Current meta and damage

As the meta has progressed towards rushing levels and looking for key 5/6 drops it has made the goals of lowering early damage paradoxical.

With the new damage cap, you only take 10 until turn 7… which is great, getting randomly clapped by high rollers and fight rng early felt bad. However, the combination of that and the general bad scaling on t1-t3 units has made a meta where everyone holds hands and levels every turn.

This usually results in turn 8, the damage cap is lifted, but everyone in the lobby is now tier 4 or 5, with a board with tier 4 or 5 units, so even on a close fight, you can easily take damage cap every turn and so even when you hit, you get two bad fight outcomes turns 8 and 9 - Game. Over.

I’m not a designer, I think the goals of the devs were to make the curve of damage feel more even, but this has resulted in a meta that feels even more punishing than pre-change. As an observer I wonder if the issue is just how damage is calculated. What if the formula was slightly more complicated, something like units (and maybe taverns?) having a cap on their damage until turn 10.

So your opponent brann who hits early probably still beats you, but their brann living doesn’t cause you to necessary get hit for damage cap. Your omu who power leveled to 6 and barely squeaks a win out by 1 hp on their 6 drop doesn’t smack you for 12.

All of these feels bad moments seem to be what they were trying to eliminate by capping it at 10, but the now the second the limit is lifted, everyone has rushed taverns and so any loss is hitting for you 10-15 damage.