Balancing Blog Series: March 2016 Update
Welcome to the new Clash of Clans Balancing Blog! Going forward, each update will now be accompanied by an in-depth explanation of the gameplay changes. Supercell is planning to be a lot more active in terms of balancing troops, defenses and gameplay in 2016. Rather than only waiting for major updates, Supercell will be regularly addressing offense/defense balance, troop viability and more, with the goal of keeping attacks interesting, exciting and rewarding of player skill. Supercell especially look forward to improving the dev team's communication to players with this effort!
Here are some of the upcoming changes in more detail:
Town Hall 11 Changes
- Grand Warden Life Aura and Eternal Tome range reduced slightly
- The Grand Warden's massive ability range and unique AI have made him a unit where placement doesn't matter as much as it should. A slight reduction in his range should help make Clash’s newest Hero a bit more challenging to place and play effectively.
Town Hall 10+ Changes
- Inferno Tower Multi-mode acquires new targets faster
- The Inferno Tower Multi-mode re-targeting delay was initially added a long time ago due to overwhelming effectiveness against Witches. With the latest Witch level in armies and donations, however, a speed increase is needed to help bring the defense back in-balance with even larger hordes of Skeletons.
- Town Hall 10 and 11 players are less likely to find each other in Multiplayer
- Now that more players have progressed to Town Hall 11, we can make adjustments to matchmaking that will result in less TH11/10 matchups. Note that players in Champion league and above will not be affected.
Town Hall 9+ Changes
- All Skeleton hitpoints reduced
Skeletons should be a fragile unit that overcome their inability to survive damage by sheer numbers. However their hitpoints were just a sliver too high, preventing Archer Towers from destroying them with a single arrow in some cases. The hitpoint decrease will make sure that Archer Towers stay effective against Skeleton hordes.
- Skeletons spawned from Witches no longer trigger traps
One of the Clash of Clans development values is Depth. This means that it should take well-thought armies, strategic deployment and mastery of troop behavior to achieve the best results. If we find a single troop, single spell army with a single deployment strategy (Earthquake and mass-Witch) semi-reliably 3-starring maxed out defenses, something is out of balance. Sometimes simple HP and DPS tweaks can solve the issue, but sometimes something more is needed to bring units into balance in the right way, without making them obsolete.
This was the example with the Hog Rider before we introduced the 1.5x damage from Giant Bombs. Rather than simply making the unit too weak to be useful at all, this extra gameplay twist required Hog Rider enthusiasts to play with more skill to avoid traps and pull off a sweet 3-star Hog Rush. In a similar way, making Skeletons not trigger traps will leave mass-Witch armies vulnerable to an abrupt end via traps, unless the attacker carefully charts out potential hazards or uses a more diverse army to clear the way ahead.
- Goblin level 6 has been moved to Town Hall 9 (was TH10)
We've been a bit stingy with the Goblin levels. Goblin-lovers represent!
- X-Bow levels 2-4 damage increased
Once upon a time, the X-Bow was the most menacing defense in Clash. Now, with ultra-tanky Giants, Golems and Lava Hounds, X-Bows could use a bit of a boost to help stay relevant at later levels, especially as TH9 defense balance hinges upon them. The X-Bow previously rode just under Archer Tower DPS per TH level, but these changes put it slightly over.
Town Hall 8+ Changes
- Valkyrie damage increased, hitpoints decreased
We're trying to win a place in people's armies with one of Clash of Clans' least used troops. A general DPS increase sweetens the prospect, but the big difference is below, and is balanced by the hitpoints decrease.
- Valkyrie starts attacking much faster after reaching her target - give her a try!
Valkyrie is a unit that runs in deep and hits hard, positing herself dangerously, often recklessly, to maximize her spin-attack damage. However, her wind-up speed has been so long that often groups of Valkyries spend more time waiting to attack (and dying) than actually dealing damage. With this change, the Valkyrie will launch into her spin much faster once she reaches that prime position, making her a much snappier, more reactive and nimble troop.
- Wizard Tower levels 5-9 hitpoints increased, greatly increased at later levels
Wizard Towers are a sturdy and reliable source of splash damage early on in Clash of Clans because of their huge HP to DPS ratio, but this rapidly falls off in the mid-to-late game, even as armies get bigger and stronger. By Town Halls 9 and 10, Wizard Towers collapse like a house of cards, despite looking like a huge mountain. A significantly higher hitpoint scaling will help keep Wizard Towers relevant on defense even into the later game, and bring them better in-line with the Cannon and Archer Tower hitpoint buffs we've already done in earlier updates.
- Defending Troops (but not Heroes) flee from Poison Spells if they are standing idle
Poison Spells are geared towards giving your army an advantage in troop-versus-troop combat, mainly by reducing enemy attack speed and providing a steady HP burn. However, it's typically more effective to just lure defenders one step out of the Clan Castle and drop one to two Poison Spells on their head to avoid the whole confrontation. Not only is this boring and time consuming, it makes Clan Castle defense more of a formality by the attacker than a strategic consideration mid-battle. Lightning will still remain an effective method for dispensing of idle defending troops caught off-guard, but now attackers will have to engage defenders directly to reap the benefits of the Poison cloud.
Town Hall 5+
- All Dark Spells brewing time decreased to 10 minutes
- All Elixir Spells brewing time decreased to 20 minutes
The Clash of Clans team is looking at ways to make playing easier, faster and with less downtime. Spell brewing time is the obvious first bottleneck here, but there is still more that can be done in the future.
All levels:
- Battle time limit reduced to be 3 minutes per attack once again
In the TH11 update, we played a bit too cautious with the battle time limits. There were three main reasons why we changed it to 3 minutes and 30 seconds: the play field was expanding, the number of buildings and/or walls had been increasing over many Town Hall levels, and the Eagle Artillery could be tackled by tactical pre-strikes. However, monitoring the situation post-update, it turned out the extra 30 seconds of battle time wasn't really needed. Bringing the time limit back to 3 minutes will help bring back shorter and tighter battles for all players, and was especially requested by the war community.
- Revenge attacks award Star Bonus and League Bonus rewards
A long requested player feature. Enjoy!
- New building constructions can no longer be cancelled (upgrades can still be cancelled)
This change is mainly to prevent the intentional building and selling of high level defenses during Clan Wars to get an unfair advantage.
☆☆☆ Additional change log ☆☆☆
War:
- Clan Wars matchmaking has been overhauled - details in the dev blog http://supr.cl/WarMatchUpdate
- War sizes 35v35 and 45v45 have been removed to boost other war sizes
- New stat "War win streak" in Clan profile shows how many consecutive Clan War wins a Clan currently has
- War Events menu has been redesigned to be much more readable
- Number of remaining war attacks can be seen from the Clan War button when outside of the war map
- All replays can be viewed directly from My Team/Enemy Team summaries in War Details
- "Star button" has been replaced with a bigger "War Details" button on the bottom-right of the war map
Other:
- Builder Summary: Tap the Builder icon to see all in-progress construction
- Tap an entry in the builder summary to select it in the Village
- When attacking, army selection bar shows left/right scroll arrows if an undeployed unit or spell is hidden off-screen
- Tapping the Loot Cart shows how many resources are inside before collecting
- Resource storages have more visual states to indicate more clearly how full or empty they are
- Exploding traps indicate their area of effect more clearly in battle
- Battles now end automatically if only a Poison Spell is remaining, and no longer end automatically if only an Earthquake Spell is remaining
- More replays are stored in the Defense Log and Attack Log, and are available for longer
- Army Overview shows time until training/brewing is complete, also accounting for active boosts
- Player Profiles unlocked units area reorganized
Stay tuned!
New Update coming!
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