Hey folks,
We’ve just pushed a change to Chandra, Roaring Flame. I’m here to explain what we did and why we did it.
The change is a small one but one that will have a big impact on the game - her first ability’s cost has been increased to 6 for every rank.
It’s a change we know a lot of you have been requesting, and I figured I’d take advantage of this to explain the thought process behind the nerf, the possibilities we explored and why it took so long to fix something that seemed so obvious.
First and foremost, the reason for the change is pretty much what you guys have been expecting - Chandra’s power level with her first ability made her too strong. Internally, when we tested the change, it did not feel bad. We knew it could get out of control, but we really liked the direction Chandra was taking. Obviously we turned out to be wrong, as it gave her a massive power boost and made games unfun, especially when playing against the AI who pilots a Chandra.
The big problem with her ability is the gem destruction, specifically two things: it generates a lot of cascades, which essentially boils down to her having the equivalent of multiple matches per turn, and it greatly devalues supports as gem destruction will lead to more supports being popped.
I looked into a few different ways to fix her. The choices basically boiled down to the following:
- Increase the cost to 6, so it’s much more difficult to spam (6 has the be the cost - 4 or 5 isn’t enough as it still is spammable quite a bit.
Leave her cost at 3, but remove the gem destruction
Increase the cost to 4 and make the gem destruction portion of the ability to destroy a single gem rather than a block
We felt that removing the gem destruction from the ability changes a lot of her flavor, and felt boring. Using an ability that simply does a bit of damage every other turn or so (her mana gain is much lower when it doesn’t destroy gems) simply lacks any sort of oomph.
We actually tried leaving a single destroyed gem instead of a 3x3 block. It looked promising, but after tests it still was not as satisfying as destroying a big block of gems. Not to mention that doing this meant we still had to increase the cost of her ability a bit.
We know it took a while before this was changed, and while it seems obvious that it had to change, I’ll explain our thought process little.
Our internal stats showed Chandra was getting an increase of play, and this was confirmed by a lot of what we saw on social media - a lot of players were using her. She was actually below average before 1.4.0 hit. Getting a small increase of play towards the median is something good, and initially it just showed this was the trend, so while some players were unsatisfied with playing against her, it did not seem necessary to act immediately. It’s actually against our balancing values to react too quickly to trends (unless they completely break something) - Chandra could have very much been a flavor of the month type of thing, and balancing against that is not to anyone’s advantage.
We also strongly believed that the addition of the new Planeswalkers would shake up the meta a little, and that players would discover suitable counters to Chandra. This simply did not happen because of how Quick Battle is set up and it’s complete need for speed, so even if players found a counter to Chandra, it is still slower than playing her and losing/winning again.
For these reasons, we changed her first ability. We will continue monitoring the game and see what comes up.
Feel free to ask me any questions regarding this! I’ll pop in regularly during the day to answer anything that may come up.
