Questionable ST buffs - What were the devs thinking?

[rrc]

CoH leader buffed to 16 and Dana now at 7P. Did they think the main problem with Harmony was CoH is 1 less provision and Dana herself? Not the shitty bronze package and over priced golds (which were nerfed like crazy due to ME)? This one provision buff and Dana's +1 power is not going to have any damn effect on that leader. So, my question is, what were they thinking? Why even wasting spending efforts on an archetype which they don't want to really make it playable?

Saboteur: Seriously? WTF were they thinking? I have said it before and I will say it again. This card is not going to be played at 5P at all. There are already enough 5P cards to fit into the deck. Even at 4P with the same effect, I don't think it will be played even though at 4P it may become borderline remotely playable. So, why spending efforts on a card which is DoA? Let it get rust along with Hattori.

Ioverth: Seriously? WTH were they thinking? Is this buff going to make Traps suddenly viable? It is not going to have any effect at all. Traps was/is and will always be for the "play 20/40 artifacts" quest or may be in Rank 25. Why wasting their effort? Seriously?

Ioverth's Gambit: This is even more laughable buff. Crushing Trap is the only good trap that is there and Ioverth can be added to play it though you will most probably lose the game if you bring Ioverth and only CT. Gambit is an absolutely horrible card which has a hard condition. It can be 10P to be may be considered playable. This 1P buff will have 0 effect on this card.

So, just for the namesake with absolutely no sincerity they had buffed these cards. They wanted to only nerf ST (understandable though wtih NJ and CW) and they should have left it as it is. Why to buff for namesake? That effort could have been used for some other cards. Even the Ciaran is not buffed enough to be on par with other lock buffs. Why? Because he has synergy with Elves? So, for SK or other factions synergy is always over and above, but for ST it should be considered when tuning faction cards?

 

[MikeBiazzo]

I agreed with the fisrt part of your post, but not for the rest of it. Traps are good enough (as archetype it could be better, but as it is now, you can do pro with it).
Snake's trap is useful on average and can be game winning combined with Iorveth destroying two times the biggest oppnent's unit.
I also like pit trap, which is specially useful to avoid some weak but powerful cards like Visigoda.
Finally, Gambit allows you to play a round with 1 more card than your oponent, and we're not talking about fillers: the double crushing trap combo is a good finishers against wide decks; but if that is not the best option, you can choose which traps do you want to use at the end (because, yes, it's random, but most of the time you can plan which will remain on the deck to use them with gambit).
So, there are archetypes more powerful than traps in ST, but it's far away from being something useless, and that's why I appreciate this little bufs to it.

 

[Madlax1992]

Some traps are good, most of them are not. Crushing Trap is the only thing coming close to being competitive in an ST deck. The rest are either useless or binary. The buffs to Iorveth and Iorveth's Gambit were strange. Not only they did not change the fact that these cards are still consigned to oblivion, they feel more like the kind of rework one justifies when he simply has no idea how to make this archetype work better. The whole trap archetype needs to be reworked, starting from a leader that synergizes with it all until possibly adding new trap cards. Otherwise, you might see 1-2 traps every now and then, or the occasional meme deck disrupting pro rank decks.

The 'buff' to Harmony leader was even more laughable. I watched the stream and they even said that Harmony is close to being meta-worthy! Which just shows that devs simply have no idea of the core game mechanics, what decks are competitive, what archetypes synergize well, etc. Harmony is in a very sorry state. For one, it has too few cards with this tag. And then many of the Harmony cards have been heavily nerfed because this archetype used to be OP in the past.

 

[Lokiat0r]

The 'buff' to Harmony leader was even more laughable.

Yeah, Harmony isn't something you can successfully play solely as a archetype. I frequently use the Harmony 2 gnome card in my mixed race ST decks as it's a decent lead-in to the bronze elf/dryad/witcher movement combos. I use Waters in Nature's Gift decks for the "Nature" tag, though I can ping an extra two points from Harmony by playing Harald in the same round. I don't think I use another Harmony tagged card anywhere...

 

[Barracuda88]

Yeah, I tried some Harmony post-buff, and the 2 points do absolutely nothing to the archetype. It's been powercrept, and this buff was really meh.

I had hopes for the saboteur, but sadly you're right. It's still useless at 5p even with 4 body. Even when you run a deck that forces opponents to row stack, more often than not your target is a token AND you can't play the card until the row is set up. It's just seems like a bad design, along with the adept. It probably needs to be more flexible, such as having the ability to move the card left OR right. Overall, ST has the worst bronze witcher package, especially now after the Cat nerf.

I do like the traps buffs, though. And the archetype. It's fun to play and you can win with it, though you could argue it got nerfed more in this patch than buffed, because of NJ nerf, since that was like the only source of tempo for the deck. The Gambit should be "Play a trap from the deck, then play the second trap randomly."