What the title says: I think the 20-turn limit in combat should be removed. It makes sense in the arena - given the time limit - but in explore and gauntlet battles it seems more like its punishing you for surviving. It seems like it heavily encourages people to exclusively use heavy-hitter type lorwolves and companions, as the high defense ones do nothing but draw out the battle - which normally could be good, but is not because exceeding 20 turns is an auto-failure. It makes team building weird, as you have to build a good team, but it cant be too good, otherwise the battle lasts too long and you auto-fail.

Support! I recently kept losing boss battles that I was on the verge of winning, just because of this, and it was so frustrating. :/

Support!

Huge support! I feel like removing an entire playstyle (stall and tank over glass cannons) is kinda sad. I can understand not wanting super long battles in a PvP environment as it would get annoying fast if you are on the receiving end of it but PvE? I feel like it should be allowed.

However, no turn limit at all might risk softlocks to happen. Say you are fighting in the campaign and you encounter the forever boosting team setup where neither party can defeat the other. For this to not happen, I suggest a "forfeit" button to end the fight and count to an automatic loss to prevent the game just breaking as even refreshing doesn't allow the server to determine a winner when there can't be any. Refresh should equal a Forfeit to prevent the servers from breaking.

Perhaps if anything it should just 'skip over' after turn 20 and auto calculate the battle or pick whoever is in better condition.

The issue is there are plenty of enemy team compositions in Gauntlet that will just spam armour, and even if you have hard hitters, it'll become a slow battle of attrition. The Icerun boss battle can also get that way if you miss judge your survivability vs combat ability. You'll be surviving just fine but that turn 20 will show up.

You shouldn't lose a battle if you still have 3 wolves/companions up and the enemy has been whittled down to a single unit at 10% ever.

I like the forfeit suggestion too.

I 100% agree with this. I can understand just fastforwarding the battle after 20 rounds and let the system calculate behind the scenes who would've been the winner.

Same goes for the gauntlet btw! There the punishment is even worse cause it leads to the loss of your streak. But yeah, it makes certain builds very unviable and even some moves/companions kind of worthless. The nythas for example, their special attack stuns both the enemy and themselves for 3 whole turns. That's quite a bit out of 20. If they happen to get hit a couple times in that turn, you're out of luck and they'll soon use their special attack again, making them basically useless the entire battle, and causing you to most likely lose because of the stall.

Java brings up a good point though, there are a couple of companions that don't attack, like the cows or companions that have those grudge / retaliation attacks (that only attack enemies that recently attacked them) if they don't get hit, theyll never attack themselves either. And some companions and synergy combos lead them to constantly use their non-attacking special move (think support companions that constantly keep motivating each other replenishing their bar completely at the end of every turn). Even then tho I think the system should have an inbuilt limit of say 200 turns. If after 200 turns still no winner is decided it's a draw/loss. But 20 is too small.

Wanna leave another note that I do think battles are already calculated with a clear victor as soon as the battle starts for users visually. So the game/server knows already who wins while we watch the animations play out, this is why if we refresh as soon as the battle starts we can see the result screen as the game already generated it and just waits for the animations to finish.

Having the turn limit set to an immense amount would allow for the server to calculate the battle for a lot longer and makes the problem of almost winning but being blocked by the 20 turn limit disappear! There always do need to be a cap or else endless battles will break the winner calculator cuse it cannot find an end to the battle and gets stuck in a forever loop.

This however brings 1 fatal flaw. What is stopping someone to make the perfect immortal team that can beat anything if it just gets 100 turns? Very tanky slow builds can be abused by just refreshing as soon as the fight starts making glass canon build basically useless as you don't need fast turn defeats if you can just refresh and end the battle immediately.

We need a good balance in turn amounts that they don't end a fight too soon while also not giving the player too much time to basically stall the enemy to death and never risk losing cuse 1 damage a turn will eventually kill the opponent.

I feel like it would need testing. 200 like Gaia suggested sounds good but maybe a bit too high still. How can we balance to make sure refreshing to insta calculate a fight outcome would not make build obsolete?

Huge support! I want to see more playstyles become viable.

An alternative idea: when it goes over 20 turns, whichever side has more health is declared the winner rather than it being an auto loss for the player.

"This however brings 1 fatal flaw. What is stopping someone to make the perfect immortal team that can beat anything if it just gets 100 turns? Very tanky slow builds can be abused by just refreshing as soon as the fight starts making glass canon build basically useless as you don't need fast turn defeats if you can just refresh and end the battle immediately."

I'm not sure why it would make any build useless. Even if the turn limit was removed and popularized tanky builds, I don't really see a negative with that. If it achieves the same thing as a glass canon build, that doesn't necessarily mean that the tanky option is suddenly better. It would be more determined by how easily you can achieve one of those builds. If both are easy to set up then people would just use whatever they prefer, if multiple builds can achieve the same results that's not a bad thing.

I can't think of any negatives to extending the turn limit beyond if it would cause the servers to struggle. LW isn't exactly the highest end in technical prowess or code efficiency, so I would not be surprised if the turn limit exists to limit how much the system has to calculate in order to achieve the immediate results that we currently have. For that reason I think unlimited is a bad idea, but at least bump it up to 50 or something.

I feel like maybe extending it by 10 might make a difference enough. I don't personally recall any battle where -no progress- in any direction was done in 20 turns. That or doubling it.

I do believe these games do have a predisposition to being tanky in nature, as the gauntlet is an endurance run after all.

Build diversity is really something more for the campaign where you specifically build to counter bossess or the Arena where you can do some really fun/wacky builds by the freedom it offers.

Yeah if it can't be unlimited, which I would understand, upping it to 40-50 probably wouldn't be too bad.