Many voices here on the forum noted, that over the year game balance was greatly impacted by emblems.
One reason for that was that maxed or nearly maxed 5 star heroes are much more difficult to beat by 5’s at their 3.70 or maxed 4 stars. I don’t think we predicted this and it’s really an issue. But I think we are past fixing that the moment people started paying for emblems in the offers etc. Because the only way to fix it would be to take it back or diminish their effectivenes, either way feels like a step back. Well I had an idea that perhaps changing the raids and wars formula to encourage players to spend emblems more evenly rather than “all in” could be considered (for example, by temporarily disabling a random pool of heroes for a week worth of raiding offense/defense), but who knows if it would help.
One of the other issues with emblems which I think was hard to predict is the cost of moving them around on the higher levels of 5 stars. Reading some of the angry voices in the rebalance topic, for many the ham and iron spent on emblemming the team around Telluria just to have it taken back is a big problem. I’d say because of the cost of reemblemming, the game lost one important aspect - experimenting with the defenses. I think it’s one of the reason of the staleness in high raid defenses, beside the obvious dominance of certain stack. People just go for what works and do not experiment anymore. If you want to put that Alfrike in your defense, you need to not only emblem her (± 15 million food and iron) but also take that now deemblemmed JF out and replace with another red who may not be maxed and need further investment also etc. The costs of food and iron make it a big deal, I think much, much, much bigger than it should be.
But there’s also a reason for that - if moving emblems around was easy and had no consequences, people would just move emblems around before each raid attack, each war flag etc. Having maximum emblems for one class would mean all your heroes of that class benefit from that. Except if you wanted to be effective, you’d have to spend 10 minutes before each raid on rebalancing. How hideous would that be.
I think what could be a fair compromise between player-friendly and abusable mechanic would be to enhance the reset tokens in a way that if a hero emblem path is reset with a token, spending the same tokens on another hero are food and iron free, or the costs are greatly minimized. If you want to reset hero with gems, you still need to go with the regular costs. We get enough of these reset tokens to be able to shake up our defenses every now and then, but not enough to start fooling around.
Also, if a hero gets nerfed and it causes an outcry in a community, just give every owner of said hero a reset token for free and they can decide what to do with it. I get that it doesn’t return the ascension mats, but let’s be honest, no nerf will bring a hero like Telluria to Atomos level; she’d still be one of the best tanks in the game, just maybe more comparable to guys like Heimdall so you may want to move emblems to him instead. You shouldn’t be punished to spend a week on doing so, delaying all your other projects due to lack of resource.