Balance Patch V1.1.2

Introduction

An early balance patch? What gives!? 

As you’ll likely remember, we had a little trouble with the console certification process for the previous update. So to help our team stay on track to deliver what’s shaping up to be a hefty update in v1.2 next month, we’re launching the v1.1.2 balance patch early! 

Balance patch v1.1.2 has a slew of tweaks and changes to Heroes and Items, as well as some buffs for Towers, and more! Alongside balance changes, you can expect snazzy new skins too, including the incredible Angelic Sevarog! 

Grab yourself some snacks, kick your feet up and let’s jump into the patch notes.

Store News

Angelic Sevarog [Rare]

Sevarog is arguably one of the most menacing Heroes in Predecessor - but if you don’t think he’s creepy enough yet, his Angelic Skin might change that opinion.

Executioner Murdock [Common]

A darker twist on the classic Murdock we all know and love! Kinda makes you wonder which side of the law he’s really on.

Hotrod Howitzer [Common]

Jump on to the battlefield with all guns blazing in the Hotrod Howitzer skin! 

New Bundles

Angelic Sevarog Bundle

Everything you need to complete the chthonic vibe.

Bundle Contents:

• Sevarog [Hero]

• Angelic Sevarog [Skin]

• Angelic Sevarog [Profile Icon] (Exclusive)

• Angelic Sevarog [Banner] (Exclusive)

• Pray [Spray] (Exclusive)

Angel Sevarog Variant Bundle

Deliver divine judgement in the skin that matches the sin. 

Bundle Contents:

• Sevarog [Hero]

• Angelic Sevarog [Skin]

• Cryo Angelic Sevarog [Skin Variant] (Timed Exclusive)

• Necro Angelic Sevarog [Skin Variant] (Timed Exclusive)

Gameplay Balance Changes

Systems Balance Changes:

Towers:

All Towers are receiving an increase to their base damages to create more risk when attempting an early game dive. Likewise, their Physical Armor Penetration is seeing an increase, further limiting the efficacy of tankier targets holding a Tower’s aggro for extended durations.

Outer Tower:

Inner Tower:

Inhibitor: 

Utility:

Refillable Potion is seeing a small decrease to its overall healing as a match progresses, better allowing poke damage to stick, and thereby creating more opportunities for aggressive play to translate into kills.

Refillable Potion:

Hero Balance Changes

Aurora’s access to high impact disruption tools paired with her innate elusiveness and durability allows her to possess significant threat when roaming the map or engaging in teamfights. Alongside hits to her early Durability and Movement Speed, she is receiving lower uptime on her Hard Crowd Control tools, creating further windows of downtime between her ganks and rotations.

General:

Hoarfrost [Secondary]:

Cryoseism [Ultimate]:

Gadget’s general safety and high Mana pool provides for an incredibly stable laning phase, allowing her to smoothly transition into the late-game where she becomes a significant threat. We’re taking steps to provide Gadget with lower early resources, thereby reducing her general laning efficacy and stability, while also decreasing the Magical Armor Shred offered by her Tesla Dome as it currently provides too much negation to Heroes that attempt to counter-build against her with Magical Armor purchases. 

General:

Tesla Dome [Ultimate]:

Gideon currently struggles to keep pace with many of the high waveclear Mages. To help bring him into greater contention, we’re granting him additional uptime on his Void Breach. This will further enable Gideon to take aggressive Lane trades in the absence of strong waveclear, and allow him to more freely opt into Magical Penetration options over Ability Haste.

Void Breach [Alternate]:

Iggy’s Turrets provide a lot of pressure in teamfights, often requiring a full ability to be invested by his opponents to be destroyed, resulting in a significant cooldown advantage in fights. Some durability is therefore being reduced, better ensuring that a single spell will consistently destroy a turret, and with this additional fragility, further encouraging smart placement and team-wide defense of Iggy’s Turret’s if he wishes to get maximum value from them.

Flame Turret [Primary]:

Muriel is receiving some additional strength to her early shields, better allowing her to protect her Allies in Lane, and better stand up to the all-in threat of other Supports such as Riktor and Dekker.

Consecrated Ground [Secondary]:

Alacrity [Alternate]:

Phase:

Phase’s can struggle to find success in various Support matchups, such as Dekker, Steel and Muriel, partly due to her Energy Lance’s cooldown being too closely synced with her opponents negation tool. To better create cooldown various between her and her Lane opponents, we’re granting the ability some further uptime to better enable Phase to force a cooldown usage and re-engage again to look for a kill.

Essence Catalyst [Passive]:

Energy Lance [Secondary]:

Rampage’s Rumble currently possesses too much downtime outside of his Behemoth state, making him feel too cooldown gated in fights and feeding into his Ability Haste and Ultimate reliance. Additional uptime is being provided for more disruption in fights and to provide him with more sticking power to his targets with the higher chance of repeated Slows.

Rumble [Secondary]: 

Following up from Skylar’s recent changes in the previous Hotfix which heavily reduced the damage output of her Hyperdrive, we’re further decreasing her elusiveness while airborne to increase the ability for opponents to track and respond to her, as well decreasing the potency of her Ultimate to ensure it does not result in as much excessive burst damage when she is ahead.

Air Assault [Secondary]: 

Atomiser [Ultimate]: 

Sevarog’s ability to take repeat trades with his Siphon due to its high uptime and damage in the early levels can result in him beating out even the likes of Grux at Level 1-3. While we wish to maintain freedom of use for Siphon to ensure Sevarog has plenty of windows for stacking, his raw mana pool is receiving a hit. As a result, he now possesses 1 less Siphon’s worth of Mana in Lane, thereby providing more resource risk to excessive usage of the ability in the early-game if he seeks repeated aggressive trades.

General:

Steel has been a force to be reckoned with in Offlane due to his ability to trade aggressively and threaten high damage during these trades. As a result, we are decreasing his damage so his trading potential does not exceed the efficacy of other Heroes. Additionally, Shield Wall is able to stall out fights and sieges with ease, partly due to its duration and the length of time it can block the battlefield. To combat this, we are reducing its duration so that its initial impact remains high, but its overall impact is reduced. It is worth noting that there are arguably issues with its cooldown cadence that contribute to Shield Wall’s strength, and we will be considering additional changes to this ability in a future patch.  

Shield Wall [Secondary]:

Shield Bash [Alternate]:

Terra’s abilities to dish out high damage while being Unstoppable can result in little room for response, and as a result she is seeing a general decrease to their damage potential at different stages of a match. For context, Ruthless Assault remains untouched as it needs to feel like a high damage ability to justify its cast duration and the fact it can be interrupted, and instead have opted to tune down the damage potential of her other Abilities. Alongside the damage reductions, we are reducing her Ultimate’s bonus Magic Resistance to better allow Burst Mages to threaten her, and therefore provide a wider range of counter options to her.

Highland Hurl [Secondary]

Wild Rush [Alternate]

Unstoppable Force [Ultimate]

We’re making some changes aimed at reducing the efficacy of TwinBlast’s Penetration builds due to the safety and versatility it allows him, especially when taking short trades from afar. This can be seen in the reduction to his Vaporize and Ventilate’s Physical Power Scaling, with some of that lost power being redistributed in the On-Hit modifier on Vaporize, ensuring that On-Hit builds are in greater parity with his Penetration alternative.

Vaporize [Primary]:

Ventilate [Ultimate]:

Zinx’s general damage output is notably high, allowing her to act as a bully in lane while also possessing some burst threat in teamfights. Given her already versatile toolkit, a reduction to Bad Medicine’s burst damage is being levied to ensure her damage output is more in-line with other Supports.

Bad Medicine [Secondary]:

Item Balance Changes

Crests:

Some additional uptime is being Granted for the Warboots, allowing for more engagement windows for those Tanks looking to get into the action. 

T2:

Both Alchemical Rod and Soul Chalice allow their users to forgo Mana restraints at a very early stage of the match, often contributing to passive play that is difficult to punish. To delay this and add some additional risk, we are increasing their cost, thereby increasing the completion time by an extra wave’s worth of gold and creating a larger window for Enemies to disrupt their completion.

Carry:

Spectra’s general damage output is a little on the high end. A slight hit to its scaling is being levied to ensure it does not overshadow other alternatives as hard. 

Assassin:

Infernum is intended to be an anti-Tank option for Assassins, but is currently providing too much efficacy against all classes. To reduce its efficacy against the non-Tank classes, we’re decreasing the Physical Penetration on offer, as toning down its Mana to ensure it does not pair as effectively with Soul Chalice builds. 

Nightfall is frequently overlooked, largely in part to the current Hero roster not utilising its Healing effect efficiently enough. In the absence of having these Assassins with high AoE capabilities, we’ve decided to swap out the Lifesteal for Omnivamp, better serving the current Assassins that seek some early additional healing and are forced to rely on Mutilator as their only option.

A quick shift in damage for Trident, with less reliance on Penetration Scaling being offered to make it feel more potent as an early anti-Heal option when needed.

Fighter:

Bonesaw was an awkward buy as a first item in the jungle for Heroes that wanted to build it. We have added a Shortsword into the Recipe so that Junglers are not required to choose between early clear speed and first item competition time. We also wanted to make sure that Bonesaw is an effective tool for sticking to Heroes and leans more into that identity so some additional potency is being offered to its Passive effect.

Draconum was not correctly Healing based on your Missing Health, resulting in an excessively lower than intended Heal on Takedown. This has now been resolved, and its Scaling increased to better ensure it feels like a high impact moment when triggered. 

Mage:

A quick bump in Ability Haste for Astral, better allowing it to serve as a Haste when paired with items such as Overseer for those Ultimate-focused builds. 

The changes in cost to Azure core have necessitated a recipe change. The total cost is unchanged. 

Golem’s Gift tends to feel underwhelming as an anti-physical option and struggles to justify the opportunity cost of foregoing other core options. Some additional raw stats are being granted to better justify this opportunity cost.

In the absence of Ability Haste, Orb does not provide enough raw value to justify the reduction in tempo required to get it online for many of the Magical Bruisers that it is intended for. With Iggy being its current core user and receiving several changes in power lately, we now feel more comfortable increasing Orb’s efficacy to further open it up to other potential users. 

Soulbinder does not feel differentiated enough as a 1st buy compared to other alternatives due to its similar stat profile. As a result, we’re granting it some additional Ability Haste, better allowing it to be paired with high-damage items such as Wraith Leggings and Overseer as a one-two core, and therefore opening up new build combinations.

Support:

A small increase in Aura range is being granted to Tainted Charm to allow a bit more freedom in positioning for its users, no longer requiring them to hug their targets as hard. 

Tank:

With Tanks seeing a resurgence in strength as of late thanks to the corrections that have occurred since v18 bringing them back into the spotlight, we’re now able to address some of the damage creep that has occurred by decreasing the damage potential of their core items. While damage is indeed necessary within a Tank’s toolkit to engage properly in PvE loops and offer enough threat that they agency of outcome throughout a match, we’re currently a bit too heavy on the damage end of the scale and have room to pull it back, starting with Fire Blossom’s effect.

As with Fire Blossom, Fist is also seeing a decrease to its damage and healing potential, as it often allows Tanks to out-damage Bruisers in 1v1 scenarios, while also contributing to excessive burst all-ins against squishier targets. In return for this damage loss, some additional Minion damage is being offered to ensure it serves as an alternative waveclear option to Fireblossom for those that need it. 

Tanks lack a significant Ability Haste option to slot into their builds outside of Fist, which can make it difficult to invest in the heavier Tank items that lack the stat. To open up more of these build combinations and allow Giant’s Ring to serve as a significant Haste stick, we’re trading out some Physical Armor for additional Ability Haste. 

That’s all for now, Champions! What do you think of all the changes? Let us know on Discord or Reddit! 

Keep an eye out for more news on update v1.2 soon.

Until next time,

Steggs, Senior Community Manager
Omeda_Zuzu, Player Experience Manager
Rei, Game Design