Supercell-Seth

Of course we think about ladder levels but it's not the primary focus of our balance. The difference with Executioner is that it wasn't just 1 or 2 interactions here, he had more than usual and once all of those got flipped with an overlevel there were hardly any counters. We have made balance changes specifically focused on improving ladder interactions in the past, it's just not our highest priority since we assume players will eventually max out their deck, making level interactions less important than endgame balance between equal leveled cards.

Because Mega Knight isn't 40% winrate - he's at 4%-48% in 8+ Win GC games. So while a bit underused in top play, he's not bad. His use rates are strong in GCs (11%) / CCs (17%) overall and very popular on the ladder until you get to the very top highest ranks.

The balance changes are live now! Between the announcement on Saturday and deployment today, we decided to pull back slightly on the Executioner rework:

Original Rework:

• Damage Increased 98%
• Range Reduced to min 3.5 -> max 5
• Hit Speed Reduced to 2.5

What We Deployed Today:

• Damage Increased 82%
• Ranged Reduced to min 3.0 -> max 4.5
• Hit Speed Reduced to 2.5
  (Axe time was also reduced, but just proportionally to the range)

I wanted to write this blog post on the two reasons we decided to hedge our bets with the Executioner between the announcement this weekend and Monday’s release. It boils down to two major factors: the impending start of CRL and the effect of various ladder levels.

Clash Royale League

As many of you know - the debut of the CRL West Fall Split is this month, and CRL Asia and China have already started! CRL consists of the best p...

Your last line is really the crux of it and its something that has been echoed by every balance team of every live game of every genre - when you have enough players, its impossible to playtest perfectly. We can playtest things into the ground and players will have more battles with it in 5 minutes than we could in months, even with a big team. Ultimately there is always going to be room for error and that's part of the job. PEKKA fell into that margin of error (we did have discussions above Medium vs Long range during testing) and when that happens it's incumbent upon us to fix it quickly. Overall I think we get more right than wrong and if we can keep up a positive %, the game will march towards a better state each month.

I don't think our goal is to get every card in the 4-13% use rate range. Some cards like Spells or Mega Minion will ALWAYS be above that range regardless of how bad they are - Wizard is proof of that. But we do care about win rates. Even if the use rate is low, the win rate needs to be competitive so players of niche strategies still feel like they can keep up.

Cards like Skeleton Barrel and Three Musketeers are not a high priority because they maintain a decent win rate despite low usage. Cards like Bowler (mentioned above) are perfect candidates for buffs because their win rate is bad even with only Bowler fans playing him.

Bowler may have a rework this year too :) Hard to predict any timeline, but there are many Epics that could use some love to make them feel truly Epic and big bowlie boi is certainly not as cool as he could be.

no joke, this is among the best/most professional suggestions I've ever seen on reddit. It's easy to lulz over the handwritten text (omg dude why did you not just type this out) but it effectively analyzes problems and proposes well thought out solutions to them. Even the color coding helps convey the information effectively

Congrats!! Getting to 3000 and then 3300 in a single session is wild! Just 300 more Trophies and you'll have all the cards available to unlock :)

Hey! Welcome to Clash Royale, figured I'd give you a few tips:

I'm guessing from the 25 cards found that you are roughly in Arena 4-5. The most popular cards in that range are Baby Dragon, Skeleton Army, Prince, and Witch. You have plenty of counter to Skeleton Army, but your deck has no Spells! Spells are important to remove defending Troops that are placed by your opponent. Most decks follow roughly this formula:

1. Win Condition - this is the main Building-Targeting troop that your deck is built around. You have both Giant and Hog Rider in this deck, both are great but you might not need both.
2. Ranged Anti Air - because flying Troops like Baby Dragon can be devastating, most decks pack one sturdy ranged attacker like Musketeer or Wizard
3. Cheap Anti Air - as a safety/backup, it's good to have another anti-air card - usually a bit less expensive like Archers, Minions, or Bats
4. Melee Damage - to fight high Health building-targeters like Gi...

Also, visual bugs can be fixed but only with a client update. So we could fix the bugs on our side but that doesn't fix them for a September balance update. Maintenance changes only tweak numbers, but don't update game logic or change art files.

Hey! This is basically correct - we have a variety of Tournament reward 'templates' and try to rotate through them. Some have a lot of trade tokens, and others like this one are purely gold. Just because we run this set of rewards for this Global Tournament does not mean trade tokens will never appear again.

Golem has only a 7% usage rate, so even if every single Golem deck ran Baby Dragon, it's still used in a variety of decks. At least some of those players have opted to switch from Baby Dragon in their decks (or changed decks entirely). Either way, a well-rounded support card at 21% usage isn't too crazy, that's about the same as Electro Wizard, Bandit, Mega Minion, etc.

With only a 49% win rate, you can assume a nerf would plummet both use and win rates - given that there aren't great alternatives for splash attackers yet that would leave decks with extremely few options for that role. We stated last month that we want to buff up all the underperforming splash attackers before making a call on Baby Dragon. We could nerf it this month - but if it just dropped so much without touching it, why should we nerf it?

When we developed Pass Royale and Trophy Road we made a few variants of the rewards. Each path has nearly identical value (when converted to a neutral economy value) but mixed up the spots where you unlock them. The reason we do this is to gauge feedback and learn. We learned a lot from the community reaction to the earlier Legendary this month, and will very likely return it to Tier 35 in future months. The only way to know is to experiment!

We are all super excited for the next card. It's a really fun design, has a unique mechanic, and challenges both players in an interesting way. Should definitely open up new deck archetypes too!

There was a very old prototype troop (Paladin) that cast Heal on himself every time he attacked! We discarded the concept for now but never say never :)

Things Barb Barrel can still do that Log can't:

- Play in the middle to pull a Baby Dragon or Mega Minion into the opposite lane

- Cycle in the back for a cheap Barb defender

- Counter Goblin Gang at the river and hit the tower for more damage

- Counter Goblin Barrel and provide a counter attacker

- Single handedly kill a distracted support Troop

Barb Barrel is still pretty versatile and strong - it can still kill Princess / Dart Goblin / Rascal Girls, you just rely on the Barbarian to finish them off and lose the ability to chip tower. Barb Barrel had over a 50% use rate in high level play for months on end, it needed a nerf for sure. Something had to be done to change at least one fundamental interaction and I think the Princess/bait type decks were the ones that suffered most from Barb Barrel's insane value. It has the same win rate as Zap and Log now, so let's see how the player base adapts to the change over the next few months.

I go back and forth on Furnace. It's not OP (4%-49% in GCs, 8%-52% on Ladder) but it is annoying. Something I find frustrating is that even after a Fireball or Poison there's that last wave of Fire Spirits that burp out. We have discussed reducing the health so that the final wave doesn't come out, but Poison doesn't really need that buff and Furnace probably shouldn't be so easily countered by Spells. It's a design that is meant to be a little challenging to interact with, but I agree that frustrating gameplay should be addressed as much as possible.

We are still watching PEKKA, but yes the win rates and use rates have trended up slightly. If it holds, I think PEKKA would receive a small health or range nerf. The goal was a minor nerf and it ended up being a minor buff. For all the talk about how we don't listen to the community, the PEKKA change was reduced BECAUSE of the community. Originally it was -15% health, but we knew it would be controversial and decided to hedge a little bit because we didn't want to over-nerf it. We even warned the YouTubers about it before the balances were announced, but clearly we should have gone with our first instinct.

Mega Knight isn't that bad: 11%-46% in GCs (7%-50% in 8+ win games). There are no plans to buff him right now, but of course that could change any month. He's very popular on Ladder (top 5 played Troop from 4-5k) and Classics (20%-50% use-win) so we are putting priority on more pressing cards that need reworks.

The monthly Classic Deck updates and introducing modes like Wall Breaker Party to Clan Wars has been our attempt to keep Clan Wars fresh in the meantime without contributing too much development time. Every day spent on Clan Wars now takes away from the update we would like to do, so hopefully those little changes keep it entertaining in the meantime :)

Golem has actually dropped in use/win rate since the update, as Bridge Spam has gotten more popular. You can't really drop an 8-elixir tank vs. Bridge Spam, so that's a bad matchup for the big boy. We may change the numbers of death damage vs. normal attacks on them though, I agree a lone Golem is probably too threatening. The strength of beatdown decks should come primarily from the support troops and not an unsupported tank.