Designing Master Yi for Path of Champions: Establishing Star Powers
The Star powers are the core experience of how the adventure will go. Let’s take a look at how it evolved over the course of its development cycle. 1/7
BASELINE - These are the rules used as an initial baseline. For Yi, we wanted 1- and 3-Star powers to amplify Yi and the deck. As for 2-Star, we wanted to power up the playstyle but from a different angle. 2/7
ELUSIVE - When digging through internal testing feedback notes, Master Yi could get very strong, but struggled at closing out games. Giving the strongest unit elusive was a good start, but it lacked the scalability and synergy to grow into 3-Star. 3/7
BURST COMBAT - In order to shift the power to combat, we made the Star power focus on generating burst speed combat tricks. This allowed us to shift the elusive power to 2-Star giving us a twist on a finisher combo. 4/7
TWIN DISCIPLINES - Having spells generate cheap burst spells created opportunities to have combat actions “flow” into other actions that the opponent couldn’t disrupt. Twin Disciplines was an amazing candidate due to the flexibility between attacking and defending. 5/7
PLAYTEST RESULTS - Twin Disciplines at 0 cost made Flow and combos trivial to pull off. The card could be cast with no risk and provided enormous reward. In addition, it became easy to generate multiple Twin Disciplines in a turn, making risk assessment unnecessary. 6/7
FINAL - When we pulled Twin Disciplines back to 1 cost, it made combos a little harder to pull off. The 1 mana of multiple Twin Disciplines could stack up over the course of a round which balanced the risk vs reward and didn’t take away the combat fantasy. 7/7