⚖ Hero Balance Discussion: Anne

Did we really want an “auto win” button?

uhm, an OP Hero is exactly your Autowin Button :wink:

you have to differentiate between “more powerful” and “overpowered”. Nobody doubts, that new heroes have to be stronger (*or be different) than the current ones. Some of those heroes you would describe as mediocre today would have been your AutoWin-Button if they came out during S1.
Its all about the point in time / the speed of the Powercreep.

Releasing an OP Hero is bad for the health of any game, so the term itself always describes something bad.

Wether this particular hero is really overpowered or just very powerful at the current state of the game…well…thats what the discussion here is for :slight_smile:

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This is just myself, but if a hero goes off on defense and your chances of winning are less than 10%, that would be an auto win if you dont have a counter already to go or a counter up. Like it or not, there a few of them and Anne fits this bill. I’ve beat her once when she has fired but I also had a nice cascade that loaded my whole team up and left the rest of the defense I was going against a hair off of them using their specials. Every other time, it was over

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Just to be clear… autowin for you if you are attacking? I mean, i dont think this is the case. You would still need to match 7-8 yellow tiles. And that doesnt always come…

Autowin for the defense? Not true also. I have gone up against a team with Anne and have won as have others who have posted videos here.

What I was trying to call out is that people want to nerf Anne because they think that attacking a team with her on def is impossible to beat. Or they are not likely to win- so the call is to only come out with heroes that are easy to beat- hence the “auto win”?

Just to share, i brought this team to a raid against Ludwig-anne. Troops are not even maxed. Horus is still qt 3/50+.

Lucky opening board with above average yellow tiles (8)

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Sorry, doesnt this technically mean “auto lose”? Referring to the inability to win if you are attacking a team with Anne? Again, do we want defenses to hit for only 2pts of damage - thus ensuring that any team we attack will surely lose and give us an “auto win”?

Call it what you want and get technical if you like. If she goes off, you’re gonna lose unless you get lucky as heck. Its the Anne’s KhuFUs, Goseks that are killing this game we all like to do. These Anne’s KhuFU and Gosek take away the skill of the game.

Which heroes hit for only 2 points???

The synergies between her,Hawthorne, Tethys and the latest op monsters are ridiculous. Not fun. Also hate nerfs but this tournament was an example of where this game is going. So many buffs, passives and buff prevention. Most of it at fast speed.

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Just to be clear… autowin for you if you are attacking? I mean, i dont think this is the case. You would still need to match 7-8 yellow tiles. And that doesnt always come…

I was trying to explain the term “Overpowered” and why releasing single OP Heroes is NOT okay.
I am still undecided, if Anne is just “very powerful” or really OP.


…but honestly I also think that going Mono only means “I put 5 random heroes of that color in my team and let the board decide” and is therefore not a good way to really judge a hero :wink:

HA HA HA hee hah whooooo…

Sorry, I just… I mean… speaking for myself I have never, ever, ever, EVER been in danger of this. Not even close.

Maybe folks with a lot, LOT more luck and resources feel like this sometimes, I guess? But I find that hard to believe, because bad boards exist.

I don’t care about “impossible,” I care about if I’m pretty much only going to win with a miraculous run of tiles that wipes out every enemy who is about to fire, fully charges all of my heroes, and fully charges none or nearly none of the opponent’s heroes.

Guess how often that happens.

(Hint: you should be thinking along the lines of “a sufficiently big room full of monkeys randomly pressing typewriters keys has a chance of producing the complete works of Shakespeare,” which is one slightly hyperbolic definition of “effectively zero”)

It’s not that I mind that there are some defenses that are hard to crack. It’s that I mind that there are entire swathes of hero that, when I see them, and especially in combination, are effectively (statistically) a choice between “reroll” and “cup drop.”

Now see what you did? Klaern is crying now. :stuck_out_tongue: Poor Klaern.

Of course we don’t want bad heroes; we want heroes that have a reasonable use case.

Oh for Pete’s sake… why should “balanced” mean mediocre?

“Balanced,” to the extent it can be achieved, means “is actually quite good in a special rock-papers-scissors kinda way if less good outside its strength, pretty good at multiple things, or at least jack-of-all-trades decent and worth having in nearly all situations.”

I suppose the last might sound like “mediocre” to folks who consider Anne and Alucard to be the standard of “heroes worth having at all”, but for folks who have a limited roster, a good multi-function hero who is worth bringing on many war teams, for instance, can be a good thing to have, and there’s always room for various specialists (healers, tanks, snipers, hit-all, dispellers, cleansers, minionmancers, fiendmancers, specific counters).

“Unbalanced” trends dangerously close to “why would you NOT use this hero, unless its color/class is excluded, or unless facing its own specific OP kryptonite counter hero.”

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Maybe just tune down the initial hit from 550 to 500 a small compromise without upsetting too many people?

:sweat_smile: the board always decides our fate mate! And to your point, is a hero OP if you can cobble together any 5 hero of a color and beat it?

So now that come up against enough ready to give an opinion.

I think when comparing to other newly released heroes she is fine. Yes she hits hard, but it decreases on each hit so she’s not like Khufu/ Goseck with kill full team herself capability at almost all full health.

There is a danger from the treevil effect part of her special, but there are also counters in the way of cleansers, ailment blockers and other options depending on roster.

Also not being a monk class she is more susceptible to mana control than Khufu is. Then of course there are the other counters by way of dodge, blind, taunt etc which can be used against her

All in I’d describe her as powerful but not game breaking.

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Great review. Thanks for sharing your experience. I guess this is what i wanted to say (but you said it waaaay better :smile:). She is strong- a good hero to have, but not game breakingly OP- and thus I dont think nerfing is needed.

I asked first. State the heroes you mentioned as a type and where they come from.

We all know where Anne comes from and her availability. Now let’s compare.

Don’t offer “solutions” which they are not readily available.

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What is readily available enough for you to accept?

S1 only?
S1 costume?
Available from HA10?

Let’s have the parameters for what heroes are allowed to have in ateam to face her

Why do it this way?

Present the heroes who are fast or very fast and we can judge their availability then.

I’m not the one that offered solutions in general. You have to show which heroes can be used against Anne and then we can see how available they are.

We can’t be talking, for example, about Myztero, who’s at 1% in a massive pool of 5* heroes every 2 months. Sorry if i get the percentages or numbers wrong, i will accept any correction.

It’s just that i will not make the case to defend Anne as not OP. It’s you guys. With examples and numbers. Because we know her numbers. Now it’s time to have your proposed solutions and their numbers in this thread, so we can do an objective assessment how OP (or not) she is.

Was mainly so I don’t waste my time listing people for it just to be excluded as unavailable. But I’ll make a segregated list. Have family visiting, but will post it some time over the weekend.

question, in your opinion, if you dont have a counter or cleanser ready, what chances do you have winning if Anne goes off???

Just from my experience, and granted maybe 15 raids with her in there isnt a lot, Ive had no success when she has gone off except 1 time when I had a 11 cascade and all my heroes were ready to fire.

Game breaking is if you dont have a counter ready and the match is pretty much over. Its an auto win…Thats not powerful, thats game breaking.

I’d love you to show some videos where you didnt have a counter ready and Anne goes off or period, where you did also.

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I suppose my counterpoint view from the cheap seats is that comparing Anne to say, Alucard, M&M, and whatever the monstrosities are from the Ultra Mega-Extreme Elemental Yellow event and the When Fighting Monsters You Yourself Become A Monster portal is maybe not the best way of telling whether Anne is, some sense, OP.

More particularly, I think it’s not the most helpful comparison to say “well Anne doesn’t have full instant kill potential like Khufu” because (1) Khufu is variously (if contentiously) held to be either very strong or outright OP himself, but more to the point (2) Khufu is Slow and Anne is Fast and if Anne could do what Khufu does at Fast speed then she wouldn’t be OP, she would be “just quit the game now” broken.

To the extent that Khufu can be at all considered “strong, but at least somewhat balanced” it’s because he is Slow --and many people have been considering him increasingly arguably OP when paired with free-mana/mana-boosting sources. Sure, the much-gnashing-of-hair-and-pulling-of-teeth nerf of Xylophone defanged one common source of great-steaming-plops-of-free-mana for Khufu, but it’s not exactly like there aren’t other mana boosts in the game…

The issue I’m seeing, from my point of view, isn’t that we have power creep per se, where new heroes are incrementally better than old ones, but old ones are potentially still viable, or that there are an increasing number of rock-paper-scissors interactions that demand more complexity and combos rather than just so much raw power that you need a hard counter or go home.

It’s that increasingly new heroes are increasing in power and/or speed so much that any schmuck trying to play the game with, say, 2020 heroes or before increasingly needs to hit “reroll” against raiding half of Diamond (or just cup drop). The power “creep” isn’t “this year’s iPhone vs last year’s iPhone,” it’s becoming more like “modern web sites vs trying to use Netscape Navigator from 1996.”

When a solution to “W3K summon combos are getting too strong” is apparently just “well we’ll release a mega-minion-eating-5*-hero who is so strong he’s better-than-your-existing-roster even outside his specialty” it’s starting to smack of the Simpsons’ Springfield planning to eradicate the invasive Bolivian tree lizards by importing Chinese needle snakes, and then importing snake-eating gorillas to eat them, and then planning for winter to deal with the gorillas by “simply freezing them to death” (except that the E&P progression has no end even so dubious as that).

tl;dr version: Comparing Anne to a bunch of other arguably OP heroes doesn’t mean she’s not OP; it means there are a lot of recent OP heroes.

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@jkdevore my device is old and has a tendency to crash so I don’t do videos ( sometimes even taking a screenshot causes it to crash)

For your definition of gamebreaking being if you don’t immediately have a counter ready I’m not sure I agree. There are numerous older heroes that if don’t have a counter ready afterwards you’re likely to lose but that wouldn’t really be considered OP.

@BobTheSnark I’m not far from the cheap seats myself, of my heroes I have one S2 5* in Poseidon, a couple of S3s in Tyr and Baldur, one S4 in Lepiota who I took as a soul exchange. Prior to the move to Challenge Festival 1 I was lucky and got Gazelle and LotL during the many months of 2/3 pulls per event from completion coins. First month of W3K I got Guan Yu on 3 pulls, only just finished him recently. Also a couple of ToLs back Costume Alasie came out on a completion coins pull. The rest of my roster is HotMs (where I am luckier than possibly my number of pulls should be) and S1/ four stars.

To me there is a distinction between same as what has come out in the last 6months and more powerful than what is about current by a large degree. I class the first set as powercreep and the second half as more powerful than should be.

Readjusting everything from past 6 months would create too much unrest in the game, I think the nerf bat needs to used sparingly.

My opinion on Khufu is in the other thread on him so I don’t want to sidetrack too much here, I thought his original was as it should be pre-buff the buff made him too strong and needs rowed back. Anne won’t kill full team, Khufu can. I know you don’t agree with the distinction but that’s one of those personal opinion things.

@Fabinas I’ve not forgotten about the list I will get something together for that.

I’ve finally managed to raid a team with Anne as tank in normal formation. I did bring Milena for the cleanse but strangely enough after Anne fired, I didn’t have Milena charged due to a lack of blue tiles. I wasn’t able to heal or cleanse my team but I charged a few of my offensive heroes up and decided to just go ahead and fire them (was willing to risk losing as I could just rematch). I did get the negative ailments but my heroes were strong enough to kill most of the opposing team and I was just able to cleanse towards the end and finish them off. So in my experience, I didn’t have a counter ready and still won, so not gamebreaking in defense if you have the right team.

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