Designing The Dragons - Part 2!

2026年7月22日

Welcome House Leader,

This is part 3 of the Alliance Legendary Assault changes. If you are missing some valuable context, take a look at the last 2 dev diaries we posted:

Rhaegal

The Core Identity:

Rhaegal is a fast, aggressive single-target attacker who will TAUNT your strongest champions, creating interesting choices right from the team composition screen. Your highest health champion will be Rhaegal’s first target and then he’ll work his way down the list, always attacking your strongest champion.

Careful planning of your team allows you to set the order that Rhaegal fights you.

Your job during this fight is to keep your TAUNTING ally alive while letting passive damage effects do the work of slaying Rhaegal.

Designing The Carrots:

Rhaegal is fast…really fast. He charges his stamina every turn. This makes him a fearsome attacker, but it also means he’ll run into BLEED damage every turn.

We leaned into this by making BLEED deal an additional % max HP damage to Rhaegal, giving a massive payoff to teams that can keep Rhaegal bleeding.

The other passive damage effect we wanted to build Rhaegal around is FIRE. Unlike Poison, FIRE needs to be stacked, which we think makes it far more interesting for a boss battle. Since the bosses will clear all debuffs when the damage bar is filled, you’ll need to constantly re-apply FIRE over the course of the battle to succeed, but if you manage to do that, you’ll be rewarded with bonus TRUE damage for each FIRE you’ve applied.

The Design Journey:

The first iteration of Rhaegal TAUNTED your team at random. We very quickly realized this wasn’t great. It felt bad when Rhaegal locked onto your damage dealers or healers before you could defend them. We experimented with letting Rhaegal swap his focus every few turns. This alleviated the problem, if you could keep a champion alive for a few turns, they’d drop aggro and then you’d have a chance to heal them.

But there were 2 problems:

Rhaegal needs to ramp his damage by constantly attacking the same target. This doesn’t work if he keeps getting distracted.
It didn’t resolve the bad feeling of having your damage dealers or healers being targeted.

This is how we landed on the Strongest system. It fit thematically, gave players a way to set the pace of the fight and created the play pattern we really like on Rhaegal where he stays completely focused on 1 target until they died.

But we didn’t want it to feel terrible to be the TAUNTING champion. If they died before they could do anything, they were just a health pool waiting to be sacrificed. So we decided that any champion that was TAUNTING would gain 40% stamina every turn. This helps them defend themselves when Rhaegal’s wrathful gaze lands upon them.

But 1 more problem came up during play tests, REINFORCEMENTS. The ability to add new champions to the battle really countered Rhaegal’s single target play style. Thoros could just keep reviving your tank. We want Rhaegal to feel like an inevitable destructive force making his way through your team, so we couldn’t allow REINFORCEMENTS to dominate the battle.

So now, Rhaegal will instantly eat any REINFORCING champions.

Design Team’s Favourite Champs:

Osha:

Osha was one of our favourite champions in this battle. Not only can she help keep BLEED on Rhaegal, dealing massive damage to him, she grants your team massive DODGE chance buffs. All of Rhaegal’s attacks can be avoided, making her very proficient at keeping your allies alive while she piles on the damage.

Criston Cole:

Counter-attacking champions are very effective in this battle since Rhaegal will use his skill every turn. By granting the TAUNTING ally Criston’s Charge, Criston will counter attack every turn. Then, Criston applies multiple FIRE every time his marked ally uses their Skill. Since the TAUNTING ally gains bonus Stamina from Rhaegal, Criston can apply lots of FIRE. Making him your team’s leader will allow him to mark an ally very quickly in battle.

Drogon

The Core Identity:

Drogon is a pure DPS race. His Brimstone Rain ramps in power every turn, making speed and relentless aggression the only way to survive.

Designing The Carrots:

When battling against the Alliance bosses, you’ll notice that filling the damage bar cleanses all their debuffs and resets their stamina.

This is because technically, the boss “dies” and revives when the damage meter gets filled. We liked how this worked when designing the bosses, especially for Drogon.

His identity of a DPS race battle means you need to constantly deal damage, and you’ll likely need to heal your team to survive all the damage Drogon puts out. So when we designed him, we put a WOUND on his stamina ability. This means if you can’t deal enough damage to Drogon before he charges his stamina, he will WOUND your team and then his damage will overwhelm you.

With that design set, we leaned hard into buffing our fast teams. Free Cities gain an infinitely stacking ATK buff and will recover stamina every time they use their skills.

This should help them not only fight faster, but keep up to the ramping stats of Drogon as they continually fill the damage meter.

Our other high burst team is the Greens. Their champions naturally do a lot of damage, but where they struggle is having consistency in that damage. After they do their burst, their aggression fades away. So for them, we made the simple act of having and maintaining their BIRTHRIGHT enough to sustain them through the battle.

The Design Journey:

In the earliest version of Drogon, there was no stopping his Brimstone Rain. As it ramped, it became impossible to survive, and while this fit the DPS race identity, it was impossible to get high scores. We tried tuning down the Brimstone Rain’s damage, but then it just felt annoying. We eventually tried turning it off if your champions used their Skills, and that felt great. It added some decision making to the battle, between holding your Skills to turn off Brimstone Rain or using them all immediately for burst.

This change didn’t help the Greens quite as much since they aren’t as fast as the Free Cities. So for them we decided to add BIRTHRIGHT any time they bottom out. This ensures you’ll always have some BIRTHRIGHT and it’ll trigger their bonus effects like Gwayne’s stamina generation when he gains BIRTHRIGHT.

But since BIRTHRIGHT wears off at the start of the turn, the free BIRTHRIGHT won’t deal damage to Drogon. You still need to bring BIRTHRIGHT generators to take advantage of the strong start of turn damage to Drogon.

The last thing we wanted to share is that in very early testing, some players brought fast healing teams. In theory, we like the Jaqen H’ghar healing team, it’s fun for alliance war and PvP. It’s a great offensive powerhouse that isn’t as good on defensive teams. But we felt this team undermined the spirit of the battle. Bringing mostly healers to a DPS race feels wrong.

Since coins count as powerups, we made Drogon deal damage and steal TREASURY every time powerups were matched. This ensured that Sandor could never use his damaging effect. Then by debuffing your champion’s gem damage, we prevented Sandor’s leader ability which constantly causes cascades and fuels the Jaqen / healer team.

When you read those skills in game, it might seem like we’re overly punishing creativity, this isn’t our goal. We definitely want to put some difficult limits on your teams to make you think carefully about your team composition, but as an example, we found great success with the team pictured below:

Design Team’s Favourite Champs:

Daenerys Targaryen

Daenerys is an incredible addition to the Drogon battle. Thanks to her iconic item, which heals allies when they use their skill, she can keep the entire team at full health late into the battle. Every time she uses her own Skill, her ATK will increase which will in turn increase the value of her healing.

Alicent Hightower

Alicent Hightower is one of the best BIRTHRIGHT dispensers in the game. Not only will she keep your team healed throughout the battle, she’ll ensure her allies are topped up on BIRTHRIGHT so that the passive damage can keep flowing.

She also has the colour advantage over Drogon, helping her stay alive in extended battles.