If we don't gripe about it, Midoki won't change it. I get that we can change our strategy to bend to some crazy AI but that shouldn't be the case when the old AI was useable. As it is now, many many players are going WTF is going on with my WD, and they shouldn't have to do that. Relearning a completely new attack strategy is absurd.
As I said in the other thread: protecting your juggs is maximizing your use of WD. They're meant to be bullet sponges, and about double how long they last when under WD. If your gunners are getting shot, your juggs and brutes aren't doing their job. None of your main force of gunners should take a single shot until you're down to 2 juggs. Be protecting juggs, you're near doubling their lifespan (tens of seconds). By protecting gunners, you're getting them a couple seconds. I see almost no situation where protecting the gunners over the juggs is mathematically advantageous, as if the gunners got hit to begin with, your jugg failed, and having the wd on the jugg would have been longer before the gunners got attacked to begin with, shielding them for more time indirectly than if the wd had been on the gunners instead, as the shield is doing nothing for tens of seconds, and then tens of seconds earlier your gunners are getting attacked. In terms of total damage absorbed, its always going to be more advantageous to put it on the jugg, and you're doing yourself a huge statistical disservice by trying to turn your gunners into mini tanks when you have an effective tank already there.
I have no clue how you attack islands but please show me some screen shots or a replay where the WD lives more than a few seconds protecting a jugg or brute.
Love your way of thinking Skye, it's a great way to look at it and I will definitely rethink my approach. Alas I'm sure statistics, sound reasoning and a well explained argument will never be enough to convince most people here to change their way of thinking
Yeah wd goes poof with the juggs. No doubt about it. He simply cannot take any fire, especially splash. My wd lasted the whole battle when he stayed behind my gunners. Now that he sprints passed the gunners and to the juggs, I can't even use the resurrect power cause he doesn't last long enough.
Drop a separate brute or jugg on the other side of the base beforehand so the mortars don't hit your main army of juggs, and the wd will be safe from all damage. No splash should be hitting your main group of juggs anyways, even without the WD there. Not because of the minimal damage juggs take, but because of the knockback and messing up party formation. Knockback recalculates target priority and its a good way to make a couple of your juggs wander off.
What kind of Islands are you attacking? How long is that first Jugg going to last while taking Mortar, Cannon & Bunker fire? Not long enough to completely distract the Mortars from targeting the rest of the crew as you're stating. The simple fact is with this new AI tweet, the WD is placed in the thick of the firing line, he's dead within seconds. Where as before you could choose who he protects by placing him with your choosing, now he makes up his own mind by running off to the highest hitpoints, taking away our control. Your scenario might work against rubbish bases but fight against a well set up base & single Juggs can't just wander around without cumming under constant fire, they won't be doing much distracting for long.
I attack any layout with good loot or rank potential. I do not send a jugg on opposite side. I send bombers before juggs, let them get mortared, then send in skellywags as a distraction, followed by juggs and WD. WD resurrects dead bombers, which become the real distraction. WD survives because he sticks with slower juggs, mortars stay distracted by skeletons until gunners destroy them. However Skye's suggestion can work well too. People have defeated my base quite well using that or a brute to the same effect. The layout does not matter so much as overall attack strategy.
My point exactly! Plus this whole statistical thing about having the WD protect your highest hp pirates is bunk. You want him protecting the pirates that cause the most Damage giving them the best chance to destroy things. The jugg and brute attack sooooo slow they are near useless for destroying things but are great at pulling fire away from your main crew. Having a WD sit right next to your tanks getting nailed with them is insane. Having the WD sitting with your heavy gunners or gunners or other pirates that do the damage is key in so many ways.
But the WD shouldn't be getting nailed if your juggs are doing their job. Since the juggs walk into range first, all defenses will be hitting juggs. And to kill a jugg with wd, it would take all 4 bunkers working together 47 seconds, to kill just one jugg. As long as the mortars are distracted by a separate unit, the WD will never have anything to worry about, as the group of juggs its protecting won't take splash damage. Making their hp last twice as long before gunners get hit makes gunners survive longer than letting the juggs die twice as fast and then letting the gunners get hit twice as much. As an example, since apparently you're not able to find any, I just picked a top ph9 leaderboard at random found a Russian base 3BE3AA rank 853, using a fairly standard design, where you can use my two brute distraction method to distract both mortars, and the gp, guild ship side, while your main force makes its way around outside of harms way and sneaks in the base safely. If you did this with a jugg instead of two brutes, it would last longer and handle the mortars fine, but the gp might fire a couple shots off to the side, so thats up to the attacker depending on where they want their attack squad to come in from. The place where the brutes would be distracting from, they would be hit by a gun tower, 2 cannons, both mortars, and a gp. With bring it on, TG2 bonuses applied, it would take 38.8 seconds to kill both brutes, if played optimally, assuming that set of max level defenses. In reality, I'd play the brutes slightly outside of gp range (it doesn't quite make it all the way to the edge of the shore), over doubling their survival time, since they're only taking the cannons gt and mortars, and come in the side, but its still enough time to walk right in the front door if you know what you're doing and want to attack face first.
I've never had my juggs or brutes pull all the fire away from my troops. Sure they pull most of it but with a lot of layouts its just not possible. I get your strategy but it seems that with it you don't need the WD, so why use him at all or what about his resurrect ability?
Don't fix what is not broken... Wd was doing fine.. Is simple: Protect the weaker guys. Let the big guys absorb the damage they are suppost to absorb...................... .................... I bet that 9 out of 10 players think WD is not better than before... Now i use two bucaneers instead of the wd lol..
But the WD doubles how long the juggs survive, which means they pull fire off the guns for twice as long. If you don't think your juggs can handle the job due to the layout, drop a second WD with the group of guns. I don't use guns in real attacks, I only use heavies, which stay far enough back that the juggs are always pulling 100% of the fire of anything that has a chance of reaching them. They kill things slower than guns, but the fact that the juggs have double survival time under the WD more than makes up for it. But even with guns, as long as you already have a WD dropped protecting all the juggs, and give them enough of a lead that the bubble doesnt cover any of the guns, your second WD should still cover them. You have 5 extra slots now, use 2 of em on another WD if you're concerned. As for the resurrect ability, you can resurrect a jugg or brute, and you seem to get a larger construct than with a gunner, which survives longer, at least as far as I've seen in any replays I've analyzed. A jugg resurrected skeleton took about 500hp off of a ground pounder hitting it dead on (3 rounds of all 3 shells of 60 damage pretty much dead on to put it down), whereas a gunner one dies in a round or two. This is poorly documented though, and it may have been buggy behavior during the PH8 era, but it was what I personally witnessed during replays when trying to calculate stats on skeleton constructs.
Only doubles Jugg survival if the WD survives alongside the Jugg, he does seem to stick closer to those he guards now, and is therefore more susceptible to splash. I read thru attack styles of Skye and Rapt above... with my very limited personal experience with the new WD, I haven't had as much frustration as some others with my "typical" method which has been similar in many respects (only irritated half the time with WD and still won those against base designs inferior to those I was battling a month ago). I will adjust when I need to. But we are all individuals and if everyone has to have pirates upgraded to a certain level, has to use a Brute to distract, exercise care about Juggs across the island, etc etc we'll all get pigeonholed to one method. One player wrecked a decent reverse right angle base I had (in mid 700s I think) three times in three different ways from different sides within 24 hours- it was brilliant! And to say the WD is OK because he can be a good skeleton reviver now seems to miss the point that his constant function through the entire battle has always been the bubble of protection. The average players (and many skilled ones) are struggling. Finally simple descriptions of attack methods do not work all the time. I've lost more than one battle by my first wave of bombs getting knocked out by a well placed bomb when preceeding Juggs in the method Rapt described.
