Happy Monday, Heroes!

Today’s update that’s bringing a Spell re-balance is kicking in! As we’ve mentioned in yesterday’s post, this update is primarily focused on Heroes and their Spells after seeing trends in data and community feedback. To make sure these changes have the proper effect and to understand the outcome and bigger picture adequately, we’re introducing a more comprehensive update instead of smaller patches across the board.

To give more context and reasons behind the specifics of the update, continue reading for developer comments coming straight from the team who worked on these changes:

Account level cap has been raised from 10 to 13. Any experience players have acquired so far since reaching the level cap was recorded and will automatically level up your accounts.

Spells level cap was raised from 10 to 13. The costs of upgrades from 1 - 10 remain the same, where the cost for leveling spells up to 13 will scale accordingly. Players will keep their current spell levels. Players will also keep their current hero levels, and the evolutions they had - there were no changes to the Hero leveling system.

Initially, during soft-launch, we’ve had both minions and spells go up to level 10, and scale up by 20% per level. When we released the game globally, we’ve revamped the minion leveling system to scale up to 13, and changed the scaling to 10% per level, to allow for a more granular experience of more frequent, smaller upgrades. We realized it makes sense to have the spells follow this scaling as well, to make their scaling follow minions, rather than be weak on early levels, and then too strong on later levels. Alongside this, we felt this was a natural moment to up the scaling of Accounts as well, since we now have more sources of experience with having more levels for spells.

Most damage spells have had their damage somewhat reduced when compared to the minions of the same level or their cooldowns increased.

Data on usage, as well as user research we’ve done shows that players mostly prefer playing area damage spells over any kind of spell. While damage spells are fun, and help create back-and-forth games, we felt they were hurting variety in terms of strategy. Most of them were strong enough to kill even late-game tanks, reducing the distinction between weaker and stronger units. We also want to create more variety in terms of gameplay experience by making more utility based spells viable to be used.

5 spells (4 epic and 1 rare) have been reworked, 2 of which have been renamed (you can read the details on spells in the patch notes down below).

Most of the spells we reworked had less than 0.1% usage in battle. We wanted to make sure every hero had a cool epic spell that fit their character but was also on par with other abilities in terms of power. In case of Spirit Call we’ve added the change where spirits will slowly decay - putting them on a timer. This will make sure that there is a cap to how much you can actually achieve with it, while still allowing for powerful offensive plays. We got lots of cool community suggestions surrounding Spirit Call, which played a major part during our rework! When weighted against many other options we’ve considered and tested we figured this felt like the most natural way to make Spirit Call more balanced.