Armor 2.0 PTR test results

So, here we are at the end of another mechanics test. Last week, a tweak that we labelled “Armor 2.0” hit the PTR servers, testing whether creatures losing armor upon taking damage was a good update. In retrospect giving it such a grand title compared to other tweaks we’ve done was a bit silly, as it was a much smaller change, but it got a lot of attention.

Here’s how we felt about the test.

The Good

• Armor became a more varied mechanic to interact with, producing many more board states.
• We had the potential to increase armor amounts beyond 1 and vary up armor cards in design.

The Bad

• Armor became a more complicated mechanic, harder to understand for new users and requiring more calculation.
• Armor got worse, and as a mechanic was already not seeing a lot of use at the top level.
• This change would necessitate a complete rebalance of all armor cards, and in some cases a complete redesign, which would upset the state of the meta for a long time.

Conclusions

The test resulted in feedback from the community in two general sentiments sentiment of either “meh” or “why?”. With this change not particularly exciting us either after testing, we’ve decided to not push it to live.

Now the armor test concluded, we’re starting to wind down active balancing on Divine Order. That said, we will still be extending the balancing phase as we have the Core Set Refresh on the horizon. We're using this opportunity to keep the cards to prevent any unforeseen broken combos, so the date has been extended to March 28, 2022.

Unlike previous months, this will be more of a ‘caretaker’ balancing period, where drastic changes should not be expected unless serious issues arise.