New Troop: Pride Guard

Many centuries ago, the Leonine Emperor and his Ambassadors struck a deal with the Raksha of the Pridelands. In exchange for shipments of their finest weapons and armor every year, the Raksha would provide a contingent of warriors to act as the Emperor’s personal bodyguard. Over the years, the Pride Guard have endured, and have become a noble, strong, and honorable contingent of warriors.

New Troop: Sand Cobra

Like the nearby Drifting Sands, the deserts of the Leonis Empire are filled with terrible beasts such as the Sand Cobra. These creatures can spit their venom up to 10 paces, incapacitating all but the most hardy of creatures. That’s just as well for the poor Sand Cobra though, since not only is its skin highly-prized due to its strength and suppleness, but their venom is also sought after by many less reputable types.

Troop Changes

The Great Maw

This was a long time coming…
His 3rd trait Hunger has been rewritten.
Turns out, although it’s thematically a lot of fun to have 2 potential devours on a creature, in practice the meta just can’t get past it! So we’ve tried to preserve both the theme and power of the Great Maw while making his 3rd trait not so annoying and random to play against:

• * Trait Change: Hunger now adds +2 to all of the Great Maw’s Skills whenever his team matches skulls (yes, even when he’s not in first place).

In a lot of teams (particularly involving skull spammers) this turns out to work pretty well. He still gets nice and large, but he just doesn’t randomly eat an enemy troop in the process!

Astral Spirit

We’re not sure how Astral Spirit snuck out there in her current state. Our mistake.
She’s doing too much TRUE damage compared to other troops in the game, and that needs to be pared back before 4x Astral Spirit takes over the meta game!
We’re going to attempt to gently reduce her power by changing three things:

• * Trait Change: Air Spirit changes to Centaur Bond
• * Spell Boost Ratio reduced from 2:1 to 3:1
• * No longer gives Magic at level 17 and 19

She still feels nice and fast for end game players, which was always the intention, but we think that she fits better in team compositions now that have some support, rather than cheesey 4xAstral Spirit teams.
Empowered troops are fun, but they continue to be the trickiest ones for us to balance!

Pride Guard

He’s a new release this week, but you might have seen him as an enemy in some Leonis Empire battles last week.
It turns out that due to some particularly high value end-game Armor scores we had to reduce his spell to have a 4:1 Boost Ration for armor, not 3:1 and drop his Magic slightly.
On the plus side, we also changed his trait Thick Headed (not particularly useful for him) to Alert (niche, but still a little more useful).

• * Spell Boost Ratio reduced from 3:1 to 4:1
• * No longer gives Magic at levels 16 and 18

Sand Cobra

He’s another new release this week whom you might have seen in Leonis Empire as an enemy.
His spell wasn’t working correctly, so now he’s seen a significant change to swap Charm for Disease, and reduce the spell cost from 16 to 6
He’s also traded the Fast trait for Agile (since being Fast with 6 mana is kind of pointless).

• * Trait Change: Fast to Agile
• * Spell no longer Charms an enemy, instead it now Diseases an enemy (as well as Poison and Stun).
• * Mana Cost reduced from 16 to 6

Hag

With the introduction of more status effects, the Hag’s effectiveness is reduced a little (especially in Arena), so we altered her spell cost to reflect that.

• * Mana Cost reduced from 9 to 8

Chest Changes
The following troops are have been added to chests:
* Hellcat
* Creeper
* Dwarven Slayer
* Northrender
* Tal’Rae
* Spider Knight
* Astral Spirit
* Moa
* Rock Troll

Refunds
We’ve fixed the problem with refund from a few weeks ago, and they can now be turned back on.

We have refunds available on:
* Great Maw
* Astral Spirit
* Troops whose refunds were turned off prematurely

There is now a small change to way refunds work with VIP levels. If you have VIP level 8 or higher, your refund will only drop the troop to level 10.
Similarly, if you have VIP level 5-7, a refund will only drop the troop to level 5.
This is to stop a small exploit where players would refund extra souls on a troop then disenchant it and gain another to get those souls back for free.