Are Merged Defenses Getting Weaker in Clash of Clans

> Quick answer: Nothing is nerfed today. Your ricochet cannons and multi archer towers are exactly as strong this morning as they were last week. What changed is the stated direction, and it points down for the old merges.

The team said the Town Hall 16 merges will drift toward being ordinary defenses over time, while newer merges take over as the powerful ones. That's from an interview, not a patch note. So treat it as direction, not a date.

It still changes what you should build this month. I'll get to that at the end.

I read through the interview coverage before writing this, because the community version of it had already turned into "merged defenses are getting nerfed" by the time it reached me.

That's not the claim. The claim is about balance drift, not a nerf patch.

The problem they described is simple. Signature defenses are everywhere now. Every Town Hall adds another special building, and a max base is turning into a wall of them. Nothing feels signature when everything is.

Their answer is to let the older ones settle. The ricochet cannon and the multi archer tower were the first merges, back at Town Hall 16. Over time those become more like a regular defense, and whatever gets merged later becomes the scary one.

They also said they'll likely keep merging defenses away entirely. The comparison they used was the Eagle Artillery going into the Town Hall.

One more thing worth holding on to. This came out of an interview series, not the in game blog. I'm not going to dress it up as confirmed.

Worth recapping, because half the panic comes from people who've never merged anything.

Merging arrived at Town Hall 16. Two Archer Towers become a Multi-Archer Tower. Two Cannons become a Ricochet Cannon. Both parts have to be maxed first, and you buy the merge rather than a new building. Supercell's own building merging announcement still covers the basics well.

The Multi-Archer Tower hits up to three separate targets at once, reaches 10 tiles, and shoots ground and air. If only one troop is in range, all three arrows land on it.

The Ricochet Cannon does more than double the damage of a maxed level 21 Cannon, and its shot bounces to a second enemy nearby. Nine tiles, ground only.

Cap it at four merged buildings, two of each, and you free up four slots on your base. That slot count is the part people forget, and it's the part that survives any balance change.

And you can't undo it. Once a merge starts it can't be cancelled, and you can't split the building back into two. That matters below.

Here's the part that decided it for me, and it has nothing to do with damage numbers.

I counted the defensive buildings on a maxed Town Hall 17 layout. Merging all four pairs takes eight buildings down to four. Four squares of your base come back, permanently.

That's not four decorations. That's room for the crafted defense station, a bomb tower you had squeezed into a corner, and still space left in the core.

Compare the two things being traded. On one side, a possible slow balance drift on two building types, with no date attached. On the other, four slots you get the day the merge finishes.

The slots don't drift. A rebalance can shave damage off a ricochet cannon, but it can't put two buildings back on your base and force you to fit them.

That asymmetry is why I'd still merge today. You're not betting on the defense staying strong. You're buying space, and space is the thing Town Hall 16 upward is always short of.

One caveat. Both buildings have to be maxed before you can merge them, so at lower Town Halls the cost of getting there is real. Don't rush two cannons to max purely to merge them if a hero or a lab upgrade is waiting.

The Eagle went into the Town Hall. That's the precedent they reached for, and it's not a comforting one.

Players got a decoration out of it. The Eagle also lost the thing that made it an Eagle, the signature shot. The team said as much, and said they'd handle it better next time.

So the honest read is this. "Merged away" doesn't mean deleted. It means folded into something else, with the personality sanded off.

If that happens to the ricochet cannon in two years, the resources you sank into it aren't refunded. They're absorbed. That's how it went last time.

I'm not telling you to panic. I'm telling you the upside on old merges has a ceiling now, and the ceiling is public.

"Becomes more like a regular defense" sounds vague. It isn't, if you've watched this game rebalance before.

It almost never means a damage cut to an existing building. Supercell hates taking things away from players who paid for them, and the forums make sure they remember.

What happens instead is that everything else grows and the old thing doesn't. New defenses land with bigger numbers. Old ones get a level or two per Town Hall and quietly fall behind the curve.

I pulled up the last few Town Hall releases to check that pattern held. It does. The Scattershot was terrifying when it arrived and is now just another building on a max base.

So expect no patch note. Expect your ricochet cannon to be the same building in a year, in a game where the newest merge hits harder.

That's a much softer landing than the word nerf suggests, and it's why I'm not telling anyone to stop merging.

For most bases, barely. For a couple, yes.

If you're at Town Hall 16 or 17 and you haven't merged yet, merge anyway. The slot saving is immediate and real, and "drifts toward a regular defense" is still a defense that costs you nothing to keep. You're not buying a lottery ticket, you're clearing space.

If you're weighing a merge against a crafted defense module, take the crafted defense. Our crafted defense upgrade priority guide walks through where each one sits, and crafted defenses are where the current attention is.

If you're saving gold for Town Hall 19, don't spend it on catching up old merges just to have them maxed. Everything we know about that Town Hall points at a different weapon and a different set of toys. Our Town Hall 19 roundup collects what's actually been said.

And if you're mid merge right now, finish it. Stopping isn't an option anyway.

Two things will tell you whether this is real or just talk.

The first is a balance pass that touches ricochet cannon damage without touching the newer defenses. That's the drift arriving quietly, and it'll show up in a maintenance break rather than a trailer.

The second is a new merge announcement. If Town Hall 19 ships a merge that folds two more buildings together, the pattern is confirmed and the old ones officially become the boring tier.

Until one of those lands, build normally. I've seen enough roadmap talk turn into nothing to not rearrange a base around an interview.

If you want to see how top players are laying out bases that already carry four merged buildings plus crafted defenses, the base browser has current layouts you can copy straight in.