September 2022 Balance Update - Discussion

So sick of these dramas.
Already known about today when many good heroes get nerfed. The only reason for this is too much player can’t take down the best defense team in current. They started crying because what called OP and keep bla bla about balancing. Having some lucky hits doesnt mean you are doing good. Zynga/SGG just make money over time by their shield “listen to player/forwarding to the data”
And this will not stop because of F2P. They can’t fight to any good defense team then they keep complaining.
First is Xnolphod Alasie C El-Naddaha, then Khufu, now SGG started reset circle of the game every 3 months. Crybabies now happy?
From my side, just farm materials for challenge events or tower events. No more competive mode.
Thanks for reading

Really? He’s been around for over a year… how was this foreseeble? I limit broke him last month, was my top hero… now I’m 5 purple aethers short and most likey will switch back to c.Rigard for purple heal. At least he boosts attak… SG are thieves. Thing is, once you got a product, nobody should be able to make changes to it in any way. The responsability for Xnolphod’s being overpowered falls on their shoulders, they released it the way it was and keept it so for one whole year, and did it on purpose. Because, one thing should be clear: everything SG does is on purpose and thoroughly considered before release. They’re a billion dollar affair, they don’t do things by ear… And now, when they lost interest in Xnolphod, they take it out of the equation to make room for the new Xholphod, Thanatos is the name, if I got it right. And they do so disregarding all those who spent money and materials on him. How’s this all right in any way?

By the way, I run Xnolphd as tank for the whole last month. At no time did I feel like my defense is unbreakable. I experienced a great many number of defense defeats. Xnolphod was’t the probelm. Heroes specials becoming too powerful is the problem. Passives and family bonuses tougher than other heroes’ specials is the problem.

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  • Neith’s 200% is going to be substantially more than Li Xiu’s 150%, given that Neith has a significantly higher attack stat
  • Neith will also be considerably more survivable, given higher defense and health stats too
  • Neith also has element link, which matters more if you have and are using another 2019 HotM (also, HotM family bonus)
  • Neith also blinds all, which is actually kinda a nasty combo, mana-cut plus blind

I didn’t much savor facing Neith on defense pre-buff, and while her buff isn’t huge, it makes her that extra bit more serious.

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The worst Part is, this round of nerf didnt help at all. At least not in concern of Wo3K defs.

If you Look at the top 100 defs, there are nearly no Xnolphods left. Which means, he didnt get balanced, he simply got destroyed. He is useless now, because 10% simply don’t do anything. Therefore no one would have given him Emblems, let alone Limit Break him.

And the Wo3K defs? Oh jea, they are the same or even more nie because the family nerf didnt help that much, Liu Bei is still great with the dmg buff and his minions.

And C.Freya is now the Main Tank, but they cant nerf her now, because they have to sell her one more time. Expect a nerf incomming for her 2-6 weeks after she gets featured one more time.

The reflect Minions of Liu Bai might get destroyd too, while Zhuge will be completly useless at this point, but they will Just ignore that, as he is the worst of them all and won’t bring $$$ anyway.

So all there is know are these simple facts.

  1. They don’t care about balance and they made it clear as day with this nerf. (And most of the ones before)

  2. They want to make more money and therefore nerf the heros that revenued enough so the newer heroes look even more desireable.

  3. They don’t know what they do to solve the Problems or they simply stopped careing.

  4. If you want them to really recognice that these balance updates are more and more Just Scans, Go f2p or at least c2p

Spending Money is pointless anyway. If you go and pull for hores, there are only two possibilties:

  1. The hero is not one of the Top 5-8 heroes that show Up in nearly all Top 100 defenses, which means he will get obliterated by these heroes anyway.

  2. The hero is one of these top 5-8 heroes that show Up in nearly all Top 100 defenses. Then it will get nerfed soon.

End of Story. Sadly

2 Likes

I see No. 1 overall still has him, No. 7 also. I don’t think you can say based on Top100 if he was destroyed or not. It’s because most of these Top 100 guys have many new really powerful heroes, so it’s easy for them to replace Xnol with Hawthorn/Bastet/Diochan/Gosek/cFreya/Agrafena… whoever they want. It’s not the same for f2p, c2p or even p2p who don’t spend thousands of dollars/euro. I think for them Xnol would be still the preferred option for defense. I don’t have him, but if I do, he would definitely replace my maxed LB Dr. Moreau who is on my defense. I’m usually sitting between 2700-2800 cups.

I won’t be this radical in this matter. The level of destruction is far from the cruelty that Telluria got. I got Milena and her passive 10% mana gain sometimes is really a life savior when I get it. Simply, not as straightforward and not as universal as 20%.

With the advent of new troops, passives, and mana generators he really could be what he was before. Just a bit trickier to get there. Really the only bad taste that this nerf left is that it was just after he was featured. However, I think it was much needed, however.

Simply the fact, that the Xnol is not present anymore in defs is IMO global hysteria. I don’t think that a few hours is enough to test how ‘bad’ Xnol is now. People just went straight to look for new tanks. Is it for good overall? I think yes.

Interested how do you know this? She’s definitely good, but in my experience, she’s just a bit better version of herself. I’d argue that Bastet is on the same level as her.

1 Like

Xnolphod has disappeared from top defenses since a quite long time now. It is not new and not a true consequence of his nerf. Mine is still in my defensive setup and I didn’t observe any change in my win/loss ratio for the moment. He is however less useful in attack where his mana boost is the most effective in my opinion. Until now, with leveled mana troops, I could fire C-Panther and Xnolphod in a row, then fire Goseck. After his nerf, Goseck can’t fire anymore…

I can actually agreed in a bit to the fact that he got destroyed, at least in the competitive alliances. 10% is too little to make a difference. It doesn’t cut a tile in most cases and is very hard to benefit in synergys with other heros. In my alliance (ranked in top 30 atm) there is only 9 Xnols left in raid defenses. The reason they are still there is because players don’t have maxed a replacement yet or haven’t paid attention to their raid defense, but he will be gone as soon as possible. Also, few has focused on purple heroes since you don’t want to use them on Xnol defenses and we are now discussing what we are gonna use instead for Xnol in future wars.

Milenas 10% have surely saved asses a few times but I think that is more likely because you don’t rely on that boost, you are after her hit all massive attack. And also most of the times it doesn’t do anything but you don’t notice because you don’t use her mana increase the same way you are using Xnolpods.

Also evaluating from raiding and friendly fights the different from 20% to 10% on defense is massive.

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Sorry it was a bit missleading, c. Freya is the Main Tank in all the Wo3K defs and as far as i’ve Seen, the top notch of alliances have switched to these defs.

We’ll see if it’s still the same this sunday.

The Telluria/Vela desaster was worse and effected a lot more people, i give you that.

Non the less, this Nerf is simply a scam, featuring Xnol one last time, right before the purple ether quest, give people enough time to level and Limit Break him and then come up with a nerf and saying, we just now realised how big of an issue he was? After one year of him beeing in most top allianc defs and top 100 defs?

That really is a very cheap lie, it’s like they don’t even care anymore.

And yes, you are right, that He can still make a slow hero fire in 9 tiles but i don’t think, that it is just a little more Tricky, as it means you have to fully emblem him and give him at least a lvl 11 Mana troop while you have to provide 20% Mana Bonus to your slow heroes. So this means ether Invest in Mana notes and a bit lieber troops or lvl 29 magic or styx troops.

And lvl 29 troops, especially the newer ones are rare and in most cases, only top players can provide one, let alone two of these troops to the slow Heroes in the same color.

And as his main purpose was giving Mana and making slow heroes useable, while healing and the tile alteration where mostly ignored, i think it’s quite save to say, that He is now just not good enough anymore for most of the playerbase

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This exactly. I see some players getting outraged as they can’t fire their Khufu’s and Alfrike’s in 9 tiles anymore. And that was exactly the problem. Also people saying he was a perfectly balanced hero are talking only from their own point of view. He was never a well balanced hero to begin with, pumping up the whole team with mana and health, including himself to create a big loophole.

Yes, the nerf came way to late and it sucks for Xnolphod owners that invested in him based on the old stats. But he’s still useable, it’s not like the nerf they gave to Telly back than.

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Part of the reason youre not seeing as many Xno’s is the fact people are now forced to test new defenses to see what will work best for them after the castration of Xno

I have no problem with tweaking heroes that are disrupting the balance of the game. The problem is that SG generally doesn’t tweak strong heroes. They castrate them. Ok, the Xnolphod nerf isn’t as bad as Telluria’s, but having played with him in his new form for a bit, I do feel he’s pretty underwhelming. He’s basically a tile sink on defense and his mana boost isn’t strong enough to justify using him as an off color healer. So, he’s basically just good in a purple stack now.

When doing adjustments like this SG should strive to adjust the part of the hero that’s creating the issue without affecting the hero’s overall desirability. An elite hero like Xnolphod should remain elite after the adjustment. A lot of people have chased him and spent mats and aethers on him. He needs to remain top tier, even if his value as a tank is diminished. In this case, increasing the heal was not sufficient to offset the loss of mana gain. Perhaps if the heal were changed to an overheal and a cleanse was added?

Nerfs like this really should go through at least one round of beta before going live.

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Exactly. When Xno came to life, the happy owners of Alfrike and Ludwig started to be exactly OP on offense. But they were the strongest slow heroes back then. After a while we got a few other smashers like Khufu, Goseck, Winifried, Malin (with new yet to come, e.g. Ahmose), which made them even more OP on offense.

And started to be also OP on defense.

Their speed was not their limiting factor anymore. What is also to note - even fast and average heroes became brokenly fast. All those pesky cAlasies arrows were flying over the whole warfield like mosquitos at the lake, draining your mana, leaving you defenseless. Crocodile Sobek bites were like ninjas, making all of your intricately prepared traps, armors and tricks as if they vanished. Lastly, the evil kong ape was in fact vanishing them.

Now, they will still be premier defense heroes, but you’d have a while more to be prepared for survival.

It started to be really a rush party at the regular wars.

3 Likes

I own Ludwig myself and I can safely say that he has a huge impact when using him on offence, even without owning big slow hitters like Khufu. I always pair him with Rayne and once he goes off that’s pretty much a sure win. He’s pretty good for defence, but unlike Xnol he is slow and doesn’t boost his own mana and only his flanks, so I’ve replaced him a while ago and my cups are now much more consistent.

Makes you wonder what their chain of thought is when applying nerfs like this. They could have made him boost mana with 15% and not giving mana to himself. That would probably be a better compromise.

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You may be right, but again, revenue is a much better indicator than what you claim. It literally means people are still spending money on it.
Offers have been the same since Zynga took over (this is the third year). More events/things to do, more offers there will be. Show me which groups of players are dropping out of tournaments. Is it whales and competitive ones or more of the ones that don’t spend and can’t keep up? Or are many just not participating in the tournaments but doing other things? Everything has a shelf life for an individual player - a game as a whole or different parts of the game get sacrificed. Just like with any other game.
Anyways, we’ll see what happens. Cheers.

I understand that you who don’t have Xnolpod may think that this nerf is resonable. But you must understand that he doesn’t do any good no more for the team. He heals and affect the tiles but the mana increase isn’t just enough to charge your heroes any faster. If your heroes doesn’t charge faster, what is the point of mana increase? 10% is too little. There is no difference now if I play with Xnolpod or Rigard. (ofc there is but you get my point)

And I think that that is the big thing here that those who have him didn’t mind some kind of tweak but still want him to bee usable more than the healing part. And those who don’t have him think that we complain just to complain. Basicly all heroes that give mana, for example Toxicandra, have cut 1 or 2 tiles after some turns but at this state Xnol doesn’t even do that.

If he turns up in the next Soul Exchange would you honestly trade for him? I have a hard time to believe so. If I didn’t have him and got him now after the nerf, I wouldn’t max him. And if his stays like this he will loose his emblems quite soon as well.

And as I mentioned before, I like the fact that we will see som new tanks and defenses but I still want to be able to use my Xnolpod on offensive.

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No, that"s right…ish, but after forging him for 24 hours on offense, I can tell you for sure that he’s lost his mojo. He just doesn’t do his job anymore. He’s just an average speed healer with (almost) no secondary skill. 10% makes no difference on the battlefield, I tested it over and over and over for the last 24 hours. They did destroy it. Turned the best into a less than average.

6 Likes

Some examples of better balancing than mana increase 10%

20% over 2 or 3 turns (makes it dispellable)

?% mana increase to all allies, 20% mana increase to dark element

20% mana increase to all allies except the caster (could also add: can’t gain mana for 1-2 turns if still to powerful)

Or maybe make him slow and give him the same passive as Prof Liedenbrock so he can be average for the first charge

1 Like

I was disappointed to hear this too.