WindHunter

I would recommend ruminating a bit more on the proposed Root Network changes and the mechanic in general. Adding the "Strong Supporter" passive to Thornbark (+3 support) and to Howling Shrine (+6 support) does a lot more in defense scenarios than you might realize, especially when combined with the new Sylvan Gate which can connect root network entities over a 100m radius. It seems that you are assuming that a given Root entities needs to have 6 support permanently dedicated to it at all times when this is not true. Often in maps with defensive situations, you are required to defend multiple locations, but these locations are not attacked simultaneously. This means that strategically placed Howling Shrines can support each other simultaneously due to providing full support when not in combat. With Sylvan Gate gaining a 100m pull radius this has become even easier and cheaper as you no longer have to create giant Root Nexus chains. I have included, from left to right, the Minimaps for Insane God, Defending Hope, and Crusade below. The red dots are Howling Shrines and green dots Sylvan Gates. While all 4 Howling Shrines cannot be fully supported simultaneously, all 4 will not always be in combat. In general, when necessary, each one will be fully supported and when it isn't in combat, it is functioning as a combat support for the other Howling Shrines. A properly rotated and fully supported Howling Shrine is one of the strongest defenses in the game against incoming waves of enemies. Both the turrets and the paralyze/root attack are affected by the linked fire speed up enabling a single Shrine to crowd control several units simultaneously. Additionally, properly positioned the Shrine can fire 3 turrets at once. The only additional change I would consider making without seeing the current Root Network changes in action is increasing the firing arc of the turrets slightly to make positioning easier and reduce the amount of esoteric knowledge a player must possess to use the card to its full potential. PS: You might notice there are no proposed changes to any T1 buildings. This is by design and was hinted at in the Deep Dive. Changes to T1 towers have an impact on other game modes and so have to be pursued more cautiously.

Hatecaster and Artillery are currently hybrid pure cards and as such are only used in very limited circumstances. Generally speaking, a pure card is the pay-off for investing that many orbs into a faction. This is true either through higher stats and/or more complex and interesting abilities. Neither the Bandit nor Twilight faction have strong stationary defenses as part of their identities and in both cases the buildings are neither powerful nor interesting enough to warrant their current orb restrictions. We could buff both cards more, or we could make them more splashable. The nice thing about the orb change is that it means they will be used more frequently without us needing to make substantial number buffs to justify their current costs. Deepgorge is in the opposite position of Hatecaster and Artillery. If you read our Deep Dive on towers, you will recall we talked about wanting to make fortress cards like Deepgorge have a different feel to them than standard towers. Fortresses should be strong solitary defenses which can hold positions easily. Having a powerful self-sufficient defense fits the thematic identity of Stonekin well and so we have tried to improve Deepgorge to fulfill its intended role. Volcano does not necessarily need to be made more splashable and at the same time it doesn't need to be so restricted. In previous discussions I have been pretty clear that I don't think loosening orb requirements should be used as a standard method of buffing a card. Instead, a card should be buffed to fulfill its current requirements. While I still fully agree with this, I think towers are a bit of a unique case due to how few of them exist in T4. If a player wants strong T4 defenses, they really don't have many options available. Some decks, especially decks with 2+ Shadow orbs, are forced to rely on T3 towers. While this is a minor issues right now since Necroblaster is the strongest tower in the game and because there are very few T4 defense situations currently in game, it will not always be like this. After we nerf Necroblaster and add new maps and game modes T4 defenses will be in higher demand. So opening up the few existing options to more decks seemed like the best idea. Also, given we are continually adding new cards to the game, we can always create more T4 towers later with higher restrictions when we have more time. Outside of the new Fire RPvE, where you won't be using T3 towers to defend anyway, and the Colossus in position 4 of Titans, the change to Mindweaver has no effect. All T4 PvE units have power costs of 250p or less, while T5 units are not controllable anyway. What this change does is give us the ability to differentiate between units which can be controlled by Mindweaver and those which can only be controlled by Mind Control. Once the mind control mechanic changes occur, Mindweaver will be able to control more units than it does currently.

The intent is that Armored Tower will apply 1 Ice Shield to a friendly entity in a 25m radius every 3 seconds. So within a 30 second period of time up to 10 Ice Shields can be applied.

Statistical Analysis The Skylords Reborn Wiki has recently been updated with a List of Card Statistics page, which includes the stat ratios used by the faction design team when balancing. While raw combat stats cannot tell the full story when it comes to balancing cards, it is still a very important tool, especially in the case of combat-oriented cards. Unfortunately, using statistic analysis when balancing towers is particularly difficult because of three factors. One, most towers have a randomness factor built-in, which makes their attack speeds variable. For example, a given Northern Keep can spawn with an attack rate of between 14 and 17 attacks in a 40-second period. Two, most of the attack speeds displayed on the card in-game are incorrect, which also means the displayed attack value is incorrect. Three, towers take up space, meaning their stat efficiencies are also tied to their sizes. To account for this variance and the existing inaccuracies, we have gone through each tower individually and performed repeated tests to calculate each towers average attack speed. Additionally, we have collected the model radius of each tower and used it to calculate stat efficiency by area. The pictures below represent an updated table of all current average combat values and many of the proposed combat values as well. In the future, we hope to update and correct all the attack speeds for towers. Explanations for the different ratios can be found in the Wiki page linked above.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Stronghold will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Power cost: 150p --> 200p 1. Life points: 3600 --> 4500 2. Cannon Turrets: (a.) Splash Radius: 5m --> 10m (b). Turret Firing Arc: Allow up to 3 turrets to attack a target at once. (c). Damage: 74 damage, up to 110 in total --> 164 damage, up to 246 in total. 3. New Active Ability - Bombardment (40p): Activate to shoot a mortar shell that deals 800 damage to enemies in a 15m radius around its target, up to 3200 in total. Knocks back small, medium, and large units. Has a long range of 40m. Reusable every 30 seconds. 4. New Passive Ability - To the Last!: If the fortress has equal to or less than 3000 life points left it will deal 25% more damage and take 25% less damage. If the fortress has equal or less than 1500 life points left it will deal 50% more damage and take 50% less damage. 5. New passive - Slowed Construction: Construction time is increased by 50%. Iteration 1 Goals Stronghold is an Ultra-rare T3 Frost fortress. With a description like that and the name Stronghold the player might expect to encounter a powerful and immobile bastion able to hold off hordes of enemies by itself. Anyone who has seen Stronghold knows this is not true and that the card is a disappointment apart from its aesthetic design. We intend to rectify this. First, we are increasing Stronghold's single-target damage from 2420 dp20 to 4000 dp20. Second, we are giving Stronghold two new abilities. The active ability will allow the player to defend against 50m siege units like Lost Dancers without needing an additional unit or building, and “To the Last!” will make Stronghold more deadly as it loses life points. This will synergize well with Frost building supports like Glacier Shell and Shield Building, allowing the player to keep Stronghold at a lower health threshold without endangering their defenses.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Rocket Tower will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Orb cost: 2 Fire --> 1 Fire, 1 Neutral 2. Power cost: 80p --> 70p 3. Life points: 2000 --> 1480 4. Reduce collision box to match model size 5. Rocket Barrage: (a) Total rockets: 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 --> 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 (b) Attack speed: Every 5 seconds --> every 4 seconds (c) Damage per rocket: 85 --> 90 (d) Bugfix: Fix target homing to prevent rocket from missing Iteration 1 Goals Fire T2 currently lacks a splash tower, while Pure Fire T2 has 2 towers. We think Pyromaniac sufficiently fills the slot of T2 tower for Pure Fire, so we are transitioning Rocket Tower into a splash card. As part of this change, we will be cutting down on its large pool of life points while otherwise increasing the consistency of Rocket Tower, both in terms of knockback and damage dealing. Even with the cost decrease, this change will make Rocket Tower mildly less stat against large groups in exchange for a lower start up cost and the ability to consistently knockback multiple enemies due to the fixed targeting and increased rate of fire. These changes should allow Rocket Tower to fulfill its role as a knockback-centric tower while its high damage allies provide the necessary fire power.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Necroblaster will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Necrotic Gun A. Corpse Cost: 500 life points per shot -> 825 life points per shot. B. Splash radius: 10m --> 12m 2. Corpse Gathering Storage: 4500 --> 6600 storable life points Iteration 1 Goals Necroblaster is the best building in the game without any real competition. It is intended to have a major downside in costing corpses but it does much more damage than it costs in corpses allowing it to be self-sufficient. We are fine with Necroblaster remaining very powerful but it should have an appropriate downside. With a cost of 825 corpses per shot, Necroblaster can store up to 8 attacks in total which translates to 40 seconds worth of attacking. Additionally, it still remains possible for Necroblaster to be self-sufficient in ideal scenarios but in general this should require the player to pay attention to their Necroblaster defenses and maintain them with more corpses.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Lost Launcher will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Lost Launcher (r), Infused Rage A. Number of attacks required per stage of rage: 4 attacks --> 3 attacks 2. Lost Launcher (b), Blessed Ice Shield A. Ice Shield now refreshes every 40 seconds B. Ice Shield strength: 600 life points --> 500 life points C. New Description - "Every 40 seconds, tower is endowed with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 500 damage and may restore its absorption capacity by 5 every second." Iteration 1 Goal A minor buff to Lost Launcher. As-is Lost Launcher(r) takes a very long time of 26.67 seconds to reach its maximum damage output. With this change, Lost Launcher(r) will reach its first rage stage of +25% in 10 seconds and its maximum rage buff of +50% (2025 dp20) after 20 seconds. Overall, this should allow Lost Launcher(r) to better fulfill its role as the damage affinity. Lost Launcher (b) spawns with an Ice Shield but if it is lost it never returns. We have slightly reduced the total strength of the Ice Shield in exchange for allowing the Ice Shield to refresh itself every 40 seconds. While this is a long cooldown, towers are not always in combat. The result of this change should be to make Lost Launcher (b) slightly weaker if used for a single engagement but much stronger when used to defend a location over a long period of time.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Deepgorge will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Power cost: 225p --> 200p 2. Ether Eruption damage: 480, up to 720 (2700 dp20) --> 675, up to 1015 (3800 dp20) 3. Cold Clutch radius: 20m --> 25m Iteration 1 Goals Deepgorge is one of the worst towers in the game with a stat efficiency comparable to a T2 tower. "Cold Clutch" seems intended to make up for the low combat stats by giving Deepgorge a built-in crowd control. Unfortunately, even this ability is lackluster. Deepgorge has a 5m radius which means its actual effective ability radius against melee units and behind walls is only 15m. When behind certain walls "Cold Clutch" lacks sufficient range to freeze XL units, meaning they can destroy the walls unimpeded as Deepgorge otherwise lacks enough damage to stop them (It will take 1 Deepgorge 40 seconds to kill an NPC Abomination). To rectify these issues, we have decided to institute major buffs to Deepgorge. We are increasing the Stonekin fortress's damage by 40% and decreasing its power cost by 25p. This will constitute a 78% increase in total stat efficiency. Even with these buffs, its stat efficiency remains well below all other T4 towers except an unsupported Howling Shrine. This is then rectified by an improved "Cold Clutch", whose increased radius should allow Deepgorge to properly fulfill its role as a damage/crowd control hybrid tower.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Bandit Launcher will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Flame Arrow splash radius: 5m --> 8m 2. Life points: 1270 / 1320/ 1400 / 1500 --> 570 / 620/ 740 / 800 3. Add Accelerated Construction - Construction time is reduced by 50%. 4. Firebug: (a) Radius: 20m --> 25m (b) Power cost: 35 / 30 / 25 / 20 --> 40 / 35 / 30 / 25 Energy (c) Infused Firebug damage: 400, up to 1200 in total --> 600, up to 1800 in total (d) Tainted Firebug damage: 600, up to 1800 in total --> 800, up to 2400 in total Iteration 1 Goals Bandit Launcher has decent stats for its power cost and model size. The issue is that it directly competes with Rioter’s Retreat which synergizes better with other Bandits cards. As such, we have decided to move Bandit Launcher in a different direction, oriented around fast construction and its suicidal “Firebug” ability. This will hopefully give Bandit Launcher a unique identity as a tower which can be quickly deployed in the field, including offensively.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Armored Tower will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Ice Bolt splash radius: 5m --> 8m 2. Gift of Ice Rework A. Now grants Ice Shields instead of damage reduction, Ice Shields apply to walls B. Permanent mode-change instead of timed, can be swapped back to attack mode anytime. C. New Description: "Grants an Ice Shield every 3 seconds to friendly entities in a 25m radius without. Each Ice Shield absorbs up to 450 / 550 / 700 / 880 damage for 30 seconds. Target cannot currently have an Ice Shield. Lasts until deactivated." Iteration 1 Goals Armored Tower has a particularly small splash radius for a T3 tower so we are increasing it to reduce the possibility of it missing moving targets and dealing reduced damage to M-size squad units such as Bandit Lancers. We have decided to move a different direction with the ability to allow Armored Tower to take on a full support role. Right now, Armored Tower's damage reduction overlaps with both Glaciation and Ward of the North. By changing to Ice Shields and allowing the mode change to remain indefinitely without needing to be reactivated, Armored Tower can act as a continual sustain tool for T3 Frost defenses. With the current numbers, one Armored Tower will be able to provide up to 10 targets with an Ice Shield over a 30 second period. Additionally, we have added the unique ability for Armored Tower to apply Ice Shields to wall segments. This will stack with Glaciation's damage reduction and provide a niche defense option in some campaign maps and the upcoming defensive random PvE.

As we announced in our recent Towers Deep Dive, our faction design team has been working on performing a balance pass across all attack buildings in the game. Some of these changes are relatively minor, while other changes are more substantial. This thread will function as the main thread for all tower based discussion. Minor changes are included here, while major changes have their own threads linked to below. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change. Substantial Reworks and Balance Changes The following buildings have significant enough changes to warrant their own threads. Armored Tower Bandit Launcher Deepgorge Lost Launcher Necroblaster Rocket Tower Stronghold Splash Radius Changes A majority of buildings will receive updates to their splash radius in line with the principles outlined in the Deep Dive. The followings towers will only have their splash radius increased. Living Tower: 5m --> 10m Rioter's Retreat: 5m --> 8m Stone Hurler: 5m --> 8m Twilight Bombard: 10m --> 15m Minor Changes It is the general principle of the faction design team not to change abilities or introduce complex mechanics needlessly. Cards should generally perform a single function and perform that function well. A lot of the buildings in the game are already well-designed but lack sufficient stats or possess too strict of requirements. As such, we have opted wherever possible to introduce simple changes to bring the tower to the appropriate power level. All values below are U3. Artillery 1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Fire --> 1 Shadow, 1 Fire, 2 Neutral 2. Power cost: 190p --> 150p Frost Crystal 1. Ice Shard (auto-attack): A. Damage: 72, up to 110 in total (637 dp20) --> 92, up to 138 in total (805 dp20) B. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m 2. Frost Wave ability radius (active): 20m --> 25m Hammerfall 1. Power cost: 150p --> 130p Hatecaster 1. Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Fire --> 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 2 Neutral Howling Shrine 1. New Passive, "Strong Supporter": Counts as 4 connected entities for the sake of determining root network supports while out of combat. 2. Life points: 3160 --> 4260 Infected Tower 1. Slime Cannon (auto-attack): A. Damage: 114, up to 172 in total (1216 dp20) --> 124, up to 186 in total (1318 dp20) B. Splash Radius: 5m --> 8m 2. Virus (active): Change spawning effect to check for population limit, so Infected Tower cannot be used to infinitely exceed the population cap. Mindweaver 1. Edict of Command (active): Restricted to units with a maximum of 300 power costs --> Restricted to units with a maximum of 250 power costs. 2. Psionic Blast (auto-attack): A. Damage: 250, up to 375 in total (2188 dp20) --> 290, up to 435 in total (2538 dp20) B. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m Time Vortex 1. Life points: 2830 --> 1830 2. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m 3. Potentially tweak thresholds on shadow affinity (p) to make it a viable alternative in more scenarios. Tower of Flames 1. Fire Ball (auto-attack): A. Damage: 216, up to 324 in total (2430 dp20) --> 266, up to 399 in total (2993 dp20) B. Splash radius: 5m --> 10m Volcano 1. Orb cost: 3 Fire, 1 Neutral --> 2 Fire, 2 Neutral 2. Gifted Eruption Healing: 150 life points every second for 5 seconds --> 200 life points every second for 10 seconds.

Last patch we made the following changes to Tortugun: Iteration 1 1. Devour Changes A. Devour animation: Tortugun has 2 eating animations. One from the ability and a second when she is in the Amok state. Change the *Devour* animation to be the same sped up animation when Tortugun is in the Amok state. B. Devour cooldown: 5 sec -> 2 sec C. Reduce digestion rate: 90 life points every 2 seconds -> 75 life points every 2 seconds D. Initial Hunger Bar: 3000 life points -> 2550 life points Next patch we hope to additionally do the following: Iteration 2 1. Devour Changes A. Temporarily satisfied: Digestion rate becomes 0 life points per second for 5 seconds after eating. B. Devour affinity buffs: 50% damage reduction for blue 20 sec after eating; +100% damage for red after eating 2. Make both affinities have 50m range, remove L-knockback from blue

We are currently working on some changes to RPvE void and power levels and we will potentially be making time adjustments alongside it.

I quite like Reforging. There is a certain kind of joy watching my collection of cards slowly precede from a pile of commons/uncommons to rares and ultra-rares.

A few thoughts: (1) The rules and insights highlighted in this document should be regarded as general guidelines. If this is true of our Design Philosophy principles, which are the most fundamental (primary) design principles in the game, then it is even more true for the secondary and tertiary design principles outlined in this document. As such, we don't few these as strict rules which we cannot break while designing towers moving forward, but as guide posts to help us not loss our way. On this topic, I think it is worthwhile for us to note why we write and release these documents. I see three principle reasons. We write these documents as a way to force ourselves as designers to slow down and consider all the factors at play. By working through the fundamentals of the game itself, a faction, or a class of card, we create a solid base of understanding which will serve as our guide posts going forward. Overall, this leads to more harmonious and less haphazard changes. We write these documents for other people in the community who like to think about the game in a deeper way. These players also directly help us by questioning, critiquing, and adding to our own understanding of the topic. So these documents act as a focusing lens which helps the community to channel their thoughts and suggestions in the same direction as the balance team, leading to more productive suggestions overall. Finally, we write these documents to give a heads-up to the community about what is coming next and to both gauge and generate excitement in a given topic. (2) We are and have been attempting to be as transparent as possible as a team. The mistakes we make are far more often mistakes of forgetfulness than of anything else. As such, I don't appreciate the insinuation that we are obscuring our thinking on the subject in an attempt to paper over the fact that we plan on nerfing a large amount of towers. This simply is not true. Two towers are currently slated for eventual nerfs, Necroblaster and Time Vortex, both of which are far outside the acceptable range compared to other viable towers. In both cases the nerfs will be relatively minor, more corpses for Necroblaster and less life points for Time Vortex. The rest of the intended changes will be buffs. I do think that we could have phrased things in a more positive light in our emboldened statements, but I also think the current phrasing does correctly convey the general idea we intended to communicate. (3) I think you have correctly identified a lacuna, or missing part, in the document, namely the distinction between damage-oriented and crowd control oriented towers. On this subject your thoughts on Rocket Tower are especially appreciated and I think raise several good points. We can discuss this particular topic more in the balancing discord where I opened a channel on this topic per your request. On the particular remark in the document about Fire T1 towers, that statement was a direct result of our playtesting for DRPvE, where Fire T1 is far and away the worst faction and a lot of this has to do with lacking a damage tower in T1. I do agree in a general sense with your analysis that Shadow + Frost tend to have damage towers, Nature tends towards support towers, and Fire in early tiers tends towards knockback towers, though this changes by T3 where Tower of Flames has no built-in crowd control. (4) As you can see right below the Deep Dive, we have recently gained the ability to resize buildings. We will be adjusting several NPC and player buildings to more correctly fit their model size. We will also be able to adjust building size as a balancing consideration, if we think that is appropriate.

Hello everyone, As everyone knows, the in-game economy shifted massively after the advent of the Reforging system. This has led a number of players to express concerns about the health of the economy, and as such we would like to share some relevant economic data with the community. Some important information on the data: When it says "Fire Pool" it includes every card in the game which includes a Fire Orb. The data was collected and presented in this manner because this is how Reforging works when it tells you that the output card has an X% chance of containing a Fire Orb. Additionally, all price information presented is an average of actual sales in the auction house over a given period. While some extreme outliers were removed from the data set, such as 5 bfp Harvesters and 400 bfp Northguards, in 99% of instances the data was accepted as-is without tampering from our side. Control Data Set: Contains data prior to the release of Reforging, from June to September 2021. Post-Reforging Data Set: Contains data from two weeks after the release of Reforging, approximately December 25th 2021 to January 5th 2022. Initial Analysis of Data Set: At first glance, you can quickly see that after the update the following changes occurred: The average, median, and minimum prices of Common cards increased across the board. The minimum and median prices of Uncommon cards increased across the board, while the maximum and average prices decreased. The decrease in average prices can be attributed to 1-2 outlier cards in most factions, such as Frost Mage and Shaman, which substantially increased the average price of Uncommon cards in their respective factions. The same thing happened to Rare cards as happened to Uncommon cards. Average, median, and max price of Ultra-rare cards decreased across the board while minimum price increased. General booster worth decreased from 378 bfp to 311 bfp. Given booster prices are still discounted by 100 bfp until January 18th, this means it is actually more worthwhile to open boosters after the update than it was before. On average, the daily discounted booster will profit a player 61 bfp post-update versus 28 bfp pre-update. How this data will move after the discount is removed remains to be seen, but we expect a slow creep up in prices for cards across the board. Reforging established a minimum base worth for all cards dependent on rarity that did not exist prior. For now this seems to be: Common: 4-5 bfp Uncommon: 14-16 bfp Rare: 62-64 bfp Ultra-rare: 153-165 bfp Neutral Cards - A Control Set Control Data Set: Neutral card prices; Post-Reforging Data Set: Neutral card prices Neutral cards were purposefully excluded from the Reforging feature. As such, they can only be put into the Reforging system but can never come out. This makes them a good control for examining the data because their prices should only increase when combined with Reforging. While this happened with the Common and Uncommon cards, the same is not true for Rare and Ultra-rare cards. The only increases to Rare and Ultra-rare cards seem to be in-line with those cards increasing to match the base value of other cards of their rarities. This can be seen with Curse Well and Curse Orb and partially in Queek Queek, though it is possible due to the low trading volume of QueekQueek the numbers were simply erratic in the period examined. This decrease in the value of Rare cards and the value stagnation of undesirable Ultra-rare cards we see in Neutral cards was a consistent trend among all card values pre-update. If you look above, you will see that the maximum price of Shadow Pool cards in the control data is shown as 3865 bfp. As many of you might have guessed, this data point refers to Infect. Now if you were active in the weeks before the update, you will also know that the price of Infect at the time was actually in the 4500-5000 bfp range. In only a 2-month period, the average price of Infect inflated by between 700-1200 bfp. This trend was not confined to only Infect but to every desirable Ultra-rare card in the game. The market trends pre-update (not shown here) were that Common cards were largely worthless, Uncommon cards were following the same trend, Rare cards were steadily decreasing in price (even among sought after cards such as Overlord, Bloodhorn, and Amii Monument), and desirable Ultra-rare and promo cards were increasingly inflating. This was because Ultra-rare and promo cards were the only remaining sources of value left in the economy. Reforging changed this by condensing the total price range of the market and by giving each card in the game a base level of value.

Watching people play this map again, I think increasing the well capacity for the T2 from 600 -> 900p would also be beneficial. Again would only help people who end up in long matches, but given the average completion time of Nightmare Shard is 48 minutes I think this is warranted.

It has likely worked like this since the beginning. All PvP players know that damage doesn't overflow just from the Nasty Surprise interaction which you can see in even the oldest PvP videos on Youtube.

Normal = S & M-units. Reach = Units with extended range. Ghostspears is a good example. Huge = L and XL-units. --- S-units count as 1 normal (or reach) attacker. M-units count as 2 normal (or reach) attackers. L-units count as 1 Huge attacker. XL-units count as 2 Huge attackers.

You can share it, I already showed the changes on the balancing discord.

I have the actual sale data as well, I just haven't had time to parse it fully yet. But if you want a snapshot of how wildly card sales can fluctuate here are two examples, Master Archers and Coldsnap. We plan on making a fuller report on the current economic state once we have been able to fully sift the data. I want to clarify these are in-order of sale. So yes, the one Master Archer sold for 3bfp and the next one for 19 bfp. Same for Coldsnap, one for 66 bfp and the next for 100 bfp.

So I notice a lot of players have been claiming that boosters are currently not worth opening and I would like to address this issue. While it is true that the average worth of a booster has decreased, this is not that surprising given that there is a -100 bfp discount for all boosters right now, we gave out an unprecedented amount of free cards, and Reforging has recently come into existence and been used nearly 300,000 times. In terms of active players within the last 3 months, nearly 1/5th of all cards in existence have been Reforged. Right now the current cost of a general booster is 350 bfp. I have attached two images which show the various statistics related to how much current boosters are worth, one with promos included and the other without promos included in the value evaluation. Ignore the first booster in each image because that is the current value of a mini-booster, the second booster shown is the general booster. As you can see, boosters are, even without accounting for promos, nearly identical in worth to their asking price. A person who purchases a booster with their daily discount, thus paying only 250 bfp, will on average make ~100 bfp in profit if he were to sell all the cards he received on the market. This means that boosters are worth purchasing in the current moment. Before the update, the general booster was worth on average 411 bfp without promos and 421 bfp with promos. There is a reason 420 bfp was the general selling price for boosters, as this was the break-even point. We expect when the discount is discontinued on January 18th that card prices will increase again to (hopefully) stabilize the average booster value around 450 bfp. Now if boosters are actually worth opening, why does it feel so unsatisfying? I have a theory that opening a booster worth 250 bfp feels as bad as opening one worth 100 bfp, while opening a booster worth 500 feels far less satisfying than one worth 1100. Now what Reforging did a wonderful job of doing is putting lower and upper bounds on the market. All cards now have an inherent worth. This means cards which were currently worthless or less costly due to being unviable or because you only needed one charge are now worth a lot more, while very expensive ultra-rares are worth a lot less. This means you rarely truly get a terrible booster, but you can still get unsatisfying ones, particularly if you are not into trading. On the other hand, you are even less likely to get the big payday you used to even if you are steadily making money and getting good cards.

We are still monitoring the current situation. We already made an initial adjustment to Reforging and reduced the reforging rates for UR and R cards (it is now harder to reroll these two rarities) and will make further adjustments as the data comes in. Things are in a state of major flux right now given the large amount of free cards we gave out, the -100 bfp booster discount, and the huge amount of cards people have been Reforging. Right now Reforging has been used ~750,000 times, resulting in over a net 2.25 million cards being destroyed or about 15% of all previous cards in existence. We have also seen a large spike in new accounts, approximately double our normal on a month over month basis. All of these factors together make it difficult to judge what is exactly happening. One of the data points I have requested and which we will continue to examine is the average value of boosters before and after the change. It is possible the prices have gone too low, but it is also possible we just redistributed the total value of the booster more into the commons and uncommons. We are looking at this all now and will announce if anything needs to be changed again in the future.

I think the idea of card specific interactions is theoretically a fine idea but with the current state of the game I don't think the idea is practical yet. Right now, we are still working on fleshing out factions in general as some factions, such as Pure Nature, currently have major deficiencies and a substantial lack of synergy between what should be key cards. These issues are true in both PvE and PvP. Now somewhere down the line, when we have successfully fleshed out each faction, we might have the luxury to add more niche and specific cards with individual card interactions like those suggested here.