I’ll try to keep this concise…
Assumptions:
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Ore of vitality will also be added as rewards in events and evenly distributed.
If it’s only in certain places, or not evenly distributed, then it could promote a certain angle and play out a little differently (e.g. if they made you get lots from the PvP leaderboard and only small amounts elsewhere). -
Ore of vitality will be rare, so we can only boost a monster’s HP once a month or so.
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They’re not changing the damage of any moves, rebalancing monsters due to this addition or adding other stat boosts.
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They’re not adding it to egg hatching or gem sales.
Pros:
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We now have another relevant item as a reward from playing content.
The game has always been lacking this… only really gems, rare gems and legendary potions matter. We do need ingredients, but they become a much smaller concern after the first few months and definitely do not excite players. Nectar is another great addition for this reason, but they don’t really give it to us as a reward much. -
Mythic second forms are more balanced.
This hasn’t been talked about for a while, but for only 11 cost some of these are a bit crazy. It’s only +1 cost over a super epic but the best ones function like good legendaries that we’d expect to be at least 13 cost, probably more like 15 cost on average. In the future, once you’re at the level in the game where most people have, say, 50%+ of their team with HP bonus then second form mythics will be more like a super epic in your team with how easily they die. -
Awakening mythics is now an obvious choice (also some legendaries that are good in 2nd form).
The HP increase is something like +60% now so the benefit you get from awakening is well worth the cost increase. Therefore some of the mythics which were hard to justify hatching three more times to awaken are going to appeal properly. This isn’t so much a benefit for the players, but is better design for the game. -
There is long-term reward for people to work towards.
Honestly, balance can be compromised a little for something like this. It makes a game fun to have things you’re working towards and it’s satisfying to feel like you’re improving your team. The crucial thing is that it the reward doesn’t completely outclass those who don’t have it. I don’t think +1000HP does that, since there are still a lot of one-shot moves (especially from mythics). -
People can customise their collection (in a sense).
Long-term maybe we’ll be able to boost all our strong monsters. However, in the meantime there’s some fun to be had where people can choose which are their favourite monsters to boost. Making your favourites even stronger will appeal to a lot of people, even if the defenders of balance are annoyed that Carmilla can now have an extra 100HP with the crazy defence buff. -
Knowledge about the exact damage dealt by moves is more important (i.e. higher player skill required).
I should note: overall, HP boost makes matches more based on power than skill. However, when equally matched opponents are facing each other then interestingly there’s slightly more skill involved now by also factoring in the two different levels of HP enemies can have.
Cons:
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Super epics are invalidated.
Let’s be real, only a small number of them can see play anyway. However, now we’ll have an even smaller subset because some just won’t deal enough damage to kill HP boosted monsters. Also, since they cost the same number of ores of vitality to boost I don’t expect anyone to consider boosting them apart from a very small handful which are super strong. They get a higher percentage boost to HP, but they’ll be one-shot by many more attacks than legendaries and mythics anyway so I don’t think it justifies the same ore cost. -
Many legendaries will not deal enough damage.
I think this is the biggest point from the community. It’s particularly old legendaries which have the damage scaled to kill squishy monsters. They have already been struggling due to mythics being tanky and most new monsters having high defence but now they’ll truly be too weak. The game is better when more monsters are playable, so this is a big loss. -
Old players advantage vs new players making fewer PvP matches being properly competitive.
This is the counterpoint to pro number (4). Depending on how everything goes, HP boost + bonus potions may prove too big an advantage over new players that they’re in different leagues and we have overall fewer PvP matches being competitive matches won by skill and team building. Personally, I stand more with the pro side of this than the con side, but I might switch once we see things in practice. -
People may bring low damage monsters to a battle because they normally face opponents without HP bonus.
While the top level meta may adapt to it, in practice I think a lot of players will still use these monsters then really struggle when they face someone with a lot of HP bonus. I can see this causing a lot of frustration for players, as well as artificially inflating the value of having HP bonus because it’ll give easier wins against people unprepared for the battle. -
Nerfs to monsters that have been HP boosted will be very frustrating.
The investment here seems a lot, so players may get very angry.
That’s enough points from me. Overall, I think it will be a fun addition to the game that’s a good extra dimension to things. However, it’s definitely going to shake things up and cause a lot of balance problems.
I hope the Devs consider these things:
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Adding a bit more damage to a few moves / buffing some monsters significantly weakened by this (e.g. Cyclozar gets union +50% attack)
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Lowering the ore of vitality cost to boost HP of super epics and below, e.g. 0-7* = 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 100.
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If ore of vitality are very rare, add a way to reclaim them when a nerf is done to a monster.
