When hammers were removed from CBM there was some discussion as to the impact on thugs of increased forging costs. This is of particular interest to me since thugging is my favorite part of the game. Now that there's been some time to play post-CBM 1.6 games I thought it would be worth talking about this.
My feeling was that removing hammers would really hurt thugs because they need to be equipped affordably, unlike SCs (if I summon an ember lord I'm not going to get cheap on equipping him). Of course if your opponent is using his own thugs to counter yours then his cost has increased as well - but if he's using magic or summons to counter then your position has gotten relatively worse. IMO this is undesirable because thugs were never unbalanced the way you could argue that SCs were/are (and of course because I really like this aspect of the game
).
Another factor that has come into play is that there seems to be an increasing number of powerful secondary effects on weapons. I realize weapon modding is more limited than, say, monster modding and that one of the goals of CBM is to make everything somewhat useful (though personally I don't mind some things being "useless" as long as what is useful is fun) but I'm worried that these changes make life even more difficult for thugs. It's a tough thing to balance in that you can use similar tactics against thugs and SCs but an attack that is damaging to an SC can outright kill a thug. Of course I realize they have different roles and I'm not trying to force a thug into an SC role - I'm talking about using them in their traditional raiding role and the threats they face there.
In my opinion the thugging aspect of the game has taken a hit post 1.6. This isn't good or bad, it's just a change. For me, it's bad because that's my favorite aspect of the game. But many others might not care and for people who don't enjoy that aspect of the game it's a good change. But this is just my impressions. I'm curious as to people's experiences. Are you using thugs as frequently as before? Are you seeing your opponents use them as frequently as before?