The balance changes are live now! Between the announcement on Saturday and deployment today, we decided to pull back slightly on the Executioner rework:

Original Rework:

• Damage Increased 98%
• Range Reduced to min 3.5 -> max 5
• Hit Speed Reduced to 2.5

What We Deployed Today:

• Damage Increased 82%
• Ranged Reduced to min 3.0 -> max 4.5
• Hit Speed Reduced to 2.5
  (Axe time was also reduced, but just proportionally to the range)

I wanted to write this blog post on the two reasons we decided to hedge our bets with the Executioner between the announcement this weekend and Monday’s release. It boils down to two major factors: the impending start of CRL and the effect of various ladder levels.

Clash Royale League

As many of you know - the debut of the CRL West Fall Split is this month, and CRL Asia and China have already started! CRL consists of the best players in the world vying for a large prize pool. These are literally the most intense and lucrative games of these player’s lives a...

cd_bandita

I agree. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that cards should have "healthy" use rates, which they have previously defined as "in the same general magnitude as the use rates of other cards." If all cards cost the same elixir and there were substitutes then this would make sense but the whole point is that most cards are relatively unique and don't have perfect substitutes. Then use rates should always vary as various metas gel around the state of the cards. Then use rates would not be even. But as a meta gels, an anti-meta forms and use rates naturally shift again. It seems very unlikely to me that in a stable game we would have both uniform use rates and a stable meta.

If anything, frequent changes cause a subset of players to focus on one or two decks that seem safe even if not optimal in several kinds of metas, which makes use rate statistics an artifact of balance changes rather than a meaningful statistic. Then trying to balance around this artifact leads to wildly OP cards.

I don't think our goal is to get every card in the 4-13% use rate range. Some cards like Spells or Mega Minion will ALWAYS be above that range regardless of how bad they are - Wizard is proof of that. But we do care about win rates. Even if the use rate is low, the win rate needs to be competitive so players of niche strategies still feel like they can keep up.

Cards like Skeleton Barrel and Three Musketeers are not a high priority because they maintain a decent win rate despite low usage. Cards like Bowler (mentioned above) are perfect candidates for buffs because their win rate is bad even with only Bowler fans playing him.

HarryTheConMan

They do test them. They wrote a whole post about it. Go search the post history. The specifically cite the problems with play testing and how they brought in a new company to do it cause pros wouldn’t. Problem is no amount of play testing will account for all the possibilities millions of player can find with a card.

Your last line is really the crux of it and its something that has been echoed by every balance team of every live game of every genre - when you have enough players, its impossible to playtest perfectly. We can playtest things into the ground and players will have more battles with it in 5 minutes than we could in months, even with a big team. Ultimately there is always going to be room for error and that's part of the job. PEKKA fell into that margin of error (we did have discussions above Medium vs Long range during testing) and when that happens it's incumbent upon us to fix it quickly. Overall I think we get more right than wrong and if we can keep up a positive %, the game will march towards a better state each month.

Jamos14

Bowler needs that rework more than executioner does IMO. It needs a rock speed increase/damage increase.

Bowler may have a rework this year too :) Hard to predict any timeline, but there are many Epics that could use some love to make them feel truly Epic and big bowlie boi is certainly not as cool as he could be.

Supercell_Drew

if i print this and stick it over seth's whiteboard do you think he'll notice?

happy cake day!

no joke, this is among the best/most professional suggestions I've ever seen on reddit. It's easy to lulz over the handwritten text (omg dude why did you not just type this out) but it effectively analyzes problems and proposes well thought out solutions to them. Even the color coding helps convey the information effectively

Congrats!! Getting to 3000 and then 3300 in a single session is wild! Just 300 more Trophies and you'll have all the cards available to unlock :)

Hey! Welcome to Clash Royale, figured I'd give you a few tips:

I'm guessing from the 25 cards found that you are roughly in Arena 4-5. The most popular cards in that range are Baby Dragon, Skeleton Army, Prince, and Witch. You have plenty of counter to Skeleton Army, but your deck has no Spells! Spells are important to remove defending Troops that are placed by your opponent. Most decks follow roughly this formula:

1. Win Condition - this is the main Building-Targeting troop that your deck is built around. You have both Giant and Hog Rider in this deck, both are great but you might not need both.
2. Ranged Anti Air - because flying Troops like Baby Dragon can be devastating, most decks pack one sturdy ranged attacker like Musketeer or Wizard
3. Cheap Anti Air - as a safety/backup, it's good to have another anti-air card - usually a bit less expensive like Archers, Minions, or Bats
4. Melee Damage - to fight high Health building-targeters like Giant or Hog Rider, most decks play Mini-PEKKA, Pri...

JoelBlasterM7

Seth meant that a small fish isnt able to hit air by logic, if it can then why not pekka too. When he mentions "countless", you gotta take his word for it

Also, visual bugs can be fixed but only with a client update. So we could fix the bugs on our side but that doesn't fix them for a September balance update. Maintenance changes only tweak numbers, but don't update game logic or change art files.

InfernoDragon203

Some people complain about trade tokens and prefer gold, because trade tokens have 0 value while these people (who are probably lvl 12s and 13s) need to gold to upgrade their cards or can’t find anyone willing to trade the card they want.

Others who are lower level want more trade tokens because they need to upgrade their deck and need to get rid of all the useless cards given to them in chests. Trade tokens are very hard to come by, and these global tournament rewards don’t help.

So it is hard for SC to please everyone. I personally prefer trade tokens as my clan offers many commons, rares and epics to trade. In my opinion, there should be more variety in the rewards to try and give a decent sum of gold and a few trade tokens.

Hey! This is basically correct - we have a variety of Tournament reward 'templates' and try to rotate through them. Some have a lot of trade tokens, and others like this one are purely gold. Just because we run this set of rewards for this Global Tournament does not mean trade tokens will never appear again.

GG_shi7head

Sorry, but this sounds like nonsense. How can he be sure that those things are correlated? Baby Dragon is a Golem staple and due to the Pekka buff both Golem and Baby Dragon winrates are affected.

Golem has only a 7% usage rate, so even if every single Golem deck ran Baby Dragon, it's still used in a variety of decks. At least some of those players have opted to switch from Baby Dragon in their decks (or changed decks entirely). Either way, a well-rounded support card at 21% usage isn't too crazy, that's about the same as Electro Wizard, Bandit, Mega Minion, etc.

With only a 49% win rate, you can assume a nerf would plummet both use and win rates - given that there aren't great alternatives for splash attackers yet that would leave decks with extremely few options for that role. We stated last month that we want to buff up all the underperforming splash attackers before making a call on Baby Dragon. We could nerf it this month - but if it just dropped so much without touching it, why should we nerf it?

iDetroy

We wanted to open up this thread as a bit of a Discussion Thread just to see what's on your mind, and to provide you with some of our thoughts as well.

I can only pretty much repeat my points I've brought up in my Current State of the Game Post and would really like to get an answer on your fishy Ban Policy as well as why the amount of Global Tournaments per Season got decreased to one per month instead of 1 per week.

Questions regards Card Balancing:

1. Pekka

Any plans on reverting the Pekka "Nerf" you've done with Season 2? It's obvious that the Nerf turned into a Buff, and the usage as well as Win Rate increased even further.

2. Mega Knight

Mega Knight has been sitting at a Win Rate below 40% in Grand Challenges since a couple of months already, and there are barely any Match Ups (except for eBarbs at 4k trophies) where I could say "wow, that's an easy one for Mega Knight". He even sucks against swarm units where he is supposed to be good against.

We are still watching PEKKA, but yes the win rates and use rates have trended up slightly. If it holds, I think PEKKA would receive a small health or range nerf. The goal was a minor nerf and it ended up being a minor buff. For all the talk about how we don't listen to the community, the PEKKA change was reduced BECAUSE of the community. Originally it was -15% health, but we knew it would be controversial and decided to hedge a little bit because we didn't want to over-nerf it. We even warned the YouTubers about it before the balances were announced, but clearly we should have gone with our first instinct.

Mega Knight isn't that bad: 11%-46% in GCs (7%-50% in 8+ win games). There are no plans to buff him right now, but of course that could change any month. He's very popular on Ladder (top 5 played Troop from 4-5k) and Classics (20%-50% use-win) so we are putting priority on more pressing cards that need reworks.

111Striker

What do you think about furnace? There has been a lot of post on reddit about its overuse and about the fact that it's too defensive. In my opinion also xbow is too defensive for this game and it makes some matches really boring, so what do you think? I truly hope that one of you will respond.

I go back and forth on Furnace. It's not OP (4%-49% in GCs, 8%-52% on Ladder) but it is annoying. Something I find frustrating is that even after a Fireball or Poison there's that last wave of Fire Spirits that burp out. We have discussed reducing the health so that the final wave doesn't come out, but Poison doesn't really need that buff and Furnace probably shouldn't be so easily countered by Spells. It's a design that is meant to be a little challenging to interact with, but I agree that frustrating gameplay should be addressed as much as possible.

MindMaster115

I'm really interested in knowing what was the reasoning behind nerfing the barb barrel so it can't kill Princess, Dart Gob or Rascal Girls

I thought it was put as a shorter-ranged log that spawned a single Barbarian but I guess that ain't the case anymore

Things Barb Barrel can still do that Log can't:

- Play in the middle to pull a Baby Dragon or Mega Minion into the opposite lane

- Cycle in the back for a cheap Barb defender

- Counter Goblin Gang at the river and hit the tower for more damage

- Counter Goblin Barrel and provide a counter attacker

- Single handedly kill a distracted support Troop

Barb Barrel is still pretty versatile and strong - it can still kill Princess / Dart Goblin / Rascal Girls, you just rely on the Barbarian to finish them off and lose the ability to chip tower. Barb Barrel had over a 50% use rate in high level play for months on end, it needed a nerf for sure. Something had to be done to change at least one fundamental interaction and I think the Princess/bait type decks were the ones that suffered most from Barb Barrel's insane value. It has the same win rate as Zap and Log now, so let's see how the player base adapts to the change over the next few months.

Wwoody123

Would you please ask the Lumberjack what the Rage spell tastes like? Will any troop ever be able to carry a Heal spell?

There was a very old prototype troop (Paladin) that cast Heal on himself every time he attacked! We discarded the concept for now but never say never :)

Mew_Pur_Pur

Any hints for an upcoming card? The recent card designs have been awesome and I can't wait for the new one

We are all super excited for the next card. It's a really fun design, has a unique mechanic, and challenges both players in an interesting way. Should definitely open up new deck archetypes too!

jetx666

can season pass get better rewards? Seems like less people are getting it.

When we developed Pass Royale and Trophy Road we made a few variants of the rewards. Each path has nearly identical value (when converted to a neutral economy value) but mixed up the spots where you unlock them. The reason we do this is to gauge feedback and learn. We learned a lot from the community reaction to the earlier Legendary this month, and will very likely return it to Tier 35 in future months. The only way to know is to experiment!

ApolloXX85

What games did he work on before Clash Royale?

Hey! I have spent my whole career working on large mobile games. I believe nearly every game I have worked on has spent time in the Top 50 charts, I spent 2011 -> 2016 in Silicon Valley. I took a two year attempt at YouTube/streaming/esports and while there were certain aspects of it that I enjoyed, I preferred to work in a collaborative environment doing game development more than purely content creation.

ThatRandomCeltic

Any chance we will see any changes for clan wars in the next update? It’s sort of getting repetitive and starting to feel like more of a chore (to help the rest of my clan) than something I play to enjoy every time.

Short answer: No, not in the next update

Long answer: We have had literally hours upon hours of discussions about Clan Wars. Overall, the team agrees that it needs an update. However, we feel the problems with Clan Wars are deeper than just surface-level fixes. We have seen multiple community posts/videos about requested changes (more capped modes, donating War Day battles, resetting Trophies, etc) but even if we did all of those changes there would still be systemic issues with Clan Wars that get stale over time. Clan Wars needs to be a huge, socially-driven endgame and its just not quite filling that role for now.

We have a variety of whiteboards / prototypes towards a Clan Wars update, but we can't provide a timeline for its launch. When you do get it though, we promise it will be epic and change the way Clash Royale is played forever :)

Vikmania

The executioner rework seems interesting. It will be something I will be looking for next season.

Ideally we have big reworks coming every month or every other month for a while. There are a lot of cards that need love but shouldn't just get a direct stats buff. Executioner has stood out for a while - he's been underperforming in competitive play, but just a 10% health buff doesn't really fix that fact that he's not particularly unique when compared to the variety of ranged splash attackers. Hopefully making him the shortest range but highest damage anti-air splash attacker creates interesting decisions of Ice Wiz vs Baby Dragon vs new Executioner

What other cards do y'all think could use a full design rework?

King0llie

These posts are so welcome mate, communication is the key to keeping everyone happy and informed!

That executioner will be very similar to Hunter if you make those changes, but i guess they would excel in certain situations.

I think a better rework would be:

• Now costs 4 elixir
• Reduce HP slightly/Damage
• Increase attack speed and projectile speed

This will then let him compete with the baby dragon, but he will be a ground troop. With the increase in attack/projectile speed he will be better at clearing swarms and be a bit more reliable, but reduced damage means hes less useful vs tanks (exe/nado doesnt rek everything)

What you think?

The original version of the rework was at 4 Elixir! But as we playtested and polled players, it became apparent that Executioner is played largely because of his toughness. If we made him 4 cost and lowered his health to die to Lightning, we would be betraying every existing Executioner player and that's not a good way to start off a rework. Ultimately keeping him Lightning proof at equal levels was a core pillar of the new design, along with needing to kill Barbarians with a single attack.