Today is game day! The time of waiting is over and the release of Conclave Arcana to the general public is here. All the preparations for the release, all that strategy building, every effort we had can now bear fruit but...
Why did I felt bad when I played the first few games? Did I expect too much?
Conclave Arcana seems to be more unbalanced compared to Chaos Legion. Regardless of what others would say, I genuinely think this generation lacks a lot of easy access to two specific abilities: Affliction and Sneak. These two abilities may not be unique compared to new abilities but I believe they should be a standard in this game, with a low mana cost unit, otherwise, the difficulty and quality of the battles would go down a lot.
Sneak and Affliction Needs to Go Back
Sneak may be bad and annoying to play against because it ignore your tanks which is usually placed in 1st or 2nd positions but Sneak attacks from behind on your 6th position unit, then 5th, then 4th and so on. Even I hate playing against this ability but that makes the game balanced. In this game, if you can predict 90% of your opponent's attacks (10% being Opportunity and Snipe), then you can increase your win rate by 90%. If 90% of the attacks are coming from the front, then just use really durable tanks. A level 2 Bera Dallin is a really good example.
Affliction is the same way. Playing against Chaos Legion's Goblin Psychic is a pain. Not only you need to defeat him first but his magic attack and Affliction can consistently remove your healing strategies. Heal is one of the most overpowered ability in the game. If your unit went 1v1 with another unit and the other unit has Heal, you would most likely lost that battle. That is why countering heals is one of the strong strategies you can use before as it destroys your enemy's strategy giving you advantage. This is like using Last Word if your enemy has a habit of using a lot of Bloodline Tribute.
To counter both Affliction and Sneak, I usually use Taunt. This redirects the attacks to one unit allowing me to predict where the attacks would hit and just buff or support that unit. In the current state of Conclave Arcana, the Taunt strategy isn't needed because majority of attacks are already coming from the front. Just use a durable tank and you're fine. This is the state of the game right now which might change as we haven't seen the full potential of Conclave Arcana yet.
This will be good for new arriving players
Since Sneak and Affliction is out of the picture, this would be the best time for newbies to start the game. They don't need to deal with tricky strategies like Silent Sha-Vi + Uraeus and can just focus on a front to back team like how most of the games with roles are usually played. You can train the new players easier by telling them to use stronger tanks then damage dealers and the wins will encourage them to play more. I doubt this was the dev's goal but this is what it is right now.
Another advantage is that the SPS rewards per win increased A LOT. I can't show proof but before, I can earn around 4 SPS max, usually around 3.75 SPS, per win in Diamond 3. Now, I earn around 5.75 per win to 7 SPS in Diamond 3. Since it's just the start of the Conclave Arcana, I expect this to go down by quite a huge amount in the next few weeks until it goes back to 4 SPS per win again. I have around 100k SPS on the account when I played in Chaos Legion and in Conclave Arcana.
For Transparency...
The information in this post might be outdated by now since I started writing this 2 weeks ago at the start of the season. I intended to post this last week but a lot of personal things happened and I lost track of time. I was debating myself if I am to post this but since it's almost done, I decided to push through.
...and also an Update from Day 1 to Day 13 of Conclave Arcana
As I wrote before, the first thing that bothered me was the lack of Sneak units. After playing around for a bit, I would say this isn't as true as I thought. There are a lot of Sneak units with both Rebellion and Conclave Arcana. The issue is that these Sneak units don't have as much speed, damage and abilities to be competitive compared to Silent Sha-Vi and Uraeus.
I sometimes use Tidal Tsunamist, Night Stalker and Bren Palesworn for Sneaks. Except for Bren Palesworn, because he has Weapons Training, I really don't find the Sneak units good. This may be because of lack of levels but also because they have really low health which is then gets targeted by Opportunity units, which are abundant in Conclave Arcana. This makes Sneak units particularly weak compared to the units offered by Chaos Legion. Whether this is good or bad depends on the players and my opinions from before still sticks even now.
Disclaimer
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About the Author
Hey! I’m Mavis the Muggle, your friendly Splinterlands addict with a slight obsession for all things Harry Potter. 🧙
When I’m not immersed in gaming or wizardry, I’m busy learning new things. Recently, I’ve been having putting a lot of effort and having a blast creating content on Hive so relax!
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