Raiding is Boring, Time to Make It Fun Again...help?

How I Got Here

According to my in-game profile, I’m about to hit 10k Raid Wins shortly, which presumably means I’ve completed some significantly larger number of Raids in my 19 months of playing, when counting losses too.

That’s a lot of times to do basically the same thing over and over again.

And it’s starting to feel like a chore.


When I started playing, I mostly Raided with Rainbow.

Eventually I stacked 2-1-1, as my heroes allowed for it.

That ultimately evolved into 3-2 for quite a while.

For many months, I would change my team each Raid.

But that eventually got tiresome, and the “2” for months became Rigard and Proteus. Effective, fun, and versatile, and less adjusting to do.

But also a little boring.

So several months ago, I stopped running 3-2, and switched to Mono, solely to increase the number of heroes I used in Raids. 5 distinct heroes per team meant a little more variety overall, instead of 2 slots always being the same heroes.

I was burned out from spending time constantly adjusting teams, so I set up 5 Mono preset teams, which meant I could swap without spending time adjusting my team each time — which helped reduce my fatigue with futzing with the team UI 20ish times every day. I picked teams with good synergy and versatility, so I could avoid swapping between them.

I typically select the team for each match based on the tank or flanks, or sometimes based on the synergy of one of my teams being better suited against the opponent, regardless of tank color.


That actually worked well for me for quite a while — I liked the teams I had made, enjoyed swapping between them, and found it fun to use a wider portion of my roster.

But now I’m getting bored again from the repetition, both in my teams, and in seeing a lot of similar Defenses over and over.


What Next?

I’ve been mulling this for a couple of weeks, but this post from @Brobb is what threw me over the edge to make this post and figure out something to do:

I actually don’t fully agree with this, as I’ve learned from months of experimentation with Mono that there’s significant leeway with practice to work a board into a usable state, regardless of the start, and it’s not just a matter of what the boards give you.

But that’s not the point of this thread, and there are plenty of other places to debate the merits of team composition strategies.

The reason it got my attention, is I’m wondering if returning to Rainbow — like when I first started playing — could be the biggest source of variety for me, just because it’s such a shift from what I’ve been doing for a while.

I’m used to leveraging tile damage and Mana Control a lot, and Rainbow would force me to change up my play style, which would inject some variety.


And Now You

I’d love feedback from others about your own experiences keeping Raiding interesting, and from becoming a chest-filling chore.

And if others want to join me in deciding on a radical shift in their own Raiding — not necessarily to whatever I end up doing, just doing something different than you are now — then that might be fun for us to share and keep track of our experience with.



So…suggestions for keeping Raiding fun and different?

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For me its boring the same defenses where we face every day, kunchen, Ursena, Grave, Guin with 18 19 talentes and nothing else. If we have some variety will be much more interesting.

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I’ve got no great insights; for the record I do similarly to you in order to keep it interesting. I vary my goals a lot, which helps. I used to play for rank always, but I haven’t done that for a while - I might not be able to reach the top any longer. These days I more often impose limits on myself - say, only playing against particular opponents (I spent a month only fighting Guin tanks, for example, and another month fighting only Aegir tanks) or only using particular strategies or heroes (I’ve always gravitated back to rainbow eventually, but I have spent time playing 3-2 and even experimenting with - shudder - mono).

There is plenty of room for varying your approach to raiding, I think, but there are inherent limits to how much variety one can experience playing a match 3 game. I too would be very interested to read other people’s thoughts.

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@Frozen We’ll probably see some more Defense variety with the release of Season 3…at least until it stagnates to common combinations again.

Do you think you’d find more variety varying your attack against those repetitive teams, or do you think the only solution is more Defense team variety?

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That’s a fair point. Maybe I’m partially just bumping up against the limits of the game’s depth of variety.

But I feel like there could be more opportunities for variance in my attacks…if only for the sake of variety.


I did the opposite for several months by never re-rolling at all.

But now I often re-roll searching for Iron, while totally ignore the team…which has roughly the same effect.

Perhaps it’d be more interesting to seek out particular sorts of teams.


I will say, Guin is profoundly boring to fight with Mono. She hardly ever fires.

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This seems to imply that you see Rainbow as intrinsically less practical for competitive play.

That makes me a little curious to try it, just to become comparably good at it to other compositions I’ve practiced.

To see if I can disprove that, basically.


A related thing for this is that I’ve been burned out on War off and on too — I’m actually taking a break at the moment from War, though I plan to opt back in this week.

I’m torn on using weaker teams for Raids, where filling my Chests is part of the objective.

It could add some variety, but I also don’t want to take forever to fill Chests.

Perhaps I could burn some of my 57 Raid Flasks…


Well that’s never stopped you anywhere else, so don’t let it now. :wink:

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Yup, did that one, too. For maybe my longest stretch I ran only a rainbow team, never changed it and accepted every opponent offered (no revenges). I was very proud of that approach, until it occurred to me to wonder on some fundamental level what the hell I had to be proud about.

With hindsight, it got me very good at using my 5 favourite heroes and made me very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of a whole lot of opponents. On the other hand, obviously I was not practicing team tailoring (a pretty vital skill) and I was just not using most of my heroes to raid.

Change is good, might be my bottom line.

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If we have variety on defense teams we will have variety and on the attacking teams. Like this now we have to play just with 5 6 heroes from our rosters because we know this heroes it’s the best but if we have more good heroes this will not be this.

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I’ve had the same concern about ending up using a small number of heroes, especially if I switch to Rainbow.

One thing I’ve thought about is making several preset teams (for easy/lazy switching) that are built for different sorts of opponents, but that are capped at 2 heroes of each color at most, or maybe even just Rainbow.

Then I could switch based on opponent…or maybe even just make 7 teams and switch each day of the week.

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I see — so you see this as a shortage of good heroes overall, it sounds like?

High level troops are one notable advantage for rainbow, I think. With a rainbow team you get to use your strongest troops of each colour. With a mono team you are forced to use your 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th strongest troops for the colour you are using,

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I agree with this a lot, but I thought maybe it was just me.

I wish we could auto raid like stages.

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Maybe a raid mode without slashes and tile damage as a 2nd raid option with its own leaderboard.

Just mana, specials and you…

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My leveling priorities for Troops have reflected that too — I generally have multiple mid-level Troops in each color to complement my higher-level Troop.

At this point that’s somewhat by necessity anyway, due to a lack of feeders — and, for that matter, still having a profoundly uneven distribution of 4* Troops.

Eh, I just went the same direction in my reply, so I’m there with you.

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That’s a reasonable point, but the trade off is that the rainbow team will be perfectly comfortable with any board, while the mono team will have distinct struggles with many.

I use mono in war sometimes and have had success with it. But I have also had failures with it, and whether I have succeeded or failed I have often felt like the outcome was less in my control than with the rainbow or 2-1-1-1 composition that I prefer. I’ve had successes and failures with those teams, too, of course - there is no silver bullet.

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I don’t know if it’s just because it’s higher stakes and I care more, but I always feel like Mono in Raids is much more forgiving than in War.

I’ve assumed the War Boosts are part of that, but it could be entirely mental bias.

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Funny - I have felt the same thing. I have no rational explanation for it,

Edit: I just thought of a possible explanation, but I think I ought to sleep.

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Yes for me it’s this and for this I am soo critical to not nerf so much the heros. I played one game for about 6 years and that’s exactly what was interesting was that I was able to fight against different heroes and not against the same every day.

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