The Overview

Welcome House Leader,

If you haven’t seen the breakdown of the changes coming to alliance legendary assault, take a look at the last dev diary we posted in this link: https://www.gameofthroneslegends.com/news/alliance-bosses-reimagined

In today’s dev diary, we’ll be looking over the redesigned dragons and what we did to ensure every battle feels unique, strategic, and—most importantly—fun. We know the old dragons weren’t the best at that.

Here’s what we’ll be looking at:

• Core changes to the Legendary Assault Battles

• The “Carrot & Stick” method we used when tuning dragons.

• Then we’ll look at each individual dragon and go over:

  • Their core identity.

  • How we built teams to take down each boss.

  • We’ll share a few details on things we tested and adjusted during the design process.

  • Some example champions we found quite effective during tuning.

This is one of our first in depth design docs, so give us your feedback if you’d like more diaries like this. We tried to keep things short, so let us know if the design talk about our testing is something you like reading about.

With that taken care of, let’s dive into:

The Core Changes

Battle Changes:

We’re introducing two universal battle effects to Alliance Legendary Assault. 1 of which you’re already familiar with from the previous dev diary, it’s the ramp mechanic, which we introduced to ensure everyone can contribute to the fight. But the other one is to prevent infinite combos. 

We know that there are plenty of fun combos like Jaqen, Arya and gold Daenerys. But those strategies are fragile in PvP. In Alliance Legendary Assault, they could be too consistent due to the slow ramp of the boss. Because Alliance Legendary Assault grants rewards based on damage done, we can’t allow for infinite combos, but we also don’t want to nerf anything because of this mode, so the Exhaustion mechanic will be present in all Alliance Boss Battles. This ensures infinite combos are impossible and we shouldn’t have to nerf anything due to exceptional performance in this mode.

1. Alliance Ramp: Bosses start out manageable and grow stronger as the battle progresses, allowing everyone to participate.

2. Exhaustion: Champions can no longer gain stamina after using their Skill twice in a single turn.

Both effects can be found in the Global Effects Menu during combat.

Tier Changes:

We’ve streamlined the 10-skull system into 5 distinct Tiers to better align with champion growth. 

When Alliance Legendary Assault first launched, champions could only gain 50 levels per star rank. Now a 1* legendary champion can go over level 100. Because the bosses didn’t have a ramp mechanic either, we needed more skull tiers to try and ensure players at every level had a dragon that was fair for their champions.

But now that the bosses scale their stats and champions can reach higher levels with fewer stars, we just didn’t need that level of granularity. There are only 7 stars for champions, so having more dragon tiers than stars didn’t make sense.

When the new system goes live, we’ll do our best to match each alliance to the appropriate tier:

• If you were fighting a 1 or 2 skull dragon in the old system - you’ll start at 1 skull in the new system.

• 3 or 4 in the old system -> 2 skull in the new system.

• 5 or 6 -> 3 skull

• 7 to 10 -> 4 skull

We didn’t want to start anyone at 5 skulls because the dragons have far more distinct strengths and weaknesses. Speaking of:

The Carrot & Stick Method

Our new design philosophy focuses on two elements: Carrots and Sticks.

Put simply, a carrot is an ability which specifically makes bosses weaker to some compositions, while a stick restricts compositions we don’t want to excel.

At lower difficulty tiers, there are fewer sticks. Lower ranked alliances don’t have as many champions to use in their rosters and we want to allow for some experimentation in the bosses. But as you move up in difficulty, you’ll have to work around more complex interactions in order to excel.

We tried to really focus on the core identity of each boss as we designed the dragons. For example, Viserion’s sleep cycle is very unique. If you strike him while he’s pacified, he’ll wake up angry and it really hurts your team. 

This play pattern benefits teams who are slower, or don’t mind holding their skills for a few turns. So naturally, one of the carrots we created was: RAID reduces Viserion’s DEF and Durability.

This felt correct since RAID teams tend to want to hold their abilities for combos, they’re happy to hold their stamina while Viserion is sleeping.

On the other hand, factions who want to go fast like the Free Cities, or who lose their effectiveness over the course of a battle, like the Greens with their BIRTHRIGHT, these factions hate Viserion’s sleep cycle. So we used a stick to even further punish them.

Viserion’s Claw Swipe, his stamina skill, will fully remove BIRTHRIGHT. This is an example of a stick.

We made sure each of the Alliance Bosses had at least 2 playstyles they were explicitly weak to, but there’s definitely room for experimentation.

With that out of the way, let’s look into the dragon designs:

Viserion

The Core Identity:

Since we already brought him up, let’s start with Viserion.

His play pattern is built around his sleep cycle. If you strike the dragon while he’s sleeping you’ll be punished. Use his nap time to heal your team and ready your damage dealers for the next volley.

But that being said, we know that a lot of players didn’t like the sleep cycle of Viserion. Waiting on the dragon while not having any agency can be annoying. We know most of you just want to get on with it!

So when we designed the carrots and sticks, we ensured there was a way to bypass the sleep cycle.

Designing The Carrots:

For all the players who don’t like to wait, we made it so that Viserion will only trigger his rude awakening when he’s not BRITTLE. Since Starks are one of the most widely owned factions, we thought this was appropriate as a carrot because we don’t want the bosses to be frustrating.

This isn’t the only carrot for Starks, but we hope this makes the battle approachable for most players.

As we mentioned previously, Viserion’s sleep cycle naturally benefits combo teams who need to charge all of their champions before attacking. Giving them a clear window to fill their stamina while Viserion doesn’t do anything.

The Design Journey:

We shortened Viserion’s sleep time from 3 turns to 2 turns. We knew that a lot of players hated waiting for the naps to end, and we didn’t want the battle to only be fun if you had Starks. 

The problem with this was that most combo teams couldn’t charge all of their members within a 2 turn window. So we added a 2nd effect to one of Viserion’s abilities: if the RAID is applied by a skill, it will grant all other allies Stamina! This means if you can at least charge your combo starter, the rest of your combo should be easier to trigger.

In some of the early versions of Viserion, we tried to make SHIELD teams work. We thought it made sense, Viserion being pacified for a few turns gave the Night’s Watch a chance to build their shields which felt like a natural fit to the fight. 

But in practice, this just made each battle last until the time limit triggered. It wasn’t fun, you were never under threat of dying until Viserion’s patience meter was filled or time expired.

We then tried a version where Viserion would eat the shields of your characters but take damage equal to their value. We thought this could fix the issue by converting your shields into damage, which it did, but it didn’t feel great because characters like Benjen need their shields to deal damage.

Design Team’s Favourite Champs:

Grey Wind: (Coming soon!)

Grey Wind will be releasing soon as a shop exclusive champion for the Alliance Shop.

Viserion’s Skill has predictable timing, making it very easy to reliably use Grey Wind’s passive for massive damage. Grey Wind also adds ICE with his Skill making him a great choice for this battle.

Mystery Champion

Releasing very soon, we have a champion who applies both ICE and RAID! This bold little girl can pack a punch strong enough to defeat a giant.

Look for this champion’s release in the coming weeks as she looks to bring foes to their knees for the King in the North, whose name is Stark.

Icy Viserion

The Core Identity:

The master of gem manipulation! This fight is all about board control and managing the explosive Eternal Winter gems.

Icy Viserion already feels very unique, we wanted to ensure that this gem board focus stayed intact during his redesign.

Designing The Carrots:

Given the intense focus around the gem board, it was a natural fit to ensure the Baratheons would be a strong choice against Icy Viserion. Their ability to spawn powerups and destroy gems is unmatched ensuring they have an easy time clearing the Eternal Winter gems and Frozen gems on the board.

We leaned heavily into this with the carrot ability. Baratheons gain an indefinite Gem Damage buff every time a powerup is matched. Because this can stack infinitely, by the end of the battle, Baratheons can reach over 500% Gem Damage. Be sure to bring healers, because once your team members go down, their Gem Damage buffs are removed.

For the 2nd faction, we wanted to give players the option of a team that doesn’t naturally play the gem board well. A lot of the game is about using your champions skills and not everyone is adept at playing the gem board. We decided to make Icy Viserion weak to REINFORCE teams for a few reasons:

1. It’s thematic and allows the Night King to beat Icy Viserion.

2. Icy Viserion stacks a lot of ICE and FIRE on his victims. Since REINFORCEMENTS are brand new characters entering the battlefield, they essentially reset Icy Viserion’s progress as he tries to kill your team.

We felt this was a fun play style to use against the boss, and we even added in a small easter egg to his Eternal Winter gem, where it will explicitly heal the Night King. This should help him be the last one standing in this fight, ensuring he can summon plenty of Wights.

The Design Journey:

In our early playtests with Icy Viserion, REINFORCE teams struggled to keep the gem board clear of hazards. We expected this, but it made it hard for them to summon their champions when their board options were limited.

So during testing, we created a series of abilities to help them manage the gem board. Your REINFORCED allies will destroy gems at the start of every turn, and when they’re defeated, they’ll spawn a random gem upgrade.

Next, while testing, we found that Lannisters were outperforming the Baratheons. This is because coins technically count as powerups. Because of how many coins they can spawn, they were getting extremely high gem damage in a short amount of time. 

We really liked the Baratheon play pattern, so we didn’t want to hurt it just to nerf the Lannisters. We started by limiting the gem damage buff to Baratheons only, but dual factions became the only viable team when we did that. Players would use Lannisters to fill the gem board with coins so that their Baratheons would accelerate quickly.

Eventually we decided the best option was to simply punish players for matching coins, so now Icy Viserion will strike your champions when coins are matched.

Lastly, because of how proficient they are at removing debuffs, we added shield destruction to Icy Viserion to ensure the Night’s Watch couldn’t infinitely survive during the battle. Icy Viserion brought down the wall in the series, we can’t have the Night’s Watch do well against him.

Design Team’s Favourite Champs:

The Night King:

Naturally immune to Ice & Fire makes the Night King a natural threat to Icy Viserion. Matching Eternal Winter gems before they explode heals the Night King. If he’s the last one standing, he can REINFORCE all defeated allies, easily piling on more damage onto the boss. 

Barristan Selmy:

Allies who can spawn powerups are extremely valuable in the battle against Icy Viserion. Champions like Gendry, Davos, or Violet Stannis all excel. But one champion who excelled in our tests was Barristan Selmy. With his leader ability, Barristan will spawn powerups every time an ally shield is broken. Since Icy Viserion destroys all shields at the start of the turn, it’s technically possible to have Barristan spawn 5 powerups per turn when he’s on the correct team.

That’s it for now. In a few days, we will publish another article explaining how we redesigned Rhaegal and Drogon. So long, and let us know what you think of this series!