2, 4, 6, 8, Who Do We Appreciate? SLEDGE!

So lets get into the meat of this, Sledge. In Season 3 he was firstly overshadowed by Iron since it was much easier to get consistent damage output from him, and then by Veteran Cinder because she was the prototype for the new way to make an Apprentice. We took the lessons learned from Sledge’s original development, and that of Veteran Cinder’s, and applied them to Sledge’s Season 4 changes.

The first thing we did was take another look at Sledge’s intended playstyle, a model who deals massive damage per attack, but doesn’t have as many attacks per turn as someone like Iron or Veteran Cinder. The problem was that Sledge’s attacks were not doing enough damage to make this type of playstyle effective. The answer was that we needed to juice up his playbook damage, hence this section’s title! Each result has been increased by at least 1 damage, and in some cases by 2 damage! This gives Sledge’s attacks an incredible amount of potency and even though damage from someone like Iron may be more consistent, the upper end potential for Sledge’s damage output scales significantly faster than Iron’s. In other words, set up for Sledge will often have a greater effect than the same level of set up for Iron.

The only other changes to the front of Sledge’s card were that both his push results moved down by a single column, and he gained a single point of health which gives him a total of 13 hp. The change to Sledge's push playbook results will be explained when we talk about Sledge's character traits. The extra health point better reflects how much fighting we expect Sledge to do whilst keeping him in line with the majority of Apprentice health pools.

Anvil’s changes are more numerous, but also more subtle than Sledge’s. For Sledge to get the most out of his playbook, he needs to be marshalled by a Master Blacksmith capable of easily sending Sledge’s damage output into the stratosphere. To this end, more or less everything Anvil does has been made a little more efficient or easier to use.

Starting off with his playbook, the two most important results that Anvil has are his momentous knockdown on the first column, and the playbook trigger for his character plays. The latter result has moved down from the third column to the second. This mainly means that Anvil will be able to hit his Singled Out character play pretty easily against most targets, which is an excellent way to increase the damage output of any Apprentice Blacksmith, particularly Sledge. In addition, we extended the traditional Master Blacksmith playbook style to Anvil, making his playbook one lower than his TAC.

To help Anvil apply his more efficient playbook, we also increased his MOV stat from 4”/6” to 5”/7”. Not a dramatic increase, but that extra inch when making a jog to go and knock an enemy model down and put Singled Out on it is hugely important.

Finally, we also realised that Anvil wasn’t quite as difficult to take out as we thought he should be. Master Blacksmiths are renowned for their resilience, and Anvil should stand out even among the company of his fellows. So we made a simple change and increased Anvil’s number of health points from 19 to 22.