A new CW, Tricky Merlin

I identify the problems with the Court Wizard thusly:

  1. Barrier feels unimportant and lacking in impact.
    The emphasis here is on the ‘feel’ part as correctly targeting Barrier can easily win the game by blocking converts. However the effect is very polarized. It either does nothing, or frustrates the enemy players, which within the game might be fine but not for the overall health of the game.

  2. Tornado is annoying.
    Especially early game when nobody has any information to work with. When CW had Tornado as his main ability, people were thrown all around, targeting themselves or people they had already confirmed, bringing a very annoying element of randomness to the game. Confusion is good, that you can deduce out of, that’s a challenge. But a malicious CW, not so.
    Another problem with Tornado was what it shared with Barrier. You could go through an entire game without ever feeling like you made any impact on the game, while in other games, your tornadoes instantly win the game by pitting killers against one another and such.

How do we go about solving these issues?
Firstly, Court Wizard has to feel impactful, even in games where they aren’t outright winning the game. When over the course of 7 days nobody trips onto your Barrier, you just feel like wasted space, that gets instantly executed by the BD. Sure, accurately Tornadoing an evil person dead is similar to the greatness that Phys get when healing somebody or a Drunk debauching an attack, but more often than not, this isn’t the case.

Secondly, Court Wizard is an important claim to the evil players. When a class has the potential to have no impact, it’s hard to disprove. It’s important to keep this element in the game, or maybe even amplifying it?

Thirdly, Wizarding. When I think of a Court Wizard, I think of great mages with all sorts of tricks. Just being able to prevent people from getting drunk is quite below Merlins of the world.

So here is my suggestion for the Court Wizard remake.

Court Wizard: Support BD
Converts to the Sage and the Ritualist

Passive: Forgetful
You start with only 2 of your night abilities, chosen randomly.

Passive: Rest
When you don’t take action during the night, your 2 night abilities are randomized and restored back to 1 charge.

Night Ability: Tornado
Charges: 1
As is currently

Night Ability: Barrier
Charges: 1
‘Inoculates’ target player from the next harmful effect at night (same rules as current Barrier). Doesn’t prevent day abilities, such as Nightshade, Troll Box or Chill. That player knows when they have been Barriered and when the Barrier has been used

Night Ability: Divination
Charges: 1
Read into the intents of target player, reading through their logs, similar to Noble’s Snoop.

Night Ability: Fairy Aid
Charges: 1
Send a friendly fairy to heal target player, similar to Physician’s Heal

The aim with this change is to create a class that is the master of magic’s. This Court Wizard has a few tricks of their own, but can also serve as an emergency option for a few other BD roles. Similarly, the wide array of options can surely create a good cover for any evil people. The randomness of available abilities and limited uses prevents things such as ‘inoculating’ Barrier, or Tornado from completely throwing the game into disarray. This also gives the Court Wizard players another decision to make in whether to use some abilities or sleep the night off to get new ones.

Sage: Support Unseen

Passive: Wicked Ideas
You start with only 2 of your night abilities, chosen randomly.

Passive: Malicious Purposes
When you don’t take action during the night, your 2 night abilities are randomized and restored back to 1 charge.

Night Ability: Tornado
Charges: 1
As is currently

Night Ability: Flame Wall
Charges: 1
As is currently

Night Ability: Disfigure
Charges: 1
Disfigure target player. If they die this night, they appear as chosen class instead, similar to Herbalist’s Defile

Night Ability: Fairy Trickery
Charges: 1
Send a malicious fairy to trick investigator’s, similar to Dutchess’ Dark Wisp

The Court Wizard’s evil twin is a different beast. A dangerous amalgamation of some very powerful, and fun, Unseen abilities. Dark Wisp leads to interesting days when that so obvious Assassin wasn’t so obvious after all. Defile is a personal favourite in creating confusion, which the Unseen enjoy. The problem is that there rarely is the opportunity to enjoy these games. While making them too common is an easy mistake, having them as options to tricky Sages is sure to lead into fun experiences.

There may be some problems in fitting all of the abilities within the limited description space, but this can be solved, for example linking directly to other abilities CW ‘borrows’ from, like Heal and Defile. Other option would be to shrink the Day Ability bar away and have four slots for Night Abilities.

Passive: Forgetful
You start with only 2 of your night abilities, chosen randomly.

Passive: Rest
When you don’t take action during the night, your 2 night abilities are randomized and restored back to 1 charge.

I don’t like the randomness :confused:

Let me chow through this

RNG big no

Clssses can’t have mutiple night abilities

Sage was nice already and now you heavily nerfed sage

You’re stopping at the word randomness and not looking at why randomness is bad. The point here was to give CW powerful abilities while maintaining the ability for Evil people to claim CW basically anytime they want. When somebody asks to prove you’re a CW by Barriering them that night, you can claim “I don’t have Barrier, I’ll rest this night and see if I get it.”
If there was an ability reading “Kill a random person at night,” that would be an example of terrible randomness and we both agree that shouldn’t be introduced. However, not having consistent access to powerful abilities, isn’t necessarily randomness, but a balancing tool to so you don’t Barrier everybody in BD for example.

I combined all your comments in one post if you don’t mind that. Not sure about the forum rules for spam so I won’t make comments on that.

I explained the randomness aspect in the post above, and certainly, there could be a possibility that instead of randomly having from a pool of 4, you start with a random 2 from there and switch between those and the remaining 2 as your Rest in nights. Would give some consistency in what to expect. I’m just making suggestions here at this point.

Not sure what you mean by classes not having multiple night abilities? I’m quite sure most of the classes in the game have multiple night abilities at this point. If you’re talking about having 4 abilities, then you’ll be glad to hear this rework of CW has only 2 at a time. This is also why Rest is a Passive for not doing anything instead of an ability you activate at night.

As for the Sage rework, I’m quite certain that’s a part of what the devs are planning. They already mentioned that people hate having Tornado as a main ability. Sage still has his Flame Wall in his toolkit but it is expanded. And as for ‘nerfing’ the Sage, I don’t have data on how successful Sage is for Unseen, I’d assume more than average, but I think having interesting scenarios and decisions is much more fun than a completely balanced game.

Thank you for your feedback.

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I made mutiple comments cause I am on moblie and it’s hard to do that without mutiple comments

Okay, it makes more sense to me now. I just think that if a different way that didn’t involve computer generated randomness were found, it should replace it. But I admit I can’ think of a simple way right now.

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Got it. Don’t worry about it. If the forum mods don’t mind that, I certainly won’t make a point of it. Thanks for your feedback again.

I agree that most things shouldn’t involve any computer generated randomness (as opposed to people randomly healing an attacked target n1), but having one class with such flavour to them sounds fun to me at least. Each class should be a pleasure and a unique experience to play, and having to bounce between abilities every 2/3 nights sounds interesting to me.

Don’t worry if I can edit quotes they don’t mind

They really don’t mind

I agree that most things shouldn’t involve any computer generated randomness (as opposed to people randomly healing an attacked target n1)

That’s not computer generated randomness, that’s player-generated randomness.

but having one class with such flavour to them sounds fun to me at least.

I agree, I am opposed to randomness generally but if it’s actually fun in practice I am on board.