SC was about 6 hours early in this announcement compared to other sneak peeks. It is probably because of the massive leak in reddit today which forced SC to release the news early. Its also Friday now so I don’t expect any more news until next Monday. Darian has also said that he is expecting a 3 day break.

https://forum.supercell.com/showthread.php/1873176-New-Hero-The-Royal-Champion

For gameplay, watch this video below:

No need for Spanser to release her stats because it is in the forum post above. The Royal Champion is a dark elixir hero who has 530 dps at the current lvl20 max compared to the 726 of AQ. The royal champion is also fairly tanky with 3900 hp at max. She’s a very unique hero because she targets defenses. She has slight range and can jump over walls. This puts her mostly near the front line, or she will wander off on her own because she ignores walls. This explains her large hp pool. Her ability is the Seeking Shield.

She is also shown to be able to target enemy heroes and troops during battle so she doesn’t have the generic weakness of hogs/loons to enemy AQ/cc troops.

The Seeking shield ability hits 4 different defenses for large damage (1860 at max). While it does look really pretty, her ability is far weaker than the any of the other 3 because they can make multiple attacks during their ability whereas she can only deal a burst of 7.4k dmg. Also, due to breakpoints, if the ability hits a full health inferno, it will be as if it has dealt 0 damage. Even though you can deal 1860 dmg to a 3k inferno, it doesn’t matter because the inferno is not destroyed and it can still deal full damage. I think the seeking shield, while very flashy, will need some buff to make it competitive.

Because of her short range, doing a champion walk isn’t very effective because air defenses can target and kill the healers. I think that if she follows behind pekkas or the yeti, she will be a beast, taking down defenses over walls and helping pekka/yeti clear out the base. Itzu has also shown that she is really good behind the hogs and can kill enemy heroes that usually cause trouble for hogs.

What interests me is her role in defense. With a decent hp pool and reasonable damage, it will be really tough for lower level players to deal with her during defense and she may be the key for TH13’s successful defense against TH11/12.

Her growth is absolutely horrendous though. She only gains 50 hp per level for a grand total of 1000 hp over 20 levels, which is only 33% growth over 20 levels. Her dps growth is as bad, giving only 7-9 dps per level for a total of 41% over 20 levels (2% per level). This means that casual players can rejoice as you can just level her to lvl5 and be 80% as good as lvl20. That alone is probably worth rushing for.

She costs a boatload of DE up front, requiring 250k to bring her to level2 immediately, where she will spend one day sleeping to lvl3. For my TH13 plans, I will most likely upgrade her first before upgrading AQ to lvl66. Then I will need to farm up 140k after that to upgrade her to lvl4. If I cannot farm that much (maybe on TinySin), I will focus everything on the Royal Champion until she is level 5-6 where her DE/day reduces drastically before upgrading the AQ.

Take note that the Royal Champion takes 7.5 days to upgrade at lvl16-20 which may indicate the new upgrade times for lvl66+ AQ/BK. She will take a total of 94.5 days to max out which is the longest upgrade time for TH13 heroes (assuming AQ/BK only goes to lvl70). This means that she will be the limiting factor and as such must be focused on immediately.