Hero upgrade design is fundamentally bad, broken, and needs to change.
Hero design is fundamentally flawed because it has two contradictory design elements that leads to a bad game experience for the player. Let's first review some facts that form the basis of this conclusion:
Fact: Shutting down your heroes by upgrading them cripples both your offensive and defensive power dramatically.
Fact: This is not true of almost all other buildings because most buildings by themselves don't represent an essential part of your offense or defense. You can stagger upgrades to avoid crippling holes. You don't need every air defense, x-bow, inferno tower, or barracks upgrading at the same time. The loss of only one of them at a time will be noticed, but not to the crippling extent the loss of hero or spell factory would. You can plan around the downtime and still function quite well with most buildings. Even losing just one hero to upgrades, and not all of them at once, is still disproportionately crippling to your offense and defense compared with almost all other buildings.
Fact: Heroes are uniquely bad in this way because they effect both offense and defense equally. Every other building only effects just offense or just defense. The Clan Castle is the only other building that effects both offense and defense but it continues to work while being upgraded!
Fact: For the handful of buildings that do cripple you during an upgrade (like spell factory), they only have to be upgraded once per town hall level. That means only a relatively small percentage of your time in game is spent crippled by upgrading those buildings. Once it's done it's done. A few days upgrade time is no big deal if you are going to be at that particular town hall level for a month. The longer upgrade times at higher TH's usually coincide with longer times spent at that TH level anyway, so it works out to still be a small portion of your overall playtime. You can also plan around the crippling to some extent to avoid it coinciding with war timings or periods of increased playtime.
Fact: Heroes are the only buildings designed to be under perpetual never ending upgrade cycles, for every town hall level, provided you have the funds to fuel it. Unlike other buildings you are never truly "done" upgrading your heroes for your TH level because the reality is you'll have finished upgrading everything else and desire to upgrade your TH level before you ever finish fully upgrading your heroes.
Fact: It's possible to gain DE faster than you can spend it, forcing you to keep all your heroes under constant upgrade unless you want to waste tonnes of DE by having full storages while you raid. This makes even a staggered upgrade approach towards your heroes impossible to implement if you want to be resource efficient.
The Problem: As you can see based on these facts, the design of heroes is logically flawed and results in a poor game experience. This is because they combine two contradictory features together: they are essential to the proper functioning of your army and base but you never get to use them because they are always under upgrade (unless you are bad at farming dark elixir or simply lack the time to invest in doing that). As a consequence, hero design is fundamentally broken when people are actually playing the game a lot and pay for season rewards (both of which are things you would want everyone to be doing), because they will have enough DE to never be able to actually play with their heroes. This is another aspect of poor and contradictory game design because you are punishing the successful and those who play a lot, and punishing those who buy season rewards, because they will expose the flaw in your hero design by having their heroes perpetually inactive due to a glut of DE available. And don't be confused; the problem is not that DE is too plentiful. The problem is hero design is fundamentally flawed and that flaw merely gets exposed by someone who has access to lots of DE. No other building has such a flaw exposed when you are flush with resources. Ultimately the logic that is applied to the design of every other building in the game falls apart when applied to heroes because they are literally the only building type designed to be under constant upgrade. Combined with the fact that not having it up leads to a severe crippling of your army and defense.
Solution: Simple. Allow heroes to continue to be used while upgrading. I know ideally you don't want to do that because of a decision that says buildings stop working while being upgraded - but you should have thought of that before you made heroes the only building that is designed to be under perpetual upgrade. Your original building design fundamentally conflicts and contradicts how you've designed heroes, and changing how heroes work is the only way to fix that contradiction. And simply allowing them to function while under upgrade is by far the least disruptive way to fix this problem.
Let me tell you what my specific circumstances are to give you a picture of how bad the hero design is:
Since coming back to the game after having not played for several years, I basically haven't gotten to use my heroes for 20 days strait. And at this rate there is currently no end in sight to my ability to perpetually keep them in a state of being upgraded - because as the upgrade cost increases so does the build time, which thrn gives me more time to raid the DE I need for the next upgrade before the build time is finished.
Keep in mind: this is without using the dark elixir rune or the dark elixir rewards. Even though I purchased season rewards, I didn't actually need them to create these circumstances of perpetual hero upgrade cycling. I have been sitting on full DE storages since the new season started after getting my season bank rewards. I cannot spend DE fast enough. I sat on my DE rewards until the very end of last season to avoid wasting them, upgrading my DE storage to make room. Everytime I upgrade a hero I have my storages maxed well before their upgrade is finished. I am forced to dump DE into researching unit upgrades I don't use simply to try to make room for my rewards.
I have wasted countless dark elixir earnings the past week by having my storages maxed a good percentage of the time.
Also keep in mind: I have been using many books heroes and builder potions (season challenges, clan games, and some I bought with gems), which should have been more of a strain on my DE by speeding up the upgrade cycle. But nope, no impact.
The only thing I have had to really speed things up is the builder cost and time reduction. But it probably evens out because the buildings get done faster so I don't have as much time to farm for the next upgrade.
More details on my situation:
- I came back to an account at TH8 with a good amount of upgrades. I upgrade to TH9 immediately because I lack things to dump excess elixir into, even though there is plenty of gold based stuff left to upgrade.
-It takes a few days before I buy the season rewards as I wait to see if I will want to play long enough to make it worthwhile.
-Initially I don't immediately have my heroes in perpetual upgrade as I am regaining my bearings in game. My trophy level is too low to harvest DE well, and it takes a while before I switch army comps and start climbing.
-I do the tutorials to give me a boost to DE to get archer queen built and upgrades going.
-Using book of building to jump to TH9, and books of fighting and spells on my army units, means I am quickly bumped to an effective TH9 fighting level and start to harvest mass quantities of DE.
-Thus, it wasn't very long before I found my heroes perpetually locked down in a cycle of never ending upgrades. It was probably only a matter of days thanks to the tomes and potions speeding things up. I would have reached this point even without that stuff, it would have just take maybe an extra week or two before I had things upgraded enough to farm DE perpetually.
-I have used training boosts to raid quicker, not buying them but using what was given to me. But generally I have only used them for gold and elixir, so I can dump more into my walls during the half off building cost event going on right now. I am using them right now even though my DE storage sits full. I think there might have used a training potion once earlier on to specifically fill up on DE. But honestly resources have not been what's holding me back: upgrade time is. So I spend my gems on items to speed up time. Items that increase my resources are really irrelevant to me at this point.
-I had to rush to TH10 shortly after TH9 simply so I would have more walls to dump my season bank into, and so that I could upgrade my DE storage.
-Maybe I will move to TH11 in a week. Probably not more than two weeks. Mainly because thanks to the half off event my TH10 walls are almost complete. And I could benefit from having increased DE storage at this point. I am losing a lot of DE during raids because I am sitting on maxed storage. But we'll see. With things not being half off after the event, maybe I will just spend less time raiding and sit on TH10 for a while. Depends on what my DE situation looks like too. Another hero to dump DE into might solve the problem. Although I would probably loath to only have access to two builders for everything else.
I guarantee you at this rate I could easily spend the next 10 days with my heroes in perpetual upgrade. I am not sure how long I have to go before the cost of upgrading my heroes is greater than the speed at which I can raid for DE.
Either way, this is a huge gaping flaw in your game design - when someone can play the game as intended but literally never see the use of both heroes for over a month, spanning across three TH level
Upgrades! (That's projecting out what I know could happen easily. I'll update this thread later in the month with information on just how long I do go without access to my heroes.
