September 18, 2019
Welcome to the second Dev Insight article where we take a closer look on upcoming card changes. This time, we’ll talk about Hero cards.
One of the objectives along with the upcoming card changes is to encourage more variety of use in Heroes. This means improving some Heroes while nerfing others and completely redesigning some.
Heroes have typically slotted into two separate camps: general use Heroes and ‘build around’ Heroes. The former are Heroes that can fit into almost any deck, and don’t care too much about what kind of cards that deck plays. The latter are Heroes that require the deck to contain specific types of cards in order to fully benefit from their powers. When general use Heroes fit better into a deck that has been built around the powers of another Hero, we’ve obviously done something wrong.
The following post shows example adjustments for a number of cards, to see the original versions of these cards, you can view them on the card database here.
It’s no secret that we’ve always had an issue with Heroes that can draw cards. Among our very first design principles, we said that the base power of a Hero Ability should never be as good as playing card, unless the current circumstances warrants it. The moment we added Heroes that can draw a card, we broke our own rule (1 action = 1 card). However, this doesn’t mean that we want to remove any Heroes that can draw cards, but we want the use of their Abilities to feel like a genuine choice with potential drawbacks.
Heroes that straight up have an Ability to draw a card, will now do so face-up, and no longer gain an extra point of health. We’ve also docked one point of health from Heroes who can draw a card face-up with a potential side effect (not including Farapang). Finally, we’ve adjusted most Heroes that can make a sacrifice of some kind to draw more cards.
Here are a few examples:
The Heroes listed above are ones we have effectively nerfed in one way or another. What about bringing up the less seen Heroes?
As mentioned in the first Dev Insight about the upcoming changes, we are removing the “this can’t be increased by effects” clause from a bunch of Heroes (but not all), but also improving ones that have always just sat below par.
All Heroes that have a basic “[Ability]: Deal 1 damage” as an effect can now be increased by effects, and their starting health has been increased by 1. While this won’t affect all decks, it does open up some opportunities to more easily utilise cards like Stellar Fusion or Body Morph.
Here are some other Heroes who have seen some improvements:
In some cases, there are some Heroes that have just been problematic. Not necessarily that they have been overpowered, but perhaps that if they ever get a good enough card pool to make them viable, they would become problematic. In other cases, it’s just some cards we wanted better support for, and we also happened to have a problematic or underpowered Hero at hand to combine this with.
Here are some examples of Heroes who have been redesigned:
Mythic Heroes have always been some of the most complicated to balance for. As you probably already know, Mythic Heroes always have access to Elements from two different Orders.
This means that their Combo choice and card synergies are, by default, completely different from any other Hero. In most cases, this realignment of Elements is a drawback (but not always), so these effects tend to be more powerful than your average Heroes. We’re taking this opportunity to adjust some of these Heroes with the extra learnings we’ve had over the years. Below are some examples of these changes:
We hope you enjoyed this Developer Insights into the upcoming Hero changes, you can continue the discussion with us on Discord here!