Armor nerf was too much (or rather it was fine, but damage probably needs to come down a bit). Final boss just mows down even full tank Footmen now. Orclings are also very, very strong. Considering how many of them spawn, and how much damage they deal. It's a bit much that they also have that much HP. Feels like it swung the balance too much in the opposite direction. From AoE being useless, to being nearly mandatory. The armor nerf also means that Werewolves are absolutely insane, if your units actually focus fired them, it'd be fine. But they purposefully spread their damage between them perfectly to make them all have infinite attack speed. Last patch it was fine, because you could just out-tank it. But now it's nearly un-tankable. At least with footmen, could just be that footmen are bad now. Need to test a Knight tank run and see if it's the same there. Could also just be that holy trinity (footman+cleric+random dps) is dead and you have to go 2x dps 1x tank now and just out-race the untankable damage. But that would be pretty boring.
Okay, so if you don't just go straight T2 footman + T2 cleric rush. The lack of armor means early/mid game is now also pretty much entirely unbalanced. Because that early, basically none of the enemy power comes from armor, and a lot of your power comes from armor. So you just kind of lose even against "normal" encounters. You just get stat checked.
T2 Footmen full tank with 2x T2 Cleric with near perfect mutations and a T1 Cleric and a T0 Cleric still has the footmen insta die against the boss. Yeah, enemy damage needs to come down so that the post armor damage is the same as last patch, by having lower enemy damage. That way the overpowered nature of armor pen gets taken down a notch, while still having the same base tankiness targets as before. Currently you just cannot tank with T2 Footmen, but if you try and make Knights your tank and don't hit T1 Knight super early, you just auto-lose to being stat checked early/mid due to how weak your armor based units are against the non-armor based enemy units (skeletons are so bad, since block RNG means you can lose at pure random to them, even if you're stronger on paper).
Okay, so the literal strongest possible god comp does still work, if barely. T2 Footman+T2 Cleric+T2 Strongbowman. With +5 Armor 65% Evasion Footman, 2x 20% spell power 3x mana regen 1x +1 Unit Cleric and an admittedly pretty mid Strongbowman, but with the rare +15% pierce. Let the orc adds die fast enough that only one Footman got one-shot before we stabilized and won on the final boss. But that comp is pretty much a war crime. So the fact it was *required* to get a win and I had really good mutation RNG on top of that, is probably a pretty good sign that this patch isn't really balanced. I'm guessing that perma stun Fire mage would still very much get the job done too. But haven't tested that yet.
Didn't get full permastun Fire Mage but even 2s stun was enough to get the job done with only the initial burst one-tapping another 65% evasion T2 Footman.
Also what i assume is a bug, not sure if this applies to the Clerics as well. But the Fire Mage's Fireball isn't actually fully decoupled from attacks. As in if it has enough mana to cast it. It will not cast it until its next auto attack happens. If this is true for Clerics heal as well (harder to tell). That might be part of the tank issues and dying to burst issues. If they are meant to heal every 0.3s but are capped to only do it once per attack cycle.