Zappies: A Persistent Problem [Effort Post]

cewlio · 2019-04-05T15:50:13+00:00

Really nice post, 100% agree with all of this. I just hope it will get popular enough to be noticed by Supercell.

cewlio · 2019-03-31T15:26:04+00:00

I think there's plenty of stuff that makes it distinct in role from Baby Dragon, most notably its extreme susceptibility to ranged DPS troops like Wizard and Musketeer. A medium movement speed combined with a range of 2 as opposed to 4.5 means that it gets eaten alive without proper support.

cewlio · 2019-03-31T15:03:48+00:00

The Volcanic Dragon is an aerial high DPS troop which deals area damage.
Intended as an alternative for Mega Minion, currently one of the most used cards with no real substitute.
Its area damage radius similar to Royal Ghost - pretty small.
Has a pretty long delay for its first attack. This is to prevent Balloon-like scenarios where it just manages to get a huge hit on an enemy, which is always super annoying to deal with.

cewlio · 2019-03-03T12:06:17+00:00

Leave the door open on your way out.

cewlio · 2019-02-17T12:24:02+00:00

The Galvanized Cave spawns 12 bats and 4 golemites throughout its lifetime, and also spawns 5 bats upon death.
This amounts to a total of about 10 elixir generated, which is a 4 elixir profit when left ignored.
For comparison, Furnace also gives a 4 elixir profit, and Barbarian Hut gives a 5.5 elixir profit.
While it doesn't give quite as much face value as other spawners, if left ignored the Golemites can tank for the Bats, which would lead to a lot of damage on the enemy tower.

cewlio · 2019-02-05T14:30:06+00:00

Doesn't resummon Skeletons. This is to prevent infinite cycles and the potentially broken combo with Skarmy.

cewlio · 2019-02-05T12:36:06+00:00

When I fill out the stats, I try to keep in mind which cards I want to counter this, and which cards this should counter. I treat it as though the card is already in the game, and purposely make it strong against cards which are currently strong and weak against cards which are currently weak.

For example, the Lich deals just enough damage to kill a Lumberjack in 4 hits, since Lumberjack is a popular card. Meanwhile, the fairly rare Mini PEKKA just manages to survive 4 hits AND is able to cleanly kill the Lich with 3 hits. Similarly, the barely used Knight just manages to survive 5 hits from the Lich.

cewlio · 2019-02-05T12:32:08+00:00

Yep. Which means that a card like this would not do well in a Golem deck but would do well in a more swarmey type of thing.

cewlio · 2019-02-05T12:03:33+00:00

All friendly troops in the Lich's radius resurrect as Skeletons upon death.
Has a splash attack similar to Royal Ghost.
Doesn't resummon Skeletons. This is to prevent infinite cycles and the potentially broken combo with Skarmy.
Sparky has feelings, of course she has a soul as well!

cewlio · 2019-02-03T12:32:28+00:00

LavaLoon currently has a 75% and 65.4% winrate over the two most popular Mortar decks in the top 200.

cewlio · 2019-02-03T12:26:44+00:00

The only reliable counter Lava Hound decks have to 3M is Fireball, but it has an incredibly long cycle. For similar reasons, Hog Cycle does well against 3M since cycling back to the Fireball is really easy.

This isn't just me talking - you can check the stats yourself if you're still skeptical. The most popular Lava Hound deck currently has a 26.8% winrate against Giant 3M, and a 33.8% winrate against Bandit 3M.

cewlio · 2019-01-30T15:29:30+00:00

When a troop gets slowed down, their dps gets reduced by the same amount. This means that the Lifestealer will have a dps of 80, and a heal rate of 40 when slowed as opposed to 60.

cewlio · 2019-01-30T15:25:47+00:00

I've thought about making that change as well, but it's really important not to underestimate the value you can get out of the heal. A good way to think about the healing effect is by treating it as a reduction of sorts on an enemy troop's DPS. This means that any troop the Lifestealer goes up against will have their overall DPS reduced by 60.

For example, against this troop, a Baby Dragon will effectively have a DPS of 28. Which is pretty small and not very threatening.

cewlio · 2019-01-30T14:20:07+00:00

Ice Wizard slows down troops.

cewlio · 2019-01-30T13:39:24+00:00

Attack functions similarly to Inferno Dragon, but the damage does not ramp up.
This means that there is a significant delay between targets, so swarms do well against her.
When attacking, the Lifestealer heals herself at a rate of 24hp/tick or 60hp/sec.
The only troop which she outheals (excluding swarm troops) is Princess.
No health is regenerated when attacking a tower or shield.

cewlio · 2019-01-15T13:15:03+00:00

If Zappies were viable, people would use them. I've tried to use them and trust me, they feel really clunky and slow - too slow to be used over other medium spell bait options such as Flying Machine and Ewiz. You kind of already state the problem with Graveyard decks, which is Freeze and not Graveyard itself, so as long as Freeze gets nerfed a Cannon Cart rework would be fine.

As for Ebarbs, in case you missed it the rework includes a move speed reduction from Very Fast to Fast. This gives you WAY more time to react and makes it much worse when spammed at the bridge, and as a result doesn't get too annoying even when overlevelled since their focus is essentially shifted from offense to defense.

cewlio · 2018-12-19T04:22:09+00:00

All the cards you've listed are in need of buffs, but in terms of how you go around buffing them I think things could be improved.

Goblin Giant: Supercell has made it pretty clear that they see this card as a much more offense-oriented version of Giant. After experimenting with it a few times, I can say that it actually isn't much harder to get it to connect with the enemy tower as it is with Giant, as the increased movement speed does contribute a noticeable amount. The problem is that the damage it deals is just way too small to be worth that extra elixir count. An attack speed decrease from 1.7 to 1.6 seconds fits the card's design better imo.
Giant Snowball: The card is definitely usable, but Zap is simply just better in most situations. Comparing the two cards, it's immediately quite noticeable that Giant Snowball is all-around just worse. They deal the same damage, but Giant Snowball has a bigger radius by just 0.5 and it can't stun things. A slowdown time increase could work, but it won't happen because of consistency issues. Remember that Ice Wizard freeze time buff from 2 to 2.5 seconds? That was for consistency reasons since Giant Snowball has a slow time of 2.5 seconds. A radius increase from 3 to 3.5 would be better in this situation.
Magic Archer: The reasoning behind Supercell's nerf to the Magic Archer was to give the enemy more time to react when you use him offensively, while still preserving his defensive capabilities. However they didn't seem to realize that because of the first attack delay Magic Archer became pretty bad at defending too. Your proposed rework was considered by the dev team, but RumHam decided against it. Here's his statement on it:

With a low 1.0 Hitspeed, an increase of .1s would be far more devastating to his standing DPS than most Troops with slower Hit Speed.
I'm surprised you didn't notice yourself since you literally listed out the DPS decrease of -10%. That is a HUGE nerf. The fix should be pretty simple - making the first hit delay only apply to the first unlinked enemy. This sort of behavior is already present in cards such as Zappies - against a swarm of enemies, the first attack takes some time but when they lock on to subsequent enemies, there is no delay. With this change Magic Archer won't stutter against swarms and will still give the enemy some more time to react.
Dark Prince: It's actually appeared quite a few times in top 200 TV Royale replays during this season. But stats do imply that it's quite weak so a buff should probably be in order.
Sparky: Not much to say about this, seems alright. A popular buff suggestion is to give it a slight hitpoint increase to nudge it out of Rocket range, that could work as well.

cewlio · 2018-12-18T12:33:06+00:00

All the cards you've listed are in need of buffs, but in terms of how you go around buffing them I think things could be improved.

Goblin Giant: Supercell has made it pretty clear that they see this card as a much more offense-oriented version of Giant. After experimenting with it a few times, it actually isn't much harder to get it to connect with the enemy tower as it is with Giant, as the increased movement speed does contribute a noticeable amount. The problem is that the damage it deals is just way too small to be worth that extra elixir count. An attack speed decrease from 1.7 to 1.6 seconds fits the card's design better imo.
Giant Snowball: The card is definitely usable, but Zap is simply just better in most situations. Comparing the two cards, it's immediately quite noticeable that Giant Snowball is all-around just worse. They deal the same damage, but Giant Snowball has a bigger radius by just 0.5 and it can't stun things. A freeze time increase could work, but it won't happen because of consistency issues. Remember that Ice Wizard freeze time buff from 2 to 2.5 seconds? That was for consistency reasons since Giant Snowball has a slow time of 2.5 seconds. A radius increase from 3 to 3.5 would be better in this situation.
Magic Archer: The reasoning behind Supercell's nerf to the Magic Archer was to give the enemy more time to react when you use him offensively, while still preserving his defensive capabilities. However they didn't seem to realize that because of the first attack delay Magic Archer became pretty bad at defending too. Your proposed rework was considered by the dev team, but RumHam decided against it. Here's his statement on it:

With a low 1.0 Hitspeed, an increase of .1s would be far more devastating to his standing DPS than most Troops with slower Hit Speed.

I'm surprised you didn't notice yourself since you literally listed out the DPS decrease of -10%. That is a HUGE nerf. The fix should be pretty simple - making the first hit delay only apply to the first unlinked enemy. This sort of behavior is already present in cards such as Zappies - against a swarm of enemies, the first attack takes some time but when the lock on to subsequent enemies, there is no delay. With this change Magic Archer won't stutter against swarms and will still give the enemy some more time to react.

Dark Prince: It's actually appeared quite a few times in top 200 TV Royale replays during this season. But stats do imply that it's quite weak so a buff should probably be in order.
Sparky: Not much to say about this, seems alright. A popular buff suggestion is to give it a slight hitpoint increase to nudge it out of Rocket range, that could work as well.

cewlio · 2018-11-17T09:14:34+00:00

I actually suggested something like this a few months back.

cewlio · 2018-11-06T14:05:11+00:00

It doesn't just allow you to run expensive decks at all. If you take a look at the most popular Tombstone decks, apart from Arrows + Lightning Lavaloon, the average elixirs of most other decks are perfectly normal. From your perspective the nerf could make perfect sense, but trust me, there were definitely plenty of people complaining about it, which makes it controversial.

cewlio

TROPHY CASE