Mana Drain needs to be removed from the game

[Starpilot]

Every single match I've done today, and 9 out of 10 I did yesterday, in PvP matches, included at least 1 mana drain character. It kills all the fun in the game to be hit every 2nd turn with mana drain. That is not an exageration, that's been my last 3 matches of this game. If I couldn't charge up my characters from 0 in 1 turn, I never got to use their own abilities. Which means whats the point of having abilities since I never got to use them without a major lucky break for myself.

Mana Drain has ruined all the fun of the game, and it really needs to go.

[Valore]

Mana drain is working as intended, as part of a rock, paper, scissors balance mechanic.

It allows you an advantage over decks that stack only high casting cost spells. It is in turn far less useful against low mana cost spells.

To say it needs to be removed is a nonsense statement because it is entirely subjective. It is a mechanic that adds variety to the game, and for a lot of people, more variety is more fun, not less.

A better argument would be to point out specific cards that have mana drain that might feel too good or overpowered.

[Starpilot]

When the majority of the PvP fights I've done for the past two days include multiple mana drain cards, and not even a basic goblin can charge up in the 2 or 3 turns in between them steadily firing, I'd say that it is killing the game. It will probably be nerfed, but I don't know if I'm going to bother to stick around until then. I play games for fun, and if Gems is no longer fun, I'll just stop playing it. I know its driven away my GF already. She loves match 3, but there's such a steady release of new match 3 games that she has no reason to stick around, despite all the money she's dumped into the game.

Mana drain on the lowest teir cards works fine. But when that is cranked up for the upper tiers, it just wipes out the match. There's no reason to bother playing at that point, as it will be a long, slow boring match if you win, and a long slow and very boring match if you lose. Defend the devs all you like, but the game is less fun to no fun now, depending on if you are fighting just 1 mana drainer, or multiple mana drainers in the same stack.

[Alkali Ali]

Drain the mana of the mana drainer ^^
Wraith should be fastest charged. Banner helps.

The basic goblin needs only one mana surge to be charged.
Also you could try if using a decoy works against the ai.
The hero with the club as weapon that's charged by 4 reds is charged with one red match if a banner is used that gives +1 red.

If the drainers waste their time with that, you can kill the drainers, or use troops to silence them. I'm not long in the game but there's a legendary that silences the entire opponent team +itself.

However, I agree that everything that drags a battle can be unnerving.

You could also use troops with that enabled trait that they can't be targeted by spells.
There's a centaur card that has that, does moderate single dmg and has an extra turn.

[drattis]

use dragon soul, which has mana shield on its first trait

[keensl]

*Nods to Alkali and drattis*

There is ALWAYS a way around just about anything the game has to throw at you. I have a team that has two Manticores for just that kind of situation. Mana drain them back. Or yah, like drattis, find a troop that has Mana Shield. Dragon Soul, I think, is the only one but still.... Find a way around things, dude, instead of complaining that the power should be removed.

[Starpilot]

I'm complaining because it makes the main component of the game, PvP, absolutely bite. This little "feature" will turn off all new players who won't know what the heck they should do to counter it. Worse, even experienced players who play regularly are likely to have no way to reliably counter it because they haven't acquired the rare cards that are immune, and they may not have sufficent cards to make an anti-draining deck.

I've played this game for a very long time, and this is the worst mechanic they've every put into the game that I've seen. Every other mechanic remained fairly close to balanced between similar power levels. This one does not.

If there is only a couple of cards that counter that strategy, that's a poor design and it is going to force the devs to do something drastic. For instance, they may decide to make half the colors "immune" to mana drain. Or they may be forced to just remove the feature and ban all the cards that have it because they can't make their design of this mechanism work where munchkinitis won't just turn all the pvp stacks into using mana drain. How fun is it going to be for the people that spent money to buy those cards when they get taken away or turned into garbage? One way or the other, there's going to be a lot of hurt players over this broken design. It is already driving paying customers away from the game. The game developer will not survive losing customers because of this, and they've locked out new players to replace them by having such a limited way to respond to this. That guarantees there's going to be large changes to this mechanism, and it may involve removing it. So enjoy your mana drainers while you can because fixing it will require big changes to it, or it outright removal.

We've had other mechanics be dominant, but they were easy for new players to acquire so it was easy for new players to be competitive in PvP. That's not true for mana drain and nor for its counters. Which is why this is going to be a much bigger problem for the developers and they are liable to go big in addressing it.

I don't know about other people here, but I enjoy going through all the classes, working my way up from level 1 hero with a new stack to build. So I get to see a lot of different levels of the game at work. I've got 2 classes maxxed already, with their ultimate weapon, and decks built around them. They eat everything in the game except mana drainers, who are competitive for them. So that sounds great. But the reason they eat everything else is that the AI isn't as good a player as the human. Mana drainers make up for that lack of AI sophistication. So I see the "it is working as designed," side. But it isn't, if you haven't already gotten to that uber maxxed state with your hero and your deck. Why not? Because mana drain is going to turn players away from getting to that state. Growing players stop playing the game means an abandoning player base, which means literally a dead game in the future unless it is addressed.

if mana drain was added to make the AI be better at playing the maxxed and uber builds, then that was a very large mistake for the developers to make because its blocking out the growing player. The other game mechanics never did this, and that's where the danger lies. I can always go back to my maxxed out class builds and play the game. But newer players don't have that option. Newer players won't have the large collection of cards to draw upon to find a counter, nor the ability to custom build those counters into decks at PvP levels through all the souls and keys earned in maxxing out their PvP standing every week. And that's the true danger of mana drain. It blocks new and growing players, which is the future of the game.

[Razguul]

OP, quit your whining. Mana drain works fine. If you don't like it play another game. Maybe tic-tac-toe would work better for you.

[Starpilot]

Hey Razguul. Start a new device, so you can play the game "fresh". See how far you get in the game before all the mana drain stacks in PvP stops you from playing any further in it. In case you haven't thought about it, that's what the new and growing players are facing. Look at the answers given to their plight: "Stop your whining. Works fine for me." "Spend lots more money on this free to play game or go away and never come back." All very bad attitudes.

Mana drain isn't a game breaker at the single opponent drained per card (ie, Sucubus). But that's the basic level of the ability. The better cards drain multiple opponents at once. The top cards drain all opponents at once, and some of those boost their damage by draining all at once. Combine a couple of those top end cards and you have exactly what I was seeing in the lower end power rankings of PvP in the 3K to 4.5K power rankings. That's why I was so concerned. When every opponent you get offered has 2 or 3 such top cards that mana drain multiple targets at once, it not only gets tiresome, it gets boring. Like I said in a prior post, I could always swap over to my maxxed PvP stacks and just go wipe everything, but not all players have that option. If the new and growing players stop playing, the game will just be a dieing game, and will end up discontinued at worst, or forgotten and unmaintained at best.

Maybe I jumped the gun in posting this thread because the game stopped being fun to play as a growing player/stack due to me striking that large mass of unbalanced cards for so long. However, I believe that it is a problem that will end up growing until the devs address it. Since its the top end cards, that means its the cards mostly acquired through paying the studio money to own directly or acquire through high end recruiting, and those people will be particularly unhappy to have their "pay to win" cards changed or nerfed to not insta win. That will create bad feelings and lost players in itself, so either way, the mana drain implementation is bad, and will cost the devs good will and player base.

[Razguul]

I'm new to the game as I have only been playing about a month and a half. I play daily and am having lots of fun with no problems or complaints. When I have an opponent (mana drain or otherwise) that is tough to beat, I change up my team until I'm successful against them. And I do lots of PVP. I also watch Tacet The Terror's live streams on YouTube as he is a very good resource to learn from as far as team building and other mechanics.

You need to figure out how to play this game or find a game you like and stop crying and complaining so much.

[Lord Rayvan]

git gut

[Starpilot]

Razguul, good luck with that. When you end up facing 19 straight matches of teams with at least 2 all-team mana drainers, do you think you are goign to perservere through it or are you going to go run off and cry? That's what I played through right before I decided to create this top. Despite the fact that I won all those matches, it was more boring than watching paint dry, and it was very tedious and slow. It is a total fun killer, and I don't think most people have the OCD tendencies to stick with the game facing that sort of fun famine every week. Because its so tedious, and so many players are just going to lose to it, over and over and over.

Also, whether you win or lose a match in PvP, you get a new set of 3 to pick from after that fight. So you aren't "trying until you beat them" (that particular stack). That only happens in the campaign and challenge matches. You only get a second shot at the same stack after lots of playing on PvP. Which again, was one of my points--- the sheer amount of opponent defending decks "down under" running multiple top mana drain cards which dealt total team draining really made it stand out to me. It wasn't just 1 or 2 matches that were cursed with being stuck in the no-fun zone, it was a 19 match series. I wouldn't have bothered to continue playing except I was chasing some additional glory for Monday's new cards.

Every mechanism has top end cards that do "full opponent team" attacks. When that mechanism is mana drain, it is a highly effective tactic in the player hands. When it is in the AI's hands, it makes the AI fairly competent. When there are multiple cards in that stack that do full team drain, you have a recipe for total fun kill. Stack on the cards that do multiple (although not full team) mana drains, and it means you are going to be left doing pure "die by skull matching" games, which are very slow and tedious. Imagine playing more than 1 dozen matches straight of nothing but the "Silence All" deamon, The Silent One. At least for that, you'd still be able to get in a few of your own abilities more often than fighting decks of multipel top all-team mana drainers. Why? Because the The Silent One silences itself, meaning it can't even start charging until it recovers from its self-inflicted silence. The top end mana drainers don't have that draw back--- yet. But the debs will get around to it because mana drain is going to cause so much fun kill and as its usage spreads, its going to make the player base unhappy. I just hope they get to it sooner rather than later.

Why would I think the devs will eventually address this? Because they have code in the program that stops the AI from getting very long cascading chains in the code. Why did they add code that prevents the AI, but not the player, from getting "too long" cascades? Because its boring and a fun killer. So were the goblin hordes. And so is mana drain (at the "higher" card flavors).

Have fun and enjoy the game where it can.

[hades the gravekeeper]

You know you can scout the enemy team before a fight, don't you?

[Starpilot]

Yes, thank you. Scouting is at the cost of a mere 50 gold if you haven't bought enough stuff to get it automatically from VIP bennies. I make use of scouting quite often.

[Kolarahidumgarabashtelarimdugarn]

So you don't like mana drain, because it makes games longer?

[Justa Guy]

The top end mana drain is annoying, especially ones like Emperor Korv who is already a good card. Sorry but mana drain, stun and high amounts of true dmg on top of good traits is a bit OP. A popular PVP line up I've come across lately is two manticores and Korv. Both manticores start out with full mana and by time their gone Korv's read for use. Unless you get an amazing first turn you will likely be struggling to get any kind of ability off. Even faster filled cards still require an enemy turn to pass before you can use it unless you fill them up on 4+ match.

But as people have said, there are ways around every tactic in Gems of war. The problem is they require you to not only have the cards but have invested enough souls, traits etc into them to be viable to use. An untrained card that's less than level 18 won't survive for long in most PVP matches above level 250 or so. Sadly PVP is about the only game mode worth playing right now if you want to advance your stuff, rewards from Arena, the map game or explore/challenge pails in comparison. Especially since PVP is the best way to get guild seals and glory.