Balance Changes: Round Four

With a lot of great playtesting behind us, we’re wrapping up our big balance changes and getting ready to ship them to the main game server. We’ve got a smaller update today, mostly tying up some loose ends. Barring unforeseen issues, we want to bring this live later this week.

Acrobatic Flip

The main criticism of this card’s expanded functionality was that it didn’t make sense for “Acrobatic Flip” to work against ranged attacks.

• Acrobatic Flip: renamed to Disorienting Block.

Short Perplexing Ray

Short Perplexing Ray was too strong, and we hit it very hard with the initial nerfs. A little too hard, maybe, as it became almost strictly worse than normal Perplexing Ray—the opposite of it being an interesting choice. There were a lot of cool things we could have done with Short Perplexing Ray, but we decided to focus on the card’s role as an escape mechanism for cornered wizards.

• Short Perplexing Ray: now discards only one card at random, has Range 4, and allows you to Move 1 after playing it.

Team Run & Team Shift

These gold cards have always been strong, in large part because the ally movement was Push, ignoring Encumber. With recent nerfs to encumber in mind, we’ve changed these cards to Move instead of Push, so Encumber will affect them. We’re keeping an eye on them in case they remain too powerful, but we think this change alone should go a long way toward making them more intuitive and interactive. As an added bonus, this change will make the cards more fun in coop!
 

 

Battlefield Training & Advanced Battlefield Training

These cards are traditionally underplayed, as they’re not that great. We don’t want to push them too hard, but we do want to give them a slight nudge. As such, we’ve made it so that the transferred card or cards are not revealed to your opponents.

Bad Medicine

As a minor buff to low-level priests, we’ve changed Bad Medicine.

• Bad Medicine: now Heals 3, Poisons 3.

Cones

Force Cone always felt weird when it hit multiple targets, the first of which couldn’t move yet because the latter targets moved second. We’ve made it so that across the board, cones affect further targets before they affect nearer targets. Now, Force Cone will push away further enemies first, creating room for the nearer enemies to get pushed back.

Utility Spells

Flash Flood, Smoke Bomb, and Wall of Stone have been reclassified Utility (purple) cards, as they have symmetrical effects that do not cause direct harm.

Demonic Revenge

Demonic Revenge, as a black self-damage trait, was way worse than other cards of its nature. We don’t want to make it good, necessarily, but we want it to be more in line with its class.

• Demonic Revenge: reduced damage to 4.

That’s it for now. If you have anything you want to test before all the changes go live, get on the test server soon! Note that our playtest has gone well, and we’re very happy with the results. If you have a longstanding issue with the balance changes to which we have yet to respond, there’s a pretty good chance that testing has shown the issue isn’t a real problem. That said, it’s possible we missed your feedback, so make yourself heard one more time.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in the testing!