Well hello, dear Battlerite Champion. It is once again me, Christian, who greets you with another rendition of the Dev Blog. This week we’ll talk about a bit about tomorrow’s patch and some details of what’s going into it. If you’ve missed it, we put out patch notes earlier today. You can find them over here.
Balance Changes
So during last week the gameplay team nailed down the changes they wanted to make to Champions. Most of their decisions were based on tournament results during the summer as well as the ample amount of statistics we’ve gathered from matches played with the current state of balance. In terms of pure statistical balance we’ve continued to have a very even spread of Champion win rates in higher leagues (for both Diamond League and above as well as Champion League and above). There was about an 8% difference between the highest and the lowest win rate in total. Of course there were things that could still be adjusted, but overall we’ve used a generally light touch for the balance changes. This is because we are a bit hesitant to upheave the current stable balance, but also because we made some more widespread changes and we’re not certain how big of an impact they might have. If you did not spot these in the patch notes, I’ll just mention them and talk a bit about them here.
Reflected Projectiles
The first, and probably the smallest change, is that projectiles affected by Battlerites will retain any additional effects after being reflected. As you can probably imagine this will diversify certain interactions in the game and lead to more interesting situations in matches with Bakko, Blossom, Oldur, or Raigon. Overall this might not have that much of an impact, but it will certainly be something to keep in the back of your mind now.
Weaker and Stronger Knockbacks
The second change is that most weaker knockbacks will no longer overwrite (i.e replace) stronger knockbacks. This could have affected the outcome games in several ways before. For example, if Ruh Kaan managed to grab someone with Claw of the Wicked (E) and an allied Blossom hit the same target with a charged Thwack! right afterwards, the knockback from the latter would overwrite the pull (technically a knockback) of the former. The result of this would have the enemy only being pulled a fraction of the distance to Ruh Kaan and then being pushed in another direction slightly by Blossom and finally stopping there. From now on, Ruh Kaan should be able to pull the target all the way without interruptions. In the grand scheme of things you most likely won’t notice this very often, but lots of small interactions will be a bit different with this change.
Recast Abilities
The third change is that all recast abilities that are not simply the same ability being used again no longer affect cooldowns. For example; Croak’s second Frog Leap will still put it on a 10s cooldown afterwards, whereas Oldur’s Time Bender recast to fire projectiles will not put Time Bender at a full 8s cooldown. Instead, Time Bender will continue to tick down regardless of when you launch that projectile again. While this change might not seem like a big deal at first glance, some key abilities will be part of Champion rotations more often than before. Bakko having access to Bulwark again 2 seconds quicker if he recasts at the latest possible moment could potentially make a big difference, especially before everyone has adapted to this. All in all it will be interesting to see to which degree this will affect matches.
Random Champion Duel
If you still have not checked out the patch notes yet, as I mentioned last week we are replacing Rocket Balloon with a new Brawl. That new Brawl is Random Champion Duel. It’s pretty straightforward: a 1 vs 1 best of 3 match where your Champion is randomly chosen every round. You play each round with all 5 Battlerites, but they’re also randomly chosen. In addition the Sudden Death timer is much shorter, which means most matches end with the Death Vortex active. It’s a quick and fun mode where you get to play champions you’re maybe not that familiar with, and the random Battlerites mean you may have to improvise quite a bit in certain matches. It might just open your eyes to some builds you’ve never thought of before too!
We do have some special rules in place for the Brawl though. First and foremost, you will never get the same Champion twice during a match, unless you somehow manage to get around 6 draws, give or take a few rounds. Second, you will not play as the same archetype two rounds in a row. If you start the first round as a Melee Champion, you will play as either a Ranged or a Support Champion afterwards. Third, you will never get to play against the same Champion you’re playing yourself. No Pearl vs Pearl or Varesh vs Varesh, just different Champions beating each other up. And finally, we have chosen to disable Supports vs Supports. So if you get a Support Champion, you will always face either a Melee Champion or a Ranged Champion. We made this decision to try and avoid overly drawn out rounds where most of the damage is done by the Death Vortex.
We hope you’ll give Random Champion Duel a go and simultaneously try some Champions you don’t generally play. To make it more enticing, there’s also an Event Quest going where you can get chests containing Rare outfits for Ashka, Blossom, and Croak that you can’t get anywhere else, at least for the time being.
And that’s about it this week. Stay tuned during the week for more information about additional Battlerite Lite keys rolling out. But before we end this post, let’s take a gander at Ruh Kaan’s legendary outfit coming tomorrow:
Thanks for reading!
/Christian