So, I wanted to see who the upcoming hero was going to be before making this, but I think it's time we have a general talk about the current state of the game: For context, I've been a player for around 6 years (end of 2020, around the Persona collab) and have seen a ton of the backlash around specific things

1- Current Hero releases

It's fair to say that they've been prioritizing more P2W units (Draconic, Awakened heroes, Cel-hypos) compared to more F2P units, and a lot of the power creep has gradually shifted towards this mindset - NC bosses get recycled and rely on draconic characters to get the best times for optimal resources, collections affecting the stats of said heroes so they can optimize damage, signature item levels increasing to 40+ for those units, meanwhile all 4F heroes cap at 30.

As it stands, our last official 4F hero was Icariel, and she is a wilder; before her, our last 4F hero was Lethos. And we all know how his release went, and before him was Gorok.

In release date for each one: Gorok was September, then Lethos in November, and then Icariel in February. You see the issue? We've gone around 4 months without a 4F hero release, with Lilith primarily going for awakened heroes & pets, as well as draconic units, and most accounts that have all of the other 4F heroes built have a ton of fodder built up, which can't be used. 

2- Arena Mergers

Yes, I understand that most people have killed this topic to death, but this is a topic that I do think deserves to be brought up as I truly think it's affecting a lot of player retention; after Lilith decided to start merging more dead server to make it more competitive, I can tell you first hand that it didn't make it competitive. It became a death knell for any non Pay to Win players. My account's located in server 732, and you know how bad at least the top 10 in my server's arena looks?

At least half of the top 10 accounts have around 1T Power, and are just awakened heroes & draconic heroes with high level collections that can just cheese. There's no strategy to making team comps anymore, just slotting in these P2W heroes and basically preventing any non spending players from getting themselves resources.

3- NC, CR & the illusion of victory

I briefly touched on this when discussing the recent batch of heroes but lately it feels like more of the endgame modes are heavily prioritizing a lot of the more recent heroes: for example, cursed capricorn or the devil boss got re-released, and one of his skills quite literally gets cancelled out with dragonspeak damage, and guess what just so happened to release in this patch that boss got reintroduced? A new highborn draconic hero releases that's suddenly BIS for that particular team.

Meanwhile the first time this particular boss got released, the infamous LibNeviBadenTrishea team was able to consistently clear it, averaging around 30 to 35 seconds to clear depending on rng - the re-released of the worm boss also proves my point since the recent draconic baden highborn hero basically became BIS for the worm boss; you get the point - taking safe and established F2P teams for specific bosses in NC and fucking them over by doing this draconic damage bs isn't helpful.

1a- Envy, Hybris & the encroaching decline of "Carry" heroes

This is a sub section in regards to my complaints from my first point, but is more focused on a specific group of heroes that most would call a "carry" or the one leading the team comp

For a while, a majority of most team comps all made sense in some form - portal party relied on Oden & Pippa teleporting enemies, Lucretia cheese relied on using under-leveled or under utilized units to let her buffs stack extremely quickly and decimate the enemy team with her ult, or even Scarlet who could deal a ton of damage but her ult had the rng chance of potentially taking an allied unit out of the fight when least expected. When awakened heroes came out, they started doing insane damage and basically becoming one person armies. Awakened Talene at launch was insane as a dps but could also keep her allies shielded and protected, awakened Thane gave allied units a buff with his awakened skill that could prevent damage to a specific amount , but he could also deal heavy damage when he had that buff himself.

Nowadays, when you look at a hero like Envydiel or Hybris - they basically just deal mass damage nonstop, and even when you look at their usage within more endgame modes, Hybris in particular is dealing trillions of damage nonstop, and his awakened skill in particular is like a cheap stun against hypogean heroes.

Conclusion: while Afk Arena is definitely not the same game I picked up back at the tail end of 2020, I feel more concerned far more than ever about a lot of the choices from the devs as well as hero design, on top of other choices seemingly made to make extra money.

Rant time (from a more casual player)