Hi Everyone,
Some good news… due to a (surprisingly speedy) trip through Apple certification, we actually have the Guild Wars update ready to release TOMORROW!
We really were expecting it to happen next week, but since it’s all good to go, we figured why not let you all get into your first Guild War on Monday, instead of waiting another week!
Now… a question we’ve been asked a lot lately is:
As some of you know, we were waiting for a small feature in the client update which allowed us to cap boosts.
SO… here is Bone Dragon 3.0, along with some graphs to show how we changed him:
Old Bone Dragon
Strip Flesh: 8 Skulls + 1 per 3 Armor Stripped (& strip ALL armor), for 14 Mana
Beginner players didn’t like him, as he tended to misfire too much, but we were kinda okay with that. He had a sweet spot through some of the mid-game where he was a lot of fun (albeit still just a LITTLE too powerful in my opinion). By mid-to-late game, however, due to the way Armor continues to scale up, he became a holy terror, and just created more skulls than mankind was ever intended to create!
New Bone Dragon 3.0
Strip Flesh: 9 Skulls + 1 per 4 Armor Stripped (& strip UP TO 25 Armor), for 15 Mana
So… we’ve increased the power for starting players a little at the small cost of +1 Mana… that should make him feeel better for any newer players who receive him. We’ve also kept number of skulls about the same through mid game, but nudged his efficiency down very slightly until you hit the 25 Armor limit.
At THIS point, he’s creating 15 Skulls, which is still pretty great, and fairly likely to give you an extra turn… just not in a board full of skulls brain-jellifying type of way!
An interesting side effect of the reduced armor-strip is that you sometimes get 2 casts on the same troop. Oh, and now Grave Knight is your buddy if you ever want REAL armor stripping!
We’ve included some graphs below to show our line of thinking - one graph shows the raw number of skulls created, and another showing his mana efficiency (skulls created per 100 mana)
The gray line shows an early test version of the changes: 7 Skulls + 1 per 5 Armor Stripped (max of 30 Armor), which felt too weak when we tested it. We tried a few different iterations until we settled on the yellow line.
A quick note: this update is for PC/Mobile only… we’re continuing to get the console versions closer and closer, but we’re not quite there yet (truth is that console may always be a little behind because of certification times for Microsoft & Sony)