[2020] Changes to the Sunspear Class

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.