I have some issues with Death March.
The fact that you can't move on the next turn is very harsh, especially on a big map with few players like in Beta. This really makes this skill very situational since the only time were it gives a clear advantage over the "2x move action " is when you can trade/charge/train etc right after. Apart from Unholy ressurection the tree has no skills that can be activated while standing about on the map (like treasure hunting, creating cards, etcetc).
Definately a very weak movement skill compared to others.
Suggestion:
I was thinking we could do something with graves. Maybe graves appear on the map when ppl die in PvP and Death players can use those to travel (for a set ammount of time while the corpse is still moist ofc) Seems very situational also and useless early on... I'll think it through some more in a bit.
I don't really agree with Death March being UP. Being able to reach a destination one Day early can be huge in some cases. As for being situational, all movement skills work like that. In fact, Death March is probably
less situational than the average movement skill because you can use it anywhere on the map.
I dislike the idea of graves because of having one new thing that has to be added on the map during updating process, but I love the concept so I see no other option than to implement it.
Graves do one other cool thing, which is to show everyone where battles took place after they have happened. The problem with the old system was that people just disappeared. If we have a grave, that shows people that "zomg, someone died there!".
Not sure what you mean by "Death players can use those to travel". The way I would do it is keep Death March as it is (I like the basic mechanic of rush&rest), but remove the limitation if the players lands on a hex that has a grave on it. This would make things interesting because you could do some grave-hopping if the circumstances are right.
Graves should now have some other functions as well. Maybe we can incorporate then in other skills and/or skill trees.
Death March
I thought and still think that it is too weak. I understand that it is a final push kind of thing, but Jappert's idea of linking Death's fast travel skill to dying players is pretty good in my opinion. I believe that it would be worth looking into.
Curse of the Undead
2 days seem very short. If you think about it, in 2 days you won't even fight after resurrecting because you need to get back to where you were; the only use I see it have is during sieges when the opponent player can't avoid the effect. Also, the player could easily have some Death cards to use with the mark, so it may not even be all that useful. I would like to see the duration returned to what it was previously.
Rotting Disease
The buff is nice.
Harvest a Soul
Interesting change. Although I liked the old one better (lots of extra xp, no bias at all ), this could work too. Just make sure the skills requiring souls will be strong enough, because amassing souls won't be all that easy.
The skill's name would probably sound better as Soulharvest or as Harvest Souls.
Blood of the Undead
I don't know how useful this is mainly because I don't know what "Tier 1 and Tier 2 positive and negative skills and environmental effects" consist of. The word "positive" is something I don't like there, but until we know what they are, we won't know how strong or weak this skill is.
Poisonous Cloud
I like the change, though the earlier version was more in line with its prerequisite, Rotting Disease. This change makes it more useful however, which is certainly good.
Unholy Resurrection
The change of cost is nice, a way to utilize souls. The drawback seems okay.
Wither
The increasing upgrade loss over the 3 duels make it very weak in my opinion, and will most certainly cause problems when players forget to remove upped cards from their deck. Instead of the number of duels determining the loss of upgrades, you could use Souls to increase it. Have it start from 4 or 5 and increase it with 4 or 5 for every soul you use before the battle.
As for the souls, my idea would be to allow them to be used for most (or higher level ones only?) Death skills to enchance their effects. Apart from the Wither idea above, for example, souls could increase the Rotting Disease discarding by 1 or 2 per soul or allow one more hex of movement with Death March for every soul you consume.
Idea with Curse of the Undead was that the player you
BEATS you, gets the debuff. This would act as a great defensive skill because it would slow down the rush-attack of opposing elements, unless they are comfortable with fighting with a
mark. Example:
player beats
player and is cursed for 2 Days. During those 2 Days the
player will be more vulnerable to attacks because not only does he or she has to use a mark that might not fit for them, their opponent knows for a fact what the mark will be.
Current Wither is just a placeholder. I'd like to change it into something less boring, something that has 3 different effects:
Effect when consuming 1 Soul
Effect when consuming 2 Souls
Effect when consuming 3 Souls
Death March
Change to "Next Day you cannot use more than one movement action."
Weaken
I like the idea. I can't decide if it's quite good enough for t3. Perhaps buff it to 15hp or less?
Unholy Resurrection
I think this would be fine without the "no ups for 1 day" penalty, seeing as how Aether can already perform similar tricks with a t2 skill.
Poisonous Cloud
Like other "force your opponent to discard" skills, there's not a lot of motive for a player to use this skill. Nap and I had an alternative that would be more effective:
"Poison an adjacent hex. Non-allies in that hex discard 1 card per day until entering a city or town. Additionally, forest hexes become dead forest hexes."
This attempts to control your opponent by creating a strong incentive to flee back to a town quickly, but one that could be ignored if the need to stay put was important enough. It also moves deforesting to death.
Rotting Disease
Anyone you fight, win or lose? :0 That'll be so annoying as a non-death player. I like it.
Animate Mummy/Bone Dragons
This is mostly useful to make extra money by selling the extra cards. Whether or not these are balanced depends on how much money can be made by typical work actions and such. Assuming dragons are valuable, this seems fairly balanced compared to beta standards of income. Once again though it depends on how income works.
Harvest a Soul
Souls seems like a nice mechanic. Perhaps having souls should have an innate benefit to, so that this skill is not too reliant on getting the higher skills, and so that the higher skills don't have to be OP to make up for a lower skill that's little more than a prerequisite. The benefit could be something simple like +ups = the number of souls you possess, or it could be something more unusual, such as allowing you to lose a soul instead of discards after a lost battle.
Wither
Shantu's suggestion seems like it could work. It's effective without souls, especially on lower level characters, but against characters with a lot of ups you would spend a couple souls to weaken them considerably.
Blood of the Undead
Hard to judge this before we've decided what environmental effects there are and what the other t1 and t2 skills are, but this seems good enough for now. Might need to clarify that the inability to receive "positive" skill effects only applies to the skills of other elementals used on you, since you're hopefully not negating your own skills.
Curse of the Undead
The change to "if you lose" is an interesting buff. I vote it should just require the to fight their next battle with a death mark, rather than a giving a number of days, or short of that at least increase the duration so that there's a higher chance the opponent will actually fight during that time.
I think the Grave buff fixed Death March (assuming it was UP in the first place)
10 seems like a better number imo. If that is not enough, then it should be 20, but I think 10% decrease in HP is no joke. I can list a million matches which I have won after being <10 at some point.
Unholy Resurrection is already 1 Day no ups.
The issue with "discard 1 card per Day" is that players have to do it manually. With systems like that, organizers constantly need to observe that players do make these discards. A lot of work and room for user error. Poisonous Cloud is boring though.. I was thinking about something where it would last longer and move with the wind direction, assuming we will implement wind direction as suggested in that other topic. I've been trying to find ways to use wind, and poisonous cloud seems like a logical choice for something like that.
Hmm.. changing Curse of the Undead to that could work, although thematically I find it more logical that the curse ends after some time, rather than potentially lasting indefinitely. I also think that if you cannot get rid of the curse, it could be pretty OP. I'd prefer if players could wait it out.
Curse of the Undead: Feels really week, you won't likely run into a fight in two days, but that depends on the number of players.
Rotting Desease: I like it, though for thematics and to make it more interesting I would like to add the following: "Stacks. Rotting ends when killed."
Harvest a disease: I really love the idea, we only need to find some use for souls. You said it would be like some kind of relic, how about the folllowing (first something else, please make relics and souls stack in your inventory): Souls can be used with any activated still (with or without relic) to improve the skill: Consume one soul to increase all the numbers (that is 1,2,3 and not one, two, three, for balancing reasons) in the skill distriction by one. That might make for some real usefull duo's, but it needs the Loyalty/Devotion three to have some active skills, or going death mono wouldn't be that usefull. Would also be a nice buff to death march: consume one of your souls to speed up some more, might be a bit overpowered though.
The way I planned Curse of the Undead was that it would basically be a defensive skill that prevents a big rush attack by forcing opponents to wait for their curse to end. We could maybe increase the duration to 3 Days..
Yes, Rotting Disease is supposed to end when you die. Also, one mechanic I haven't added yet in the description is the victim further spreading the disease. Idea is that
anyone with the disease will infect anyone who they are fighting with. This way infecting one person could potentially infect tons of players. Players with Rotting Disease or Blood of the Undead would be immune though.
I like the idea of using a Soul to improve any skill, but it could be a nightmare to balance it and write the description. I mean we would basically have to go through ALL the skill trees. I don't know how that would be possible. Only simple way would be to use it to decreasing AP cost or something.