Thanks everyone providing well thought out, constructive feedback. The Mod Team appreciates you taking  your time, and will be collecting all of your thoughts to give to the Dev team.

So let me get this straight. You want to shake up the arena meta by making some debuffs more viable, alright I can get behind that.

But you managed to miss the elephant in the room, if we use poisons etc we get sheeped to hell and back. Are you even playing the same game that we are? 

Very well said.  And thank you for sharing your Kraken's/Whale's perspective.  As a low spending player, I appreciate your viewpoint.

Definitely not a fan of the blessing changes. 

Regarding those blessings that were buffed, core mechanics didn't really change, so I don't think you really created many viable new choices. In large part, those that were poor choices remain poor choices because the mechanics don't synergize with the current meta, nor allow for a viable deviation from meta.

Regarding the blessings that were nerfed...

First and foremost, if you are going to make changes that downgrade a blessing, you need to reset people's blessing selections automatically for any nerfed blessing or else remove the gem cost associated with a player's decision to change.

Secondarily, with the brimstone nerf in particular, you've made progression on iron twins itself now more difficult because of that boss' cleanse mechanic. So now not only is the blessing less effective, but you have also basically made it a very poor choice for a number of bosses, including the one that ties into acquiring blessings in the first place. Couple that with the fact that even high-end soulstones are mostly just resulting in worthless rares 99% of the time, the fact that twins fights cost energy, AND the frequency of fusions that require deep energy reserves and you now have a perfect storm where I think a lot of people will stop doing Iron Twins altogether. And with soulstone pull rates being so poor and prices so unreasonable, I think you're creating a bad situation for yourself and for your customers.

Just my two cents. 

Ok trying to fix that two unusable blessing poisons/hp burn. But still nonsense this changes there. I wrote earlier, if should be bombs, i should understand...

If plarium want to use his playersbase those blessings, just need to remove the Arena perspective. If should use everywhere... thats made those blessings to useful. But these changes wont be change anything. Incinerate and Lethal Dose still useless

Brimstone and Phantom touch were used so much because most of the blessings are useless and they at least gave some benefit.

Nerfing them when people have put resources in is just going to cause people to stop farming Iron Twins or giving a shit about blessings at all because let's face it, they're still going to be the most used blessings even after the "balance" because NONE of the buffs are good enough to make the others viable. Meaning they'll likely be in the firing line again for the next time you come steaming in to devalue your system.

"On top of that, we’ve buffed 9 other Blessings to increase their power and give you guys more awesome options to choose from. It won’t be the last balance patch as far as Blessings are concerned, so please leave your feedback on the changes and thoughts on the balance of this feature overall - we’ll be reviewing it all! "

Apparently you don't even know what is a buff and what is a nerf (Temporal chains is not a buff). 

After the revelations of finding your total spend last week, and the annihilation of blessings this week, I suspect it's going to be a tough month for Raid.

Wow this is rediculous... please don't add an accuracy requirement for Brimstone! Someone already mentioned the effect on Helicath, and I'm in the same boat. I can't build him with accuracy, so having brimstone helped me get a comfortable 2 key for UNM on all affinities and it has been so satisfying to see my hard work pay off and now you want to take that away... it feels like such a gut punch and it seems like you don't even care.

Shame on you, you destroyed the game... fix sulfur, it is unacceptable, no one will spend a penny

Why does this game have so many issues and none are bein fixed

i

So forget your "Core Mechanics"?

Puhhh where to start.

I seldom write any comments.

I understand why employees of plarium don't play the game, because raid is a fulltimejob.  

People have spend TIME, RESSOURCES and MONEY to optain the needed awakenings on theire used champions. Most of the time one gets only useless crap in the soulaltar. A win in the lottery is more probable than getting a high ranking awakeing for a legendary champ that one actually have and use.

The rewards of the twin tower dungeos are lacking at best. 

When blessings where introduced. It was said, that blessing did not need Accuracy to be placed. They have their own mechanic. I've heard Brimstone now need Acc to be placed? So the word of plarium counts once again nothing

This nerfing of the usefull blessings is in the same category as the nerf on Urogrim. 

First pull TIME, RESSOURCES, and MONEY from the playerbase to get actually something worthwhile and than take it away from them.

I'm a free to play player and would have quit a long time. Only the comunity and RSL-Helper let me stay. I've heard a lot of voices in my community, that they quit spending money in the game because one can actually be sure, after all the RNG, the Champ, Blessing etc. will be made useless after some time by Plarium.

The only sure thing in raid is that mony spend in the game on the long run is an ill investment.

The entire concept of blessings was that they didn't require accuracy.  You made sure to clarify that when people were confused early on.  Blessings not requiring accuracy is why sheep has just made top PvP play even less enjoyable (which I didn't think was possible).  So what did Plarium do?  They destroyed the core tenant of blessings by making them require accuracy.  Ok fine, so that means that polymorph, temporal chains, and intimidating presence now require accuracy because they don't say "doesn't require accuracy" just like brimstone doesn't say that, right?  Becasue the core mechanics are no longer true and they now require accuracy?  What's that?  No?  Those don't require accuracy even though they don't say it?  Plarium, please talk to the game designers who originally made blessings because you just broke the most fundamental part of them but you did it only for one blessing and made everything confusing.

And why did you do it?  Because people used brimstone and phantom touch a lot in PvP?  Could that be because you didn't make any other decent options?  Could it be that maybe you should have buffed the other options to make them also viable instead of just nerfing the only ones you designed correctly in the first place?  Fix the ones you designed so poorly that nobody wanted to use them, don't do this.  Don't destroy the core mechanics of blessings in the hopes that people will spend a bit more.  They won't when they feel Plarium is untrustworthy and inconsistent.  Destroying the very first core mechanic is the definition of not having a consistent system in place.

Hey, too many people seem to be using savage so now savage will require an accuracy check!

Just feeling the need to point out the new champs.

Im guessing these are the fusion food and we will be eating them.  Thanks for the info Plarium so I know its defo food champs given the kit (no geomancer here from what I can see).

I understand the issues with blessings and will be impacted myself as a very low spend player, but dont see the need for such abuse to the devs etc as at the the end of the day we are all still playing this game and cannot be hating the gameplay as we are all still here! 

Will look forward to the abuse I get for this comment later folks ;)

You seriously have to be kidding me?!@?!?!  You can't balance champions that have been out since day 1....but you have no issues nerfing the hell out of the one good thing you gave us.

Actually, your supposition that "we are all still playing this game" isn't true.

I only returned to playing the game regularly once I realised the usefulness of Brimstone and Phantom Touch on my clan boss teams, where, as a minimal spender, I obtain the majority of my shard and book resources. With the nerf of these two blessings and resulting nerf on my ability to obtain resources, I will probably return to checking into the game once every month or two to see if game mechanics have changed enough to make me want to play again.

Well, stoneskin and Sheep eliminate the use/viability of debuffs, so unless something changes these blessings will always be useless, no matter how much more damage they do.

As a player that has just acquired Scyl, I can say that I'm currently prey to the sunk-cost fallacy - I sunk ~$500 acquiring Torvald and Mighty Ukko, and have since learned my lesson on spending money in this game.

Iron Keep is a highly disliked addition to the game overall. First, it's a competing source for energy and gems directly. In addition is the overall extremely low yield of rewards - Despite there being hundreds, and steadily approaching 1k champs, the amount of daily rewards from Iron Keep is barely enough to acquire a 1 star epic soul, not even mentioning 6 star legendary souls, the most desireable ones. Having to both clear a dungeon for a month straight, along with the overall RNG of the reward system, is not at all desireable, it's outright bad design.

Then there's the overall boss design - extremely overtuned. Not only does the boss have a total number of mechanics approaching the Hydra, it's stats are incredibly high, which results in near-unobtainable numbers being needed to down the boss in a "non-cheese" manner - and of course this resulted in players figuring out as many cheese comps as possible to down this boss, ranging from unkillable teams (Since nerfed), to perma-block damage teams, to extreme heal reflect damage teams - but no real teams actually designed at countering the boss itself, simply because it has too many mechanics and is far too overstatted to do so with a team of 5 champions.

And really, it seems that there hasn't been any retrospection on this - Al-Naemah clearly shows that this form of design is the direction the development team is taking Raid - Once more a boss with a huge plethora of mechanics along with insane stat requirements, that sucks up a metric ton of energy - Literally, 1k or more energy to fully ascend a single gear piece! - in exchange for almost no reward - Gaining the equivalent of 1-2 glyphs worths of stats. And given that there is going to be yet another dungeon for accessories? Players are being pushed away to other titles, like EE. Perhaps even the upcoming Arclight Rumble from Blizzard might even be a superior option in the future, if one can believe it!

Furthermore, there are many glaring issues in other parts of the game that desperately need addressing, such as..

1: The terrible energy-gear efficiency of stages 21-25 of the 4 gear dungeons.

2: Crippling energy dependence preventing constant play.

3: Tournaments/Events becoming more and more F2Play unfriendly

4: Max Gear/Champion limits hitting developed players hard

5: Acquisition Creep - Torvold was significantly fewer Void Shards then Chaagur. Getting a specific key champion - especially since these key champions are becoming more and more  neccessary as PvE boss power continues to be crept up - is harder every new champion release. Oh, and ofc tying in with #3 - Mighty Ukko was notably easier to acquire then Pythiax

6: Resource Starved. As players advance, everything requires far more energy, yet the acquistion of energy slows to a crawl - eventually halting at lvl 60.

Overall, Raid is on the path to becoming a footnote - Players will drop the game in droves as has been happening all over the gaming industry with older titles that become steadily more P2Win, going to F2Play alternatives, and eventually the income from what few whales are left will no longer be able to support existing infrastructure, resulting in a close. Before coming out with even more content aimed at the very small portion of your playerbase, update it so that your larger, if non-paying playerbase is content.

With all this said, let me say that Gnishak is an excellent addition to my roster - I'm currently in the long phase of slowly, oh-so-slowly acquiring good gear pieces for him.

Regarding the nerf on Phantom Touch and Brimstone: These changes are a huge hit on all the playerbase since these blessings are the only general use ones in the game (very good in pretty much all PvE contents and not bad in PvP). They are mostly used in PvE, where they help many players, especially F2P and low-spenders without access to the best champions and gears, advance through difficult contents. Since they are used in mostly PvE contents they are always helpful and don't cause trouble because PvE is single-player, not competitive so Brimstone and Phantom Touch do not cause frustration among the playerbase. They are very welcome addition and sometimes are the only way for some people to beat certain contents. They are strong indeed but the biggest reason people choose them is because they are the only general-use and generally useful blessings, since most other blessings are either only really shine in arena or too niche/low chance of ever being useful. 

The combination of them being useful all-around even at low awakening levels along with soulstone being a very scarce, RNG-heavy resource that require people to spend a lot of energy and specific champions. Iron Twin is extremely powerful so a lot of players don't even attempt to fight it at all, or try to experiment different strategies, because the probability of losing and wasting energy is very high. Most content creators settle for the same strategy of using Geomancer and block damage/ultra tanky team since they don't find a way to beat this boss consistently other than this. For the average F2P and low spenders the best way they can make use of blessing is to buy 1 star souls for the champions they have and want and the best blessing to use at 1 star is of course Brimstone and Phantom Touch. Hitting these 2 blessings that have been so helpful to all players, whales, low-spenders and f2p alike, and change it in a way that scream "spend tons of money and pray for RNG that it hit 5-6 stars on the legendary champ you have and want if you want it to be good like it used to be" is not exactly a good move and the community outrage is expected. 

Also more information about them should be clarified because people are confused about whether they require accuracy now for lower levels because the line about it cannot be resisted has been removed but people were told blessings don't require accuracy so they no longer know what is true anymore. That information is very crucial and need to be clarified ASAP. 

Regarding other blessings: It is true that many blessings deserve buffs but in the form of rework, not changing the numbers. Too many blessings are too niche to be useful. 

Miracle Heal is not used because the only places where destroy Max HP happen is Hydra, Sand Devil (a dungeon that a lot of people try to ignore if they don't have to clear that annoying Advance Quest that force them to spend like 100+ energy to get a 130 energy refill) and the occasional Skull Lord Var'gal in Doom Tower but even then that blessing is not needed since people can ignore their destroyed HP and still win or in the Sand Devil and Hydra have ways to get back destroyed HP already. 

Those anti-debuffs blessing (Indomitable Spirit, Dark Resolve and Chainbreaker) have too low chance of happening, RNG-heavy, too passive and not useful in many contents. 

While I appreciate that the dev want to implement different strategies in arena, the Arena Poison and HP Burn completely miss the mark because Poison and HP Burn as they are now, without any additional mechanics, are strong in PvE contents, not in PvP since they are designed to counter high HP bosses and minions, not player champions. In arena people either fight against speed nuke teams or tanky go-second teams. Against speed nuke team you don't have time to setup those Poison and HP burn since if you win the speed race against them you want to kill them immediately, if you lose the speed race you either get destroyed immediately or if you survive you still want to kill them as quickly as possible in 1 or 2 turns before their big skills get back online (and they get back online very fast). Against tanky go-second team poison and HP burn is even more irrelevant because of stoneskin, high resistance comps, block debuffs, remove debuffs and heal (1 continuous heal = 3 poison) so they don't even have the chance to be effective. People don't use Poison and HP Burn in arena because they are too easily countered and there's not enough time in arena match for them to be effective (and increasing damage does not solve these problems). Additionally, poison and hp burn champions are mostly PvE so players will gear them accordingly and use blessings for PvE, not PvP. I don't build my Bad-el Kazar and Tomb Lord for PvP so even though they are good poisoners that can solo entire dungeons they are still very bad in arena games where stat requirements are completely different from PvE. These champions' place are in PvE contents so I would not change my gear or pick those arena poison and hp burn blessings and will instead use PvE blessings, like the reliable and useful Brimstone.

And speaking of PvP blessings, people are not happy because the really problematic ones remain untouched. Polymorph is of course the biggest offender since it's extremely annoying to play against. While it has low chance of happening, it's still likely to happen because it counts for every debuff and every buff strip so even at level 1 it's still a threat. If someone wants to debuff/strip a team of 2-3 Polymorph users then their chance of getting sheep is very real, especially when they put more than 1 debuff. Sheep just completely take a champion out of the equation, with no chance to resist or cleanse, and when they come back, even if they are the tankiest sort, they lost 50% HP straight up. Lightning Cage is another strong PvP blessing that is pretty much fully operational at level 1 since it has almost all features and 50% buff protection already. Aside from the problems and the change already made to it (which is speculated by a lot of people only because it hurt the money-maker that is Divine Speed gear), Temporal Chains can stack with multiple champs using it and reduce speed by a lot. These are blessings that work extremely well at level 1 Awakening and becoming more powerful (and annoying) at higher levels but they are not addressed like Brimstone and Phantom Touch, which are nerf for allegedly on the ground that they perform too well at level 1 Awakening and limit choices. The choice limitation is already pointed out due to most other blessings being too niche to be effective and Brimstone + Phantom Touch are generally useful while the "broken at level 1" stuff also happens with these PvP blessings but they are mostly left alone. This obviously trigger most of the playerbase because most players want to use generally useful, PvE blessings to help them advance through PvE contents, which are the most important part of the game, and only use PvP blessings for certain arena champs. The fact that broken PvP blessings are untouched while PvE blessings got nerf is seen by the community as a move that, whether intentional or not, cater to big spender, competitive PvP platinum pushers (and pretty much only whales/krakens ever have a real chance to compete in platinum, who would spend tons of money to get every inch of advantage possible by buying speed gears and soulstones) with those specific PvP blessings and punish the the majority of players. 

In my opinion the blessing system is not a bad idea but at the moment its implementation is not great due to heavy RNG, high cost (energy, coins/essence and money pricing for soulstones) and scarce resource, locked behind an extremely powerful boss that can't be farmed by average teams and there are too many obviously niche blessing options that are ignored in favor of obviously better, more useful blessings. Most of the system need to be overhauled and "useless" blessings require extensive rework to make them viable options when put on the table alongside useful ones. Like a general-use blessings for healers and tanks to do their job would be appreciated (Brimstone is also picked by healers and tanks because they don't have better stuffs that suit their role). The poison and hp burn blessings need to either work in PvE or if they're confined in PvP then they need very exciting mechanics, even at lower levels because people can't afford to rely on high awakening to make a blessing useful, to make them viable instead of just more damage, because poison and hp burn are easily countered in PvP where anti-debuffs and speed are everywhere. Problematic PvP blessings need to be addressed since they exist in a competitive environment and make people frustrated when fight against, whereas PvE blessings upset nobody. 

That's my take on this update and the community outrage in reaction to it. I really hope that Plarium actually take the community feedbacks into consideration and listen to the players because there has been so many things that upset the players, especially the low-spenders and f2p, already (increasing cost for fusion and guaranteed, back-to-back-to-back Void guaranteed when nobody has enough void shard, gear ascension advanced quest, the entire plarium point system and replacing normal rewards with plarium/titan points, etc.) and this blessing "balance change" that hit the useful blessings, doesn't make unplayable blessings more playable and doesn't address the really problematic ones, is seen as another move against the playerbase. If Plarium continue to enrage the community by pulling questionable stunts then they would lose players for real and that's not a good thing. I genuinely believe the players want to love this game and want it to succeed so Plarium should give them more reasons to, not finding more ways to exploit and punish the players as much as possible (every games are made to exploit players in some way but there needs to be limits and enough rewards). Once again, I hope Plarium listen and acknowledge the community's opinions and feelings to make the game better for the players' enjoyment. When players love the game and feel they are appreciated and rewarded then they will generate income for the company, by willingly spend more time, money and recommend the game to others. 

playing a beta where the enemy team is a bunch of 3* starter champs with no gear in bronze 1