These are 3 categories of weapons that largely suck because they are too weak, or that they are so incredibly overpowered that the BC admins have had to completely change the way they design challengers to accomodate these weapons. Also changes to the bombs and to the sheilds could push different build strategies into actually being a major choice.

Bombs: At high levels, Even the best bombs (Martenez Briefcase and Thunderball) rarely ever get used, because they just don't deal enough damage to justify a spot, or they don't justify the mental energy to thing to use your bomb during a battle instead of mindlessly clicking your same 2 attackers each round.

One of the biggest problems with bombs is that STR formula is a power function, and each additional icon means less and less, so as you go up higher and higher in tier, you need to do more and more icons to justify a bombs use. They start off in the low tiers generally being reasonably potent in low tiers, and very quickly lose their luster as battles get longer and they do not provide a significant boost in damage.

The test case I would use to demonstrate this effect is what happens with a T13 pet with 8K STR fighting something like Prodigy. Using 2 god weapons that deal on average 34 Icons each, and a 23 icon god scroll a typical T13 pet can deal 91 icons per turn. this translates to 1938 Damage per turn.

The best bomb that I was able to find was Thunderball dealing about 80 icons on average. Using 1 God, a Thuderball, and a 23 icon god scroll you deal 137 icons this translates to 2918 Damage on that turn.

This is an increase of 980 damage or 51% increase in damage for 1 turn, which is an extremely mediocre effect.

Against an opponent like Prodigy that only represents 4.5% of his total HP.

In the past the problem was that you could go and hand that bomb to any tiny pet, and against the challengers they cared about beating, it would be a massive % increase. However, the Tier system lets you keep the mega-bombs that I am about to suggest out of the hands of tiny pets.

So how big does a bomb need to be for people to care about it? For Tier 13 8K STR test case that I showed above, I would say that that minimum that a given bomb should do would be 190 icons. That would let the test case pet deal 4046 damage with the bomb alone, and combined with a god weapon and god scroll do 5260 in a single turn. About a 2.5x multiplier of their single damage turn. That starts to make bombs look attractive against the challengers with less than 10-15K HP, but TBH I'm not even sure if that is enough to justify using a bomb for something like Prodigy on the first win, but for a Tier 13 you might even need to push it more towards something like 400-500 Icons, since they really probably don't have much of a challenge beating Prodigy and the other impossibles the first time.

Some other considerations for balancing bombs:

• Make them use similar icons, that way if you want to make an opponent that can't be quickly bombed out, you can give him a scroll that blocks all fire and physical icons, or something like that (but that would also defeat the purpose of making bombs better in the first place, so I would avoid that route unless it was for a very flavorful reason, like a castle resisting a siege....).
• Avoid spreading the variability of icons out. For example most bombs look like this: 6-7 fire 6-7 water 6-7 dark 6-7 light 6-7 air 6-7 earth 6-7 magma 6-7 ice 6-7 phys Range: 54-63 Average: ~55 if I remember the math (edit: I could be misremembering this. There is a scenario where it tends towards the low end of the average, but I don't think its this.) This configuration gives a icon distribution very close to to the minimum, because each icon type ends up being an independant probability. Where if you did this: 190 Fire icons 1-200 Physical Range: 191-390 Average: ~290
• If you make a 400-500 Icon bomb, get a massive price for it out of the MC (like 1-1.5bil), it would Massively speed up BQs for Tier 13 pets, and should still be useful in high end fights. You can always release bombs that are worse as limited run prizes, but whatever you decide to make the biggest baddest bomb, make that thing equivilent to a high end god weapon. If you do it right it should be a god weapon, and if you underpower it the first time around, you can always adjust it upwards.

Shields I don't think these have ever really been used since the Aaron revamp years ago because if I remember correctly keith thought that by limiting the number of icons any given shield would do, it would make defense more valuable, so a lot of high end shields like Blackmoons Warplate were given a max of 8 icons for each type defended.

If a challenger is doing all 9 icon types against these shields, they end up blocking at most 72 icons, which isn't as much as a god weapon, and it doesn't attack like a god weapon, and that is in a very narrow case when used against a challenger dealing all 9 icon types in a single turn. A more common scenario is that a challenger is dealing 4 icons types per turn, and the 8 icon capped shields are blocking a max of 32 icons.

So I would say design sheilds around the 4 icon scenario. I don't think this shield would be unreasonable design for something like Warplate at Tier 10 35 Fire Defense 35 Water Defense 35 Earth Defense 35 Air Defense 35 Light Defense 35 Dark Defense 35 Magma Defense 35 Ice Defense 35 Phys Defense

In the 4 icon opponent scenario, this would give you a potential 140 icons blocked, which seems reasonable at high tiers, where you would be giving up healing and attack for something when the deficated defending shields are blocking 75-90 icons each.

the tier 12-13 version might need something like 100x of each type (with 0 healing and 0 attack)

Or else if you wanted you could also make the current shields that are availible 35 icon x6 or x7 icon types and make the most expensive/rarest version of the shield 35 icons x9 types. I'm also no sure if that needs healing or not, and I could even be underestamating the numbers needed. Although if I understand the current critical hit formula, a shield like this even that has wasted icons against a given challenger, would still have significant reductions in the ability for the opponent to crit hit.

Stealing and Blasting I'm actually kinda surpised you guys have put up with these weapons as long as you have. When these were combined with real 100% blockers, they required massive modifications to the way challengers were designed since you had to design around 3 of the challenges weapons disappearing. Now all challengers are so built around not being affected by blasters stealers, its like they dont exist at all (except for the blasters to oddly turn into junk that the opponent ends up using for the rest of the battle.)

This is a suggestion that I think to do in the most efficient way possible would require a programmer, but i'm also about 80% sure you can probably do it with custom code yourselves, its just going to be a pain to do.

I know that Ryan was able to program WoTP to behave differently against I think it was the Satyr opponent. What I would do is that instead of having a blaster randomly blast weapons, use custom code to get it to blast a specific weapon for each opponent. Or to only steal a specific weapon from each opponent. Which would end up making the custom code on RB/Soma/TS/Subetaball/KT Ring, ect really long (maybe even too long?)

Against opponents where you don't want to deal with coding around using blasters, you can just program RB to always miss or have no effect on that opponent. If you want to be able to let people Steal Saggis Dragonheart, but not his blade, program it to do that. You could also program different blasters to blast different items.

This would give blasters the feeling that they are being aimed better. It also prevents things that make no sense from getting blasted (like different body parts.)

It opens up a lot of design space too. You could custom code an opponents weapons to be powered up by another more passive item. Something like you code all of the opponents weapons to block all light and dark when used in the same set as shield generator. Then if you blast the shield generator, the shields go down, the shield generator no longer exists, and the combo effect would wear off.

Or else now that 100% blockers essentially don't exist, you could funnel an opponents damage types more effectively into your blockers. And there are several other things too.

You could give the opponents Once per battle items like Once per battle healers. That would make interesting battle because if they used the effect early it would actually benefit you, so you owuldn't want to blast the healer early. But if the battle is going long you would want to blast it because if you don't it risks greatly prolonging the battle, ect. The key would be to make them potentially worth considering in some battles, without making them ever mandatory.

I've only read up to bombs (gotta go, bbl), but actual T13 damage is closer to 3k+, 6k with a crit, 12k with a double crit. I wouldn't use a bomb because I'm already a bomb

Hmmm I think I forgot to take into account mods, math might be off a bit, but point is - needs to be much higher numbers in higher tiers to justify using one at all (which it sounds like you still might not be impressed :P)

Depending on how exactly the crit hit system works, they might need to be adjusted down a little, because numbers that high might automatically trigger crit hits. The main thing is that I think to justify using a bomb on a tier 13, you need to have the bomb hit somewhat consistently for 4-5K+ damage, if not more (I can't see how much HP the paramasian challengers have). But as long as they are heavily tiered, it shouldn't mess things up too much.

There were challengers built like that. Felibot works best if you blast after it uses its breakable Feli Bombs, so you are more likely to take out her hard hitters. Wyrmgear you can do what you just said with its OPB healer, trying to not blast until he's already used it or at least hoping he uses it early. Lich Lord if you are battling with a small/medium pet you want to steal its heavy hitting sword and use it against him. Saggitarius was originally made with you stealing and using his Dragon Hearts against him in mind. GE it can still make a big difference in the fight which things you blast/steal from him. Prodigy, before the increase in icons to all his weapons, encouraged you to blast his Molecular Storms before he could generate Quarks.

Other than Lich Lord and I think Scary Singer, blasting or stealing specific weapons has gone by the wayside though.

The other thing you said about custom coding blaster/stealers to react to each opponent would be a massive pain in the butt or at least it would have been years ago. I think one of the BAs posted they now can do most things through a drop down menu to add CC to weapons. But I think the amount of layered code you would need for what you suggested would still be done by hand and thus be incredibly difficult/time consuming/maybe not even possible.

I realize that there are some challengers where you can eek out a narrow advantage by doing it, but the number of lost battles it takes compared to the advantages you can gain from it are very small to the point where it isn't really worth messing around with too much.

I think the period of time it took me to go from blasting Felibots weapons, to not needing to blast feli bots weapons was about a week of training HP every day.

I think it might actually be easier than you think if you are clever about it, you don't even need the code to do something different against each challenger.

You would just need to write the code so that instead of saying destroy a weapon at random, generate a recycled wad, you write the code to say:

Destroy all Great Balls of Fire, Canyon Rush, Small Tremors, ect. generate Recycled Wad.

So Recycle Blaster would be attempting to destroy everything in the list every battle, its just that most of those instances would fail, since the opponent never started with the weapons your trying to destroy in the first place.

Then if an opponent was set up to have multiple of one weapon like this:

Weapon X Weapon X Weapon X Weapon Y Weapon Y Weapon Y Weapon Z Weapon Z Weapon Z

And you wanted the blaster to blast 1 copy of weapon Y, you set it up like this, duplicating the item so that there are 2 instances in the databse: Weapon X Weapon X Weapon X Weapon Y Weapon Y (b) Weapon Y Weapon Z Weapon Z Weapon Z

So now you can set up your Blaster to be: Destroy all Great Balls of Fire, Canyon Rush, Small Tremors, Weapon Y (b), ect. generate Recycled Wad.

Then when you used a blaster the opponent would end up with this set: Weapon X Weapon X Weapon X Weapon Y Weapon Y Weapon Z Weapon Z Weapon Z Recycled Wad

Except that's way more complicated than what you do with custom code. Ryan did some pretty fancy things with it but I don't think what you are saying is supported (or at least it didn't use to be). Plus if you are going to list that for every challenger of note's weapons you want having the option of blasting/stealing, its going to be a whole lot "if then" to go through every time a blaster is used. Its not that I disagree with the idea, I just think Subeta's held together with chewing gum and string coded BC won't support it.

The real problem with Subeta's Colliseum, is something that you never see mentionned on the forums because 99% of the people who say it's broken couldn't actually tell you why. In truth, issue is that the BC lacks solid foundations / standards that would be forever set in stone for what weapons can do and to what extent they can do it and instead it has, over the years, worked like that :

1. release a very difficult opponent few people can beat (that is in their stat range)
2. release a one weapon / type of weapon (such as blasters, multi stealers, 200% reflectors, multi use 8 icon full blockers, etc, multi use 300% healers - these weren't all released at the same time. they have all existed at some point, most still do, tiers fixed little ) that will help against this opponent
3. have every new opponent be built around all these stupid new weapons
4. release new weapons that are even more stupid that will help you against these new opponents
5. from there : impossible weapon and opponent design forward
6. broken forever

See, BAs (over time, not necessarily current) always get overexcited about new ideas they get and we end up with always more powerful weapons. But people don't see it, because they think power relies in strength and icons, when really, it's all the other perks that mess up game design forever.

Shields would be great, so many things would be great. Programming issues aside (also : Programmers don't battle and talking to them about balance is like writing the instructions of what you want in Chinese and having them make a pick), there's so many weapons that would have to get destroyed first because they're massive parasites to the BC system. But if you do, all of a sudden, the masses will be like "Why did you break the BC it wasn't broken / I bought that weapons for X and now it does Y / I paid real virtual money for it and now I won't anymore and your company will crash buys some more CWs anyway / is Subeta 3D coming soon". For all people know (or hear, and then distort), the Coliseum isn't working because.. I don't know, there isn't enough purple weapons ? Or was it orange weapons? I can never remember

I guess I would disagree with you on that one , at least since the aaron revamp. with a couple exceptions, most of the top weapons are weaker today than they were 5 years ago. I would hardly say there is a runaway power creep of weapons. It's stats that have had massive power creep, where for years pets were able to collect more stats per day than smaller pets.

Aaron made a couple really terrible weapons (FoRRC/P combo, Truth Serum, Thief Baguettes in 6 mod slot Shinwa Strength Bracelet), but otherwise the best weapons from 5 years ago were more powerful than the best weapons today (ie they no longer 100% block and are tiered).

I think the only weapon that is out there today that I would say is "too powerful" is Truth Serum, and that is only "too powerful" in theory since it has completely warped the way every single challenger needs to be designed. In practice the weapon is much worse than Soma Tablets now.

They've generally tried to get better but it's still the root of the problem

truth serum is useless and no one uses it afaik. It was too powerful, but then they adapted every single challenger's weapons to negative heal 100%, rendering stealing effectively useless.

Truth Serum is good for Lich Lord. Never use it for anything else.

I'd be sad if, say, Trident was destroyed, but I'd also understand if it made for a better BC. I think the only problem with a few weapons (including Trident) is the rl money factor. What weapons would you personally look to nerf?

to be honest as long as sporks stay intact I AM FINE WITH EVERYTHING

Laws of scaricty people - battlers are increasing (for all intents and purposes I'm considering that weapons will leave circulation as battlers go on hiatus/leave). The situation would fix if God weapons were released at a slower rate than t12s increased. Substantially lower. You don't mess with people's current stuff while fixing the overall issue. I think.

Hey I won't complain if the Trident gets messed with. I got mine dirt cheap. ;)

I really hate using shields in battle tbh cause it only blocks. And as already mentioned, the icons are too spread out to be very effective. xD And then there's the Flayed Breastplate, which actually has a chance to do -5% heal if you don't have the other two weapons in the set.

I personally would rather see more weapons with the chance to blast an opponent's weapons. The IH Whip doesn't blast often enough, but when it does, it's a nice benefit. Mod it out with thief baguettes, and it's pretty useful against Chase. Not a reliable strategy, but eh, it's something.