Greetings Summoners!Season 2 of Alliance Wars is coming to an end, and Season 3 will be coming at you onWith the introduction of Seasons, one of our goals was to continuously iterate on the mode, introducing changes to scoring and Maps with each new Season’s start. This helps us keep the mode fresh, and introduce new Challenges that continuously shift the Contest’s Meta.Our first major change is to the Cadence of Alliance Wars Seasons as a whole. Alliance Wars Seasons will be shifting from 8 Week long seasons, into shorter 4 week Seasons, with 2 weeks off in between each Season. The rewards have also been adjusted accordingly. You can see Season rewards in game from the Alliance War tab, under Season Rewards. The intent with this change is to make seasons more manageable, and also keep the mode more competitive for the entirety of the shorter season, while also giving Summoners more opportunities throughout the year find new Alliances, recruit new members, or to start a new one. The Minimum number of Wars you must participate in to qualify for Season Rewards remains at 5.Secondly, We’re adding 1125 Tier 5 Basic Catalyst Fragments and 4500 Tier 2 Alpha Catalyst Fragments to the Rewards for the Gold 1 Bracket, to help transition Alliances in that Bracket forward.Third, we will be removing points for Defender Diversity. While this scoring method was originally meant to act as a Tie Breaker, and we have moved closer and closer with every iteration of Defender Diversity, it is still determining the winner in many Wars. As many Alliances were still able to achieve 100% Map Exploration, failing to completely diversify your defenders would lead to an Automatic loss, resulting in these Wars being determined before the War even started. In many other cases, Diversity was also forcing users to place weaker Champions, resulting in easily defeated Defenders. As we continue to monitor Wars and Defender placement, we will determine if Defender Diversity will return in later Seasons, but want to avoid the return of “spreadsheet wars”.The Maps for Easy and Normal have been completely overhauled, making completion more achievable for growing alliances and reducing complexity for those newer to the game. We’ve reduced the paths so only 5 Summoners per Battlegroup are required to reach maximum exploration rewards (we still suggest bringing more to reach 100% exploration, and doubling up on Paths) and have removed the Portals, instead opting for interlocking paths where players can choose to change directions. We’ve also reduced the number of Linked Nodes from 37, to 12 in Normal Difficulty, and 6 in Easy Difficulty.The Challenger and Expert Maps are getting a significant boost in difficulty. At this time, Exploration and Battlegroup completion is still nearly always 100%, but should be the determining factors of which Alliance wins the War, and not the Attacker Bonus. Therefore, Nodes 27-31 on both of these Maps will now act as a second set of Mini-Bosses. They will also be visible before you enter the Map, so Attackers will be able to plan ahead to counter the Champion in use, and Defenders will have a secondary layer of tricky fights outside of just the Mini-Bosses and Final Boss at the top of the map. This is more of a Challenge, but in the past, we have tried to increase the difficulty to reign in the 100% completion, but have yet to be able to do it. We will continue to monitor the difficulty of these maps and shorter seasons will allow us to iterate quicker. The buff changes will be as follows:There you have it Summoners! Remember, Alliance Wars Season 3 kicks off on July 11th! Be prepared!Questions? Ask them over in our Discussion Thread here.