Godtear Community Playtest: Halfway Report

Hello Champions!  As I’m sure you all know, the community is working on a balance pass for Godtear.  In this article, we want to share with you what’s happened so far, what impact your feedback has made on our process, and what’s further planned with this project.

Firstly, what we’ve done.  

As of this writing we have published experimental changes to the following champions: 

That’s a third of the entire roster of Godtear, and we’re still looking at six more champions to adjust.  Which six?  Keep on reading to find out later in the article.

Along the way we’ve hit the bullseye a few times, but many of the revisions missed the mark (some missing the target completely).  This is okay!  Expected and desired even!  That’s why we playtest changes as a community.  So that we can adjust if we find our changes aren’t hitting the spot where the champion is more fun to play with and against.

On that note, let’s discuss one of our success stories:

The changes to Raith’Marid came in the adjustments to 4 numbers on his cards and nothing else.  The data from our feedback forms show some great trends.  Players considered the original version of the crew too powerful by far.  They considered the experimental changes sufficient to bring him down to a reasonable level, but not so far as to be unplayable.  Most importantly, everyone who playtested the experimental Raith felt he was fun to play with and against.  The most common sentiment amongst the qualitative feedback we received was that, “Raith feels balanced.”

With that in mind, we are putting forth our changes to Raith’Marid’s as the first Community Balance Champion.

This is an exciting day for all of us.  This is the first Champion we’re adjusting as a community, and who better to be the first adjusted than the first to be overpowered?

Secondly, how feedback affects this process.  

Sometimes we hit the mark on the first try (like with Raith), and sometimes we miss the mark by quite a bit (like our Rangosh changes) so we need to take another shot at it.  The sharp eyed of you already saw that last week when we announced in the Kailinn/Grimgut article that we’d be revisiting Rattlebone.

We feel like we’re close to the target with Rattlebone and Halftusk, but not on the mark yet.  We know that, based on feedback, we require more effort on Rangosh and Skullbreaker.  We’re really happy with the changes to Jaak, and we’re quite proud of how Morrigan has become more interesting and fun to play.

That means we’ll be adjusting the experimental changes to four of the seven crews we’ve released, and watching the feedback on the other two still undergoing playtesting.  Raith is codified above.  This second round will allow us to hone the right balance, without disrupting the identity of the champions.  This seems like a good time to remind everyone of our initial goals with this project:

1. We want to be as transparent as possible with the community on how and why we’re proposing any given changes.  We’ll have an OH article every two weeks to present proposed changes.

2. We want to work with the community to build something approaching consensus for any given change.  To that end, we will not force changes on the community, but build trust that our efforts are valuable and reasonable.

3. We want to keep the identities of the Champions and their followers intact.  We’re not looking to create anything new, just nudge some numbers and text so that the models feel more balanced and fun.

4. We want everyone to have fun.  There are some deeply disappointing kits out there in Godtear, and some very powerful ones.  We’re looking to change that so that everyone’s favorite champion can see tournament play.

5. Our scope is limited.  All champions should have a niche.  We are tuning champions, not remaking them.  No modifications to core rules, roles, or identities.  If we can't fix it with a card reprint, we can't fix it.

Thirdly, what’s ahead.

We’ve got 6 champions still in the pipe for initial balancing:

Alongside each class we’ll be posting revisions to experimental changes on champions we didn’t hit the mark right out of the gate.  So for Slayers we’ll have 4 champions listed for experimental changes (Lorsann, Maxen, Rangosh2 and Skullbreaker2). We’ll also be codifying champions we feel are solid (like Morrigan if her feedback remains positive).

Please continue to fill out the Feedback Forms found in each playtest packet article.  We’re especially interested in more Morrigan vs protection 1 champions at this time.  Remember that feedback forms are weighted much more heavily than just posting one's thoughts on the discord.  Vacuum feedback is fine, but gameplay tested feedback is gold.

Next week we’ll be releasing our changes to Lily, Nia, and our second shot at Rattlebone.

Wooloolool,

The Council of Eldritch Judgement