Welcome house leader, 

Today we’re proud to share our plans for the upcoming changes to the alliance legendary assault mode, as part of the 2-year anniversary celebrations for Game of Thrones: Legends. These are expected to go live in the next month or so.

For today’s dev diary, we’d like to go into more depth to help you all see how we do our changes.

When Alliance Legendary Assault first launched, we knew there were problems with the game mode, and we’ve heard a lot of feedback from all types of players about why this mode wasn’t great. We’ll break down the problems and how we’re tackling them in this dev diary.

Here’s the TL:DR if you just want the cliff notes:

• We’re making sure you can always participate in Alliance Legendary Assault.

• We’re making it so you never need to hold back when you attack.

• We’re introducing a shop and rewarding the entire alliance based on how much damage you all did to the boss, so cheer for your alliance members who beat their personal bests!

• We’re making all dragons track their progress individually so you won’t need to maintain a win streak to rank up.

Now then, let’s start the detailed dive with something we think you’ll all like:

Individual Progression & Renown

Going forward, all the dragons will track their progression individually.

We’ve seen the data and heard the complaints. Your alliances are great at defeating most dragons, but you hate fighting Viserion. The data pictured below shows the average damage on Viserion is lower and the time to beat the boss is substantially higher. Many alliances struggle to defeat him entirely.

We understand that it can be a terrible experience to struggle one day and then be bored by an easy dragon the next day. This happens in our current system, because in order to increase the tier of the dragons, your alliance needs to maintain a win streak, which is often stopped by 1 pesky dragon that your alliance just can’t beat.

So in the new system, all dragons will only have 5 Difficulty Tiers and they will track it individually. Your alliance also won’t need to maintain a win streak. We’re moving to a points based system which we call RENOWN. 

As your alliance deals damage to the boss, you’ll earn RENOWN, and once the time expires on the battle, the amount of RENOWN will determine how that boss will be adjusted.

Scoring below 100 RENOWN will cause the boss to demote to a weaker tier the next time you encounter it. (Tier 1 is the lowest tier)

Scoring over 200 Renown will cause the boss to promote to a stronger tier the next time you encounter it. (Tier 5 is the strongest tier)

Between 100 and 200 will cause it to stay at the same tier the next time you battle it.

Let’s talk more about RENOWN next.

Battle Mechanics: Infinite Health

We’ve all been there before, you log in, ready to attack the boss…

It’s a bad experience, you don’t get to complete your daily quests, and you’re locked out of an entire game mode for the day. 

Alliance Legendary Assault can also feel bad to play when your alliance is fighting very powerful bosses and you’re on the weaker side of your alliance. It can feel like your contribution is pointless.

Fixing the negative feelings of alliance legendary assault was one of our top priorities. We want to ensure everyone always has a chance to engage with our features and everyone’s attacks matter.

With that in mind, here’s how Alliance Legendary Assault will work going forward:

THE DAMAGE BAR:

When you enter the battle you’ll be fighting a completely fresh boss. And there’s now a new icon on the bar:

This new icon is here to show that this isn’t an HP bar that’s counting down, it’s a damage bar that’s counting up. Every time you fill the damage bar, this number will increase and the bar resets. In the picture below, the player has filled the bar 3 times and has an additional 235k damage dealt.

That number is Renown. Every time you or anyone in the alliance fills up the damage bar, you’ve earned Renown for the alliance.

What this means is that the bosses in Alliance Legendary Assault now have infinite Health!

You’ll never log in to play and see that your alliance has already defeated the boss, because the boss no longer dies. You can always contribute and help your alliance by scoring additional Renown!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot!

We wanted to make sure that any improvements you make to your teams will matter in Alliance Legendary Assault. There is no upper limit to how much Renown you can earn and any extra damage you do will help your alliance.

For example:

• If the damage bar has 1 Million HP in it.

• You deal 2.5 Million and one of your friends scores 1.5 Million.

• Your combined damage is 4 Million. So together, your alliance damage results in 4 Renown, even though you technically only get 2 Renown and your friend only got 1.

• So always do your best, every bit of damage can help your Alliance!

I Have The Power!

To try and make sure everyone in the alliance can meaningfully participate, the boss will be weaker and gain power over the course of your battle.

Each time you enter the battle, the boss will begin with low stats.

• Pictured below is a Tier 3 Viserion’s stats

• Every time the damage bar is filled, the boss will gain a stacking buff that scales with its tier.

• So for example, our Tier 3 boss gains 10% ATK and DEF per stack. 

  • Filling the damage bar for the 1st time = 1 Stack.

  • Filling the damage bar for the second time is +2 stacks (2+1 = 3 total stacks)

  • Filling the damage bar for the 3rd time is +3 stacks (3+3 = 6 total stacks).

  • As you can see, the boss will get substantially stronger as you repeatedly fill the damage bar and earn renown for your alliance. In the image below, the player has earned 5 Renown, which is a total of 15 ATK and DEF buffs (1+2+3+4+5=15).

We introduced these buffs in the game so that we could make the base form of the bosses weaker. Our hope is that, within reason, each alliance member can feel like they contribute to the battle and earn renown for their alliance. 

It might still be difficult in some situations. If you’re in a strong alliance, fighting against a tier 4 or 5 boss, the base stats might be a bit too powerful for a newer player. But in general, we hope everyone can feel like their contribution matters to the team.

Optimizing For Time

With the new system and designs for all the bosses, we wanted to be conscious of the time investment we’re asking from all of you.

Now that bosses have infinite health, we’ve increased the duration of the battles. The time limit is now a maximum of 10 minutes. This gives you more time to think about your moves, and for stronger teams that can survive the ramping strength of the boss, more time to deal damage.

We understand that 10 minutes can be a lot for 1 battle. So we’re making another change to the system: Only your BEST attempt against the boss will contribute towards your alliance’s damage. To clarify, the number of attempts against the boss does not matter - only your BEST shot counts.

Our hope is that by asking for only a single battle, players who are busy can get in and get out quickly. Battles shouldn’t always go till time runs out. But for players who enjoy the game mode or want to experiment with different strategies, this new system, where only your best attempt counts, should allow for low pressure experimentation. We feel that in the old system, many players were scared to change their teams away from what worked, because if they didn’t deal enough damage, they could be letting their team down. With this new system, you can do 1 serious run and then spend the rest of your energy trying out new team compositions or trying to get a new high score.

When the new system launches, we’ll be keeping the energy limit at 3 with 1 energy recharging every 4 hours. We think this will be a nice starting point for energy, and we’ll be monitoring the performance of the game mode after the launch.

We don’t want to increase the energy too quickly on the chance that some players get confused on how the new system works and feel like they need to keep battling and spending all their energy, when in reality, they only needed 1 battle. If that fear ends up being unfounded, we may increase the energy or potentially remove alliance legendary assault energy all together, allowing unlimited attempts. No promises, but we’re considering it.

A Cause For Celebration

We don’t mind a little competition between alliance members, competing for highest damage and bragging rights can be fun. That’s why there’s a leaderboard. But it’s not ok when one player doing well actively harms the other players in their alliance.

In the old system, players needed to deal 3% of the boss’ max HP in order to be eligible for the best rewards. That means if your alliance had a really strong member, they’d need to hold back or everyone else in the alliance would get mad at them. 

That’s not ok! If your alliance has a strong player that can deal a lot of damage to the boss, we want you to celebrate it.

So in the new system, the most important reward is the currency for the new alliance shop, and everyone in your alliance will gain currency based on how much Renown the alliance earned.

When you see a player hitting a new personal best score, you should celebrate! Because their increased damage to the boss is directly granting you more rewards and currency.

For those of you who are competitive, don’t worry, the leaderboard isn’t going anywhere. But we’re changing how we look at it. 

The leaderboard gives flat currency rewards. We did this so that if you’re a strong player in an alliance with your friends in real life, you’ll always be in the #1 spot and earning a decent amount of currency. But as players move to stronger alliances, the total Renown earned by their alliance will start to eclipse the leaderboard rewards. The leaderboard becomes more about bragging rights than the rewards it offers.

And for the ultra competitive alliances, we look forward to seeing your high scores posted on the discord. Now that the battles are infinite, we wonder which alliance will score the record on each boss. Will it be Night’s Watch? Red Wedding Planners? Valyrian Steel? 

The New Alliance Shop!

Speaking of currency, we’ve got a new shop coming with some things we think you’ll be excited about.

In the Alliance Legendary Assault shop, you’ll be able to directly buy a whole bunch of things, but the big highlight is that all of the iconic material currencies will be there! That includes the rarest materials like the “Jade Of The Summer Isles”.

Shortly after release, we’ll also be trying out a first for Game Of Thrones: Legends - Shop exclusive champions! Watch out for that when it comes out. We will share more details in due course.

What’s Next

We’re looking to make another post about alliance legendary assault next week where we want to share some information with you all that we usually don’t.

We’ll share the design process and new kits of the dragons ahead of their release. We’ll share how their abilities changed over time and how we tuned them to create new interesting battles for you all to take part in. 

We hope you’re all excited for that post and we look forward to hearing your feedback about the changes coming to alliance legendary assault.

– The Game of Thrones: Legends Team