SP has done a lot of work on improving the ai, lately. One of the benefits of a more predictable ai is that you can tweak monster's skills in such a way that they will do what you want them to do under certain circumstances. Unfortunately SP changes the ai's behaviour almost weekly, causing monsters to choose different skills than before. Skillsets that gave me the desired result at first can suddenly become useless on defence.

It's becoming extremely expensive to have to change skills, and test different skills set ups, every time there is a change! Please make changing skills available for gold, not gems. This way SP can keep tinkering with the ai as much as they want, without frustrating the players who try to set sensible defences.

Can't upvote twice unfortunately!
The current format is punishing. You don't want people re-specing all the time ? Scale the cost but with gold (for each monster),

• 1st skill change 100k gold.

• 2nd skill change 250k gold.

• 3rd skill change 500k gold.

• 4th skill change 1M gold (and that would be the cap for all the future skill changes for the current monster).

totally agree, it would be fair and funny.

Any news on this? Or SP is looking to another direction, and acting like this post never existed? Nobody would expect that, ofc

20 gems to change out a skill is absolute greed. There is no other way to look at it.

@jacinto said in Why Changing Skills Needs to be for Gold Permanently:

Any news on this? Or SP is looking to another direction, and acting like this post never existed? Nobody would expect that, ofc

This post does not even exist for 24 hours.

@Fox, though.

@Fox any chance this would happen? It'd really help out the players.

Hi @Ekto-Gamat,

it's on a table but I wouldn't expect it to be for gold, for certain players the gold has almost no value since they have a LOT.
What do you think about making it cheaper though? Do you see any reasonable amount in gems or it wouldn't make any difference?

@Fox Considering the huge inflation of offers (based on gem spending or orbs or real money) during the past 2 years and the current costs of most new features I think the "changing skill" for gems is simply a remnant of long gone past for the game that has no more real reason to exist. The "gold has no value for some" is not a valid point, every player who progresses steadily will reach a point to which gold value is becoming less and less relevant since he will always produce more than he uses. So in my personal opinion the reasonable amount of gems would be: 0. Make it cost gold only or gold + food (might be based on player level or create a weekly/monthly limit to the number of skills that could be change per monster), or 1 bronze relic for a skill change, or simply why not making us use battle items (another remnant of the past) that we are still collecting but have become useless. I think there are many ways to implement this without making it cost gems and I doubt it will ever have an impact on game income at this point of time.

@Fox For this to become a feature, it needs to be gold. The vast majority of players stick with their preferred skill set and just put up with the old occasion where a different skill or two would have been handy. You only spend the 20 gems if you made a serious mistake with your skill choice or if you are on an elite team facing another elite team where every tiny bit of advantage counts. You should have the data, I'd be surprised if this gem costing feature attracts many 'purchases'.

And if you think that gold isn't worth much to high level players, maybe you can scale the cost with player level so that a top level player has to pay 50M gold per change. At that cost, you also don't want make 4-5 changes every war, but it would certainly be attractive to do for the odd important war. Heck, the Rune Guardian also costs 56M to activate which is a struggle even for many Lvl >100 players

@Fox said in Why Changing Skills Needs to be for Gold Permanently:

Hi @Ekto-Gamat,

it's on a table but I wouldn't expect it to be for gold, for certain players the gold has almost no value since they have a LOT.
What do you think about making it cheaper though? Do you see any reasonable amount in gems or it wouldn't make any difference?

You are right that Gold has almost no value for many players. The question you may want to ask yourself though is why the cost of changing skills has to have any value. In current situation only advanced players will pay gems to change skills, and sometimes only when they really have to. Skillsets always had to be adjusted for changes in the game, but lately the changes in the ai have made things extremely 'in flux'.

To give one example from my own experience:
I want my Sweeperion to always open with 'pneumatic carpet remover' on defence. After the first introduction of the new ai I chose a skillset that made this the case. Then after some changes in the ai I noticed he was now opening with 'puffing billy'. Had to remove 'puffing billy' and TWO other skills to have him open with 'pneumatic carpet remover' again. Then for our current war I noticed Sweeperion was not using 'pneumatic carpet remover' anymore, but 'Crevice Tool'. So now I would have to remove 'Crevice Tool' and possibly other skills as well to have him open with 'pneumatic carpet remover' again, if this would be possible at all. Oh, and I also want 'puffing billy' back if at all possible.

All of this skill changing for only this epic, including testing, could amount to 200 gems. Nothing of this is because I had a change of mind on what skillset to use, but because SP changed the parameters.

If you insist on keeping it for gems however, I would already be far more willing to change skills for 10 gems. My guess is that for the vast majority of players this still is too much to change skills easily.

when we buy a monster, we also buy all the skills he owns.

why should we pay to change them?
why should we pay for something we have already bought?

@Fox sure, gold for some players is like nothing, so maybe change the gold cost per level. Like it's cheaper for lower lvl players (who value gold), but way more expensive for high lvl players.

@Fox Why you want to "hurt" players by taking something valuable like hard earned gems for something that should be available by default.
The fact that gold ain't that much of importance to some players doesn't mean it isn't still important. Combine it with food then. No gems. And I think no one should debate about whether it will cost 10 or 20 gems. It must not cost gem, period.
Don't get me started on locked runes, which in my opinion is also really really bad mechanic but I'll derail from the subject.