Last week on the blog we revealed the seventh of our updated Season 4 model cards, the Mortician’s Guild Spirit Weaver, Scalpel. Today our reveals will be taking a bit of a change of pace, as we discuss some of our changes to the Ratcatcher’s Guild in general.

Are You Gonna Eat That?

As we mentioned in our last 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.

With the Ratcatcher’s Guild, there have been a few factors swirling around them that has made the Guild quite controversial since its release. Primarily, and perhaps the one that has been the most frustrating, is that the Ratcatchers were always intended to be a team capable of inflicting take outs, but not reliant on them as a game plan. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.

What we’ve seen since the team’s release is quite a lot of Ratcatcher coaches gravitating towards taking out enemy models while benefiting from both Grave Digger from Veteran Graves and Snackbreak from Scourge. Together, these abilities give the Ratcatchers access to take outs that are worth 4 VP instead of 2. The original intention for these ‘Snack-Digger’ take outs was that they would serve as a decent alternative or back up plan should the goal scoring game go slightly awry. What’s actually been happening is that the majority of Ratcatcher coaches are finding Snack-Digger take outs easier to engineer than scoring goals, so they are defaulting to using these 4VP take outs as the primary game plan.

Ultimately, we decided that we needed to make a few small adjustments to the Ratcatchers in order to adjust their playstyle back to what it was always intended to be. Additionally, we took a few steps to give the Ratcatchers a small boost in power level at the same time.