Balance Discrepancies

[DanTheTimid]

So I heard that the card list shows cards different then what was seen at A-kon because A-kon used the original Japanese effects and our cards shown in the card list are based on a newly rebalanced abilities just for the English game. The particular area of re-balance focus was supposed on soul skills because soul cards are very poorly balanced in the japanese game. I was very happy to hear this as card balance is very important to me. However after really looking through the cards I'm beginning to wonder really just how balanced things are.

Example:
Skeleton Master - if used as a soul card he provides you with 3 life, however his soul ability causes one random unit card from your Card File to be removed from the game.
Guardian Sphinx - if used as a soul card he provides you with 3 life, however his soul ability causes all friendly units to get DF=0.

Ok so far seems reasonable, I don't know enough about the game to know if either of those negative abilities is worse then the other but they both seem reasonable for 3 life. However then I see these:

Harpy - if used as a soul card she provides you with 3 life, however her soul ability gives AGI-1 to all units.

Wait... thats to everyone, so its not helping you, but its not necessarily hurting you either. But wait theres more:

Witch Queen / Catherine - if used as a soul card she provides you with 3 life, and on top of that her soul ability removes from the game three random cards from Rival Iczer's Cemetery.

Huh? Sure it might not HELP you against some decks, but against other decks that could actually be a useful effect. I haven't seen any cards that wanted their cards removed from the game so I don't see in what way this is a negative effect. To put it simply, this seems like at worse an effect that doesn't hurt you, at best will help you, while Skeleton Master and Guardian Sphinx both clearly have negative effects that at best won't hurt you, at worst will hurt you badly.

Since they all provide the same LP of 3, from what I understand of how soul cards work (and maybe I don't fully understand) this seems to be a clear imbalance.

If level does have any effect on anything for soul cards, as far as I know it doesn't, its worth noting that harpy and skeleton master both have the same level (3).

So am I not understanding how soul cards work, or is there an imbalance there. If there is an imbalance, is the card list not the final version for cards? Maybe some of these effects have been mistranslated?

[Grain]

Very good examples.

Unlike all of the other cards you mentioned, Witch Queen/Catherina is a character card, and a Falkow card at that.

Characters are rare and supposed to be more useuful than other cards. Falkow cards are known for having very good effects. To add onto that, only one Catherina card can be used in an entire game.

I feel that the circumstances make it fair enough.

-Grain

[DanTheTimid]

Very good examples.

Unlike all of the other cards you mentioned, Witch Queen/Catherina is a character card, and a Falkow card at that.

Characters are rare and supposed to be more useuful than other cards. Falkow cards are known for having very good effects. To add onto that, only one Catherina card can be used in an entire game.

I feel that the circumstances make it fair enough.

-Grain

Maybe your right, but from my understanding of soul cards they sort of break the normal rules. They're clan and level don't matter, the card goes off whether you want it to or not (thus why some cards have negative soul skills, obviously you don't want them to go off but you can't avoid them just by running them in a deck with a different clan), so you can put any card from any clan into your soul cards. I also don't know if the character card rule would apply here, the character card really isn't in play, its in a special place. Whats more, even if we both play the character card in our soul cards and his comes up first so when mine comes up mine is negated... then still no negative effect happened to me, I just didn't get the positive effect.

[Grain]

Sphere differences are the reason why I also don't know if the character card rule would apply here, the character card really isn't in play, its in a special place.

A non-character card could be put in the same place. Character cards are special.

Are you sleepy?

-Grain

[DanTheTimid]

Sphere differences are the reason why I also don't know if the character card rule would apply here, the character card really isn't in play, its in a special place.

A non-character card could be put in the same place. Character cards are special.

Are you sleepy?

-Grain

First off... what the heck, you just misquoted me. Where did "sphere differences are the reason why" come from? Perhaps an accident on your part?

Anyway I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying, and again I'm not 100% clear on soul card rules so I could be wrong and you could be right, but it seemed like soul cards were seperate from your deck and the normal field of play so the ruling on character backlash wouldn't apply or perhaps would work differently. I've actually posted a topic about this asking how it works, once I have a better understanding of how character backlash works when soul cards are involved I may have a better idea as to whether or not this is really an imbalance. Regardless though Harpy still seems better then skeleton master and guardian sphinx, its ability seems to effect both players equally while theirs is only negative to you.

[Grain]

First off... what the heck, you just misquoted me. Where did "sphere differences are the reason why" come from? Perhaps an accident on your part?

Oops

Anyway I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying, and again I'm not 100% clear on soul card rules so I could be wrong and you could be right, but it seemed like soul cards were seperate from your deck and the normal field of play so the ruling on character backlash wouldn't apply or perhaps would work differently.

Yes, I did. I was talking about cards as wholes, not just their soul skills.

Regardless though Harpy still seems better then skeleton master and guardian sphinx, its ability seems to effect both players equally while theirs is only negative to you.

If you ignore attack power, HP, other skills, whether the cards would be more useful as souls or units, and usefulness in fights between different spheres of influence, then yes, Harpy is better than skeleton master & guardian sphinx.

-Grain

[DanTheTimid]

Ok I just got confirmation fron DWildStar that soul cards are indeed unaffected by the character backlash rule, so my complaint about Witch Queen / Catherine remains valid.

Keep in mind that when you play a card as a soul card everything else on the card but the LP and the soul skill is ignored, so in order to balance soul skills you need to ignore the rest of the card and balance the LP and soul skill separately. This would not be the case if soul cards were chosen randomly from your card file, but you get to choose exactly which cards to use as soul cards before hand so their other stats never come into play.

Or atleast that's my understanding.

[Logress]

I've pretty much been wondering about this stuff myself. Since all the soul skills were retranslated at the last minute, I think there's probably some typos in there. I was hoping to test them during the alpha, but since we're not really having an alpha, I'm going to have to sit down and play myself 800 times and test all those soul skills next week. Right now I'm very suspicious of Harpy and the Witch Queen. I'd test them right now from home, but unfortunately I won't be able to access the server remotely until the Beta starts.
However, one thing I do know, is there's one big disadvantage to having a character as a soul card. Other than the fact they're more rare, you can only have 3 copies of a card in your Card File, which means if you have the Witch Queen as a soul card, you can only have 2 in your playing set. May not sound like a big deal, but if you're playing Falkow... it is.

[DanTheTimid]

I'm curious, if after your self testing (or from results of the beta test) its deemed any cards are indeed imbalanced, will you be going over the Japanese heads to make balance changes? Or maybe you'll just bring it up to them and see what they have to say on the issue? Hopefully its just a translation issue, I could see how mistakes could happen if the re-translations were made at the last minute, but if its not the case I'm hopeful that some sort of action will be taken. If nothing else I'm very happy to hear that this is something you, Logress, atleast are also investigating.

As for the factors you brought up, my own personal opinion is that rarity should never equal superior cards. It CAN mean stronger cards, but at higher costs or risks. If you make the highest rarity cards the best cards then you find yourself with a game where not only the richest have an unfair advantage discouraging poor or new players, but decks tend to be very similar and boring as everyone just uses the same rare cards.

The fact you can't use any soul card in its max copies in your play set, while true, is true for all cards. Further, It only even comes into play if your playing a deck that would run that card anyway. Even if the card is pretty much a staple for its deck right now, that's hopefully just because we only have 1 set so you don't really have any other options and as more cards come out you'll be able to build equally powerful decks that don't require the max copies of said card in your playset.

So yeah, I'm not really convinced those justifications hold, but thank you for trying to come up with something, and I'm still very happy its being looked into and I hope things get figured out.

[Logress]

Yeah, those two cards were totally wrong. Just playtested them and fixed them. Whoopise...
The Japanese will be playing in the beta test themselves, and also analyzing the battle data to check for any game balance issues. Plus, we'll be keeping an eye on complaints in the forum.