Spent quite a bit of gold to upgrade air defenses and infernos today. I plan to max out infernos now because it only requires a few levels. Current plan is to bring all 3 infernos to lvl6.

Unfortunately infernos really don’t scale well because their charge time is way too long. They nerfed the infernos such that it needs 5.25s to charge to full damage from 4.25! Worse still, the first 5.25 seconds have negligible damage at all levels.

It takes a lvl1 inferno 9 seconds to take down a maxed electro dragon with 4200 hp. It deals 30 > 100 > 1000 dps

It takes a lvl6 inferno 7.8 seconds to take down a maxed electro dragon with 4200 hp. It deals 81 > 200 > 2000 dps

This was the main reason why I didn’t upgrade infernos previously because they sucked. The only reason why you want to upgrade them is for multi mode which rarely sees use in crystal 1-3 CWL. Lvl6 infernos are only 12% stronger than lvl1 so why bother? Its better for them to be at lvl1 so enemies underestimate them and be surprised that their AQ and electros die so easily. Now that I want my base to be stronger, I decided that infernos are better investments compared to cannons and mortars since my enemies mainly use electro or miners in war.

Why does this occur? As explained, the first 5.25 seconds do nothing to troops while all the damage comes from the full charge. After 5.25 seconds, the lvl6 inferno only dealt 780 dmg to its target. And it dealt the last 3300 hp in 1.67 seconds.

There are actually few ways to buff infernos. Firstly, the charge time should decrease as infernos are leveled up. At level 1, it needs 5.25 seconds to charge fully. At lvl4, it decreases to 4.75 seconds. At lvl6, it goes down to 4.25 seconds. This gives progression per TH level and makes TH12 infernos significantly stronger than TH11. Despite this change, it would only make TH12 infernos 33% stronger than lvl1. While an improvement, this is not really enough.

Another idea is probably to make single target infernos scale continuously, meaning each tick deals more damage than the last. Infernos deal 8 ticks of damage per second (firing rate 0.128s). At level6, it deals about 10 damage per tick which gives it 81 dps. The idea is to make it charge up every single tick instead of fixed intervals. It should also charge up linearly so that it can deal more damage in the front end.

But after doing the math, it seems like it would unnecessarily buff lvl4-5 infernos making them much stronger and way too strong for TH11. So fundamentally, the single inferno will probably never be balanced in terms of good progression. The only way I can see it work is to buff lvl6 inferno significantly and slightly slow down the ramping. The math can be found below:

In this example, infernos will deal 10 damage in the first tick and gain about 5.5 damage per tick until it reaches 250 damage per tick at max. At the first second, the inferno will deal 10+ 15.5 + 21 + … + 48.5 = 234 dps in the first second. Following this example:

t = 1, damage = 234 (notice that this has higher dps than current single target after 1.5s charge)

t = 2, damage = 4 * (54 + 54 + 38.5) = 586

t = 3, damage = 4 * (98 + 98 + 38.5) = 938

t = 4, damage = 4 * (142 + 142 + 38.5) = 1290

t = 5, damage = 4 * (186 + 186 + 38.5) = 1642

t = 6, damage = 230 + 235.5 + 241 + 246.5 + 250 + 250 + 250 + 250 = 1953

I even slightly nerfed inferno such that it would take 5.5 seconds to fully charge instead of 5.25. Despite that, infernos will take down a maxed electro dragon in 4.6 seconds instead of 7.8 seconds, a 40% buff against the old one. Even the formidable BK would die in about 6.75 seconds under this new buff. While it may be strong, I think they would need to buff all TH12 troops so that they don’t die so fast under inferno fire.

Using the same formula, a lvl1 inferno would require 6.9 seconds to kill a maxed electro and a lvl5 inferno would require 5.4 seconds while lvl6 would only require 4.6 seconds. After doing so much math, I realise that it wouldn’t really make much difference in the end.

It would also increase the gap between single and multi infernos which mean that multis will probably need a buff as well to compensate. This would make balancing even harder.

Currently at a loss on how to buff single infernos and to ensure a good progression between the levels. Any ideas?

Farming gold is ridiculously easy. A few raids here and there is enough to farm gold for my defenses.

Finally got the 20% discount again. It only took 9 days to get the discount, so I’d say the discount is active during 70% of the game. That uptime is really good.

These packs are far worse though. The book itself for USD$2 is considered ok. You can normally buy the book for 925 gems in the trader which costs about USD$7.50. Overall, unless you really want to upgrade a troop or building, I wouldn’t buy these.