Hey Guys,
Welcome to my lair, and what I hope will be a semi-regular series. Here I’m going to post discussing anything from design thoughts to discussions about bugs and beyond. This is mostly so you guys can get a small glimpse into what we have been doing or discussing.
While I would like to say, this will be a weekly thing, unfortunately I can’t make any promises when I will be able to fit this in my schedule.
Each lair post will have its own overall theme so I do ask that the discussion be kept to that theme. Also, I will say that I can’t promise to answer any questions that are asked but that I will try to answer when possible (again this depends on any spare time I have).
With all the introductions done let’s get into it.
Mythic Balance
I want to start off discussing some of the coming balance ideas + changes we’re looking at currently for the future.
Let’s start off with the one everyone is currently discussing… Famine. Famine is getting a lot more notice as he appears more in player’s GW defense teams. Famine’s spell can feel frustrating against you when it goes off as it slows down the game. To help delay him getting his spell off we’re going to increase his mana cost by a small amount. We’re also going to give players a means to counter his Mana drain at a later date (more on that further below).
Next up is Jotnar Stormshield, he’s not hitting as much as we would like and creating a giant team with him can have its own troubles. He’s getting 2 indirect buffs coming in the future. The first is a couple of giants are on the buff list for the next update, which should open more options for giant teams. The second is changes coming to Barrier which should help his legendary trait feel better (more on that further Below). Once those are out, we’ll be reviewing him further to see if his numbers need a little nudge.
Last of individual mythics I’ll mention is Ketras. He’s not quite living up to his expectation of a powerful Ancient Tauros slaying enemies with the swing of his axe. We’re looking at change his damage type a little so not only will he hit his target, but a portion of the damage will be dealt to adjacent enemies to his victim.
Bonus: Changes coming to help….
Barrier will be getting a buff in a coming update and will block devour. Many players have asked us why barrier doesn’t protect against devour. When we first added Barrier, we did consider making protect against devour except there was issue with Black Beast’s spell (where he selects an ally to devour rather than an enemy). This issue made us change the nature of barrier and felt the devouring troop earning barrier would be a fun little bonus.
Once we make this change to Barrier, we are going to be testing Black Beast. It may be that we will need to rework his spell, or it could be that we just need to make some minor changes to his spell instead.
Finally, as I said earlier we’ve been looking at better means of offering counter play to Famine + Mana drain in general. With that we’re looking to change the Mana Shield trait to also gain immunity to Mana drain. Now this seems like an obvious solution so why didn’t we do this earlier? The main reason is it isn’t possible, due to some technical issues with the way our Adobe Air client is coded… I mean, it IS possible (it’s always possible to change code), but it’s a high risk change that would certainly introduce some bugs. With the PC/ Mobile version switching over to Unity, we are now able to investigate adding this extra immunity (this is not 100% guaranteed to happen though).
Does that mean Impervious will gain immunity to Mana Drain? The answer currently is no as we feel that impervious is good enough, but we will revisit this once we know if this is possible.
