Supercell-Seth

FWIW I read every balance update idea list! Keep up the goblin-tier content!

Nope, always the closest target just like any other Troop. If you deploy something after she has picked a target though, she won't change to them.

This is LITERALLY the Arrows re-work we have in prototype right now. To be honest, I really like it! It provides a nice counter to Guards (2 shots take off shield, 3rd kills the Guards). The challenge with this rework at this point is purely visual - Arrows was the first spell introduced to the game so it's very weird in the effects code. When I switch to 3 Arrow projectiles, it becomes 3 single arrows (instead of the batch of arrows you normally see). We have been trying to fiddle with this so we can deploy it in a maintenance break, but it might require a client update with new visual effects to get working.

Yup! We had an updated text but it didn't go out with the maintenance (doh!). It may go out later this week along with a few other server tweaks

We actually have a rework to Barb Hut that has tested well. The big problem is that Barb Hut leads to a lot of stalling/draws so we aren't sure if it would be good for the game overall to have a powerful Barb Hut. We are considering other reworks in the meantime, but maybe we will end up releasing it after we can determine if Tiebreakers would lead to a defensive Barb Hut meta.

Posted this on another thread too:

The 100 gems are still there! We split up the 100 gems:

5450 -> 100 Gems

to

5225 -> 40 Gems

6150 -> 60 Gems

We did this as part of a re-balance to the Trophy Road rewards, bringing more rewards to lower tiers. Moving the gems down will ensure far more players will get some gems (the peak of players is around 5300, there's a big drop-off after that mark). We also moved lots of Gold lower - all the Gold nodes are 5000 now instead of 2000, 3000, etc at lower trophy ranks. We have re-introduced the choose-your-reward tiers with seasonal themed cards after fixing bugs and listening to player feedback on how the choices should work. Finally, chests have been moved lower including an Epic Chest at the first set of rewards.

Overall, Trophy Road is slightly more valuable - about 3-4% than before - but the rewards have shifted downwards so the players in the 4000-5300 range should feel much more reward...

The 100 gems are still there! We split up the 100 gems:

5450 -> 100 Gems

to

5225 -> 40 Gems

6150 -> 60 Gems

We did this as part of a rebalance to the Trophy Road rewards, bringing more rewards to lower tiers. Moving the gems down will ensure far more players will get some gems (the peak of players is around 5300, there's a big drop-off after that mark). We also moved lots of Gold lower - all the Gold nodes are 5000 now instead of 2000, 3000, etc at lower trophy ranks. We have re-introduced the choose-your-reward tiers with seasonal themed cards after fixing bugs and listening to player feedback on how the choices should work. Finally, chests have been moved lower including an Epic Chest at the first set of rewards.

Overall, Trophy Road is slightly more valuable - about 3-4% than before - but the rewards have shifted downwards so the players in the 4000-5300 range should feel much more rewarded than before. Players who complete the ...

We do have plans to release more Common cards! Interestingly enough, Commons tend to the be the hardest cards to design. We generally want Commons to be very mechanics-light, easy to understand. With most of the basic cards already designed (Knight, Barbarians, Goblins, etc) its difficult to come up with new cards, with few mechanics, that don't overlap with existing cards. Sure, we COULD make another mini-tank with no special abilities that happens to cost 4, but that feels really cheap on our part compared to something with a lot of new stuff. Having a lot of new mechanics, however, naturally drifts a card to Epic or Legendary.

If I could go back in time, I think cards like Mega Minion and even PEKKA would make more sense as Commons, whereas cards like Tesla or Skeleton Barrel should probably be Rares or higher. But we are challenging ourselves to think of more Common/Rare type cards, and I don't think you'll have to wait too terribly long for a non-Legendary release :)

This is just a visual bug - the card info screen only displays both values if they are at least 1 tile different. The projectile still travels 4.5 tiles

This is tied to the range - if he has more time to start a swing, he's more likely to complete it. We decided to not increase the load time because we didn't want to overdo it and end up making him OP. Just fix the two most glaring problems - not killing fireball bait like Flying Machine, and making his minimum range not cartoonishly short.

The reason we decided to go with 4 is that his old minimum was 4.5 - we want our reworks to be different but still feel familiar to players. The much shorter minimum range felt wrong to many existing Executioner player, so this change should make him feel/player much like before his rework.

Zappies are definitely on the 'probably rework' list. We had one rework in testing but it didn't feel great and existing Zappies players didn't feel like it was an improvement. So we went back to the drawing board with a different rework but that starts the timeline all over again with playtesting.

Hey JC, thanks for your well-written reply.

We made a big list of cards in the beginning to rework and Executioner was a popular choice (when I did a twitter question he came up often as well). At the time we locked in on Exe for September, Baby Dragon was peaking in usage and we wanted to prioritize splash attackers because the meta needed more diversity in that role. Executioner was always going to be the hardest of the reworks because splash attackers are so hard to balance, but we will get him balanced and continue the march of fixing cards that are not finding a spot in the game.

I agree the Elite Barbs rework did not go far enough, that was one of the reasons we decided to commit to much braver changes and deal with the consequences as they come up. We have learned a lot from the last few days and that increases the chances of success in the future :)

CRL runs for many months out of the year - CRL will still be running next month as well, so we don't want to hold all balance changes (or limit ourselves to only tiny changes) for 3-6 months out of the year.

I do agree that perhaps in this case we should have trusted our data and playtesters and not overreacted to the community response, but that is the challenge of trying to balance player feedback with internal data. We will continue to evaluate the changes and see what we can do. I can pretty much guarantee next month's rework will go out as-tested regardless of what social media's reaction is.

I hear your criticism - its too early to tell where Executioner will land but if it's too weak then yeah we can consider making changes outside of the normal schedule. We will not revert back to the old Executioner but I promise we will make sure the new Executioner is a strong, viable option within the new framework of a shorter-range but high damage splash attacker.

If we cancelled every balance change that the community reacted to before release, we would not release anything. Remember, like 5 hours ago people we absolutely certain we would have to nerf Executioner. So we nerfed it - and perhaps it was too much. The alternative is saying "Sorry players, we aren't going to listen to you" and perhaps having to nerf anyways. With big changes, developers are definitely between a rock and a hard place - we had our playtest data that showed the change was dramatic but not OP and a community on the brink of riot over a perceived massive buff. We made a call and for better or worse we will live with result and share our thoughts with you via social media like this.

I am sorry you feel that way - give it a few days and see if you still feel that way. If so, we will continue to tweak/buff the Executioner. The whole point of reworks is to make low-usage cards for viable. If we didn't get it right this time, we will keep working on it.

Yep! Most cards have a small number of interaction changes from +1/-1 level. That's just a part of leveling up, it's not possible to make every interaction the same within a band of +/- 10% damage and health. Cards can have a few of these, but if it affects too many various cards of different roles then the normal methods of counterplay start to fall apart.

I mentioned this on Twitter earlier this week - we want to be aggressive and push these reworks to be very good. If he's not clearly better then people feel betrayed and you can see the vitriol in these comments and on social media. Maybe the first version of Executioner was pushed too far, but naturally we are trying to balance "playtest changes and consider data" with "respond to criticism from pros and the community". The latter was very clear this weekend that they felt we were making a mistake so we try to listen to them.

Perhaps this is true - we will keep watching the stats and make changes accordingly. Worst case, we can buff with next month's balance changes if he's truly worse overall. We try not to react to day-1 feelings since it takes a few days for people to try out new changes before settling.