🏅 [Apr 9, 2019] 2nd Raid Tournament! — 3* Buff Booster, All Elements

This Week’s Raid Challenge

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR THE SECOND RAID TOURNAMENT!

This thread is for discussion of team planning, strategy, and FAQs.

For other related topics, please see:


:no_pedestrians: This Week’s Restrictions & Special Rule

  • Elements Allowed: All — no restrictions

  • Hero Rarities Allowed: 3* or lower

  • Troop Rarities Allowed: 2* or lower

  • Special Rule: Buff Booster — Each buff adds an attack multiplier!


:left_speech_bubble: Share & Discuss Your Teams, Thoughts, and Questions!

Some topics to start off with:

  • Do this week’s restrictions on hero/troop rarity and elements make your bench depth better or worse suited to this Raid Tournament than Regular Raids?

  • Are there heroes you’re likely to use for this Tournament that you normally don’t make use of anymore?

  • Are there heroes you plan to power level for this Tournament, or level before the next time a Tournament like this one rolls around?

  • What are you thinking about using for your Defense Team?

  • Are there heroes you expect to see on Enemy Defenses that you think you’ll have a harder time dealing with than usual because of the restrictions or special rule in this Tournament?

  • Which of your heroes will you be likely to use on your Attack Teams?

  • Will the restrictions or special rule of this Tournament change your usual approach to color stacking or team building?

  • Are there elements of this week’s Tournament that are unclear to you?




Overview of Weekly Raid Tournaments

:medal_sports: Tournament

Here’s the overall process for the Tournament:


:tickets: Attacking

Other than restrictions on heroes/troops and Special Rules, the Raids themselves in Weekly Raid Tournaments work the same way as regular Raids.

Each day, you’ll be able to attack up to 5 teams.

The flags used for Raid Tournaments are separate from regular Raid flags.

NOTE: Kills in Raid Tournaments count toward your Wanted: Heroes Raid Chest, so Raid Tournaments also effectively give you extra flags to potentially help fill your chest.

One notable difference to Regular Raids — you can’t reroll.

For the whole of the Tournament, you have 4 “Lives.” Each time you lose a Raid, you lose one life.

The lives do not reset across days of the Tournament. Once you’d lost 4 times at any point during the Tournament, you are out.

If you choose, you can pay some gems to reset your lives after 4 losses — but your score and ranking would still be lowered because of the losses. Paying to reset your lives does NOT give you an advantage from the Raids you’ve already fought. It simply allows you to continue using your normal 5 flags per day and not be “out” of the Tournament.

There is no way to buy additional flags. So everyone ultimately had the same number of maximum flags to use for attacks during the Tournament. The only thing gems allow you to do is continue playing if you’ve used up all of your lives.

@NPNKY explained this well:

CAVEAT: How this worked in beta changed SEVERAL times during testing. It’s very possible we’ll see how all of this works evolve over time, much like Alliance Wars have changed many times since initial release.


:busts_in_silhouette: Matchmaking

Obviously this was an area with a lot of problems the first time around.

We don’t really know how this will work yet — and it clearly didn’t work as intended for the first Tournament.

What we do know is that there are updated release notes indicating some changes:

=> Discussion and Feedback on the Updated Raid Tournament Matchmaking & Difficulty Bonus


Once matchmaking is working correctly, Raid Tournaments should offer some interesting shifts vs. normal Raids, because everyone is playing under the same restrictions — if the week’s Tournament only allows 3* heroes, it’s not like you’re taking your 3* team up against someone’s 4* team.

Players with deeper benches meeting the requirements will obviously benefit, but just having a pile of maxed 5* or the best HOTM won’t do anything for you in a tournament that doesn’t allow 5* heroes.

In the long run, that should make Tournaments interesting — but we’ll need to see if the changes to matchmaking have resolved the problems from the first time around.


:trophy: Scoring

New This Time:

To add some of my own thoughts to that:

Difficulty Bonus

The Difficulty Bonus seemed to me to be a little esoteric in beta.

The general concept of comparing the defense’s average performance against your average performance as an attacker makes sense — but how that’s turned into a particular number of points was not clear to me.

I imagine many people will be interested in trying to deduce more insight into this element.

Defense Team Grade

I found this was actually very clear and useful — and I think provides some insights into regular Raid Defense Teams too.

The grades are assigned based on a percentage of wins by your Defense Team:

The Defense Grade is determined based on the win percentage of your Defense Team. At the end of each Battle Day, you receive points based on your grade.

Percent Won Grade Points
60% A 900
50% B 650
40% C 500
30% D 400
0% E 200

My Personal Take on This:

The top grade in this approach was awarded to a Defense Team that won 60% of the time. To me, that’s a good confirmation of what many of us have long accepted: Raids are unfair, but not for the reasons you think - Raids MASTER — that is, they heavily favor the attacker, and even a top-notch Defense Team will lose much of the time.


:no_entry_sign: Restrictions

Each Week can have restrictions on:

  • Hero and troop rarity — e.g. only allowing 3* heroes and 2* troops or below

  • Elements — e.g. no red/fire heroes allowed


:dizzy: Special Rules

Each week has ONE Special Rule in effect.

(At least in beta; it’s possible live Tournaments may sometimes have multiple Special Rules at once. If that ever happens, I would be surprised if we see that before core elements like matchmaking are working properly, so I anticipate a single Special Rule for the foreseeable future.)

The possible Special Rules are:

Whichever Special Rule is in effect for a given Tournament remains in effect for the entirety of that Tournament.

The Special Rule affects both Defense and Offense teams.

Some Clarifications/Expansions

  • Rush Attack makes all hero specials of any speed Very Fast — it doesn’t require Very Fast heroes, it turns all heroes into Very Fast heroes. Heroes that are normally Slow or Average can become quite powerful in this setting.

  • Bloody Battle makes any healing effects do nothing. It doesn’t prohibit healers, it just prevents the healing portion of their special skill from having any effect.

  • Buff Booster adds a stackable 20% attack buff to each hero for each active buff on that hero. Using heroes with special skills that grant buffs or multiple buffs can lead to very high attack boosts. These buffs stack with each other and normal attack buffs.


:gem: Rewards

As of the Second Raid Tournament, loot has been temporarily reduced:

NOTE: Moderators have asked for clarification about what the “meantime” is, i.e. when the devs expect that will change back to normal loot.

For discussion/feedback about the reduced loot, please see this thread: Reduced Raid Tournament Loot During Work on Matchmaking [Developer Response in Post 334]

Archive of First Tournament's Loot

Acronyms in this table:

  • AM: Ascension Materials
  • EHT: Epic Hero Token
  • ETT: Epic Troop Token

Any of the tiers starting at top 75% have a chance for ascension mats.

Here’s the current breakdown for ascension mats, tokens, and Emblems (for simplicity, I didn’t include the Flasks, Atlantis Coins, Battle Items, and Crafting Materials that are in loot in addition to these):

Tier AM Chance EHT/ETT Chance Emblems Chance
75-100% 0 0 1 Draw: 100% x1
50-75% 1 Draw: 5% 3* 1 Draw: 5% EHT, 15% ETT 1 Draw: 20% x3, 30% x2, 50% x1
25-50% 1 Draw: 18% 3*, 2% 4* 1 Draw: 15% EHT, 25% ETT 1 Draw: 40% x5, 60% x3
10-25% 1 Draw: 22% 3*, 3% 4* 2 Draws: 20% EHT, 40% ETT 1 Draw: 40% x5, 35% x10, 25% x20
5-10% 2 Draws: 45% 3*, 5% 4* 2 Draws: 25% EHT, 45% ETT 1 Draw: 10% x50, 20% x30, 30% x20, 40% x10
1-5% 2 Draws: 95% 3*, 5% 4* 2 Draws: 40% EHT, 60% ETT 1 Draw: 5% x100, 30% x50, 30% x30, 35% x20
Top 1% 2 Draws: 90% 3*, 10% 4* 3 Draws: 50% EHT, 50% ETT 1 Draw: 25% x100, 50% x35, 30% x40

:thinking: Feedback on Raid Tournaments


:bug: Bug Reporting

Please see these threads for existing bug reports before creating a new report:


:link: Other Related Threads

Current Threads

Older Threads

13 Likes

This wasn’t true in the first tournament and they haven’t announced a change. You get 40 points plus 20% of the difficulty bonus for each hero killed.

Anyway, looking forward to a Bloody 3* Battle. [It’s Buff Booster. I guessed wrong.]

3 Likes

Thanks! We’re working off the limited release notes and observations we have so far…I’m quite sure all of this will continue evolving, so we’ll see how that works this time, especially since we know the Bonus Points are shifting in the new version.

I’ll update it again once we confirm it’s still working that way now.

2 Likes

I still find the name raid tournaments too cumbersome. I’m going to start calling them tourneys, or tourney when singular is required.

It’s too confusing when our players are saying how they just did in a raid and we need to keep clarifying regular raid or raid tournament?

Yes, first world issue :sunglasses:

4 Likes
  • The difficulty of enemies that the players face at the beginning of the Tournament is now determined by the strength of their Tournament Defense Team.
  • Improvements to matchmaking to more evenly distribute attacks among all players.
  • The amount of Difficulty Bonus is increased and has more emphasis on the performance of the opponents Tournament Defense Team.

So if some upper level player gives themself a poop defense team they can get matched with poo poo opponents they can decimate?

And if they give themself a poo poo defense team the people who attack them will get less points than otherwise?

And since there’s nothing in there about making the (base) rewarded points match the team power more, they can still get tons of points for killing weak teams?

~cough~cough~ ’AHEM’. I am not planning to do this, I am hypothetically asking for a…friend

8 Likes

Without clarification this absolutely reads like a potential loophole.

2 Likes

And in the main thing, a doubt assails me. If I interpret what they say well, if I put my best defense, I will have better rivals, who give more points. This seems like an idea to seek equity, but do you realize that, unless the defensive points are a hundred times higher than the attack points, is it stupid? Everyone has the last one in mind and they think based on it, but there will be 5 * or limiting to one color less. If I put, in a tournament of 5 *, a defense of 4200, they confront me to 4200, but if I put 5 of 4 *, I face 4 *, that I will attack with a team of 4200 and it will be a 20/20. This is valid for 4 * too. Either the defense points are huge or it is a huge mistake.

1 Like

I read this significantly differently than the posters who feel this is problematic. “The beginning” may mean the first day’s worth of raids, or even just the first raid. For as long as the beginning is, you may get a few easy matches. But they may be worth fewer points. And / or your defense could grade out so poorly each day that you can’t recoup the points by beating up on those easier teams.

I noted that we all seemed to be offered a first attack against a brand new defense, worth 200 base points + 100 bonus points (presumably those bonus points then dropped precipitously as they lost more and more matches). And many strong defenses (in fact I think all, that I remember seeing) were never attacked at all.

It seems possible that those strong defenses were never matched up in the first place, and thus never entered the pool of defenses to draw upon in future matches. This change seems to be an effort to address that.

Regardless, we’ll have to see how it plays out. I definitely will NOT be setting anything less than the best defense I can just to try to find an edge, though I kind of hope a few people do (so we can learn from it, not so you do poorly). If you gamble on that and are correct, then kudos.

4 Likes

The amount of loot given by the Raid Tournaments has been reduced in the meantime … why?
For four days of the tournament … there are really ridiculous prizes !!!

1 Like

Me too :grin: I am also guessing it’s going to be a 3* tournament.

2 Likes

Please see the 200 posts (and counting) on the loot change here:

5 Likes

I may or may not… (undecided)… use myself as a guinea pig and use a poo defense team.

Sure it might make me end up in the bottom 25%, but the way I see it: Since the loot is nerfed temporarily, if there’s any time to experiment—it’s now.
If someone uses this tournament to learn from, they might miss out on one or two good pieces of loot and it will most likely be an 3* ascension item and some emblems most likely. If someone waited until after the loot is restored to expirement, they’ll be missing out so much more.

8 Likes

If you do, I look forward to your findings!

3 Likes

A Freudian slip … :poop:

4 Likes

I thought that was just a Forum-friendly intentional word choice. :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

I’m in on low def team (if possible; if it’s a 3* tourney I can’t do all 2* in a way that would be meaningful…yet).

I agree that it is a prime time to experiment, and I tend to believe that low def will be much more beneficial than high def in this.

1 Like

good evening a shame the tournament awards … you do not have the sensitivity to see how much they are hurting the warriors … giving good prizes in the first tournament and then taking the good prizes and putting ridiculous prizes … Download this but it is not game

1 Like

Can we use what we have at the moment , matching wise , Diamond vs Diamond, Platinum vs Platinum etcs, ofcourse I’m going to drop cup so my ranking will be higher , better than current system where my 4* TEAM destroys defense of TP3000. No perfect system, i m sure they can use the experience from Common raids & Alliance War matching to fix this prob.

1 Like

+1 on this. I think that, as a strategy, setting a low def will screw one in later days as one wins and gets matched upward. If they’re smart, one’s D and O will match at the same level. So I’m anticipating a good first day in that strategy, and then a rough rest of the week.

Of course, loot is reduced, so now is the time to try out crazy strategies if you’re going to.

5 Likes