Whether you’re cutting down hordes of monsters in an event, or hitting enemies for crit damage in the Arena, you have to admit that heroes are quite possibly your most important resource in Valiant Force. As such, the team began discussing how we would add more heroes to the world of Arathos. Should we continue summoning heroes using the current mechanics, or should we do something new?
We decided that we should take a step back and look at the hero pool from a bigger picture, and review some of the feedback we’d received from the community. After some discussion and brainstorming, we decided that it was time to take the hero pool to the next level by adding an all new 'breed' of hero. Introducing Summoner Heroes!
The Design
What is a Summoner Hero you ask? Summoner Heroes will be a unique kind of hero that can summon other units, called 'pets', to the battlefield. The original concept for Summoner Heroes started with a "beastmaster" inspired design, featuring heroes covered in animal skins and war paint.
However, as we continued creating more hero designs, we began to branch out and add more and more variation. The current designs consist of a variety of Summoner Heroes with a wide range of styles, featuring anything from dresses to formal wear.
When it came to designing the summoned pets, the most natural starting place was drawing inspiration from real-life animals, such as bears, eagles, etc. As our ideas for pets began to grow, more interesting creature ideas such as angels, dragons, and other mythical beasts also began to emerge.
We even went back to art entries submitted for art contests in 2015 and 2016 that featured ‘pet’ creatures as part of the artist’s original design. We are excited to say that some of our latest designs even include a couple of the top 3 entries from those contests! So thanks again for those awesome artwork entries, and be sure to keep an eye out for those that we’ve selected!
Unique Gameplay
Summoner Heroes will still be similar to the heroes you are already familiar with in that they will not have separate hero classes or job types. This means that you can expect to see Summoner-type Ninjas, Witch Doctors, Chaos Knights, etc. What will be different about these heroes is their unique summoning abilities as well as their corresponding pet’s abilities.
The pets will take up 1 grid space on the battlefield once they are summoned. They will be able to perform basic actions such as Move, Attack, and Defend, and most importantly, they will have their own unique abilities such as, "When pet attacks, X% chance to stun an enemy." We hope this will bring greater diversity to players' Arena formations and add another layer of strategy for greater surprises and hero synergies.
When considering summoned units, an obvious question that comes to mind is, "How many units can we summon?" To maintain balance in both PvE and PvP, the current design is that players will not be able to have more than 3 summoned pets on the battlefield at any given time. However, players will be able to bring more than 3 Summoner Heroes in their formation. If there are already 3 summoned pets existing on the battlefield, and the player summons another pet, the 1st summoned pet will be recalled, and the newly summoned pet will appear on the battlefield.
We are really excited about this new type of hero, and we hope that you will have as much fun playing the heroes as we had in designing them.
How To Summon The Summoners
We plan on releasing events based on Summoner Heroes in the near future, and hope to make Summoner Heroes available to players in a variety of ways, not just through summoning. Summoner Heroes may even be part of an event's prizes, exchanged for using event tickets, or may drop in Legendary difficulty event stages! We have made it our goal to reward each player with the latest Summoner Hero at least once for completing an event.
The Next Step
We are already looking forward to getting feedback from the community so that we may continue polishing the design and balance of these new heroes. Players should note that all the above feature information is based on the current development status, and that changes may occur before this exciting new feature is released.
Thanks so much for reading this dev blog post, and we will be back again soon with more exciting content for you to read and share!
