Should emblems be addressed?

Many voices here on the forum noted, that over the year game balance was greatly impacted by emblems.

One reason for that was that maxed or nearly maxed 5 star heroes are much more difficult to beat by 5’s at their 3.70 or maxed 4 stars. I don’t think we predicted this and it’s really an issue. But I think we are past fixing that the moment people started paying for emblems in the offers etc. Because the only way to fix it would be to take it back or diminish their effectivenes, either way feels like a step back. Well I had an idea that perhaps changing the raids and wars formula to encourage players to spend emblems more evenly rather than “all in” could be considered (for example, by temporarily disabling a random pool of heroes for a week worth of raiding offense/defense), but who knows if it would help.

One of the other issues with emblems which I think was hard to predict is the cost of moving them around on the higher levels of 5 stars. Reading some of the angry voices in the rebalance topic, for many the ham and iron spent on emblemming the team around Telluria just to have it taken back is a big problem. I’d say because of the cost of reemblemming, the game lost one important aspect - experimenting with the defenses. I think it’s one of the reason of the staleness in high raid defenses, beside the obvious dominance of certain stack. People just go for what works and do not experiment anymore. If you want to put that Alfrike in your defense, you need to not only emblem her (± 15 million food and iron) but also take that now deemblemmed JF out and replace with another red who may not be maxed and need further investment also etc. The costs of food and iron make it a big deal, I think much, much, much bigger than it should be.

But there’s also a reason for that - if moving emblems around was easy and had no consequences, people would just move emblems around before each raid attack, each war flag etc. Having maximum emblems for one class would mean all your heroes of that class benefit from that. Except if you wanted to be effective, you’d have to spend 10 minutes before each raid on rebalancing. How hideous would that be.

I think what could be a fair compromise between player-friendly and abusable mechanic would be to enhance the reset tokens in a way that if a hero emblem path is reset with a token, spending the same tokens on another hero are food and iron free, or the costs are greatly minimized. If you want to reset hero with gems, you still need to go with the regular costs. We get enough of these reset tokens to be able to shake up our defenses every now and then, but not enough to start fooling around.

Also, if a hero gets nerfed and it causes an outcry in a community, just give every owner of said hero a reset token for free and they can decide what to do with it. I get that it doesn’t return the ascension mats, but let’s be honest, no nerf will bring a hero like Telluria to Atomos level; she’d still be one of the best tanks in the game, just maybe more comparable to guys like Heimdall so you may want to move emblems to him instead. You shouldn’t be punished to spend a week on doing so, delaying all your other projects due to lack of resource.

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Emblems (and costumes to some extent) introduced an extra level of ascension for heroes. But I don’t see the reason why it needs any adjustment.

People do experiment. With that many players we have to experiment just because different players have different rosters. The reason we see similar defenses is their obvious advantage and synergies. Players that can field those teams just push the other combinations down.

The only adjustment with emblems, that I think useful, is an ability to remove emblems one level at a time and ability to move a sub tree of emblems from one hero to another hero of a same class. So that I could take a branch, say 3 levels out of 5 from Obakan and give them to Azlar leaving the other 2 to Obakan.

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I don’t think that happens to the level it was before emblems.

My personal example:

I have Zeline at +19 in my defense (duplicating color of Telly, but Vela is there to punish red stacks so it kind of works). She’s the same class as Alfrike. I have no purple in my defense, so would be curious to see if placing Alfrike in the left wing would give better results than Zeline. I obviously won’t get any valuable informaton if that Alfrike is 4.80+0. So I would need to:

  • strip off Zeline
  • emblem Alfrike (around week worth of food and iron)
  • check if it works
  • if it doesn’t, strip off Alfrike
  • put the emblems back in Zeline (another week worth of food and iron)

Entire ‘experiment’ just cost me half of a month, not even including the time of watching results. Before emblems it would be as easy as editing your raid offense team. And that’s only to test one hero; there are instances where you would need to swap 2 or 3 with a new hero you pull, that’s literally months to just check if it works.

I think part of what caused the staleness of recent meta was caused by this - if there was a ‘safe’ option that has proven working for many, why trying anything else, potentially fail and be left month behind on resources?

That’s good point as well. I hesitate to put some of my heroes from +19 to +20 just because if I wanted to turn back to +19 and spend the 250 emblems elsewhere, guess what, I need to build the entire ladder from the scratch. Resetting should allow to reset to certain level, not only back to 0.

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Really great thread and hope it does not get derailed !

Agree playing around with defence setups diminished once everyone got to the higher tier of emblems , not so much of an issues when there wasn’t that many

Maybe sg can release another type of token. Which is transfer to another hero with maybe a set time frame of 24 hrs before another transfer token can be used

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Yes atomic “all or nothing” seems to be way too expensive. Especially taking into account that all resources of food and iron are just lost.
I’d like if transfer of emblems from one hero to another could be done at some reduced cost. May be 50% of resources required for first time emblemming.

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So, we are talking about different ways of experimenting. You mean experiments carried out by one person, while I meant variations distributed over population.
Individual experiments are difficult, yes. But many people will give a try to different combinations. Like in your example many people don’t have Zeline but have Ulfrike to emblem.

I think eliminating food/iron costs and make resetting hero emblems free, but with a significant cooldown would solve this.

Eg strip emblems off a hero, that hero now has a star-based 0/1/3/5/7 day cooldown before emblems can be reallocated to him/her. Reset emblems allow a player to bypass a cooldown. I guess gems could be used to skip the cooldown too, although I’m not thrilled with this idea

This lets players freely experiment with embleming different heroes, but prevents abuse (esp at high levels) of super customizing each raid. I hate having to use gems to reset emblems, and taking a loss of emblems to do so (!!!), so this would get around that while opening up a new possible revenue stream and repurposing existing reset emblems

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I think the game is fundamentally broken now and each layer or correction added contributes to the cascading problem of imbalance or unfairness to people who’ve spent $$ and/or invested a great deal of time on the game - specifically building their team a certain way.

I’m just about finished rebuilding my defence to a Telly tanked defence - that involved stripping and re-embleming 3 heroes and embleming a fourth (Telly)

I used all my saved crates of food and iron and pulled nearly all my TC20 heroes out for the banked food… the sheer amount of time and energy has been monumental - all so I’d not let my team down.

Speaking of my alliance, we have 11 players in the midst of making a similar switch so that we’d not get behind the obviously emerging Telly meta… now we are all in the same boat.

I am almost certain from the reactions of players that despite the fact that we almost to a person agree Telly needs the nerf, the fact that it’s happening now, after we’ve accepted that she was the new meta and invested so much in dealing with the change, that we are going to have some players quit the game out of frustration.

I doubt this will be unique to our alliance.

This Telly thing is a big deal and SG, while free to make whatever changes they deem necessary as per the user agreement, are still bound by the tenants and limitations of player/developer good will.

They have one chance to get the change and the compensation right, or in one fell swoop they’re about to lose a not insignificant percentage of their player base.

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I love this idea, or let us specify how many levels to reset.

When I were a lad I remember playing E&P when there were no emblems…:older_man:

As a player the cost of assigning emblems is quite high, and emblems are quite rare too. The class quests for emblems really don’t offer many as a reward. Then there’s the removal and reassignment; the penalty of emblem loss by using gems for removal.

The high cost of assigning emblems, especially for 5*, means it’s quite a loss and decision to reassignment those emblems to someone else. I imagine emblem usage goes either to embleming up the main defence team for war/raids and making it difficult for the attacker. Or spreading out the emblems to have better overall attacking chance at potentially fully emblemed up 5* defence teams.

Love SuuriKoira’s idea as others have quoted a few times. I would love to reassign my emblems at will to experiment, but it’s far too prohibitive to do so.

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The percentage bonus from Paladin I believe has created an interesting issue with stacking. It really wasn’t a huge deal until they introduced a self sustaining tank. The may want to lower the overall percentage or reduce the bonus to a flat static number, like 50.

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Flat number could be tricky due to the differences between 3, 4 and 5 star heroes. Flat numbers are not really scalable there.

Though interesting point that not all classes were born equal. I think experiences from the last 18 months could help reevaluate that.

I worry about a strong yellow tank and a Clarissa flank a little. I don’t think it’s as big a problem as GTV, but they certainly stacked percentages there again. And DOT(poison) resist then becomes a serious issue.

The problem of emblems is that experimenting new setups is very expensive and slow. I would do some changes:

  • Token for emblem Transfer. You can Transfer all the emblems from one Hero to another using a token.

  • Flexible and free path change. You can move the emblem paths freely for your heroes. That Will Also enable further strategic planning on attacks and defenses.

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Lol emblems were talked about for quite awhile before the recent balance announcement…

Please have a clue about what’s going on before responding so you can actually contribute something to the discussion

If you want to, if not then ok scream into a void, I’m good either way

Thanks

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I just want more emblems

That is all

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I know right? Everyone talking about refund, could be asking for free emblems and ascension mats. Leave stuff on ‘balanced’ heroes. Some of them could grab seconds at the balancing buffet and still be BIS coming out of it. Nothing wasted, nothing changes.

They should or could reduce food and iron costs on emblems. Or make items like harvesters that reduce food/iron costs by a percentage.

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We just need a reason to make people spreading emblems more evenly. A few suggestions that are not thought to the end:

  1. Give higher talents daily costs of iron and food. A roster with many + 7 heroes should be tremendously cheaper to keep than a roster with 8 heroes +18

  2. The main reason for a +20 def is alliance war (not pvp. You are always +2400 cups there)
    So give the alliance wars new tools:

  • give each war different bonuses ADDITIONAL to field aid (Dont open up that discussion now)
  • random buffs for example like
    “Yellow heroes gain +30% base defense, and
    Red heroes mana speed is set to fast” both atrackers and defenders

With idea nr. 2. and the example I made you would try to set a yellow tank and flank him with two slower red hard hitters or something like that.
So to have a roster for alliance wars, that has the best average strength, people would need to emblem more heroes

Players with their +18 fast heroes in each class would have some alliance wars where they really rock off but others where they fall down hard when slow heroes benefit from war-buffs.

funny side effect
Eventually even a whole alliance would think about a complete tactical setup of their members.

  • 10 people focus on pushing slow heroes to hardcorely rock in a slow-pushed war
  • 10 people focus on tanks in any color to always have 10 defenses in you alliance war where a heavily boosted tank stands in front.
  • other 10 people focus on the Standard fast heroes

Yeah…I like my idea the more I think of it. Too bad I have so little influence :slight_smile:

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Can we please keep this thread separate from the balance rant thread

I know i know they’re sorta attached but i would highly prefer 2 different discussions/threads than 2 of the same

I think a year of seeing how emblems impact the game has been long enough, and expecting everyone to hit +20 defenses with offenses that have 7 or less to 0 emblems outside of 4* is a bit of a tall expectation

(This was in general response to the thread and no one specific)

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I’m torn on your suggestion

Sure the extra war rules would be kinda fun but would also kinda suck for the game to tell us what defenses we need to run each war and the camaraderie of coming up with a defense strategy for an alliance(regardless of how common the same ones are) being removed

We already have raid tourneys that tell us what we can and cant use.

I’d prefer that be the only feature like that.

Now i do think altering the emblems and ham/iron costs could be beneficial

Making lower nodes cheaper and higher ones above 10 more expensive

Similar to leveling troops, heroes, etc…any other part of the game actually.