SYNDICATE mechanics are OP and NR patch is not good enough

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I have seen some pretty creative and effective decks, so to say that SY and NR are the only two factions in the game right now is disingenuous.

I genuinely hope CDPR looks past the hysterical outcry towards DJ and Foltest and their two factions

It's not hysteria. Of the top 20 pro rank players, 11 of them are SY and 8 of them are NR. That's 19/20 total. That is not normal... you may have anecdotal experiences in your rank but overall there is really only 2 factions. Homecoming has always been really imbalanced, but i think this is a new low for the game. I remember a time in Beta before Midwinter where all the factions were really balanced. They all had multiple viable archetypes that were a lot more thought out than the ones we have now. I don't really understand how we got so far away from that...
 
Still, they can bring the other factions up and perhaps give them more options at countering SY and NR mechanics.

I just know from experience with MMO's and from what I have seen in Gwent that nerfs will just see people abandon leaders and factions. Hence why slightly reducing what DJ can do or giving other factions ways of interrupting coin gain would be a more balanced way to approach it.

I just dislike strict and heavy nerfs because they always take far more value away from a game than what they add to it.
 
I hate to be this negative, I really do since I love the game and even in its more... Rough patches I have always stuck by it (seriously do you all remember Sabbath and Grate Swords at the end of open beta?), but this recent meta shift has actually killed my desire to play the game outside of seasonal.

I was super hyped for SY, even thinking it would be the thing that got me into streaming the game at last, but it ended up sort of being a mess and I felt my enthusiasm ebbing the more machine gun Witch Hunters I ran into. But then a light appeared! NR rework, hotdog! My boys in blue are coming back and SY will get some nerfs to bring them back in line with the rest of the... Oh their going to buff everyone up to SY's level? Well... Okay ya cool! More playable cards! Just so long as they reduce the power of Witch Hunters I am sure it will be... No not doing that? Sure okay fine, well NR and later the other factions when their gotten too will be able to... A new leader you say? And their... Just a straight up power creep on the cool pirate lady I really was looking forward to building decks around once SY was toned down so I didn't feel so dirty... Cool. Well hey as long as its all been balanced I am sure that- OH WHAT THE-

And then the meta exploded into a healthy mix of Foltest, DJ and No Fun Allowed Usurper just in case you might want to try out some fun deck ideas. Because the team did just what they promised they were not going to do anymore and made a large number of sweeping changes in a very short period of time and when asked to address them went, "No, but don't worry, EVEN MORE SWEEPING CHANGES ARE COMING! Also another new expansion! Also maybe another new faction!"

Like... What the heck? I thought the lesson we all took away from Homecoming was to take things slower, not shake everything up all at once and carefully address issues as they arise rather then rushing blindly forward? SY was a MASSIVE addition and the coin mechanic is still rife with issues that need addressing, NR and SY are massively ahead of the curb and the plan is to quickly shoot out similar overhauls to 4 additional factions, all leading up to what might well be a 7th faction being added to the game, possibly with another new mechanic that could be hard to integrate smoothly with the rest of the game?

I'm sorry, I love Gwent, I think the team is wonderful and has worked very hard on all of this and I am sure their harts are in the right place, but what we need is not an new faction, not another expatiation, not a new crop of leaders, but a rework of the remaining, existing factions followed by a slow down to seriously look at the state of the game to address everything that these changes have messed up. Because at this point theirs no putting the cat back in the bag, we have NR and SY at a much high level then everyone else and so reworks ARE needed for the remaining factions, but after that before ANY new cards and ANY new mechanics are introduced, the devs need to get their house in order! They need to address DJ, they need to take a serious look at coins and consider making them more intractable, they need to see where some combo's might have been overturned and where small changes to provisions and leader caps might be needed.

We can all bellyache and complain about the game being dead or about that this or that update should not have happened, but I truly think right now, the biggest threat to Gwent is the devs insistence that al our problems don't need to be addressed, because new shiny cards are coming that will make us forget all about them.

Please, CDPR, please consider a hotfix and more transparency about how your planning on re balancing the other factions. Please give us a sign that your going to give due consideration to fixing the game as it stands now rather then just dumping more cards on the fire in hopes of smothering the problems. And please, for the love of all things good, don't make another faction right now! We don't need another SY!

Okay that's my rant. I'm spent. I'll go back to... Waiting and hoping that my faith is well placed and that the game will get better. If not... Well... I managed to make it through Sabbath and Grate Swords, I guess I'll just hope I can make it through SY and expansion fever...:-/
 
Both SY and NR are unbeatable to me.
First round is easy enough to control, but when I have to go second in the final round, I need to counter each card immediately as it comes onto the board. If I only let one card slide, they build up a few charges and just kill any unit I place immediately.
They all gain charges based on other units which they just stack and stack and unless I have a hand of special cards to destroy theirs, I cannot get a single unit down.

Order usage has to be limited to 1 per turn... otherwise this game is just not fun.
 
Let's not forget about hyper-thin NG with Ardal or Usurper, as well as, Monsters with unitless Woodland and finally ST Eithné with Schirru/Scorch; all capable of dealing with SY and NR. And these are not the only viable decks.
decks aiming to counter the 2 strongest meta decks with toxicity (gameplan denial) are not an argument that there is deck variety.
dj is broken even within his own faction - there is no need to play any other leader, he just does everthing better than the rest. foltests zeal ability breaks the balance design of high value orders - as soon as there are cards that provide huge zeal value, he will be broken aswell - for the same reason SY's coins are a problem. its uninteractable.
Its okay for me to take your time to fix the balance issues with SY/NR vs the rest (by adjusting the rest) - but you also have to be willing to implement hotfixes when you make these big changes. DJ needs a hotfix. bsc/draug needs one aswell.
it dreads me to think we have to wait 20 days for it to change. its a mess NOW!
these are NOT minior balance issues, but a huge blunder/oversight during the internal testing before patch release and it is not acceptable to wait this long.
 
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decks aiming to counter the 2 strongest meta decks with toxicity (gameplan denial) are not an argument that there is deck variety.
dj is broken even within his own faction

I've already agreed with the assessment that DJ is too strong. Besides that point, there are still other factions that are viable. Not just to counter DJ and NR, but also to defeat other decks. I wouldn't call hyper-thin or Schirru toxic. Only unitless (Woodland) was specifically made to counter everything by playing nothing.
 
I've already agreed with the assessment that DJ is too strong. Besides that point, there are still other factions that are viable. Not just to counter DJ and NR, but also to defeat other decks. I wouldn't call hyper-thin or Schirru toxic. Only unitless (Woodland) was specifically made to counter everything by playing nothing.
ardal is toxic by design, as long as most viable tactic cards aim to remove stuff, rather than improve the own board that wont change. and the synergy cards also mostly deal dmg - which means the few units that do not get destroyed immediatly are then targets for muzzle/leader ability.
shirru or g:igni themself are not toxic, i agree. quiet the opposite - they need setup and you can play around them - i like the design of these cards. problem is that atm they get played in a deck, mostly consisting of removal options - which brings it back to the uninteractive side of things - which makes it toxic imo.
 
I have 580 hours of playing gwent and i can say that yeah devs make mistakes but they are trying their best to solve all the problems. Also i think that it's not always the question of some decks being op (like it was with detlaff), it's the question of meta, of what decks are being played. For example, when Dj appeared, gwenters started playing Usurper, then Ardal's powerful decks appeared and Dj became more like a usual deck, not OP. Players like Freddybabes, Ace of plays etc form the shape of meta. Recently they introduced mill deck and tibor, which for some time have been powerful, and what's amazing, the card of yennefer divination and xarthisius gained new life.
Yes, there is more control of decks after NR patch, but remember that noone forces you to use important engines at first. You can throw away useless cards and then the most important ones, while your opponent loses all his control cards.
To sum up, it's important not only to make all strong decks which are introduced by proplayers, it's also a question of you understanding current meta and of your knowledge what cards to play first. People are playing same decks, so it's not the problem to form your strategy.
 
"Ardal is toxic by design" again with the unwarranted jabs at NG. Ardal is fine, Usurper is also fine. Both unique leaders who are being used exactly as they are designed to be used.

The game has some issues now of course, I would be surprised if it didn't given the amount of changes it has seen recently. And I wouldn't classify it as a "huge" blunder. Things will calm down and CDPR will get to work balancing.

However if DJ gets the nerf a lot of people are demanding he will just end up like Detlaff and people will no longer use him very much if at all.
 
"Ardal is toxic by design" again with the unwarranted jabs at NG. Ardal is fine, Usurper is also fine. Both unique leaders who are being used exactly as they are designed to be used.

yeah, thats the point. these two leaders are designed to disrupt the gameplan of your opponent. which is only ever fun to play for the disruptor and so toxic by design.

not caping DJ's charges is ofc a huge blunder, i looked at it for 2 seconds and it was clear the leader was broken. every streamer i watched, who talked about the new leader said the same even without even needing to play a match. same goes for foltest: his BSC/draug list was already the one of the strongest NR lists, then they buffed BSC like crazy and removed row restriction from revenants - anyone could have told them that would be too strong, even without any other buffs to NR.

it still got into the life patch - so it was a huge blunder. As did baron, falibor and kira.. all way to strong cards for their provision. they wanted to introduce a limited value growth instead of a linear one with the new update, thats why they started buffing low prov bronzes in the first place. this means low prov. cards produce more value than they cost provision, while high prov. cards have a value below their provision cost.
example: the standard 4p card should have a value of about 5-6, while a high provision card like speartip may not ever reach its max potential without major drawback. (12 for 15p)
baron, falibor and kira are all high provision cards, yet they easily give MORE value than their provision cost and dont require a lot of set up.
so these cards are OP and their release a mistake. and they will need to get nerved again in close future - otherwise balance will stay a mess.

i can understand if its a 2-3 card combo that turns out to be very strong and got overlook because of that. but these cards dont need any setup. that should not happen.

Detlaff nerv also was a blunder. his whole vampir package is unplayable, crimson curse an absolute joke. just like gascon in TB, one of the main characters is an RNG fiesta.

stuff like that should NEVER make it into a life version of the game. its a big flaw and its justified to critizise it.

The Point is to make DJ a balanced and unique leader, that is what a discussion like this is for. If he is unplayable after the patch, i will be equally displeased with the result - that would just be a job badly done.

I am defending GWENTs design and argue for the improvements made, when ever i'm on a platform other than this forum. but this forum is where we give feedback to cdpr directly, so i also point out its flaws - and it has some big ones.
 
example: the standard 4p card should have a value of about 5-6, while a high provision card like speartip may not ever reach its max potential without major drawback. (12 for 15p)
That isn't true for high provision cards and in particular not for Speartip, because his value comes from him being consumed in hand or graveyard, as well as giving additonal support to thrive and domination.

i can understand if its a 2-3 card combo that turns out to be very strong and got overlook because of that. but these cards dont need any setup. that should not happen.
Keira needs 2 adjacent cards as setup with high enough base power as well as enough turns to get her effect.
Bloody Baron is either just a Peter Sar Gwynleve or needs either a turn delay or a different boost, which makes him a 2 card combo as well.
And Falibor can only exceed his provisions by 2 if you gave him a good setup and there are 3 enemies on the board.


I would probably agree that all of them could need 1 less base power, but I wouldn't call any of them op or there release a mistake.

not caping DJ's charges is ofc a huge blunder, i looked at it for 2 seconds and it was clear the leader was broken. every streamer i watched, who talked about the new leader said the same even without even needing to play a match
Streamers are more likely to say something is op, because telling that nothing interesting will happen is a lot more boring. And there are enough cases where people complained something would be far too op and nothing happened in the end.
 
Keira needs 2 adjacent cards as setup with high enough base power as well as enough turns to get her effect.
Bloody Baron is either just a Peter Sar Gwynleve or needs either a turn delay or a different boost, which makes him a 2 card combo as well.
And Falibor can only exceed his provisions by 2 if you gave him a good setup and there are 3 enemies on the board.

Keira, Roche, and Baron all feel like power creep to me. I haven't actually gone over the numbers yet to make a clear argument on this but when I played these cards it seemed like they were stronger than most golds in the game.

Edit: For Baron I would argue that he is a better card than Peter. Higher strength is better in the last round since Baron is at minimum an 8 point drop. Baron also has formation with an added ability that Peter doesn't have. Considering Peter is such a good card this says something.
 
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For Baron I would argue that he is a better card than Peter. Higher strength is better in the last round since Baron is at minimum an 8 point drop. Baron also has formation with an added ability that Peter doesn't have. Considering Peter is such a good card this says something.
There are two sides to this and I'm not saying you are wrong. But Peter is a lot cheaper and you can include him with other cards, while you have to sacrifice key cards for Bloody Baron. And formation isn't helping much except for utility, because if you use it for the boost you loose Zeal which is huge. The only major upside is the bleed though as that needs time, it makes not much sense as a finisher.
 
There are two sides to this and I'm not saying you are wrong. But Peter is a lot cheaper and you can include him with other cards, while you have to sacrifice key cards for Bloody Baron. And formation isn't helping much except for utility, because if you use it for the boost you loose Zeal which is huge. The only major upside is the bleed though as that needs time, it makes not much sense as a finisher.

In the situation that you can drop it early, boost it with Meve, and then immediately hit a big target AND give it that bleed. Wow, in that situation it's a lot better than Peter.

IMO on average it's marginally better than Peter. The only upside to Peter is being cheaper to put into decks which isn't a huge upside but it's something.
 
That isn't true for high provision cards and in particular not for Speartip, because his value comes from him being consumed in hand or graveyard, as well as giving additonal support to thrive and domination.
Keira needs 2 adjacent cards as setup with high enough base power as well as enough turns to get her effect.
Bloody Baron is either just a Peter Sar Gwynleve or needs either a turn delay or a different boost, which makes him a 2 card combo as well.
And Falibor can only exceed his provisions by 2 if you gave him a good setup and there are 3 enemies on the board.
I would probably agree that all of them could need 1 less base power, but I wouldn't call any of them op or there release a mistake.

you CAN compaire speartip with other high p cards like keira, because she also has very good synergy with her deck. ozzrel + speartip is 12+13 points for 15+9 provision (=25 for 24p) , if keira hits either tridant or nathaniel + whatever unit, she is a 9for10 and a 6/4 or 7/7 (15/14p or 16/17p) on the same turn, gaining up to an insane amount like 25-30+points for 14/17p. point is, even without synergy she is insanely strong.. with cards that combo with her ability she is just crazy.

baron and falibor are removal cards, that both easily surpass their provision cost and go about even when you "brick" them. i think it is well established by now that removal options should not exede their cost that easily without much drawback.

the peter beeing cheaper argument gets more then countered by the fact that baron is a way better finisher. most of the time you want to keep either until the match is nearly over and baron always plays for an additional 4 points - which is his increased provision cost.
 
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you CAN compair speartip with other high p cards like keira

I'll say up front that Monsters could do with a buff. Regardless, Speartip is still strong in its own right. Keira needs two adjacent units and a few rounds to get value, while Speartip gets value instantly, enough for a power swing to take the round or drop it as last play.
 
"Mmmh okay let's see what they are all talking about this DJ leader ..."

OP_DJ.JPG

Notice the small pause loosing with NR, after an awful draw resulting in a loss.

... mmh this is not even fair. This leader has no weakness.
 
I build an Adda deck to test these 3 cards a bit in isolation, because she does not provide any synergy with NR cards. I also tried to avoid most NR synergies alltogather and use some old pointslam combos like caldwell/cursed knight/nerco to push a bit of tempo.

https://www.playgwent.com/de/decks/guides/28399

I won 9 out of the 14 games i played - from rank 10 to rank 8 - loosing 3 times 0:2 to foltest and once to eithne by 1 point because i missplayed hard and gave her a 21 point g:igni after i had already depleted all her charges. the last loss was to ardal with an unrefined list where i pulled useless stuff with circle and could not get my caldwell on bord savely.

the three cards in question are crazy.. without any synergy they just wreck poeple, i almost never got all 3 pings of falibor, but he was absolutly worth it anyway. keira is insanely good. caldwell, then cursed knight into keira on a tempo round 2 is nearly unbeatable 25 points in 3 cards (for 23 provision), and it will keep generating two points a turn while your opponent is trying to catch up..
baron is almost always a 12 for 10 - quiet often he gets a lot more value.

sry for beeing a bit of topic - I just wanted to share the results :)
 
I build an Adda deck to test these 3 cards a bit in isolation, because she does not provide any synergy with NR cards. I also tried to avoid most NR synergies alltogather and use some old pointslam combos like caldwell/cursed knight/nerco to push a bit of tempo.

https://www.playgwent.com/de/decks/guides/28399

I won 9 out of the 14 games i played - from rank 10 to rank 8 - loosing 3 times 0:2 to foltest and once to eithne by 1 point because i missplayed hard and gave her a 21 point g:igni after i had already depleted all her charges. the last loss was to ardal with an unrefined list where i pulled useless stuff with circle and could not get my caldwell on bord savely.

the three cards in question are crazy.. without any synergy they just wreck poeple, i almost never got all 3 pings of falibor, but he was absolutly worth it anyway. keira is insanely good. caldwell, then cursed knight into keira on a tempo round 2 is nearly unbeatable 25 points in 3 cards (for 23 provision), and it will keep generating two points a turn while your opponent is trying to catch up..
baron is almost always a 12 for 10 - quiet often he gets a lot more value.

sry for beeing a bit of topic - I just wanted to share the results :)
That's quite a good experiment and convinces me that they are probably OP. Moreover, it answers the question how much of NRs strength is due to Foltest alone.

Also I just noticed that including Adda, NR has more cards giving bleeding than MO after the rework. That is quite sad.
 
Oh my god.. my deck.. its so simple, yet so effective..
after i added 2x northern wind and xavier, i beat a foltest aswell.
and i just destroyed a DJ bounty/townsfolk list and a gudrun with bincy/sigi/revive/redanian.
the knights are increadily effective against bounty, transforming the unit and canceling the bounty :D
it has strong round 2 pushing, northern wind/xavier for the flying redanian/brothers, 2 resets if a unit ever gets out of control.
Im mid rank 7 now (highest i have ever been while only playing casual fun decks).
 
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