Leader Ability play rates and win rates in Season of the Dryad

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And saying "it's good enough, just get better" where there's ample evidence it doesn't perform well compared to other factions even for the best players
Is there? There is ample evidence for Warriors/NR in general being overpowered, indicated by their abnormally high winrate across all ranks.

There's no definitive proof for NG/SY being bad in general, though. Try not looking at clearly overpowered decks at the top for a second.
Now you see that NG and SY leaders generally have same distribution of high/low winrates as everyone else.
The whole hassle is a byproduct of some new broken shit introduced to the game, not excessive nerfs.
 
The whole hassle is a byproduct of some new broken shit introduced to the game, not excessive nerfs

This is what people've been saying all along... Noone said vincent, Ball or Braathens are overpriced or bad now, the problem was these cards were carrying a weak faction with an assembly of powercrept bronzes and golds.
 
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This is what people've been saying all along... Noone said vincent, Ball or Braathens are overpriced or bad now, the problem was these cards were carrying a weak faction with an assembly of powercrept bronzes and golds.
Immagine if you have a table with broken legs held together by duct tape, and you remove the duct tape cause it's unsightly...
IIRC you lost our little recent Assimilation wager.

Got me to pro, still works fine, without any "duct tape". I play it quite a bit now, actually, so...thanks?
But I sure see many people doing a hack job in mirror matches, like blowing all the main cards R1 to get that last say they don't really need, or running highly questionable Hen Gaidth, or making silly sequencing mistakes...which only reinforces my opinion about winrate being sagged by significantly high skill floor.

Same with Enslave 5/6. Control-heavy deck with some decent tempo and game-winning tricks. This one is especially good at shutting down any kind of attempts at comboing. Unless, of course, you drop Hefty Helge as your first move, which happens embarrasingly often.

I am aware of powercrept bronzes, yes, they're some of the worst in the game. But every faction has those.
And NG has viable bronzes, still, and some of them are actually really, really good, and as such the faction itself isn't any worse than all the other factions...except for the fact it doesn't have a broken overpowered deck, unlike everyone else right now.

You'll see what I mean when SW/Warriors/Symbiosis get hit with inevitable nerfs.
 
This is what people've been saying all along... Noone said vincent, Ball or Braathens are overpriced or bad now, the problem was these cards were carrying a weak faction with an assembly of powercrept bronzes and golds.
And that's the problem, look at the playrates for NG and then compare it to the playrate last season.

It's not weak, the moment the poison spam train ended players were too lazy to strategize and just jumped to the broken factions. These NG players have become so accustomed to thoughtlessly spamming removals that the few who actually know how to pilot the faction are all that remains. They're still one of toughest opponents to beat in pro ladder unless you're piloting one of the overturned factions/leaders above. As the previous post has indicated, assimilate is no less of a threat
 

ya1

Forum regular
Shinmiri - who afaik got one of the highest MMR with NG and is known for being diplomatic when sharing opinion - agreed that NG is weak (in MCBeard's podcast). Top500 players - who obviously are the most skilled players - hardly play NG at all. And those who still do still got the lowest results from all the factions. So the arguments about player skill...
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assimilate is no less of a threat

39.02% in pro. Same "order of magnitude" as Invigorate.
 
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I played NG and you can win against certain match ups, but seldom do I blowout my opponent on points (unless I'm high rolling assimilate). It's sad to stare at really tall Fallen Knights :think:


Do we also have data on the number of active players per season?

Coz from what I saw on Steam, it's decreasing every month :( but that's just from the Steam database though.
 
This win rates are pretty embarrassing for CDPR. It basically shows that they don't know how to balance the game.

Across the rankings, SK is overwhelmingly on top.

SK has been dominating season after season, and CDPR does patches again and again with no effect.

Kinda sad, really.
 

rrc

Forum veteran
Shinmiri - who afaik got one of the highest MMR with NG and is known for being diplomatic when sharing opinion - agreed that NG is weak (in MCBeard's podcast). Top500 players - who obviously are the most skilled players - hardly play NG at all. And those who still do still got the lowest results from all the factions. So the arguments about player skill...
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39.02% in pro. Same "order of magnitude" as Invigorate.
31 and 39 are not of the "same order of magnitude". While I respect your attempts to bring your voice up for NG, I can't allow that to compare anything NG with Invigorate. Invigorate is in its own league, in its own Order, it own Magnitude.
 
Shinmiri - who afaik got one of the highest MMR with NG and is known for being diplomatic when sharing opinion - agreed that NG is weak (in MCBeard's podcast). Top500 players - who obviously are the most skilled players - hardly play NG at all. And those who still do still got the lowest results from all the factions. So the arguments about player skill...
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39.02% in pro. Same "order of magnitude" as Invigorate.
Top-500 players, no matter how skilled, generally tend to play the most broken thing available and abuse whatever they can abuse, because for them rating is obviously more important than fun/style/authenticity.

It's the same few decks with small variations over and over again, so it says little about actual faction balance outside of those.

Of course anything is weak, when compared to Warriors/SW package right now!

But the thing is, not everyone is obsessed with broken netdecks and going top-500, so dynamics of more reasonable matchups between less ridiculous decks are vastly different.

I understand how getting gibbed by broken archetypes can make one bitter, but it's no reason to make more stuff broken, because that would just result in more powercreep.

If NG still struggles when all the prime imbas are nerfed, I'll gladly take my words about it not being weak back. Don't really think it's gonna happen, though. It's already reasonably powerful against every archetype outside of top-4.
 
With invigorate continuing to be very low in both play and success rates, I was considering how it could be improved without losing its essential character, or becoming too powerful. One thing I have observed is that what to me are very subtle changes can suddenly drastically alter the extent to which a card is used.

I believe the major drawback to invigorate is that it is most effective at the start of rounds, and usually at the start of round 1. Thus, it never reacts to board condition, and is inefficient if “saved” to carry a critical round. Therefore I propose it be changed to “boost four random units in your hand” and be given two charges. If power needs tweaking, changes such as boosting 3 units with three charges, or removing “random” are possible. This would allow effective use to be delayed until third round, or later in a round if needed. It also allows the possibility of particular key units receiving a boost of two by using both charges. I believe these advantages would offset a slight decrease in the power ceiling and would make the power more appealing, interesting, and effective.
 

rrc

Forum veteran
With invigorate continuing to be very low in both play and success rates, I was considering how it could be improved without losing its essential character, or becoming too powerful. One thing I have observed is that what to me are very subtle changes can suddenly drastically alter the extent to which a card is used.

I believe the major drawback to invigorate is that it is most effective at the start of rounds, and usually at the start of round 1. Thus, it never reacts to board condition, and is inefficient if “saved” to carry a critical round. Therefore I propose it be changed to “boost four random units in your hand” and be given two charges. If power needs tweaking, changes such as boosting 3 units with three charges, or removing “random” are possible. This would allow effective use to be delayed until third round, or later in a round if needed. It also allows the possibility of particular key units receiving a boost of two by using both charges. I believe these advantages would offset a slight decrease in the power ceiling and would make the power more appealing, interesting, and effective.
Invigorate has been discussed to death (and I think I have contributed to those threads and posts the most) a long time back. But now, any discussion of how Invigorate should be modified is useless as CDPR had mentioned that they are going to rework Invigorate (and I think in the same video, Ostry, the game designer mentioned that StockPile will be viable if and when it gets more support - kind of meaning that Invigorate is hopeless even if more cards are added which can potentially synergize with that ability, if it even can, because Invigorate is basically flawed to the bone and blood, touched by the curse of the black moon)
 
9 leaders have above 50% winrate, 2 of them just barely. so basically it's 7 strong leaders that ass-clap ever other leader in the game, way to go. the flow of changes since MM had me enjoying myself for a bit but the game has again fallen into a state of monotony and frustration for me and I havent rly played in octobre at all.

both buffs and nerfs are happening at a much too conservative rate at this point, as can be seen by the never ending dominance of SK and the pathetic buffs to NG and monsters (and also old ST archetypes) since MM.
I guess I'll see you all when the next expansion drops that shakes things up again :howdy:
 
9 leaders have above 50% winrate, 2 of them just barely. so basically it's 7 strong leaders that ass-clap ever other leader in the game, way to go. the flow of changes since MM had me enjoying myself for a bit but the game has again fallen into a state of monotony and frustration for me and I havent rly played in octobre at all.

both buffs and nerfs are happening at a much too conservative rate at this point, as can be seen by the never ending dominance of SK and the pathetic buffs to NG and monsters (and also old ST archetypes) since MM.
I guess I'll see you all when the next expansion drops that shakes things up again :howdy:
It's particularly depressing when you realize how similar the Uprising and Shieldwall lists are to each other. And how similar the Rage of the Sea, Patricidal Fury and Blaze of Glory lists also are. All of these also very much resemble what they dominated with when MM first dropped.
Total failure of a balancing effort. I really wonder what the ultimate goal with these patches were, because they certainly didn't promote deck variety.
 
Invigorate has been discussed to death (and I think I have contributed to those threads and posts the most) a long time back. But now, any discussion of how Invigorate should be modified is useless as CDPR had mentioned that they are going to rework Invigorate (and I think in the same video, Ostry, the game designer mentioned that StockPile will be viable if and when it gets more support - kind of meaning that Invigorate is hopeless even if more cards are added which can potentially synergize with that ability, if it even can, because Invigorate is basically flawed to the bone and blood, touched by the curse of the black moon)
Since they haven't touched Invigorate in the Leader Rework Patch where they even reworked Leaders that didn't that desperately needed a rework (Vicious Slash, Sacrificial Vanguard and Force of Nature) I expect them to rework Invigorate with the upcoming expansion to work with the newly added Cards or even a new Archetype maybe something like Swap or a Dwarf Mahakam Ale boon archetype like OB Golden Froth comes to mind.

With the increased Handbuff support introduced with MM I really don't think that Invigorate should stay handbuff related because Scoia'taels ability to generate carry-over with Handbuff is already a bit worrying (wasn't they're reasoning behind removing Sacrificial Vanguard that it can generate carry-over lol).
 
Another thing, Monsters have been performing yet again incredibly well. So how come there's always a certain amount of players who say that this is the weakest faction? What do you base your contention on?
 
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Shieldwall was tier 1 last season as shown by this and meta reports shows that it's still tier 1 this season. That's exactly what people have been saying. Keep in mind this is after pretty much everyone has been forced to tech against it.

Actually, shieldwall is a strong deck. But a win rate of 53 % at Pro does not make it completely overpowered. My point is that at a balanced game at best all win rates of the different leaders would be between 45 and 55 per cent. So improving all those <40 pro Rank leaders should be Prio 1.

Talking about the dominance of shieldwall and what to do against it:
Mostly you face two different types of NR decks.

1) Decks with no shield units but with many units you want to protect with your shield orders (e.g. Vysagotta, Kerack Frigate, Baron, War Elefant, Viraxas, Anna Strenger compare https://teamleviathangaming.com/meta/).

This strategy appears to be one of the strongest currently. To my mind the most obvious card which should face a nerv is Kerack Frigate. It´s a 6 provision card with 4 value + 2 engine each round.
If you compare Kerack Frigate with Lieutenant Von Herst you see another card which basically offers the same value (4 provisions + 2 engine each round) for 8 provisions. One might argue that the firesworn token is more valuable or that crew is more easily achievable than hoard 4. But this does not explain that huge difference.
So I would suggest: Kerack Frigate (2 strength, 3 armour, Order: Spawn a Volunteer in this row. Crew: At the beginning of your turn, refresh this ability.)
Furthermore, one might discuss whether Anseis should get Veil.

2) Deck with many shield units, fewer units you want to protect with your shield orders and King Roegner as a finisher. Sucess of this deck heavily depends on whether you win round 1, because you want to play Roegner as your last card in round 3. Additionally it depends on the ability of your opponent to remove your shields. I would argue that this deck is definitely not overpowered.
 
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