Kyrian mission followers STILL embarrassingly bad

Community General Discussion
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Just a(nother) reminder to Blizz that they really do need a balance pass. The first one helped a bit, but it didn’t finish the job.

The DPR numbers Kyrian followers and troops put out is laughably poor. A couple of the 9.1 followers are better than the OG team, but none of them hold up to, say, Tezan from Night Fae.

Tezan will do something like 1500 damage every turn when the enemy has a full front line. Sulanoom (new NF in 9.1) will pump 1950 to the back line. Pair them up for nearly 3500 DPR overall.

Compare them to Clora, a hopeful aspirant, who does 266 damage per turn to the melee line. Or Sika, the charming silver owl, who boosts the team by an average of 33 damage per unit - so about 133 damage per turn, since the text doesn’t specify she buffs herself. Combined total of 500 DPR. They are 1/7th as strong as the Night Fae option.

Don’t get me wrong; Night Fae have some weak followers too. Two of the three trees are atrocious and can safely be ignored, since they don’t contribute to the mission. But the point is that Kyrian are almost all weak units while NF have about 10 strong ones, and the gaps between good and weak units is too wide.

That’s not fun, and if you didn’t spot this early and focus on levelling your strongest, you are probably stuck today with 10-15 level 60s, some of which never go on missions because they can’t do them. So after more than 9 months of training your followers, you’re now training more followers to replace them.

And this is really not hard to resolve if someone would sit down with a spreadsheet and do a side by side comparison. Pick an average DPR that they should be able to output in favourable circumstances, and normalise around it. Why is Clora cleaving for 63 where Tezan is 350?

On my 9.1.5 wishlist for sure. An afternoon’s work to make all Kyrian players happier is surely a good investment? :smile_cat:

Bonus points for a WoD/Legion/BfA style upgrade system. I mean really, where did that go? I liked giving them little doodads to improve their success rate, or bring back resources. Sure the potion of herb tracking never paid for itself, but the Legion upgrades came easily and made life noticeably better.

Why not actually… make players happy with some low hanging fruit?

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While balancing some followers is a good idea, I really don’t think that many people are invested in any of the additions like the missions table / queens conservatory etc.

My followers are max level 41 and I’m bored stiff with even caring. I don’t think I’ve done more than 5 minutes in the path of ascension and I don’t think I can even name most of the other fluff additions.

I honestly don’t think the game would be much poorer if they removed that kind of stuff. I can’t imagine anybodys ever sat in work and looked forward to getting onto wow to do their queens conservatory for instance.

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I’ve noticed that kyrian & necrolords are pretty useless ( doing mission tables on 20+ alts so i have exp )

Venthyr seems to have more damage than others, but give very low hp, night fae straight out op

Don’t really mind this, i just find it a strange decission to make all 4 covenants have different powered followers, seems like alot of extra work and resources for something that makes the game worse

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Their loss? I get a lot of resources out of 4 tables and 3 conservatories.

But is this because it is:

  1. Too slow. It took me 9 months to get 10x level 60s?
  2. Imbalanced and semi-broken?
  3. Too hard for a human to figure out if the mission will be a success without an addon?

If they were reasonably balanced, if the game itself told you whether you were on a winning or losing outcome, I feel like more people would have bothered in the first place.

I personally agree that the PoA is a PoS. I kind of feel that someone failed to ask what kind of player is attracted to Kyrian and Bastion, because this feature feels like it belongs with Necrolords - who instead got a build-a-buddy workshop.

I honestly quite like conservatory day, especially if all 3 characters are aligned. I get a dump of resources and sometimes a mount or cosmetic. For practically no effort, I don’t mind that it is a slow turnover. It’s just something small to do.

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You rate venthyr higher than necro? Woot, necrolord I’d say is a tad below night fae but venthyr is straight up bad for consistently clearing the mission log.

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I forgot to mention, i only look at numbers when it comes to mission table, i dont use any addons to check autocomplete

Venthyr seems to have alot more dmg than the others, but have alot less hp than the rest aswell, necrolord just seems weak, but then again i fail like 2% of all my missions so its hard to tell

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Honestly I don’t think it is a lot of extra work. It’s a my-first-autobattler, and an intern with a spreadsheet should be about to balance it reasonably in a couple of days.

Testing process; you tick the table in seconds instead of hours, and just sit there for a while, doing a few hundred missions and getting a feel for it.

But I genuinely think nobody ever used it. Had it been used, they’d have noticed that:

  1. Most Kyrian setups fail most level 60 missions. They can often be fiddled to work, but you can just randomly place anything, and the calculations are literally beyond the wit of man. When the game doesn’t work without an addon, the game doesn’t work.
  2. Night Fae can do anything with 4x troops + Dreamweaver. Except at level 50-55 where the scaling means they can’t do that mission at all.
  3. Other covenants are similarly varied.
  4. Break the Briarbane and a few others are particularly tough missions and require the perfect follower to be available, thus bottlenecking the system when multiple tough missions are present.

I mean, the 9.0.5 patch included some 100% buffs. You literally cannot get that unless something was never tested. You can’t need to double the numbers on something a human ever sat down and played.

Much as anything I just wish they’d take it seriously. I actually like the idea of an autobattler, but the execution was terrible. Why not give us a cool hex map of terrain with line of sight and height advantage mechanics, let us place our troops around, and give us some sense of how the battle will go? Why not actually make effects useful (by which I mean, 10% damage reduction usually isn’t worth taking the troop so make it 30-50%).

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I mean alot of work resources at blizzard for designing some covenant’s to have weaker followers than others

instead of just copy pasting all 4 covenants but changing the character model and/or do minor adjustments in the numbers just for visual appeal

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Ahh…

Yeah, I didn’t get why they weren’t just reskins with different text. No imbalance, no annoyance. If they are all challenging, then so be it, it’s meant to be difficult and it’s up to players to git gud.

But when one covenant is E.Z.Moade, and another is an epic failtrain, it’s just another reason to feel bad if you chose for aesthetics and got the latter.

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You do missions on 20 alts without ventureplan? respect

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Venthyr and Kyrian need a buff.
Anyone using the table on a regular basis knows this is true.

My proposal:

10% extra dmg
30% extra HP

To the troops ofc.

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Necrolord is the table i have managed to progress the furthest and fastest. Alot faster then the venthyr one on my main. To me the necro table seems alot better then venthyr one :slight_smile:

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I agree with your points Alewin, i dont get why there even is an unbalance in the tables. Just have the followers be the same with different skins, should be easy enough?

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I poop ye not, a 500% buff would only just bring some followers into line with Night Fae. But that is also true of NF’s weakest vs NF’s strongest. The weak-strong gap is fairly consistent, but Kyrian only have 2 strong (Mikanikos and ELGU) where Night Fae have about 10 superheroes in their ranks, 9 of whom have been around since launch.

Troops… may be about right. With a solid chunk of hitpoints they could at least be the sacrificial pawns to allow the followers to do the damage. I would also like to see Kyrian tank troops give more than 10% damage reduction to others; that’s really nothing. Should be 30%, and then it’s worth it.

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Kyrian is lacking tanks anyway. Got bron on 56 or something and is the only real tank. I was leveling Inspiron. He get 40% less damage for 3 turns with a cooldown of 5. Noticing he actually has 50% less health in the first place. LOL.

Yeah, the only thing why i can do higher missions is mikanikos.

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Indeed! A simple system made complicated for the sake of ‘flavour’, but in the process, imbalanced and unfair.

They really would have done better with re-skins so they could fix one follower at a time and have it affect all covenants.

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I do it mostly on mobile, dont see much point of having an addon for those 2 times a month

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If it was maybe fun in some way, more people would care.

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9 superheroes since launch? I would like you name them, because apart for Dreamweaver, Tezan and Lioth’wellyn, other NF champions were complete and utter garbage, by far the worst out of all covenants. What NF has is very good troops, Kyrian and Venthyr just need troop buffs to get more in line with Necrolord and NF.

Your math makes no sense. Tezan at max lvl does 490 damage to melee line on 3 round cd, which is 163 damage every round for each target in 1st row. Sulanoom does 420 damage to ranged line on 1 round cd, so 210 damage every round for each target in 2nd row. Total maximum damage is 1892 per round with ideal scenario of 4 targets in row.

Not sure why you are comparing best NF champions to worst Kyrian champions, wouldnt it be more fair to compare worst NF champions to worst Kyrian champions? Sika does buff herself with pots, which means overall she buffs team by around 165 damage per turn, it also buffs other troops/characters abilities during that time. So while she is not good in aoe, she is decent against 1-2 enemies.

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You guys find necrolord weak in the mission table ? IMO they are the strongest. Plaguey is by far the best hero of all the covenants, having the ability to heal all of his team + damage every row of the enemy team for its atk value every turn is just crazy. Any team with plaguey is basically immortal when he is 30+.

I haven’t played NF much, but Venthyr felt a bit weak in 9.0, there was no viable healer & most of the chars were either glass canon or pure tank dealing very little damage, making most missions races against death, but in 9.1 they got very strong healer/support follower making compositions way more diverse. Kyrian felt pretty balanced in 9.0, except some heroes that were incredibly undertuned stat wise, the best (or worst) example is the mechanical lion that cast on itself 40% DR and -40% dmg but has passively half the HP of anyone else, wtf ? Unfortunately I switched my kyrian in 9.1 so I don’t know what 9.1 have given to the kyrian mission table.

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