Originally Posted by
Kalitor
The recent update making resource storage buildings immune to lightning and earthquake spells, while fixing one imbalance in the game, has created another. TH7 players now have almost no means to obtain dark elixir from opponents short of running all dragon attacks all the time. While at the same time, they are completely susceptible to TH9 and some TH8 player attacks on their dark elixir storages creating a sort of critical mass on dark elixir storage level that is very difficult to get over. Once you hit around 13000 in your storage, the amount maxed out TH7 troops can steal from opponents is dwarfed by how much can be stolen from them.
With the lightning spell, this wasn't a problem. But due to the fact that players can only have a single dark elixir storage and it is (rightly) always housed in the very center of a player's base, it makes it nigh impossible for a TH7 to attack players with a significant amount of dark elixir to grab and actually succeed in getting to the center. The DE storage being in the center effectively means that you have to almost entirely wipe out a base (or at least one side since no unit's AI is set to go towards the center of the base) to obtain the dark elixir from the opponent now. A TH7, is incapable of doing that to almost all well thought out TH8, TH9, and TH10 bases. Leaving the only opponents they can steal dark elixir from being other TH7s, which also can't obtain any dark elixir from anyone leaving essentially nothing for a TH7 to do to obtain the 105000 dark elixir needed to upgrade everything available to him except wait for it to slowly accumulate from his single collector. But this is a problem, because like I mentioned before, once you get about 13000 or 14000 in your storage, you are now a prime target for TH8 and TH9 players who have no trouble wiping out even a well structured TH7. Essentially, Dark Elixir farming is just about impossible for a TH7 now short of expending ridiculous amounts of time and ridiculous amounts of regular elixir training troops to pick off enough instances of the paltry 75-150 dark elixir available from most TH7 bases to obtain enough to upgrade everything.
Effectively, removing the lightning spell ability against storages removed a simply annoyance for TH8 - TH10 players, who by the way have the means of accumulating Dark Elixir much more quickly than a TH7, in exchange for completely destroying any Dark Elixir acquisition capabilities of the TH7. I mean I can't even train any Dark Elixir troops because there's no way to readily replace it.
So that my complaint isn't void of a suggestion for a fix (and why it fits under feature requests), I have three suggestions:
1. Bring the lightning spell ability back, but modify the hidden tesla to have a shield setting. You choose to have the tesla either attack or produce a shield, just like the inferno tower and xbow have two different settings. In shield mode, when placed near storages, when the hidden tesla detects a spell being dropped, it quickly sets a lightning/earthquake immunity shield on all storages in its range. It's still hidden so players have to take a bigger risk if they want to use the lightning spell strategy, but it would give players a strategic way of defending against it.
2. Perhaps a better way would be to simply increase the number of dark elixir storages and dark elixir collectors that you can make, reducing their cost and their abilities, so that at each TH level the cost and production rate is the same (or maybe slightly increased for TH7 because they have less attacking options), but it creates more targets for a player to have to defend. This way, all of the storages wont necessarily be in the center, making it possible for TH7 to have a chance at acquiring some dark elixir without having to wipe out an entire base.
3. The easiest and perhaps best fix is to simply make Dark Elixir upgrades cheaper so that you don't have to max out your storage to upgrade things. Two separate upgrades, lvl 2 hogs, and the lvl 5 barb king, can be obtained at th7, but require 20000 dark elixir, the maximum amount that can be stored by a th7. There isn't a single upgrade at th7, that requires the maximum amount of gold or the maximum amount of elixir one can hold. In fact, not one single upgrade at th7, requires more than half of the possible 4 million gold or 4 million elixir possible at TH7 (the most expensive individual upgrades being the lvl 2 Dragon upgrade, the DE collector Lvl 3, and the TH8 upgrade, all of which only cost 2 million of the appropriate resource). Ironically, not one single dark elixir upgrade costs LESS than half of the maximum amount of dark elixir that can be stored at TH7 (the cheapest upgrades being the lvl 1 barb king, and the lvl 2 minions which each cost 10000 DE). Dark elixir should follow the same pattern as the regular resources. Since 20000 is the max you can hold, no upgrade at TH7 should cost more than 10000 dark elixir. The same pattern should hold at all TH levels. Otherwise, you run into the critical mass storage problem, where the amount you can obtain from an opponent is dwarfed by the amount that can be stolen from you, meaning that every time you lose your shield, you are guaranteed to lose resources. The bottom rung always loses out in this case.
Get over it! And try this...
