Greetings brave Knights!

To celebrate Doctor Flox's Hero's Challenge, we'll be taking a trip down memory lane of our own, exploring the history of this explosive Alchemist!

Our diminutive Alchemist was one of our earliest Heroes, and below you can see the evolution of his visual design. There are many consistent elements across all the iterations: the colour scheme, the pauldrons, the moustache, the flame on top of the hat, the satchel - and the general aura of mischief! But, ultimately, the hat got pointier, the man got shorter, and we ended up with Doctor Flox as we know him.

Tied in closely with the White Peak Invasion story, Doctor Flox was originally supposed to be called Doctor Phlogiston, with 'Phlogiston' being a 17th century theory about a fire-like element released during combustion. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), 'Doctor Phlogiston' was deemed to be too long, and so he was renamed 'Doctor Flox' - with Flox being the Ancient Greek word for 'flame'. So, much like his visuals, his name was shortened, but kept the vibe!

And so Doctor Flox went into the wild and became... well, not very popular. Despite his best efforts, his toolset never really set the world on fire, with his Expose on his Rage Power that also applied to the Knight making him a sadly unpopular Hero. The original aim was to play into his volatile persona, and (as with most Heroes with 'Blaze' abilities - ones that inflict friendly fire), having a trade-off between great power and a soupcon of pain. Unfortunately, many players felt that the trade-off wasn't worthwhile, particularly with the risk of Expose, and Doctor Flox largely sat on the bench.

So, we've decided that Flox deserves a long overdue rework, which is as follows:

Burn, Burn, Burn

As with his original version of this, Flox targets the entirety of the back row, with a chance to apply Burn. However, Flox's Base Power has now had its charge rate reduced from 8 actions to 5 actions, meaning it'll become available a lot faster.

We also wanted to keep an element of Flox's volatile personality within his toolset, so his Base Power now includes friendly fire on the Knight, instead of it being part of his Rage. However, the friendly fire percentage is a relatively modest 10%, and his damage has been boosted, making him similar to Urmas.

Big Bang

Flox's Rage Power has had a few major changes. It still includes applying Expose, but only to the enemies now. Doctor Flox has learnt his lesson and made his concoctions slightly more considerate!

The other big changes are how it applies damage. Big Bang now bypasses armour and hits health directly, and is now distributed damage - the fewer enemies there are in the field, the harder it hits each enemies. We've also made his Rage Strong vs. Burn, meaning that he can boost the damage of Big Bang by applying Burn, Burn, Burn in advance.

Max Star Perk

We've switched his Max Star Perk to apply Fury to the player, which will also boost the player's damage output - especially when combined with the Exposed on the enemies from Big Bang!

With these changes, we hope that it might help Doctor Flox fill a gap in the Alchemist roster around PvP and Guild Bosses. Let us know what you think of the changes in our socials.

To highlight these new changes, Doctor Flox is being featured in his very own Hero's Challenge, allowing players to experience him at his new maximum potential. And Hero's Challenge means a new Hero Skin! Here we see a slightly more rugged, rough and ready Doctor Flox, in his Blastproof skin!

But not only that - as his Hero's Challenge is running over 4th July, we have the Uncle Ban skin in the web store, in honour of our American players! Head to the web store to check it out!