100%'ed, fifty hours in, my criticisms on Aimless / Teeth

[Nobody󠁳⁧⁧ ©]

Aimless is fine as player keyword. It is a risk you take for a reward. You can still manipulate your targets to negate its effect, override it with barrage, spread debuffs, abuse smackback, or brute force it with sheer power. It is fine and is relatively well balanced.

Aimless is NOT a negative as enemy keyword. Opponents don't employ strategy. It puts an entire row at risk. Bigfoot doesn't need 7 dmg 4 counter to compensate for aimless. Picking aimless frenzy should not be a punishment for when you win a non-vanquish run. You can keep aimless but the keyword should not be treated as a downside for enemies and they should lose stats accordingly should they harbor this keyword.

And then you have Teeth. Smackback is an amazing keyword because it interacts with a lot of other mechanics. It works with everything that works with hitting, and scales with a unit's attacking capabilities. You can snow, frost (reduce attack), ink, or even outright kill to overcome smackback. Its awesome. Its powerful. It has workarounds.

Sorry was still talking about smackback. Teeth on the other hand is terrible. It is an independent value. It doesn't scale with anything else. It doesn't have any counters. If this fella has 6 teeth any unit touching it receives 6 damage, no way around it, no exceptions. Awful.

So what's the solution? Make it work with other mechanics! Maybe ink can affect it? Frost? Longshot? But I have a better idea: Teeth should only affect attackers within two columns. If a unit is in the furthest back hitting a teeth unit in the front, it is not hit by teeth. Barrage and clunks can now safely hit Teeth without instantly blowing themselves up. BAM! Best feature of Wildfrost used to deal with the worst feature of the same game! pls like and subscribe.

Whatever the decision is, Teeth NEEDS to change. Aimless enemies only need some adjustments imo.

Put these two together and you know which encounter I'm talking about. That alone with unlucky starting placements. and one of it carrying good charm? Instant ragequit. Not even gonna entertain the dice roll that ensues.

[bigm17]

You pretty much nailed it. Just quit a run where a wooly drek had smackback charm, then eats a cat with a teeth charm. Isn't game over without bom, overburn or shroom.

I think teeth just needs to be reduced on the enemies overall, so they can't get more than 1 per hit. If allies were able to build up 30 plus hp, it wouldn't be as big an issue, but its hard enough to get a unit to just 10 hp, let alone worry about an enemy that has 6 teeth on it.

[Jeshrack]

+1.

Teeth is a pure fun-killer.

I've yelled about this a lot, but it needs repeating until something is done about it.

[Loop_Stratos]

That one encounter is manageable if the +3 thorn guy is alone in a row, but if it got placed together with something else, pray you're running a defensive deck that run. Frenzy-based decks can probably just quit though because the enemy reinforcements contain the +2 teeth when hit enemies.

Good post.

[Rockloh]

I built a teeth team and now I have to fight it, kinda difficult to kill a 20hp unit with 9 teeth only with direct damage cards that do 2-4 damage. Also you can't stop your leader from attacking so you have to always leave a target on the other roll.

[Postman Pat]

Yep. Teeth is very, very insane. I have to fight a boss I gave Tusk... oi vey... not looking forward to it.

Only thing I can think of that's viable against teeth are the big nukes, but the teeth units have very high HP often times and many big damage nukes (if you roll one) require setup which punishes your tempo like crazy.

Makokos with +4 teeth are the bane of my existence.

[Ssjbryando]

I really don't get the hate for aimless. I honestly take it quite often on my champs simply cause the other bonuses are so good.

BIgfoot does blow

[Azktor]

I like both teeth and aimless, it is a checker for people going full aggro builds. Aimless also fine you can more or less reliably work around it. Yeah, sometimes you have to gamble? but it is part of the charm.

Bigfoot is kinda nasty that I agree, mostly because he has some amazing stats backing up the Aimless 'threat'

Against teeth you either tank up your units or you slow like crazy and deal with spells damage. I like that not all fights can be solved by "ME SMASH BIG NUMBERS OF DAMAGE ON ENEMIZ*SMOrc*"-strategy.

[Tubers]

Teeth should be countered by direct damage items, but those are very limited in this game, I guess by design. The second problem is the obligatory attack: you can't prevent your own creatures from attacking unless you snow them.

Perhaps teeth could change in the following way: each time the unit takes damage, it loses one stack, and so its damage is reduced. In this way direct damage items can still help deal with it, without being too strong at removal. Of course you would have to change the "add 1 teeth when attacked" enemies because it wouldn't make sense anymore, but those can be balanced in another way.

[Postman Pat]

Teeth should be affected by ink, snowballs, and frost just like everything else.

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by Ssjbryando:

I really don't get the hate for aimless. I honestly take it quite often on my champs simply cause the other bonuses are so good.

BIgfoot does blow

Nobody is hating on aimless on your own units that much. The problem is that enemies like Bigfoot have stats as if Aimless is a downside for them, but it's really a huge problem for the player because it means you can't tank the hit as easily or plan around his attack as easily. Bigfoot is a 15/7 but would still be very scary as a 10/5.

[Azktor]

Originally posted by Postman Pat:

Teeth should be affected by ink, snowballs, and frost just like everything else.

That would make teeth worthless. The only exception maybe frost could, that would be an indirect buff to frost. Snowballs and ink are already pretty potent overall. But that would probably mean teeth on our units would probably need bigger numbers in order to be playable.

[Postman Pat]

Originally posted by Azktor:

Originally posted by Postman Pat:

Teeth should be affected by ink, snowballs, and frost just like everything else.

That would make teeth worthless. The only exception maybe frost could, that would be an indirect buff to frost. Snowballs and ink are already pretty potent overall. But that would probably mean teeth on our units would probably need bigger numbers in order to be playable.

No... it would put teeth exactly in line with every other type of ability in the game. You can choose to expend turns to kill, buff, or lower enemy effects. Teeth is the only ability in the game you have zero options on, other than withdrawing an attacker. If it's your hero, you cannot avoid it at all other than to snowball your own hero. This is nonsensical.

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by Azktor:

I like both teeth and aimless, it is a checker for people going full aggro builds. Aimless also fine you can more or less reliably work around it. Yeah, sometimes you have to gamble? but it is part of the charm.

Bigfoot is kinda nasty that I agree, mostly because he has some amazing stats backing up the Aimless 'threat'

Against teeth you either tank up your units or you slow like crazy and deal with spells damage. I like that not all fights can be solved by "ME SMASH BIG NUMBERS OF DAMAGE ON ENEMIZ*SMOrc*"-strategy.

I have a feeling you don't know what people are talking about when they say they hate fighting enemies with teeth. What are you planning to do against a snow-resist boss that has 78 health and 4 teeth, that gains 3 teeth on kill, and applies 6 blue fire in a barrage? Oh and it has +3 teeth as an aura from a 16 health unit while another unit gives +3 attack to enemies and -3 attack to your allies, while there are 2 enemies that throw 3 snow alongside their attacks and a frontline smackback unit stopping you from actually reaching the other must-kill things. This isn't a made up scenario, this is a real boss someone has to overcome that you can see in the image below.

It's not as simple as "duh don't smash big numbers". You cannot "slow like crazy" when it can't be given more than 1 snow at a time, you cannot "tank up" against that much blue fire in a barrage, and you're not going to survive the 39 turns needed to kill the boss with scrappy swords.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1090960729240248381/1097797977466216558/SPOILER_image.png

[Postman Pat]

Originally posted by Totopo:

Originally posted by Azktor:

I like both teeth and aimless, it is a checker for people going full aggro builds. Aimless also fine you can more or less reliably work around it. Yeah, sometimes you have to gamble? but it is part of the charm.

Bigfoot is kinda nasty that I agree, mostly because he has some amazing stats backing up the Aimless 'threat'

Against teeth you either tank up your units or you slow like crazy and deal with spells damage. I like that not all fights can be solved by "ME SMASH BIG NUMBERS OF DAMAGE ON ENEMIZ*SMOrc*"-strategy.

I have a feeling you don't know what people are talking about when they say they hate fighting enemies with teeth. What are you planning to do against a snow-resist boss that has 78 health and 4 teeth, that gains 3 teeth on kill, and applies 6 blue fire in a barrage? Oh and it has +3 teeth as an aura from a 16 health unit while another unit gives +3 attack to enemies and -3 attack to your allies, while there are 2 enemies that throw 3 snow alongside their attacks and a frontline smackback unit stopping you from actually reaching the other must-kill things. This isn't a made up scenario, this is a real boss someone has to overcome that you can see in the image below.

It's not as simple as "duh don't smash big numbers". You cannot "slow like crazy" when it can't be given more than 1 snow at a time, you cannot "tank up" against that much blue fire in a barrage, and you're not going to survive the 39 turns needed to kill the boss with scrappy swords.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1090960729240248381/1097797977466216558/SPOILER_image.png

Tha'ts quite similar to what my current boss looks like... except mine also has smackback. XD

[Azktor]

Oh yeah i know what they are talking about, had to play against one of my hero that had a very large hp pool + teeth. I did had to plan my run around 100% in order to beat it.

Needed a lot of healing + HP increase that could be used frequent. Also had to play the fight around that unit. Clearing all units before even interacting with the teeth high HP unit (i think it had 40~ HP, not so high. but anyway) and then control the battle by healing units with recall/skills. Also, focused on big single damage instead of multihitters,

But the problem with this image is not teeth, it is how the boss are generated with such crazy amount of HP + teeth. The change that should be made is: if the hero/unit created to the boss squad has teeth, it should have less value of HP. Because that unit with 40~50 that i played against + teeth was already pretty hardcore, I can't imagine. Maybe have a hard Cap on how high a unit/heroboss HP can be.

Also mine was not paired with overburn, so that is pretty hard to beat, probably only ink + all the above in order to have a chance. But again, I don't think the problem is Teeth, is Teeth + A LOT of hp (more than 50) + extra juice.