redraw spam for gold. which was a good change imo.

[JohnnyBazooka89]

Ok, so it looks like souls actually work with other leaders, which is completely unclear that they would. Looks like Cementary is mega op, it's like Warren but much better. But for me cards with soul siphon still seem too situational to be good, while buildings are ok. I still think like this mechanic shouldn't be limited to only card in your hand, just numbers need to be adjusted.

[cainboy]

Originally posted by JohnnyBazooka89:

Ok, so it looks like souls actually work with other leaders, which is completely unclear that they would. Looks like Cementary is mega op, it's like Warren but much better. But for me cards with soul siphon still seem too situational to be good, while buildings are ok. I still think like this mechanic shouldn't be limited to only card in your hand, just numbers need to be adjusted.

While the idea of a shaman being all mystically kinda made it seem like souls was a shaman thing, I think its more accurate that souls is a Soul Siphon Card thing.
Cemetary is a Soul Siphon card, each unit that dies gives +1 soul
that is independant of any leader. Its just that Shaman gets a passive +1 soul per unit death. :)

Soul siphoning really works well with Soul Siphoning stuff.... but not so well with everything else.. :(
Like, I specialized in Enchanting, and boosted up Forbidden trade to be somewhere around 180 souls X 15 gold. Which is INSANE.
You could also do something similar, and jack up Reaper by 180, and then they can have 4+180 attack.... which would be insane in base game. *(not scaling well in nightmare)
Buffs like the Fire spirit, and the atk speed buffs need units to be dying to be worth it, and by then its starting to become a problem, or isnt necessary depending on which units are dying *(yours or the enemies), so yeah something like this the mechanic isnt super great :/

The skill dmg and building dmg still just never feels like its enough to pull its weight either :(

I think it needs some fine tuning, or changing to work better, but I love the idea, and how it adds new strategies to the game... It just needs to work better with the rest of the game.

[Etienne]

Originally posted by JohnnyBazooka89:

1. Cards with Soul Siphon only catch souls when they are in your hand, which is extremely frustrating and not fun mechanic. I would 100% prefer if they were catching souls always, but had smaller numbers to balance them. Buildings with Soul Siphon are fine, because they work all the time and they feel much better to play.

That's something I was confused about, since I often tried using Rest + Shaman hero power, and got nothing from it. That makes that combo much weaker than I expected.
I still need to check this mechanism more, since I had the (possibly wrong) impression that all cards (not buildings) shared the same Soul pool. I was convinced that using Forbidden Trade reduced my Soul attack card (forgot its name) down to zero.

If that's indeed the case, then it deserves to be well documented.

[cainboy]

Originally posted by Etienne:

Originally posted by JohnnyBazooka89:

1. Cards with Soul Siphon only catch souls when they are in your hand, which is extremely frustrating and not fun mechanic. I would 100% prefer if they were catching souls always, but had smaller numbers to balance them. Buildings with Soul Siphon are fine, because they work all the time and they feel much better to play.

That's something I was confused about, since I often tried using Rest + Shaman hero power, and got nothing from it. That makes that combo much weaker than I expected.
I still need to check this mechanism more, since I had the (possibly wrong) impression that all cards (not buildings) shared the same Soul pool. I was convinced that using Forbidden Trade reduced my Soul attack card (forgot its name) down to zero.

If that's indeed the case, then it deserves to be well documented.

Soul Siphon cards get 1 soul *(+modifiers + Shaman Passive) per unit *(enemy/ally) that dies while in your hand.
Buildings will build up Souls from units *(enemy/ally) that dies on the field while being on the field. until it reaches cap and can then be spent to get its ability to activate.

So no, there is no soul pool. Each card/building gains souls when units die.

Wording could be better.... and I'm still not sure about the attack speed buff since its a % of the souls, so 10 souls with a lvl 1 card boosts units attack speed by 10 *(what?)
lvl 2 would be boosting attack speed by 15 *(what?)