Sight as a mechanic needs ... something

[Stormfox]

Obviously Sight stacks are very nice to fuel Nezglect, and Sylvie does not have a passive besides the minor damage boost from Sight stacks, but overall, it even feels pretty weak with those two.

The core issue is that there is only a very small benefit to sight at all once you are routined at the game (as you kinda know what every enemy typically does, so seeing the actual cards is not really a huge practical benefit) for the first 2-4 stacks, and any further stacks are basically irrelevant. There are also only very few cards interacting with Sight stacks, and even those are usually not worth building for (again, with the obvious exception of Nezglekt although he is still better of focusing on Insanity).


Our new elven archer, Sylvie, kinda showcases that imho. Her passive and a few of her other abilities say "utilize Sight", but I am reasonably sure completely ignoring Sight and removing the corresponding cards from all decks (as usual when not playing the mind flayer) will still leave you with a stronger party. Which incidentally means she is currently a slightly worse Andrin in that regard.


The obvious solution would be to make stacking Sight beyond ~3 somehow worth it and/or to make the power budget cost of Sight stacks much cheaper. The issue is that Mark already exists and kind of fills the thematic as well as the mechanical niche (including being the counter to Stealth stacks).


Some ideas:

- Perhaps Sight and Mark should simply be merged into one and the abilities triggering off either rebalanced to take that into account? This would reduce the information overflow for newbies a bit, solve the core issue and remove effectively nothing from the game.

- Or sight could be "vulnerable lite" in that it lowers all resistances slightly (.25 per stack?), i.e. make Sylvie's passive into a generalized core feature of the effect and she simply double-dips? This would likely be a good quick&dirty solution, although its a bit inelegant.

- Another idea would be to give high Sight stacks some kind of scrying effect when certain threshholds are met. Like when you hit a character with x stacks, you can also scry one or more cards, and at higher thresholds this gets upgraded to "draw x, discard y", transitioning to actual card gain as the effect gets more powerful (or possibly via perks). Card draw and scrying are both effects that are not as powerful in this game as in more traditional deck builders, so there is definitely usable design space here that would not neccessarily feel mandatory or overpowered.

[Twogs]

Huh?

I had two sight teams recently, they absolutely wrecked havoc and even the infamous bunny fight was done in round one

I am not sure what you are talking about. Really.

Sight is totally viable as a team build and otherwise of course you won't need more than a few stacks to see everthing

[Stormfox]

What exactly is a "Sight team"? I already excluded having Nezglekt from the above critique, who is kinda the only one who really does anything worthwhile with the mechanic right now and who still does not want to focus on it because going for Mind/Insanity is not only more powerful but easier and synergizes stronger if you want to build around it (for example with our new bard, Gustav).

So besides this, what does more than the odd incidental Sight that you get from some abilties (that you typically play because they tend to have nice Vulnerable, Mark or other useful stacks or because you have Spyglass) give you? Yes, there is that one spell (that obviously Nezglekt starts with) that does damage based on Sight, but that is exactly my point: There need to be more interactions with these stacks *and* the stacks themselves should do something useful.

People rightfully dislike Frost because the effect is pretty weak, and Sight basically has *no* effect on it. The odd card and one major character ability (and the odd item) interacting with it does not make it generally useful or something you can build around outside the singular use case with tentacles.

[Twogs]

Magnus/Wilbur/Nezglekt/Silvie (from Front to Back)

Stacking sight (mostly Silvie and Nezglekt) and using it to deal massive damage (Magnus, Wilbur and again of course Nezglekt)

Of course you have to build the whole team around it, but it is very powerful.

[HAWAIIANpikachu]

Since I’ve discussed this again, I’m gonna talk about it here again.

Sight as a mechanic is fine, it synergies with two entire characters (which if you believe it’s still bad on Slyvie, I recommend you actually play as her because all the sight she can apply let’s her basically own the DPS from every other character) and lets some direct synergy with a third (Slyvie’s sight allows synergy with Bree’s thorns if you don’t make it inflict holy/poison damage) and along with a bunch of other cards and equipment (despite you thinking there’s only one)

Sight also can act like a mini-mark with its ability to disrupt stealth with a perk upgrade. Given there’s a lot more sight synergy and AoE sight cards, it’s a lot easier to use it to knock someone out of stealth so you can attack them. Since sight can be applied a lot easier, it also encourages players to actually check what the enemy cards do even when they know the general idea to help make better plays.

I haven’t heard many people say they dislike frost as well, most people I heard actually like frost because it gives the best long term crowd control on speed (and can force negative speed, meaning even shackle users can go first)

[Sdric]

Sight is weird. While strong in real player vs player matches, the supposed information advantage is gives is near useless in AtO:
1.) Enemies are already predictable as they have very limited deck sizes
2.) Full discard after each turn means that your reaction capabilities are really limited, as you need to have an immediate response, since your opponent won't old his hand for more than 1 round.
3.) Many "random enemy" cards make it impossible to determine who to preactive protect

Now, is Sight useless?
Sight shines in combination with Nez. Not because Sight itself is of any use, but because it scales really well with some damage cards and Nez' trait.

Personally, I do dislike SIght for aforementioned reasons even though it does objectively well in dedicated builds. It just feels so odd since it has no impact until you trigger a synergy, while most other debuffs have a more or less immediate effect.

[HAWAIIANpikachu]

Enemies are predictable, yes, but sight is still useful as nobody is going to remember exactly what everything does. That's a veteran's trap. While many random enemy cards exists, there's just as many cards that target someone, and knowing who it will is great for defense and/or healers. There's plenty of synergy with sight as well, so it does have impact.