Hello, Heroes!
I said as part of the 0.3 update patch notes that I’d be putting up a deep dive post on the rework for Crimson the Shapeshifter, and I’m here to deliver just that.
Crimson has long been a problematic Hero for us, and one that has been cited as probably the most powerful in the game at various points. Her ability to mercilessly slaughter her prey fits her theme as a Balverine, but in a game about playing and attacking with units this had given her a distinct edge when it came to controlling the board. This made her pretty un-fun to play against, while earning her a place at the top of our internal power rankings for the six Heroes.
So, we decided to make some drastic changes to try and address these issues. Let’s get right into the bigger changes and start off by talking about Feral. Anyone who’s read the patch notes or glanced at Crimson’s post-update section of the card collection should have noted that the Feral mechanic no longer exists. For those of you who are just joining the game now, Feral was a keyword mechanic that said:
This card does something different if you dealt Rend damage this turn.
Rend damage was a unique kind of damage that only appeared on the Shapeshifter’s Hero Power (Rend an enemy for 1 damage), as well as on some of their units (Big Entrance: Rend an enemy for 3 damage) and spells (Rend all enemy units for 1 damage).
Through extensive playtesting, we found that Feral ended up being a mechanic that promoted a very set play pattern: use your Hero Power, (or one of the other cards that dealt Rend damage) then play a powered up card. This led to really predictable lines of play, and didn’t give you the flavourful, intricate choices that you get with a similar, dual-natured mechanic like Invest where you’re able to choose which effect you would like at different stages of the game.
Nobody ever wanted to play the un-Feral version of the spell, as doing so often felt like a failure. This meant that Feral as a mechanic didn’t really reward you for doing something smart. Rather, it felt often like it was punishing you if you couldn’t do that thing at that moment. Consider the old version of Ambush for a moment - (2) Deal 2 damage. Feral: Deal 4 damage instead. Using Ambush to deal 2 damage for 2 Gold felt awful, especially compared to the option of using it to deal a total of 5 damage for 4 (2 Gold for Ambush, 2 for your Hero Power). You basically felt like you were getting a raw deal, because you were.
In addition to that, Feral was also hard to design effects for. This was because you didn’t want the Feral effect to change the card so it did something different to the un-Feral effect because it introduces a lot of issues with ordering actions during your turn. Use your Hero Power without thinking? Oops, now your card does something completely different. No takesies-backsies. In testing out some designs for more of these dual-natured effects, when you made these sorts of mistakes, you felt pretty stupid. That’s not a feeling that we want you to associate with what should be a Hero’s core mechanic.
If the Feral effect couldn’t be significantly different, that meant that they had to be either amped up versions of the un-Feral effect, or something that could sit alongside it and not seem out of place. Those types of effects are really hard to design and balance without just having them feel tacked on. We ended up cutting them and cutting them until we only really had Ambush left, and Ambush fell heavily into the ‘I will only use this if I can get the Feral effect’ category. Then we asked ourselves: if there’s a card with two effects but you only ever want to use one of those effects, shouldn’t it just have the one effect that you want to use?
To top this all off, Feral cards sucked if you received them from a source of random card while playing another Hero because you simply couldn’t activate their Feral effects 99% of the time.
So, Feral was out. That meant that we had to redesign cards that previously have Feral effects, or just straight up remove them, as follows:
This left us with another dilemma: with Feral out, Rend really didn’t serve much of a purpose in the game. It just added a layer of complexity (rather than depth - which is very different) to a Hero that we’d always wanted to be easy for newer players to pick up and be able to have fun with. We played around with a few alternate uses for Rend but in the end circled back to our initial thinking: getting rid of it offered the cleanest solution. Now, all damage dealt by Crimson’s spells and Hero Powers is now just damage like any other damaging effect.
With the larger mechanical changes out of the way, let's look at what we changed about her cards. We do want one of Crimson’s strengths to be dealing damage. However, much like Sand she was previously pretty much only dealing damage, so we wanted to introduce some more diversity into her card pool.
We started with her units, as these were the main cards that were allowing her to simultaneously remove opposing threats while developing her own board presence. Of these, the Balverines were by far the biggest offenders. After a few rounds of iteration, we came up with the following set of designs:
The Balverines were redesigned around a common theme - feasting on slain enemies by having abilities that trigger when they destroy an enemy unit in combat. This is a pretty fun mechanic to play around, as you can use your Hero Power and spells to weaken an enemy before having a Balverine finish them off and trigger their ability. It also allows interesting counterplay on your opponent’s part as they can throw some of their tougher units in Guard to protect their weaker ones and remove the Balverine’s easy prey.
We also took some steps to introduce some other sub-themes to further expand Crimson’s deck diversity. For example we invested more into Wolves as one of Crimson’s themes with the brand new Mistress of the Hunt spell to join old staples like Savage Charge and Maiden of the Beasts.
We expanded on the existing self-healing theme with our redesign of her Evil Hero Power, White Hart and Snarling Lunge, giving her the option to play a more attrition-based game, like the Prophet.
We also added more pro-active Stunning units like the new Brown Bear and Timber Cleaver, so that you can lean more on temporarily neutralizing your opponent’s threats rather than just dealing damage to them.
Finally, Call of the Balverine is now a fun enabler for Shapeshifter decks that want to fill their board with units.
Suddenly transforming your board into self-healing 4/3s can be pretty explosive if your opponent doesn't have a board-wipe to counter it.
Speaking of clearing the board, let's talk about her removal spells for a moment. What we found after changing the Balverines was that Crimson now had a similar removal package to other Heroes. For example, compare Crimson’s removal spells to Temple’s:
Crimson:
Temple:
While you could argue that Crimson has the edge in some areas, Temple also has some strong options in Ashes to Ashes and Consume Life that Crimson doesn’t have access to. It's no longer the case that Crimson has more powerful as well as more numerous removal spells than everyone else. This means that for now, aside from making Surge of Fangs more fair by making it affect ALL units and redesigning Blood Frenzy into a card draw spell, we’ve not made any further changes to her other removal spells while we wait for the dust to settle on her other changes. If more adjustments are necessary, we will continue to make them as we head into Early Access.
That’s all for now. Hopefully you’ve gained a little more insight into our thought process behind the latest changes to a pretty divisive Hero. Sound off in the comments with your thoughts.
Happy chicken chasing!
Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush - Lead Game Designer of Fable Fortune (Mediatonic)