Sunspear Changes

Official News
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As you all are very aware, we made a change to the Sunspear Hero Class.

We also know that not everyone liked this change. That’s normal - it’s the nature of game development that some changes and new features won’t appeal to everyone equally.

For context, when we were first made aware of potential issues between the Heatwave trait and the Firestarter Talent, we looked at potential fixes with the least impact. This is why Heatwave was changed instead of Firestarter, as Firestarter is in the Fire Talent Tree, and the Fire Talent Tree is shared with multiple classes; changing it would have affected all those classes (and we were fairly certain there would be some people using it on those classes who would be affected). For that reason, we changed Heatwave – so that only the Sunspear was affected.

When changing it, we wanted to try and keep the theme of the Sunspear’s legendary trait (which focuses on getting Red Gems for more Red Mana). So, the new trait was a more powerful version of the Fire Link trait (and indeed could stack with other Link traits, much like the Corsair’s High Seas trait).

Yesterday, there was a bit of commotion on our forums about this change. We were confused, as we felt the new trait was of equal value. Fortunately, several players kindly reached out to us, to explain that the previous version of the Heatwave trait was used in an Explore-farming team with Phoenicia. Now it is never our intention to stop players having fun farming, as we have our own farming teams – we just weren’t familiar with this particular team.

For this reason, we will be reverting the changes to Sunspear. As previously mentioned, we’re hesitant to touch the Firestarter Talent, but we’re quite happy to give you your Phoenicia team back! None of the other balance changes will be affected.

Will the newer version of the trait (+2 Red Mana) come back as a Legendary Trait in the future?

If so, it will only be on a Hero Class. Unfortunately, these +2 Link traits cannot exist on regular (non-Hero) troops, as that allows them to be stacked, and allows too much mana to generate in a single turn.

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Best Gems of War change ever. Thanks!

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I personally think that a weaker version, a +1 if you will, would work perfectly to replace the 2nd trait. Yes its the same as the 70 talent, but it stacks to be the same as the trait you wanted to give us.

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Thank you :green_heart:

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Thank you for listening! I would actually say it wasn’t just Phoenicia that needed Sunspear - in fact, nearly every existing Sunspear team was built around the original trait, so I don’t think most of them would have worked. Of course we would have found new teams for the new trait - a +5 red mana bonus with banner/traIt/talent combined is terrifying. But I feel like it was still far too drastic a change to something that people liked in the niche it already occupied. There are only a few troops and classes in the game that get storm priority for attack teams over defense teams, and losing one would have hurt too much.

I feel like Sunspear probably gains very little from talents (except at level 100), and that’s always gonna be a complaint (see: fireproof redundancy), unless one of its trees is completely swapped out for something more useful. But the traits are what makes up for that, so I don’t think it should be a high priority for rebalancing, compared to a lot of other classes. Rebalancing should be more about minor tweaks than completely changing the identity of a class, as we had here.

Anyway, I’m quite relieved to see the extent to which community feedback is being heard and acted on now, so thank you again.

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why only SP? there are other hero classes that make a fire storm. SP even still made a firestorm. explore is even set troops so… you know if they would overwrite your storm. and… SP isnt the best class to use with Phoenicia…

:smiley: Normal - cant make everyone happy. its a complex game.

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May we know when this will happen? Thanks .

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Thanks for hearing us. Please feel free to change the 2nd trait to literally anything else you want. :wink:

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At least with Immunity to Burning and Faerie Fire as a second trait, I can choose Immunity to Frozen as well.

… I don’t really see how replacing the second trait for say Allied Raksha gain 2 life would be better and forcing a choice between Immunity to Burn and Immunity to Frozen in the process.

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We’re deploying it now, we were just doing some final tests first.

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I would happily trade the current 2nd trait for almost any other 2nd class trait. Perhaps mech 2nd trait just to troll us lol.

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If Firestarter just kicked in at the start of every turn. Then that would allow zero issues with the 4.8 version of the Sunspear Legendary trait.
To balance it. Make all the color storms kick in on every turn. Except of course the ones that need 4-5 gem matches to activate a storm.

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If every storm activated every turn, that would would throw a lot more out of balance than a single class. I think it is worth having a “weaker” storm and a “stronger” storm, as we have now. This keeps more options and strategies open than if all storms where at their strongest.

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And does nothing to fix the redundancy that the devs were trying to address.
Basically, it sounds like those who use Sunspear all the time just want a Red storm to be active all the time and therefore never want the possible opponents defense storm to override it.
If that’s the majority then that’s fine.
But originally back when Sunspear was released. The redundancy was a big complaint.
Unfortunately the devs waited until after Phoenicia was released before they decided to bother with the change. And we got what we saw after 4.8 because of it.

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Sunspear is alive again.

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Its a redundancy sure, but it is certainly not the only one. The trees are definitely in need of some changes across the board.

I just don’t think that a minor redundancy is a good enough reason to change the primary reason people play sunspear over other classes.

It is classic “cut off your nose to spite the face”. It does more damage than the initial issue.

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Thank you. Thank you.
(Glad the bin men haven’t been yet :joy::joy:)

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Thanks for returning the original Heatwave trait :smiley_cat:

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I mean, I should be happy about this but we’re literally back to the other problem, word consistency.

Storm Soul: “Conjure a Lightstorm when my turn begins.”
Heatwave: “Create a Firestorm at the start of every turn.”

Like… just… please can this not be a thing on new and modern features?

I should be happy this 3rd trait is back, but it was taken away and brought back. I’m indifferent, even though I prefer the Firestorm by a significant margin.

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