Scars of War Balance Changes

Hey all, Corey Burkhart here with a Development update with the release of the HEX’s sixth set, Scars of War. Today, we’re announcing changes to some of the Herofall champions.

I want to start by saying we take changes to our game very seriously. We stand by our promise to not change PvP cards that people have spent time, energy, and money to collect. You’ve made an investment into HEX and we want to protect your collections and your fun. That said, occasionally things need additional tuning to ensure the best possible play experience for everyone. So, today we’re announcing changes to some of the Herofall champions which will go live with the Scars of War patch.

With Herofall, we wanted to evoke the feeling of war time. We wanted the power of Dreadlings to be leveraged by Underworld forces in teeming, swarming waves. And, we wanted the Ardent to leverage Valorous forces to stand fast against the Underworld assault. In aiming at these goals, however, there were some cards and combinations that were pushed too far to the detriment of the overall play experience. Most of these issues spawn not from the cards inside of a pack, but instead from the champions you get to use every game (assuming you hit the necessary charges and thresholds).

From our data, a few champions have a vastly disproportionate play and win rates which have been stifling creative freedom for our deckbuilders. We’re aiming to correct these rates with this update. Therefore, the following changes have been made to the Herofall champions in the name of format diversity:

All triple thresholded champions have been reduced to double.

Angus the Arsonist- Has had the damage he deals reduced to 3.

Gorn of the Hell Pits – Has been increased to 4 charges and health reduced to 21.

Lysander – Has been increased to 4 charges.

Wildshaper Kaliban – Has had his charge cost increased to 7.

Takahiro – Has had his health increased to 18.

Blue Sparrow – Has had her health increased to 21.

Triple Thresholded Champions

We initially put champions that required three of their threshold into the set to synergize with the “matriarch” cycle (Bride of the Damned, Daughter of the Poet, Matriarch of Flames, Empress of Ice, and Mightsinger of Ages) and the 1-cost cycle (Misery, Battle Hymn, Fireball, Frostbite, and Clobberdon). These cycles were something we wanted to use as a tool to incentivize mono-shard play. With the printing of the wells (Well of Purpose, (Well of Life, (Well of Innovation, etc), we felt it necessary to provide powerful mono incentives to pull back on the potential desire to play three+ shard “good stuff” decks. The thought was that if there were very powerful single-shard cards, there’d be balance in deckbuilding. These triple threshold champions were designed alongside the matriarch cycle to continue that initiative and to help define what these shards were looking for.

As time passed, we realized our error. Matriarchs have flexibility because they can be used even without meeting the five threshold mark. This is not true for our triple threshold champions, and so they were seldom played, which has in turn reduced the number of options for deckbuilding archetypes. This was never our intention. Therefore, we’re dropping a threshold off of each of the following champions to make them easier to play.

We still think varied threshold is useful design space, but Herofall was not the place for it. We’ll look for better places to use triple-thresholded champions and allocate proper power and definition to them in the future.

Angus the Arsonist is the only champion on here for its impact outside of limited. Angus exhibited strong constructed win-rates at around 61.6%. By itself this isn’t a problem, but Angus had other effects which tipped him over the edge for us.

We want diversity in the metagame. With Angus around, he was crowding out the ability to make other true aggressive decks. When you’d build another aggressive deck, the first question you’d have to ask is “what makes this better than playing Angus?” The Ruby aggressive cards are intentionally pushed, we knew that when we released Herofall, but we also intended for there to be aggressive Wild and Diamond decks roaming the ladder as well. With Angus’ strong early troops, Ruby burn, and champion charge power to close the door, it was hard to justify playing another aggressive strategy.

Having a “best” deck is a good thing. I’m not going to debate if Angus was the best deck in Herofall constructed, but instead I will talk about the concept of there being a “best” deck for a moment. Having a deck or series of top decks for deckbuilders to aim for is great. There’s fantastic tension as players vie to innovate the next piece of technology that can topple the existing “best.” The positive moment of finding some combo or deck that can take down one of the top dogs is one of the best feelings deckbuilders can get when it comes to the competitive environment. You can’t build to a field if there aren’t specific powerful or popular strategies.

That said, there have to be cards/combinations to properly tackle a dominant deck’s strategy. As designers, we try to make sure there are always options to deal with specific strategies. If we’re successful, that creates a constructed environment with diverse and healthy gameplay. If a best deck can avoid being “hated” out of the environment, then we need to step in. It’s debatable if Angus crossed the line, but he does have several warning signs. If you didn’t play decks specifically designed to hate on Angus’ aggressive burn charge power and troops, you were already playing catchup. Then, if you did play a deck with tons of health gain and cheap removal, you were outclassed by the other decks in the format that put out a steady stream of threats. We want there to be a middle road where you can prepare for a wide variety of matchups and not have to feel like all 15 cards of your reserves need to be dedicated for one deck.

Therefore, we’re bumping Angus down to double threshold and moving his damage down to 3 from 4.

The Limited Duo

Gorn of the Hell Pits and Lysander are a heck of a duo. Both are extremely strong champions on their own that play extremely well in the context of Herofall limited, which is all about relentless aggression. You want to continually apply pressure to your opponents, enabling your Assault cards and preventing theirs from being online. The shards best at using Assault were Blood, Diamond, and Ruby, which lead to Gorn and Lysander being two of the most popular and highest win rate champions.

When it came to Draft (vs Evo and Sealed), this didn’t drop off much. We expected to see these shards and champions having a reduced success rate as players fought over them and split the pool, but that didn’t happen. These champions had such strong synergies with the mechanics and cards in the set, they outshone their companions significantly. This is, in part, because both of them ask you to attack to turn on their powers… which is exactly what you want to do with the keywords in the set.

In addition, we adjusted Gorn’s health total. The aggressively focused champions are usually the ones that we like having lower health totals. This creates a tradeoff for their aggression, the balance being that they are easier to kill themselves. Therefore, in selecting a more aggressively focused champion like Gorn, you should be taking on some risk in gaining a powerful effect like Rage 1. However, Gorn had an average health total of 23 in the format, which was a little bit too high when granting Rage 1. In addition to adjusting his charge cost, we’ve reduced his health by two.

While Gorn and Lysander aren’t the only two champions you can play in Herofall limited, we want to see more champions shine. We’re confident that Scars of War will shake up the limited environment, but we want players to explore existing options as well. Therefore, we’re adding 1 to the charge cost for each of these champions. We considered altering the designs of these champions more significantly, rather than just tweaking the numbers, but at the end of the day we wanted to preserve these champions’ identities as much as possible while promoting more diverse gameplay options.

Wildshaper Kaliban

Wildshaper Kaliban is an exceptionally fun champion, but one that crosses the line in terms of the impact he can have on the game. Summoning random troops and creating random actions can be quite exciting when used tactically, but Kaliban’s charge power managed to push the envelope too far.

To explain further, we’ll use a common example, where a player plays a troop with cost 5 and then immediately uses Kaliban’s power to make it transform into a troop with cost 7. The 7 cost troops in HEX, on average, are significantly better than the average 5 cost troop. In part, this is because card cost is a lever we use to gate power, but it’s also much more difficult to design 7 cost common troops than it is to design 7 cost rare troops. Therefore, a Kaliban player can expect to get a fairly large increase in the power level of their troop. This seems like a fine trade for a charge power, except that now one player is forced to deal with a powerful rare on turn 4 or 5 that was intended to be played as 7 cost troop.

This results in situations where, as an opponent, you felt like you couldn’t win unless the opponent spun the wheel poorly. This is not the type of gameplay we want to promote, so we decided to move Kaliban’s charge cost up to 7 to account for his powerful impact. This is approximately the same time you’d have 7 resources to play a 7-cost troop, so the early game impact is much more reasonable. Plus, troops from 7 resources to 9 don’t scale quite as exponentially as they do from 5 to 7.

Buff it Up!

We don’t want to make changes like this often, but a healthy limited format is incredibly important for all HEX players. Therefore, in addition to bringing power down on the previously mentioned champions, we’re also increasing the health on Takahiro and Blue Sparrow to bring them in line with our other offerings. We’d like to see these champions get their days in the sun rather than taking up UI space in the champion tab. We hope these new champion versions are as fun for players to play with as they have been for us!

Spoiler changes

We made two changes late in development since things have been spoiled. The two cards altered are Ruby’s Favor and Dread Transport.

Ruby’s Favor was a card we play-tested a fair amount. It saw play in our most of our heavily aggressive ruby decks, both single and multi-shard. The card was powerful, and while I don’t want to give away some exploration of the format, I would certainly expect it to see tons of constructed play either in main decks or in the reserves of any ruby deck looking to end the game quickly.

Despite all that testing, after consideration, we have decided to move the card to cost 2. Why? The reason is for proper health of the format. Ruby is very good at dealing with artifacts, their troops have high attack, and it’s the shard best suited to deal direct damage to an opponent’s health total. This card is perfectly placed thematically, but it does a little too much. Typically, artifact destruction comes with an opportunity cost attached, but the version we originally spoiled of Ruby’s Favor lacks those tradeoffs. It is versatile, inexpensive, and runs the risk of shoving artifacts out of the format because many Ruby decks will run Ruby’s Favor for its other, powerful effects. When a card like Ruby’s Favor is good in the best versions of aggressive Ruby decks, no matter how powerful of an artifact we make to combat it, it cannot be correct to slot the card into your deck unless you’d be willing to play a card that discards a card from your opponent’s hand and gains you 3 health.

Thanks to everyone’s feedback, we’ve correctly moved this card to two cost. This preserves the power and flexibility we intended for the card while also forcing important choices like “do I play Ruby’s Favor or drop my next troop?” We’re also happy with how each of the Diamond, Ruby, and Sapphire favors now each cost 2 while the Blood and Wild magic favors each cost 3. It makes the whole cycle more cohesive and in tune with our lore and magic system.

The second change and final change for today was made to Dread Transport. Dread Transport spent almost the entire time in development and design at three cost. Towards the end of the process, we decided to move the card to cost 2 because we wanted to push Dreadling creation cards at a better rate.

Little did we know there was an infinite combo involving the card in constructed. For those who haven’t heard about it, you can get Dread Transport down to zero cost, give it speed, and then create infinite Dreadlings. This can be done through cards like Coralcove Witch or a pair of Mindcalls. The Speed can be granted by using a card like Glyph of Ferocity or Ruby Infusion Device.

This is something we flat out missed. We never considered testing Dread Transport in constructed. It was a card that saw some play in limited Dreadling strategies, but it wasn’t on our radar as a combo enabler. After playing some different versions of Dread Transport combo decks, we realized this is too dangerous a combination to take the risk of existing. The format would devolve to decks that could kill with infinite dreadlings on turn 5, decks that could kill on turn 5, or decks that interrupted everything the opponent tried to play. This is not healthy gameplay. Rather than let Dread Transport go into players accounts and us having to ban it months down the road, we are fixing it before Scars of War goes live.

We considered moving Dread Transport back up to 3 cost, but this didn’t solve the problem. It made the decks comboing with it less consistent, but we didn’t want this combo to exist, period. We don’t want you to click for 6 minutes to try and make 100+ Dreadlings to kill your opponent. That’s not going to be fun for anyone after the first time. Therefore, we added a resource activation cost to Dread Transport.

Now his power reads: [BASIC]: [(1)], [ACT] Put this into your hand [ARROWR] Summon two Dreadlings.

This will prevent infinite combos until we get around to printing cards that reduce the payment power cost of cards by some number of resources. This is tricky design space, as it’s difficult to test every possible card, but it’s something we may try at some point.

To everyone who spoke up about Dread Transport, thank you. We messed up, and we’re exceptionally grateful that you caught it so quickly that we were able to change it. We don’t like changing cards after they’re spoiled, but when they have such positive impact on the game like the two card changes today, we will step in. We’re incredibly grateful to our amazing community for pointing out flaws in certain cards in a considerate and civilized manner. We hope that these changes, as well as the changes to the champions, will get you as excited as we are for the fresh new experience of Scars of War.

~Corey Burkhart

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