Currently I enjoy playing Faeria Pandora draft. I even streamed it all last month. It was great. But it’s a delicate love/hate relationship. The idea is solid. The game mechanics are solid. Learning the game, trying different strategies, failing/improving are solid. Locking one of the color choices is solid. The actual Pandora game format with treasures and a hefty amount of RNG is solid.
But, there are some things that I think could be improved/redesigned in my opinion.
Further, maybe the suggestions aren’t for Pandora, maybe they are for a normal draft format without Pandora.
Here are my suggestions:
- Auto mute emotes. -> For all the reasons already mentioned in other forum posts. But here are my experiences with emotes.
Examples:
My opponent is winning, they spam emotes. This type of bm is not healthy for the game.
My opponent is losing, they spam emotes. It is used as a mechanic to disrupt the turn.
My opponent knows my turn is long and complicated, they spam emotes, to distract. This is the worst offender for obvious reasons. It’s not interactive or fun or interesting. It is form of unsportsmanlike behavior hardcoded into the game. It is an enabler for unsportsmanlike conduct. Again because no default setting is in the options.
- Turns should be longer. 15-35 calculations in a turn followed by some number of animations is not enough time.
Power wheel, amount of Faeria, board position, health total, deck composition, opp. deck composition, creature power/health totals, sequencing (which sequence), etc. It’s not enough time.
- Normalize the power level of treasures by about 30%, bringing down the overall power, and bringing up the minimum power level.
On the same note, I’d probably be satisfied if just the Hammer was nerfed. Maybe 4 damage instead of 5, maybe 6-7 damage without a reshuffle. Maybe +2 faeria cost (still probably not enough for Pandora). There are many ways to attempt to balance this card. I could write a whole forum post about balance changes to treasures. I will write one if someone asks me to write one!
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Set the rarity frequency for draft pools to a consistent amount (or reduce the amount of legendary or epic cards to choose from if players receives a legendary or epic). Some draft pools have no legendary cards. Some draft pools have three legendary cards. Seeing zero out of five or three out fifteen seems like too much RNG.
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Reduce the amount of RNG in Pandora to promote a healthier competitive environment.
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More draft pool information. Number of creatures, events, etc.
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Scroll bar in card list removed. Visually I should be able to see the contents of the deck without scrolling.
Finally, as a note. I seriously had to tone down the amount of frustration that some of these events cause before writing this post (including re-writing this post about six times). Getting BMed in almost every game is actually just infuriating. Or just playing/drafting perfectly and losing to imbalance/RNG is actually just infuriating. I don’t mind losing games, and I especially don’t mind losing games to my own mistakes (lots of mistakes), but after having invested so much time into a format (drafting takes an hour, games take an hour) it feels very bad to lose games because of BM/RNG/etc. A little RNG is great, a lot of RNG is not great.
Also finally, two more notes. The first note is that this is not a post meant to overly criticize Faeria or Pandora drafting. I think you guys have a great format, and these are just some suggestions I came up with. The second note is I understand the current state of Pandora and I think I understand the goal/flavor that was intended. What I mean is that I understand that I don’t think that Pandora is supposed to be a heavily competitive format and that it is more or less supposed to be a fun unique format for Faeria (and it is). Again maybe all my suggestions here are for the request for a regular draft format. That way more players, including myself, have more ways to enjoy an already fantastic game.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy playing a less RNG based Pandora format though!!!
Thanks.
