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To start off, 4th Age is the first time I have ever lost to a Captain as a 2200-3000 rated player. (before matchmaking made it easy to get there). Then it quickly became the second time, the third time, and eventually losing to lower rank players became something that "just happens". I could sit here and blame the RNG and claim something like my opponent's pet went off and mine didn't, but that's not even the real issue. Even if my opponents didn't a lucky cast or critical, the matches would still be close. Before the recent updates, that would NEVER happen. You would expect a 3000 rated player to completely outplay somebody at 2000 rank let alone somebody at 700 rank. PvP as it seems, is at a point where anyone can beat anyone, and it's going to remain that way even if you took out all the RNG in the game. You could sit here and blame RNG, some spell or school is overpowered, etc, but I'll explain from my point of view why PvP just seems the way it is right now.

1) The damage output is way too high. This is by far the biggest underlying issue at max PvP and has been for a very long time (since Shadow spells). The meta consists of 2-3 row decks with about 15-20 cards in them that have the offensive firepower to take out any kind of player in queue unless they have extremely high resist. At max PvP, you're able to use a small sequence of cards to start threatening a KO from almost the very beginning of the match. This lets low rank players play almost identically to how a higher rank player of the same school would because a small set of cards is almost guaranteed to work every time. I'm perfectly fine with kill sequences working when you get your opponent "in range", but the damage output needs to be lowered so that it's not immediately clear how to win the match from the very start.

Another thing to add is that the more offensively tilted a meta is, individual cases of RNG play a much larger impact since they come with more momentum. Slowing the pace lessens the impact of RNG and isn't just a cry to "make pvp slower because I want it to". Having a bad hand, getting a maycast damage aura casted against you, or even a Mantle fizzle isn't always an immediate death sentence when the damage is lowered and you have time to counter.
2) PvP is dwindled down to a damage race: Dealing, buffing or reducing damage is the only thing we can do.We need to be able to do more in a match than just blade, hit and shield. When PvP gets dwindled down to just "how effectively can you deal damage?", it becomes a race of who can attack better rather than a fight between who has the better playstyle. Unfortunately there is no way to punish your opponent for over-extending and spending too many pips, and there are no ways to force your opponent to respond to something that requires a use of their pips. Currently, spells that say "you're going to have a hard time beating/surviving me if you don't counter this" such as minions or heals are unviable at max level because minions get one shot by wands with the new critical system and heals are completely useless at max level.

In contrast to lower levels of PvP if I'm at a pip deficit, I'm able to minion repeatedly to force my opponent to sink their pips into my minions, and eventually I can convert my situation into having equal or more pips than my opponent. On the other hand, if my opponent overspent their pips, I can use a minion (which needs to be countered) to make my opponent fall even farther behind. We need more spells at max level that do these. There needs to be a fight for tempo. This "I have the opportunity to hit with an open shad so I'm going to take it immediately" situation needs to have more questions being asked such as "should I take it now or use something else to shorten/extend the lead and then go for it again later?"

3) Heals need a place for ALL schools for PvP to be a contest between the best player. This might raise some eyebrows since a lot of the current max level PvP community complains heavily on any form of defensive counter-play, but not everything can just point towards offense. I'll give an example of what happens in PvP and then offer an analogy. Currently at max level, since you don't have to worry about anybody recovering health, if somebody is at low health and you have a good health advantage (say 2000 vs 5000 health), the only thing you need to do to win is to secure your health advantage by shield spamming and then build enough pips to DoT/2-pip into shad repeatedly to assure victory since there's almost nothing your opponent can do to out-damage you.

This is what the above situation would look like in a wrestling fight: You get a tired opponent down on the wrestling mat, and then instead of pinning your opponent down to make sure they can't get back up, you run away from your opponent and hunker down into a defensive position. Except your opponent has to stay on the ground for the rest of the fight because getting back up isn't allowed. That's exactly what max PvP looks like because there's absolutely nothing that anybody can do to get back ahead in a PvP match once behind. PvP right now is like wrestling without escapes or reversals since healing is unviable on every school & playstyle except a Jade Life. This means that if you didn't pull the right card early game and fell behind in damage, then you're not coming back. You lost.

Since a lot of people will obviously complain about heals, there needs to be better counters to them than just Death's spells. Infection isn't good enough in Turn Base because small tempo spells like Minor Blessing or Spellement Leprechaun simply remove the Infection and you're back to square one pre-countering the heal. Obviously, heals need to be pre-countered, so an example of a spell that would effectively weaken heals would be something like an Infection that costs 1 or 2 pips but weakens the next rank 4+ heal by 50%. In my opinion; a good, counter-attacking player should be able to outlast damage unless properly mitigated, and I hope that we'll be able to do that again.

4) Overall cheese and Shrike need balancing. This goes somewhat in line with what I said about 15-20 card decks, but I consider all these 2-pip tempo spells that force responses upon every use (Deathbat [for Balance], Storm Elf, Rain Beetle, Rat Illusionist, White Rat Magician, Yellow Troll) to be cheese just as badly as a Maycast Aura or a decisive critical is. These spells let you completely bypass your opponent playing a well-designed defense and just makes play vs counter-play something that isn't a reality at max level.

For example: I have a -70% Myth Shield on me, and a Myth uses Rat Illusionist (sets up a bubble and breaks shield), and then I'm left either being forced to change the bubble (take an open Shadow hit), or try another -70% shield and then get hit by Minotaur or a DoT. There's no good play here at all, you just have to pick your poison and take it.

Shrike does the same thing and definitely needs a nerf when resist gets audited. Shrike lets you completely bypass somebody's defensive resources with momentum since you're still gaining a pip and 10% damage & 50% pierce the next turn, and then compounds onto that momentum by providing you with 10% more pierce every turn. Add that onto any single one of the spells I mentioned above and it's an unstoppable, immediate loss of a lot of your health no matter what you do. The backlash rework makes sense, but that's based on the assumption that you survive their Shrike. The Backlash rework also phased out every single other Shadow spell in the game since none of them are nearly as impactful as Shrike but fall under the same Backlash cost that Shrike does. When resist gets audited I hope that Shrike stops being so centralizing and that Backlash can go back to not being as punishing so other Shadow forms can see use.

Conclusion: Overall, this post is basically saying that card-play and good resource management needs to be at the core of PvP again. All of the RNG that we're complaining about now weren't even issues not even a year ago, the difference is now we're not able to do anything about the RNG when it happens. Bringing back cost-sensitive tempo, cost-effective heals, bringing back real counter-play & pre-counter-play, and phasing out cheesy strategies/spells will help PvP become a test of who's better again and not who's better at a damage race.

Exabytes on Mar 1, 2021 wrote:

Great post. In my opinion the Mirage spells broke high level PVP. 4 Pips and 1 Shadow Pip is just too low of a cost and essentially forces a shield of some sort after 2 turns.

We also need more utility TC. Bring back Enfeeble, Shift, and Aftershock.

Add Cleanse All Wards (TC / Trained). Remove all Maycasts. Do another spell audit, especially regarding TC Hit + Buff spells like Rat Illusionist.

It's usually fine if one invested in a pet to get some useful Item Cards (like Rain Beetle pets), but it depends on the item card. Stuff like Fuel and Myth Fuel is just unfair to play around and is brainless and annoying.

Although I use Aegis now, I still think Shatter should be No PVP, and Aftershock / Earthquake should remove every effect on both sides.

And lastly, the mechanics of Diego really can't and should not be 'proprietary'.

That only gives an advantage to players that have the ability to play enough games to brute force which playstyles synergize the most with the tiebreaking algorithm that Diego uses and additionally one only gets this information on max timer matches and if they're counting hits, weaknesses, shads, heals, cards in deck, et cetera.

I think shatter is fine tbh. I agree with the above post and your post mostly except that I feel the issue largely coms down to damage. Schools like Fire, Myth (thanks to their op spells) and Storm have a lot of damage compared to other schools. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't have 8-9k health. Add a maycast aura and its over. You can't blade stack against a myth or a storm and fire can just kill you when you make one bad move.

I think the things that need changing is maycast auras need to be a way rarer maycast and there also needs to be a life damage one since it doesn't make since why life doesn't get one.

Gear audits are needed like ratbeard said since health has gotten comparatively closer. Level 60 a storm had 2.2k and an ice had 4.4k. Now ice gets 10.8k while a storm gets 8.1k. While the difference stays around the same, the percentage difference has not which has led to schools getting extremely close to each other health wise which has caused problems. In fact, ice is probably the only school that has been able to stay ahead on the health front. Life which in the current worlds should have the 2nd most health if not the first based on gear is completely in line with Fire, myth and Balance. If you want damage above 100 as a life, you have to stick with 9.6k health. Fire on the other hand can hit 140 damage but with a health of 9.1k. Myth does the same thing. This is not a large enough difference and schools like life have been completely out classed.

The last thing that should be done is a tc/item card audit. Ki has done a good job at dealing with tcs recently but some spells still cause major imbalances in pvp that should be looked at. Spells like lightening elf should not be given to storm due to their spells basically being one shots. Polar swarm has given ice the ability to have access to plenty of high damage yielding hits while other schools struggle to put good hits in their side board. Myth fuel is a card that should not be allowed since unlike life and fire, myth has a really easy ability to delete shields without triggering the traps and even the overtimes have pierce. Maybe fuels should be made to work on overtimes only.

PvP King on Feb 27, 2021 wrote:

To start off, 4th Age is the first time I have ever lost to a Captain as a 2200-3000 rated player. (before matchmaking made it easy to get there). Then it quickly became the second time, the third time, and eventually losing to lower rank players became something that "just happens". I could sit here and blame the RNG and claim something like my opponent's pet went off and mine didn't, but that's not even the real issue. Even if my opponents didn't a lucky cast or critical, the matches would still be close. Before the recent updates, that would NEVER happen. You would expect a 3000 rated player to completely outplay somebody at 2000 rank let alone somebody at 700 rank. PvP as it seems, is at a point where anyone can beat anyone, and it's going to remain that way even if you took out all the RNG in the game. You could sit here and blame RNG, some spell or school is overpowered, etc, but I'll explain from my point of view why PvP just seems the way it is right now.

1) The damage output is way too high. This is by far the biggest underlying issue at max PvP and has been for a very long time (since Shadow spells). The meta consists of 2-3 row decks with about 15-20 cards in them that have the offensive firepower to take out any kind of player in queue unless they have extremely high resist. At max PvP, you're able to use a small sequence of cards to start threatening a KO from almost the very beginning of the match. This lets low rank players play almost identically to how a higher rank player of the same school would because a small set of cards is almost guaranteed to work every time. I'm perfectly fine with kill sequences working when you get your opponent "in range", but the damage output needs to be lowered so that it's not immediately clear how to win the match from the very start.

Another thing to add is that the more offensively tilted a meta is, individual cases of RNG play a much larger impact since they come with more momentum. Slowing the pace lessens the impact of RNG and isn't just a cry to "make pvp slower because I want it to". Having a bad hand, getting a maycast damage aura casted against you, or even a Mantle fizzle isn't always an immediate death sentence when the damage is lowered and you have time to counter.
2) PvP is dwindled down to a damage race: Dealing, buffing or reducing damage is the only thing we can do.We need to be able to do more in a match than just blade, hit and shield. When PvP gets dwindled down to just "how effectively can you deal damage?", it becomes a race of who can attack better rather than a fight between who has the better playstyle. Unfortunately there is no way to punish your opponent for over-extending and spending too many pips, and there are no ways to force your opponent to respond to something that requires a use of their pips. Currently, spells that say "you're going to have a hard time beating/surviving me if you don't counter this" such as minions or heals are unviable at max level because minions get one shot by wands with the new critical system and heals are completely useless at max level.

In contrast to lower levels of PvP if I'm at a pip deficit, I'm able to minion repeatedly to force my opponent to sink their pips into my minions, and eventually I can convert my situation into having equal or more pips than my opponent. On the other hand, if my opponent overspent their pips, I can use a minion (which needs to be countered) to make my opponent fall even farther behind. We need more spells at max level that do these. There needs to be a fight for tempo. This "I have the opportunity to hit with an open shad so I'm going to take it immediately" situation needs to have more questions being asked such as "should I take it now or use something else to shorten/extend the lead and then go for it again later?"

3) Heals need a place for ALL schools for PvP to be a contest between the best player. This might raise some eyebrows since a lot of the current max level PvP community complains heavily on any form of defensive counter-play, but not everything can just point towards offense. I'll give an example of what happens in PvP and then offer an analogy. Currently at max level, since you don't have to worry about anybody recovering health, if somebody is at low health and you have a good health advantage (say 2000 vs 5000 health), the only thing you need to do to win is to secure your health advantage by shield spamming and then build enough pips to DoT/2-pip into shad repeatedly to assure victory since there's almost nothing your opponent can do to out-damage you.

This is what the above situation would look like in a wrestling fight: You get a tired opponent down on the wrestling mat, and then instead of pinning your opponent down to make sure they can't get back up, you run away from your opponent and hunker down into a defensive position. Except your opponent has to stay on the ground for the rest of the fight because getting back up isn't allowed. That's exactly what max PvP looks like because there's absolutely nothing that anybody can do to get back ahead in a PvP match once behind. PvP right now is like wrestling without escapes or reversals since healing is unviable on every school & playstyle except a Jade Life. This means that if you didn't pull the right card early game and fell behind in damage, then you're not coming back. You lost.

Since a lot of people will obviously complain about heals, there needs to be better counters to them than just Death's spells. Infection isn't good enough in Turn Base because small tempo spells like Minor Blessing or Spellement Leprechaun simply remove the Infection and you're back to square one pre-countering the heal. Obviously, heals need to be pre-countered, so an example of a spell that would effectively weaken heals would be something like an Infection that costs 1 or 2 pips but weakens the next rank 4+ heal by 50%. In my opinion; a good, counter-attacking player should be able to outlast damage unless properly mitigated, and I hope that we'll be able to do that again.

4) Overall cheese and Shrike need balancing. This goes somewhat in line with what I said about 15-20 card decks, but I consider all these 2-pip tempo spells that force responses upon every use (Deathbat [for Balance], Storm Elf, Rain Beetle, Rat Illusionist, White Rat Magician, Yellow Troll) to be cheese just as badly as a Maycast Aura or a decisive critical is. These spells let you completely bypass your opponent playing a well-designed defense and just makes play vs counter-play something that isn't a reality at max level.

For example: I have a -70% Myth Shield on me, and a Myth uses Rat Illusionist (sets up a bubble and breaks shield), and then I'm left either being forced to change the bubble (take an open Shadow hit), or try another -70% shield and then get hit by Minotaur or a DoT. There's no good play here at all, you just have to pick your poison and take it.

Shrike does the same thing and definitely needs a nerf when resist gets audited. Shrike lets you completely bypass somebody's defensive resources with momentum since you're still gaining a pip and 10% damage & 50% pierce the next turn, and then compounds onto that momentum by providing you with 10% more pierce every turn. Add that onto any single one of the spells I mentioned above and it's an unstoppable, immediate loss of a lot of your health no matter what you do. The backlash rework makes sense, but that's based on the assumption that you survive their Shrike. The Backlash rework also phased out every single other Shadow spell in the game since none of them are nearly as impactful as Shrike but fall under the same Backlash cost that Shrike does. When resist gets audited I hope that Shrike stops being so centralizing and that Backlash can go back to not being as punishing so other Shadow forms can see use.

Conclusion: Overall, this post is basically saying that card-play and good resource management needs to be at the core of PvP again. All of the RNG that we're complaining about now weren't even issues not even a year ago, the difference is now we're not able to do anything about the RNG when it happens. Bringing back cost-sensitive tempo, cost-effective heals, bringing back real counter-play & pre-counter-play, and phasing out cheesy strategies/spells will help PvP become a test of who's better again and not who's better at a damage race.

I agree with almost everything you have stated there. Without an effective way to heal aka recover, one missed round due to a deck fail can cost someone the footing that they have ahead of another player. One deckfail on any round could put you behind your opponent in the match or cost you the game. If the meta allowed heals to be used that would make it so someone could recover from a deckfail or a small amount of rng that messed them up on one of the rounds in their match and put them behind. I played offensive level 90 pvp recently and it is hyper offensive, it shows that with 2 offensive players fighting one another one pet cast aura or one pip fail means death because the meta is so fast everything needs to go exactly how one wants it too or else the game will be lost. There is no recovery from bad rng or rng deckfails because no one can heal, just like max. Its a good example of how offense makes little rng amplified. Say I have a spell that does 2k and my enemy has a spell that does 2k. If my pet casts a damage aura mine is just better and I have gained a foothold on my enemy due to rng. If my enemy could heal that would allow for a possible comeback. Say we have 4k health at level 90 my pet casts and my 2k hit does 3k but my opponent doesnt get a cast and his only does 2k. Since the damage is so high the little rng is amplified and ensures that a 2 pip finisher treasure card will kill with my pet aura while the other person is still struggling to do more then 2k damage and their finisher wont kill because they have no may cast. Now if the damage on the hit was lowered and did 1k instead of 2k that pet aura wouldnt be as game deciding and the 1k hit lets say does like 1700 and my enemy can heal to recover countering the rng that I just got from my pet. The stakes arent as high when damage is lower. Deck fails are also like this, with the more offensive the meta is the more important it is to pull the right cards or else you will lose since a card does half ones health for instance. One turn you wasted because of a deck fail made you be behind a turn of damage you could deal to your opponent and that means your opponent is closer to killing you and your farther away from killing them. Again no chance to recover because no heals. That deck fail is a death sentence. I just used argo level 90 pvp for an example so its hopefully easier to understand what Im saying.

wale800 on Mar 17, 2021 wrote:

Just saying I agree with pretty much everything you said

Why does damage or shorter fights make rng more impactful? Wouldn’t a slower longer battle make the rng happen more times and make it even more rng? What if someone gets all the auras and the other person gets none at all over the entire battle? Also if you have to carry more than 15 cards wouldnt you just get more hang clog if you had to pack more cards and you deck fail more?

Before I answer your questions, I'll start off with these 2 notes because I don't think that the RNG itself is the problem but a lot of players keep insisting that it is. This epitomizes almost every PvP player on Wizard101 and basically answers your entire question without needing to read much more: 1) The Wizard101 PvP Community is way too sensitive towards RNG and 2) Most players are way too used to blaming RNG rather than their playstyle or other issues that cause the RNG to be so impactful.

Maycasts: It's Not All Down To Pace and Damage. I don't want to give the idea that the fast pace of PvP is the only thing responsible for RNG in this meta. The fast pace is one of the reasons why RNG "hurts more" but doesn't necessarily cause the imbalance. The biggest reason for RNG being so decisive right now is because PvP (in the big picture) is more balanced than it was a year ago. Before, there were more impactful criticals, the randomness of Shadow pips, and the first turn advantage. When critical got reworked and changed to the point where it is now, the average critical hit is doing a lot less than before and occurs far more often (feels less swingy). Shadow pips got reworked to come in the form of a gauge which takes away more randomness, and now our biggest randomness factor is the Maycast feature. Previously, if someone got lucky with Maycasts, the other player could get lucky with going first or get more Shadow pips so the RNG balanced itself. Now if someone gets a decisive Maycast and you don't get one, there's no "lucky Shadow pip" that you can get to balance it. Of course, there were situations where the luck could swing heavily in one player's favor and you could feel like a match was completely decided by the game, but that's why those areas were targeted and reworked. The remaining one is pet maycasts and once that's balanced out (which is coming soon), matches should feel like they're decided a lot less by arbitrary decisions even if the pace doesn't slow down.

Card Draw: But pace does play a large role. To answer your question, slowing down the pace is still following on the right track. About 8 years ago before PvP was offensive-based, spells like Black Mantle or Stuns were considered bad spells because winning one turn hardly got you an advantage until the endgame. That's because matches usually lasted more turns and therefore winning 1 turn out of 40 is a lot less impactful than winning 1 turn out of 8.

The best picture I can give is Snakes & Ladders. Picture the normal game where you roll dice from 1-6 and you have to make it to tile number 100. One player rolling an immediate 6 doesn't have a huge impact on who's winning because you'd still have to roll a six 16 more times to win. That still lets the player who didn't roll a six (say that player got a few 1's in a row) to still win. Now take the same game and have it only consist of 12 tiles. Now rolling a 6 has a significant impact on the game because once you roll a 6, you're half way to winning the game and need to roll one more to win. Now if the other player rolls a 1 on the first turn, the player who rolled a 1 has a huge chance of losing after just one roll of dice.

Now let's bring that back over to PvP. Say rolling a 6 is an optimal turn where you play the perfect card, and rolling a 1 is a turn where you play an almost useless spell due to a bad hand. Since PvP is fast paced and it only takes a few turns to win, the need to have the most optimal turn every turn is seriously important, because if you roll one or two 1's; you lose. A slower paced meta should, theoretically, allow the better player to win even if they have a slow start due to a bad hand because over a longer match, a better player will make more optimal moves (roll more 5's and 6's) than a less skilled opponent (rolls 2's or 3's sometimes).

RNG is good for the game. From what I believe, skill is a lot more about making the most out of each situation you're put into than just stringing together the best options. A lot of players complain about card draw and ask for more drawing capabilities or to be able to access your full deck so you can always pick the right card. Any player can follow a set plan of spells, but what truly differentiates a skilled player vs an amateur is the ability to adapt to situations that they otherwise may not have been put into. It's the job of the devs to make sure that PvP always remains interesting and new to us without the RNG swaying games too heavily, and once things are balanced out, it'll be our jobs as players to make the most out of unfavorable positions and respond the best way possible.

To conclude, like I said, the RNG itself isn't the problem. The same card draw system has existed since the beginning of the game and was never an issue. If you've ever played other CCG's, Wizard101 is by far the most generous when it comes to card draw mechanics. Not only do you draw 1 card at a time in other games, but you also use multiple cards in one turn which makes drawing the right combination of cards that much more important. Wizard101 lets you draw up to a maximum of 14 cards a turn (main + side) and you only cast 1 of those cards every turn. I'd say it's time that players stop blaming the RNG itself and look to the actual problems on why RNG causes such a swing in matches. I can guarantee you that until the root of the problems get resolved, once one thing gets fixed then other things will become the new problem (to players) and it'll continue to be a cycle.

I couldn't agree more. The current state of the meta is hyper offensive compared to what it was when the game first came out. The initial state of the meta although it had other more significant problems such as an unfair turn system, it was very balanced. All schools had a unique combination of strategies that could all be used to success. If we could find a way for damage and healing to be doing equivalent amounts as they originally were on the games release we can once again have the same expansive variety of strategies and gameplay rather than everyone rushing to kill before being killed.

Achieving this could be as simple as gradually reducing damage compared to health and healing of gear with new expansions. However other factors exist within the game that did not on the games release. I want to go a step further and point out the moment (in my opinion) PvP was broken. Everything went wrong on the arrival of Jade gear. This provided a new strategy of turtle tanking. This new gear for the time made any player a complete wall that could not be killed with traditional strategies. You didn't have to adopt the new gear and playstyle, but it was necessary if you wanted to win, and so traditional PvP and it's variety of strategies and play styles died and was replaced with turtling. It was the one and only dominant strategy, and everyone was doing. KI realized their mistake and attempted to correct it with the release of Aquila. What was the solution? Damage and Critical!! Much more of it and a new stat called pierce to cut through the massive resist of Jade gear. Finally we had something that the Jade gear could not tank. The problem was though that if Jade gear could not tank this new damage output then nothing could. Matches would last 3-4 rounds at most. One problem had been replaced with another.

Fast-forward to where we are now and we are still in this hyper offensive state. It's not as bad as it initially was but still needs to be reeled in if we want to restore balance to the metagame playstyle to let these other dead strategies make a come back.

My suggested solution:
First, we cannot change the stats of existing gear because in the case of a lot of it people have payed real money for it. Also bringing out gear in future worlds with less damage doesn't mean people will use it due to still having the option of already existing gear. The way we do this is to release upgraded gear for the next few worlds that does not lower or increase damage, critical or pierce. They should remain relatively the same. The stats that should be increasing is HP and heal boost. This is what will make the gear an upgrade from what we currently have while not increasing any of the problematic stats until balance is eventually reached. I should point out that HP is to be increased instead of resist because it can be increased in a linear fashion as much as you like without causing problems. In my opinion resist has already increased beyond what it should have and shouldn't be increased anymore.

Of course this is not the end all to the balance of PvP. I once thought that the broken PvP turn system was the biggest issue PvP had. Now that that has been fixed I believe this is the next biggest problem. Once the power within the game has been balance I will most likely be focusing on whatever I think the next biggest problem is.