Last week on the blog we revealed our thoughts on the Falconer’s Guild and we looked at a few small changes they’ve received for Season 4. Today we’ll be continuing with our model card reveals with a look at the Season 4 card for the Fishermen’s Guild Veteran Siren, the Turning of the Tide.

There’s Something Fishy Going on Here…

As we mentioned on last week’s blog, one of the first things we did when we started the development of Season 4 was to take a look at the intended playstyle for every Guild as a whole, and then each model individually. This process helped us to identify not only which models needed to change, but also by how much and with what purpose in mind. These objectives were in addition to overall aims such as reducing complexity and tweaking game balance.

The Fishermen’s Guild were one of the first Guilds ever to be designed for Guild Ball, alongside the Butcher’s Guild. Since then, the Butchers and the Fishermen have always represented two extremes of the game, in terms of playstyle. The Butchers are all about inflicting the maximum amount of damage they can, and the Fishermen are all about scoring as many goals as they can. One of the things we are careful to avoid when designing new players and new Guilds is Guilds homogenisation. We try to ensure that they Butchers never have access to a better striker than the Fishermen do, for example, and for the most part we believe we’ve been successful in ensuring that each Guild has a unique identity.

When it came analysing the identity of the Fishermen however, it became clear that we had deviated somewhat from their original design. The advent of Corsair and Sakana in Season 2 allowed the Fishermen to have in-Guild models with momentous damage, something they only had access to through Union mercenaries before that. At the time, this made some sense. We wanted to level the playing field and allow the Fishermen to have the potential to inflict take outs in case their goal scoring game should ever falter. However, in the current climate where there are quite a few Guilds out there with strong goal scoring games backed up by momentous damage take outs, the Fishermen were starting to lose some of their unique identity.

So we’ve taken the step of removing all momentous damage from the Fishermen’s Guild to return them to being the only Guild with such an extreme playbook design. However, they will still be capable of inflicting take outs to facilitate a 2 goals and 2 take outs playstyle, particularly when captained by Corsair. To give an example of how the Fishermen’s take out game has changed, in Season 4 Corsair still has an effective playbook for causing damage, as well as this brand new character trait.