Guild Ball: Season 3 Previews

Conditions are an important part of Guild Ball. They can have a massive impact on the game, and more than that, they’re part of our integral core design for several of our Guilds. The Butchers will bleed you, the Hunters want to snare you in their dangerous traps, and the Alchemists… oh boy, the Alchemists. They’ll poison your poor players, set them alight and burn them, and even bleed you if you’re not careful. These are just some of the obvious examples, but just about every single Guild has methods of inflicting one or more of Guild Ball’s condition effects upon their opponents, and then capitalising on it. As a coach, learning to deal out conditions and how to remove them from your own players is one of the first things you’ll learn once you pick up the basics!

Of course, certain models interact more than others with conditions, whether by placing them on enemy models, or gaining benefits from interacting with enemy models who are suffering certain conditions. For this week’s Wednesday reveal, we’re going to focus on two models that have interactions with specific conditions. The first of these is a model we’ve heard a lot about recently, since she’s currently involved in the Civil War for control of the Butcher’s Guild – it’s the Flashing Blade herself, Fillet!

Fillet is a model we’ve had interesting feedback on since she was released. The queen of the bleed condition is a powerhouse of a player, able to score goals as well as murder the enemy team. With coaches throughout the Empire of the Free Cities all watching carefully, we knew that we’d need to be very careful when we approached making any changes going forward into Season 3, as she existed in an extremely delicate state of balance.

Here’s the great news for those of you on #teamfillet – the front of her card is essentially unchanged. She’s still fast, still agile, and still has her base DEF of [5+]. We didn’t feel that any of those core values needed to change and were very accurate in representing the dangerous woman making her play for the Master Butcher’s throne. For the #teambrisket coaches, we’re sure that you’ll have noticed that Fillet lost a couple of points of HP, though, so she’s a little easier to take out at the end of her murder spree. Fillet coaches will need to weigh the risks of sending her off alone, shifting gears to work more closely with the rest of her team.

Moving over to the back of Fillet’s card is where things start really changing. One subtle change is that Blood Dance has been amended to only trigger on Playbook damage results. Although the rule was functioning as we intended previously, we felt that her ability to get around Character Traits such as Unpredictable Movement via Pain Circle was a little too strong. Depending on other models’ positions, Fillet can still get to evasive players but Butcher coaches will have to think a little more carefully on how to do so.

The next change is to Haemophilia, which now heals Fillet whenever an enemy model suffers the bleed condition within the aura. This actually pairs very nicely with Fillet’s reduced HP to give her a passive healing mechanic which can be triggered by other players – especially easy with Meathook or Boiler on the team. With Fillet’s natural DEF [5+], and access to Character plays such as Swift Stance to increase it further, the Flashing Blade remains a real headache for any opponent to take out.

Whilst Fillet has seen some changes which will no doubt have coaches from all of the Guilds talking, we’re happy that going into Season 3 we’ve kept everything that makes her actually feel like a solid, fun character. We didn’t want to mess with the core design of the model, but we needed to very carefully look at what made the model strong, and the effect the model was having on the game at large. Small changes can be very effective, and a series of small changes can combine to have a big effect.

By making the revisions we’ve seen here, we’ve kept Fillet as an extremely potent murder machine, capable of ruining her opponent’s day with absolute ease – #teamfillet for the Master Butcher’s throne!

The next model we have to show you all today has changed much more dramatically than Fillet has. This is a model we’re particularly excited about, and we hope you all are too. We know Union Players haven’t been getting much love in terms of spoilers up until now, but that’s about to change!

Enter the Feral Hunter, Minx!