Hang tight! We have a lot of reworks in the mix, and Zappies is definitely in the discussion. I think its important the game has a variety of stun-attacking Troops available to players to minimize the swinginess of Inferno or Charging cards. The goals of a Zappies rework would be to make them better at splitting lanes and making the first attack not nearly so slow. But we want to do more than just a faster first hit :)

:}

This! Fisherman at the river can yeet the Balloon away and apply a Slow effect with the hook. More unique counters to Air cards is something we have been looking at, because all-Air decks can be frustrating when they dominate the metagame.

The original version of the rework was at 4 Elixir! But as we playtested and polled players, it became apparent that Executioner is played largely because of his toughness. If we made him 4 cost and lowered his health to die to Lightning, we would be betraying every existing Executioner player and that's not a good way to start off a rework. Ultimately keeping him Lightning proof at equal levels was a core pillar of the new design, along with needing to kill Barbarians with a single attack.

Ideally we have big reworks coming every month or every other month for a while. There are a lot of cards that need love but shouldn't just get a direct stats buff. Executioner has stood out for a while - he's been underperforming in competitive play, but just a 10% health buff doesn't really fix that fact that he's not particularly unique when compared to the variety of ranged splash attackers. Hopefully making him the shortest range but highest damage anti-air splash attacker creates interesting decisions of Ice Wiz vs Baby Dragon vs new Executioner

What other cards do y'all think could use a full design rework?

Short answer: No, not in the next update

Long answer: We have had literally hours upon hours of discussions about Clan Wars. Overall, the team agrees that it needs an update. However, we feel the problems with Clan Wars are deeper than just surface-level fixes. We have seen multiple community posts/videos about requested changes (more capped modes, donating War Day battles, resetting Trophies, etc) but even if we did all of those changes there would still be systemic issues with Clan Wars that get stale over time. Clan Wars needs to be a huge, socially-driven endgame and its just not quite filling that role for now.

We have a variety of whiteboards / prototypes towards a Clan Wars update, but we can't provide a timeline for its launch. When you do get it though, we promise it will be epic and change the way Clash Royale is played forever :)

Hey! I have spent my whole career working on large mobile games. I believe nearly every game I have worked on has spent time in the Top 50 charts, I spent 2011 -> 2016 in Silicon Valley. I took a two year attempt at YouTube/streaming/esports and while there were certain aspects of it that I enjoyed, I preferred to work in a collaborative environment doing game development more than purely content creation.

This is correct - just an unforeseen bug that old Quests did not update to the new conditions. Every new Quest should work in all competitive battle modes, but the old ones need to cycle out.

Hey there! Here's how this happened:

While reworking Quests, we decided to re-write the lines into a simpler syntax. For example:

"Play cards that cost 6 Elixir or more 30 times" -> "Play 30 cards that cost 6 or more Elixir". The latter reads more naturally. When we got to "2 or less Elixir" string, we decided to rewrite it as "1 or 2 Elixir". In the Quests data, that's a simple change to make Min_Elixir = 1 (it was null before). Each Quest has its own min/max elixir setting, which is how we added the new Play 3-Cost, Play 4-Cost, etc Quests. Min and Max is just set to that number.

When the update goes live, the strings updated but the data of each Quest was saved from the moment you got the quest. So even though the conditions of new Quests were updated, any existing ones used their stored data. Since the Quests had null for min_elixir, the updated string didn't have a number to reference and that's why it displays as the variable name.

This is also...

Why not both? This change aimed to solve two problems:

- There wasn't a clear hierarchy for which melee Troops would get the first hit as ranges were all over the place. You had to memorize individual reactions based on unique ranges + first hit timers. In general now, the longer melee range will get the first attack (there will be some exceptions with incredibly fast attackers). This rewards knowledge a bit better as players can research and think up more reasons to swap from (example) Lumberjack to Mini PEKKA, realizing they get something more than just DPS in the trade off.

- Once the ranges had been set, all the cards in the middle needed to be aligned to them. The changes made were made with balance in mind. Cards like Knight and Mini-P that could use a minor nerf gets a bit longer reach and cards like Prince can get a bit of a haircut without changing any surfaced stats.

I hope this update DOES change interactions and balance, by improving the lo...

As we move to rework cards more often (instead of little stat nudges), Zappies are totally the sort of card that we would look at. Zappies, like Freeze, make the game way less fun when they are 'balanced'. Zappies had something like a 12% use rate and 57% win rate, the meta was verrrrry defensive and frustrating to attack into them. I think the game is in a better state overall with them at 1%/51%.

But what's even better is reworking them to be less frustrating, then the meta can tolerate them at a higher use rate! So yeah, in short, Zappies are likely the sort of card to get reworked eventually.

Annoyingly, mine is a dash (not underscore) because someone grabbed the underscore name. So its dash for Seth, underscore for Drew or Daria

Wall Breakers gain quite a few new skill-testing tricks with this buff! You can use Miner to distract the tower and whatever is played to defend the Miner can be caught in the WB blast. It's very fun to set up Traps for your opponent, adding a new dimension to a card that is very basic by design. Glad we could make all 7 Wall Breaker fans happy :)

Rascals almost made the cut :) They fluctuate a lot in win rate, sometimes over the line and sometimes just under. As their use rate rises and win rates stay high though, I would say they are a likely candidate for next month.

In the 5000-5499 Trophy range, Witch has a 17% use rate. Buffing Princess and Bomber might help deal with her :)

I'm sorry you feel that way, I always respect your opinion and read your posts when I come across them.

Please give the balance team a chance here, I will happily come back and eat crow if we totally bork the meta. But every month we release a list of changes, the community spends a weekend saying that we have totally ruined everything, and yet this last month was one of the most diverse metas ever. If every month was really as bad as first impressions seem, we would not have reached this point as a community.

We use level one stats in the post because thats the number that changes, and ripples up to higher levels. Here is the Clone balance note I wrote (we didn't add it because it was a few weeks ago and seemed like old news):

CLONE Radius Reduced 4 -> 3

This change went live with the April update. We initially increased Clone’s radius to try and buff an underperforming card. The most recent buff, making the Clone...

This is basically our stance for now. Despite having very high use rates, Baby Dragon sits around 48-52% win rate every day, in both Classics/Grands, and doesn't budge much even when you look solely at 8-12 win games.

Baby Dragon is a jack-of-all-trades that can fit into basically any archetype, providing the meta with a solid presence to keep air and swarm decks in check. I think the meta is better off with Baby Dragon being very popular compared to when Royal Ghost, Bandit, Valkyrie etc filled that spot of "Most Popular Troop".

Its possible we would nerf Baby Dragon with a slight health reduction (to put it around 1000 HP) but this month I suspect Baby Drag + Tornado will be useful in regulating how strong 3M decks can be.

Because it hasn't :) This is a good example of how websites can skew your perception of the meta. Here are the four small spells use/win rates in Challenges:

• Log - 30% / 48%
• Barb Barrel - 30% / 56%
• Zap - 27% / 49%
• Snowball - 18% / 58%

Snowball is a bit concerning, we have a nerf we want to apply but it requires a client update so it will have to wait. Barb Barrel has been slowly trending down, and given how many times we have buffed/nerfed it, we are letting it sit a bit longer because if it does get nerfed again it will likely be another Barbarians health nerf instead of Barrel-specific change. (Barbs are sitting at 55% WR, Battle Ram at 54%)

In general, Barb Barrel and Snowball are the higher skill cap Spells compared to Zap/Log. It stands to reason that better players would take advantage of them to generate marginally better results. This is why websites (which tend to self-select for hardcore players) are showing ...

Hey! During our testing we felt that the strongest use case of 3M was being a very quick defense. If you attacked and your opponent dropped 3M, they near-instantly generated a ton of damage. Even if you FB+Zapped them rather quickly, they often got ~3 Elixir worth of damage in, negating the Elixir trade. With a slower deploy time on defense, there are chances to damage or defeat them before they get a shot off. 3s Deploy time also greatly reduces the effectiveness of playing 3M in the pocket to take a 2nd tower.

Splitting behind the King Tower with a slower deployment does allow more saved Elixir, but the slower reaction time gives a bigger window for Bridgespam, Log Bait, or Miner decks to get in chip damage before they walk/shoot. In addition to changes to Barbarians, introduction of Earthquake, and buffing multiple splash Troops that match up well against 3M... I am optimistic the meta will find the tools to adapt.

I understand the feeling that this might be a b...

Hello r/ClashRoyale!For those who don't know me I'm Seth, Game Designer for Clash Royale.

We hope you are enjoying the new update!

The newest card to Clash Royale has been rumbling through Challenges and Trophy Road – EARTHQUAKE!

Today we wanted to take some time to talk about how and why we decided to bring this anti-Building spell from Clash of Clans into Clash Royale. If you would like to read past card design blogs here on reddit, check out:

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