Creep is everywhere. Don't think we're getting huge boosts in flasks A/D for nothing. Played any war venue lately? Since the BLACK flasks have been release in beta and now available in live, I'd suggest the following.
Manually play something in GE 4, OR something where you've achieved at least 30-40 attrition in GbG. Take your time - Watch carefully how the defense now acts (moves and presents itself for interaction with your warriors). Based on their own special skills, it's doing a whole lot of much smarter things now. It's been honed repeatedly from vast stores of our playing data - how we use 1+7, or 2+6 rogue configurations, for example - to exhibit much more defensive opportunism.
The more you play various configurations manually, the more you'll learn so that you do NOT misconfigure an offense when you do want to use autobattle.
For example,
1) it's very clear it holds back from rushing headlong into a vulnerable position and plays quite differently, dropping first strike warriors further back than the "initial killing field".
2) Any chips in your health dramatically affect your hit power, even with an AO. Keeping ANY injured warriors swapped with fresh is the best strategy, but can slow you down if you let it. After a few fights, there are enough partially chipped warriors, that I swap out the entire 8 - and make changes to the configuration .
You can see this and many other education things unfold by playing a manual battle like you would a game of chess.
Worth a serious review - take the time to invest in your own battle education. What you know and did isn't going to work as it used to with a smarter AI fighting against you.
So.... We didn't get the huge BLACK FLASK BOOSTS (100/200/300) to achieve an advantage, we got them because we'll need them to compete with the changes made for fighting parity, including what else is coming...
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