Did Legendary Colossally Crush GvG?

Alex Berg
Alex Berg
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

For many Legendary players, nothing in the game is more important than GvG- and that’s why they’re furious about this week’s new relic.

The Colossal Crusher

The core issue is balance. Defending against a GvG attack requires a purpose built deck, with cards and relics that have limited utility in other aspects of the game. Building a GvG defender deck takes a lot of time- or money.

The game introduces only one new Warden every week, so players who are locked into a defender deck of a particular affinity might have to wait months before a new defender skill pops up in an affinity they can use without seriously undermining the strength of their current deck. New GvG defender relics are rarer still. Even heavy spenders might work on a defender deck for a full year.

This is where the issue of balance comes in. It is difficult to build a good defender deck, but it is increasingly easy to build an attacking deck. Every week players get access to four new event cards and one new relic.

If the new cards that come out every week don’t offer some kind of in-game-value to players, they’ll just keep using old decks.

But that means that the new cards that come out every week HAVE to be more powerful than the cards players already have access to, which creates power creep. The older a deck is, the weaker it is in comparison.

So if you’ve spent a year building up a strong defender deck, there’s a very good chance that you could get completely steamrolled by somebody who picked up an even stronger attacker deck just last week. No matter how strong your defender deck is, if a player with last week’s event deck can blow right through you, their guild is going to get 150 kills. In fact, so’s yours.

This is the imbalance at the core of GvG, and it’s something the devs are aware of.

For a long time, Legendary Live Ops Lead Danil Monsur has been vocally and actively pursuing the goal of zero ties in GvG. On September 5th, Danil addressed the issue directly in a video on the N3TWORK app, where he said:

We’re still committed to our statement of 0 ties in GvG. We’ve been making a lot of small changes over time in order to push it in the right direction, but we believe GvG needs larger changes to get it to the right state… Starting on Saturday, we’re going to run a Season of Harmony. The season will last for 1 week, and during that time we’ll be making constant adjustments based on feedback and data.

One of the big changes promised was that attackers would now only get one attack per day- which is undeniably a step in the right direction. Without the second attack, attackers have only one shot to take out all five defenders, shifting balance back towards defenders and hopefully away from ties.

“Finally change!” -Dread- posted in the N3TWORK app. “Thanks for listening!”

“Yup it’s exciting,” added Jadoriah. “I’ve passed along the info to my guildies.”

“I think that network [sic] has listened to us,” wrote -Dread- ”and any major change right now is a positive change.”

…and then, on September 6th, the Colossal Crusher entered the game. An Earth affinity relic that generates four gems at the start of the battle and five intensity every turn is nothing new. And, although powerful, the relic effect Bough Breaker is also something the game has seen before:

If more than 12 Earth Gems exist on the board, create 1 Earth Power Gem II as long as a Giant is on the team.

Stalwart, on the other hand, was a new manifestation of power creep:

Creates 1 Earth Power Gem IV at the beginning of battle as long as a Giant is on the team.

Colossal Crusher’s Power Gem Powers

An attacker with five Colossal Crushers would start off a battle with five Power Gem IVs and five Power Gem IIs, more than enough to completely blow past the first card of any GvG defender deck.

Getting five of these relics would also be easier than ever, thanks to the Buy One Get One Free Relic deal, announced in the newsfeed during the event.

The guarded optimism some had for the changes coming to GvG quickly soured.

“We fight for change and then this…” wrote -Dread-. “Almost hopeless.”

Joker Fuel, guild leader of -GvG, felt similarly.

“Bottom line is that I respect the devs for doing this Harmony Season to test changes to equalize some imbalance in the GvG matches. The power creep is a real factor, it will happen,” he wrote, “but the timing of the said relic this week is basically a blow in the face.”

Chris Lilley, better known as Sniperweed117, is a community moderator and a longtime Legendary player. When asked to comment on the new relic, he didn’t mince words.

“Players are losing faith in the developers abilities to balance GvG. When players feel like things are going right the team introduces something that makes the community think ‘well that doesn’t help balance GvG.’”

The player’s response to the relic and their worries quickly made it to the very top of the Legendary food chain.

“We will be keeping a close eye on player feedback, as well as our own internal analytics, to validate this GvG rebalance in light of the newest heroes and relics,” said James Marr, Executive Producer of Legendary. “We are committed to keeping GvG balanced and this coming shortened season contains many tuning changes to maintain that balance. Please reserve judgement until you have a chance to experience the changes first hand.”

“I’m not sure what will counter this relic age personally. They can beef up the defense as much as they want, but a lot of us have the tools to be able to break through it. New warden relics will probably even things out a bit, for what price?” wrote Joker Fuel.

Opening Salvo. Sailor’s Bane doesn’t stand a chance.

The Season Of Harmony offers some hope to GvG players disillusioned by the introduction of the Colossal Crusher, but what optimism there is is guarded.

Whether or not balance will be restored to a GvG is, obviously, an open question. And all GvG players are rooting for the dev team to restore balance. But announcing the Season of Harmony and releasing a power gem four spawning relic within 24 hours of one another has left players wondering whether or not the dev team actually understands the problem they’re trying to solve.

“They implement changes during an event have have dramatic consequences effects on GvG. They do this while saying to us that they are trying to balance GvG,” said one player, on condition of anonymity. “The devs have no ability to see the big picture.”