So, I played this game a bit over a year ago and quit because the skill timers made both pvp and 3-starring missions painfully aggravating. I gave it some time; a considerable amount of time to see if the game would improve and reinstalled now to see.
What I see is that the game is practically dead. The arena is nothing but bots. The most active guilds are completely dead in my server; even the top guilds in my server have only 1-2 people max who log in regularly, and the reason is glaringly obvious because the biggest most fundamentally broken aspect of the game is STILL here.
Random skill timers are completely, totally, absolutely broken. It is not engaging, or fun to have 99% of the battle’s outcome weighted on something the player has no control over. Worse still, there is just no benefit to the random skill timers. They do not do anything to make the player feel good, they only discourage players because nothing the player does can amount to nearly the impact that just good luck with the skill timer does.
This desperately needs to be fixed. I see that pets and glyphs have been added since I had quit the first time, but even these don’t matter. These minor buffs and customization options are completely wasted, because when you get down to the actual gameplay in practice, the ONLY thing that matters is who’s spell timer is randomly set to go first.
Honestly? I don’t find the timers to be a problem
Are they a weird and sometimes annoying mechanic? Yes
But there are ways around the skill timers, such as choosing a second attack skill for the advanced skills or modifying the skills with glyphs and armor to reduce the cooldowns or extend the life of the skill
Basically, it changes the focus from a fighting game to a strategy builder. While this type of game is not for everyone, I quite enjoy trying to manipulate probabilities to ensure a favorable outcome the majority of the time.
The other point to consider is that this game isn’t for those looking for just another game, it’s for those who are trying to find additional incentives to get out of the chair and excercise. The fighting is just a secondary part of the game for those people, and thus making the fighting simpler is better.
There are other games that might be more to your liking if you are still looking for a pedometer game (Walkr: Fitness Space Adventure for example), or perhaps you would like one of the GPS location based games from Niantic
The game doesn’t have to be super complex to not be ruled 100% by luck. For example; if the timers acted like a super move; where it fills as you land hits, dodge or block attacks, then some luck would play into it, but your skills going first would largely be more about you having the better team that was able to land hits more reliably, and/or dodge and block better.
The issue with the randomized skill timers is that they have such a massive impact in comparison to any other factor, that it makes everything else feel less impactful. Say I go for a long walk, get a few thousand energy, increase the level of all my heroes by 5, and then enter battle with someone in the arena who I beat previously; but this time their skills go first and my guys are wiped out effortlessly. That obviously makes it feel as though the walk didn’t really contribute much to success.
Or trying to three star the adventure mode battles? Even if my guys kill every enemy in one shot each, my odds of getting 3 star depend ENTIRELY on whether my heroes use their skills at the start of the battle, getting a ton of double-kills to save rounds; or if they use their skills later in the wave when there aren’t enough targets left to actually get any double kills. At this point, making your team stronger does nothing. You’re already killing everything in one hit. You can’t get any faster than that; all you can do is just go into the battle and leave over and over until you roll the correct result for the skill.
For me, GPS games are sort of out of the question; I live in the middle of nowhere, which means there are never any landmarks which are necessary for progression. I did try walkr; but it doesn’t encourage walking at all. You get “speed things up” energy from walking, sure, but the further you go into the game, the less that energy is worth. When you have two planets, instantly completing one for 50% of your current energy is nice… when you have 10 planets, instantly completing one for 50% of your current energy is rather unimpressive. Also, the cap on walking energy is nonsense; I went for a walk, got home and it’s like “You earned 16k energy! But you can only store 10k so you lose over a third of the energy you earned.” How is THAT supposed to encourage walking?
There is a game called Maguss, like the new Harry Potter game in that you cast spells and battle monsters, but it has monsters everywhere, not just in cities
It IS still in development (and has been for many years now) but it’s pretty good
Yeah, it is a huge issue for getting stars. The requirements are straight up broken. Basically, you have to luck out. Doesn’t matter if youc an one shot everyone and bring all characters with multi-target skills, if the skills go off exclusively at bad times (or the mages decide to double-target the same monster) you fail. It’s not engaging or interesting, it’s just repeating a slow boring fight until you get the random outcome you need.