Woohoo! Finally done with my thesis and I can finally write blog posts. The last 168 hours have been crazy and I have barely gotten 15 hours of sleep.

Not much progress in my base at this time. After maxing AQ and warden, everything else is just slow upgrading with not much impact. Good thing SC is adding 5 new AQ levels and 10 new warden levels eh?

Before we go through the changes, please have a cursory look at all the new stuff that is being added:

I’ll go through the balance changes and my thoughts about them

• Archer Queen lvl65
  • First big increase here. Giving 5 levels to AQ means that she will have 10.3% more dps and 15.8% more hp
  • Fairly decent improvement which will make QW a little stronger and at least AQ can now 2 shot collectors again
• Barbarian King lvl65
  • He gains 13.1% more hp and 10.5% more dps
  • This allows him to survive for an extra 2-5 seconds
  • At least his iron fist now increases his dmg which will really help. The key to properly using him is to use iron fist after the giga tesla is down or using warden tome to allow him to break past anything with ability
• Grand warden lvl30
  • 10 whole levels, which basically means all troops +1-2 extra levels
  • He will give 150 extra hp for high hp troops and an extra 20% for those with lower hp
  • Barbs for example will get 205*1.9 = 389hp which is 40 more hp than with lvl30 warden. This would make troops like bowlers, barch and witches much stronger. This is the #1 strongest thing in the entire update, max him asap.
• Golem lvl9 (7500 hp)
  • Such a dumb upgrade. He gets another 300 hp only instead of getting buffed straight to 10k hp. I believe that even 10k hp wouldn’t make him broken at TH12 level.
  • The only thing new is that his death dmg is buffed which may make him decent in defensive cc. 700 dmg is really too weak in offense though
  • The 700 death dmg would actually make miners without warden almost obsolete if you manage to trap the miners to hit the golem.
• Healer radius from 2.0 to 1.5
  • Its a nerf to pekka smash, mass bowler healer and bowitch
  • Not entirely sure how much the nerf would be or how it would feel
• Battle blimp hp increase
  • 1-2 extra seconds of survivability? Fair enough
• Mortar lvl12
  • Just +3 dps instead of the usual +5 of the previous levels. It will now deal 190 dmg per hit instead of 175 now
  • Still a pretty weak upgrade. They could just double their firing rate without adding much dps and mortars would be absolute monsters. Maybe they should increase firing speed as you upgrade it? Maybe from 5.0 seconds at lvl1 to 3.5 or so at lvl12
• Wizard tower nerf at TH10
  • Not really significant, doesn’t hit any break points
• Walls
  • Should be fun to finish them in 1-2 weeks
• Earthquake spell balancing
  • This really worries me, because now TH10 can destroy almost a quarter of a TH12 base without any effort. This really opens the door for TH10 to 2 star maxed TH12s again. It was harder a while ago but with this I think it would become so much easier
  • Otherwise, it would be interesting to see and use as a TH12
• Haste spell
  • With the way it linearly increases the speed of troops, it may make balloons a little stronger. Not sure if it would be any useful though
• Rage spell
  • Typical SC making it a real small boost, it will only be 3.7% stronger than lvl5 rage. They should really make it much stronger so that it allows good balancing at higher TH levels.
  • I think lvl6 should be introduced for TH11 at 200% boost and give TH12 lvl7 with 240% boost. This makes it a consistent 20% increase per TH level
  • This would synergise with the health increase of warden making each TH level much stronger than the previous one. Right now, the balance between levels is a joke. It takes a maxed TH12 and roll over a TH11 and even then it isn’t as easy as pressing your nose on the screen.
• Poison spell
  • Nothing much here. It would make electro cc much weaker with the 60% decrease in attack speed
• Skeleton spell
  • Now this is interesting. SC must have used them in testing and deemed them “balanced” but what worries me is the small growth between levels
  • Lvl1 (TH9) is already 67% as strong as lvl6 (TH12), this means that even a weak TH9 can have very strong skeleton spells. This worries me as people would use it to hit up. TH9v10 and TH10v11 might become much easier and it is unfair to the higher levels when this happens.

Tell me what are your thoughts on this sneak peek down below! Are you looking forward to it? I definitely am looking forward to grinding my heroes again. With my thesis done and having the next 1-2 weeks free, I should be able to grind heroes effectively