Evil Mojo Games · Hi-Rez Studios
Event Pass 2024 chest is now available for purchase! Fixed an issue where translations for new content were not available in several languages. Fixed an issue where some font files had corrupted and did not display correct values.
Greetings Champions, and welcome to Year 8 of Paladins! We wanted to take a moment before we dive into our first update of the year, Wekono's Wake , to talk about where we are and our direction moving forward. Over the course of Year 7, we focused our small team's efforts more an
Note: Octavia does not select a Subclass, instead opting for her own Commander options.
After watching our changes to Anti-Healing’s ramp speed from the latter half of Season 7, we saw the desired improvements in the late game distribution of healing. However, the effect on the early & middle game was a bit more heightened than we intended and led to some matches lacking proper pacing. To alleviate this, we’re shifting the starting value for Anti-Heal down a single interval to allow a bit more time in these earlier stages while still keeping the scaling fast.
To kick off the Season, we’re bringing a whole host of Item changes with two goals in mind: making Items a more powerful part of our gameplay loop as well as merging together various eras of Items to curate the most diverse offering we could have. The headliner changes are those around Wrecker, Guardian, and Shields. Shields used to be a much more prevalent part of Paladins’ sandbox, with the health values higher and Wrecker more impactful than has been the past few Seasons (circa Season 3 onward). As part of Season 8, we’re returning closer to that style of defensive gameplay, with some new additions as well!
Wrecker is having its price increased slightly, but its scaling nearly doubled to make it the new standout item of the Offense category and a powerful counterplay to Shields. Guardian is also getting a minor bump to still allow it some room to either encourage a Wrecker purchase from your opponents or augment a Shield-heavy composition. Speaking of, Resilience is returning as the premiere CC counter Item! With that change, Sentinel has been adjusted to offer a bit more value on Shielding.
Alongside these larger changes, we’ve also finetuned the pricing of Blast Shields to accommodate its slightly more niche use and Bulldozer is being reverted to its S2 values to encourage its purchase when team composition leans heavy into Deployables.
Due to the changes to Wrecker, we'll be adjusting most base Shield abilities slightly upward to compensate for the early game pressure Wrecker may cause. Our goal with the Shielding changes are not to make Shields irrelevant, so we'll be watching closely to make sure the push and pull still remains both with and without Items.
Barik has slowly slipped from his comfortable spot as a safe Frontline pick to struggle to stay competitive against most compositions. After assessing where the weaknesses in his kit reside, we've decided to amp up his Cards to be more impactful and provide him stronger build options. We also are increasing Dome Shield's efficacy substantially to make it a larger threat to handle for opponents.
Buck is a strong yet niche Flank, mostly owing to his heavy reliance on Cards and Talents to cover gaps in his base kit. While this design is enduring and we intend to preserve most aspects of it, it has also led to his popularity and play rate dropping over time. We're shifting some of his cooldown Cards effects slightly into base, giving him a bit more room to create builds that don't spend the majority of points on those options. We've also reverted Bulk Up back to one of its stronger states and partially given Ensnare some damage back to bring back the version of Buck that lives in many veterans memories.
After the changes we made to Vatu's animation canceling, we wanted to go across the roster and ensure the cancel timings made sense for both animation and gameplay balance. As a part of that investigation, we found several cases where we could make animation canceling better and more fluid for several Champions. Any change you see like this one on Caspian is meant to make timings consistent across the game!
Cassie has been in a similar spot to Buck, however her popularity remains higher despite lower efficacy. These changes are meant to buff the playstyles on Cassie that haven't had as much room for success, specifically ones that focus on her sustaining herself and surviving duels. Big Game is also getting a slight increase to also have its value on lower-health targets a bit more competitive with Exaction.
Dredge has been performing well for himself after the return of Blast Shields, however there have been some long-standing areas of tension between his design, his balance, and his fluidity. We want to make Dredge more dynamic to play and also more interesting to fight, as such we're adjusting his Talents to reduce some of the efficacy of Scuttle and turn Hurl into a skill shot reward as opposed to a spammable option. We also are buffing a variety of his Cards to give him alternative build choices and to play around with and potentially surprise opponents with new game plans.
Khan has been a bit stagnant in his loadout useage with Storm of Bullets providing a significant DPS that outweighed his other benefits. To shift him away from this, we've partially put Storm of Bullets into base kit while reducing its effect to match the Live version. In essence, this is a buff to his other Talents. Vortex Grip is also seeing an additional change, allowing Khan to enable his team to burst a foe he grabs by Weakening them. We've also tightened up his Ultimate pull time to make it feel more consistent on both sides of the cast. P.S. We're keeping an eye on Lian's Shield and still considering directions to take it into the future
Here we go again. After Crystalline Battery's niche, fun but ultimately ineffective time in Live, we took a step back and considered all the change we've made to her the past few years as well as success we have had with designs elsewhere. This new Talent, High Voltage, gives her a flexible Carbine playstyle that synergizes both with her kit but select Champions across the roster to gain a potent damage buff.
Greetings, Champions! First off, we want to thank everyone who played or watched the PTS and gave us feedback on the upcoming Wekono's Wake update. It's been a wild rush to get to the start of Year 8 and hearing everyone's excitement and concerns gave us even more motivation to d
This concept proved a bit too overwhelming in testing, so instead we want to make Deft Hands more enticing as an Item by dropping its price a bit to allow earlier purchasing in conjunction with other Items.
There was a lot of interesting discussion around Overhealing as a concept and we may find ways to revisit the design in the future, however the consensus has landed on current Rejuvenate being healthier and closer to the ideal solution. We still hold some concerns for Support Itemization but will take more time to gather feedback and try other paths to resolve the pain point.
The core design of new Sentinel clashed too much with the heavy prevalence of CC within Paladins and even with adjustments would lead to cases where the enemy would be discouraged from engaging at all due to the potency of the Shield. We're reverting this Item but with a slight buff to compensate for the loss of CC interaction, and will watch how it performs in Wekono's Wake.
The concerns raised around the Wrecker changes are valid and something we plan to continue to keep our eyes on (i.e. Paladins' TTK with and without Shields is part of what makes it unique, we don't want to introduce another "must buy" Item like Cauterize), we still feel the buffs it is receiving make sense at a reduced value. We will continue to watch how these changes shape Season 8's meta and will respond quickly if any issues arise.
Barik's Cards are already receiving a lot of love this update, but we heard some discussion of how we could push them further without disrupting the balance state. Specifically, his Cards that interact with his Deployables reinforce his identity and should provide proper reward for him investing his time into protecting them.
Hurl's rework has some pain points both on the user and receiver side we didn't intend as part of its new design, so we're being more forgiving on what it considers a valid hit as well as removing the Slow to match current Hurl. We've also looked back at previous Dredge balance states and are bumping his Abyssal Reload at base up more to encourage non-Scuttle players to still utilize it. Scuttle's damage will remain at 700, but we will revisit if this divide ends up being too vast.
We intend to take a better look at Jenos and his kit design in our next update. Luminary has a >85% pickrate at all levels of play and gives him the highest average healing of any Support the past few updates, so we expect to make some change on his Talent front to provide more variety and less reliance on Luminary. This will not involve basekitting the effects of the Talent, and instead will most likely take form as a base kit increase and a Talent rework in order to preserve his identity as the aggressive pocket or team trickle heal option.
Instead of adjusting Kasumi's cone once more, we've decided it makes more sense to revert her falloff changes from a previous patch while keeping the accurate cone size. This allows her to regain some lost range and consistency without loosening her need to aim. We also are buffing her passive damage increase to deployed structures to match the changes to Bulldozer and Wrecker.
This Card's general identity was pretty popular, especially among the Flank Moji contingent, however the way we implemented and designed it left it a bit less consistent than any of us would like. We're currently working to make it use a simpler method of resource management to improve the reliability of this Card. In the future, we still plan to make additional changes to refine the Support aspects of Moji as well as harken back to her original design.
One basekit Shield almost went this update without a buff, however after watching Vivian's performance on PTS we felt she needed the bump up as well. With Suspect Everyone now focused on uptime, this buff is meant to simply provide more value to all the Shields she pops and give her a bit more room in buildcrafting if she doesn't need to bolster her Deflector up all the way.
Our intent with the change on PTS was to make it weaker into the new interaction it had with cooldown reduction, however after experimenting with ways to preserve the current firerate we decided to transition the ability back to using an Ammo system, but in a way that does not affect how players interact with the ability. In practice, Quills will feel exactly how they do in Live except they will no longer scale their cooldown with any reduction effects
Greetings Champions, and welcome to Year 8 of Paladins! We wanted to take a moment before we dive into our first update of the year, Wekono's Wake , to talk about where we are and our direction moving forward. Over the course of Year 7, we focused our small team's efforts more an
Note: Octavia does not select a Subclass, instead opting for her own Commander options.
After watching our changes to Anti-Healing’s ramp speed from the latter half of Season 7, we saw the desired improvements in the late game distribution of healing. However, the effect on the early & middle game was a bit more heightened than we intended and led to some matches lacking proper pacing. To alleviate this, we’re shifting the starting value for Anti-Heal down a single interval to allow a bit more time in these earlier stages while still keeping the scaling fast.
To kick off the Season, we’re bringing a whole host of Item changes with two goals in mind: making Items a more powerful part of our gameplay loop as well as merging together various eras of Items to curate the most diverse offering we could have. The headliner changes are those around Wrecker, Guardian, and Shields. Shields used to be a much more prevalent part of Paladins’ sandbox, with the health values higher and Wrecker more impactful than has been the past few Seasons (circa Season 3 onward). As part of Season 8, we’re returning closer to that style of defensive gameplay, with some new additions as well!
Wrecker is having its price increased slightly, but its scaling doubled to make it the new standout item of the Offense category and a powerful counterplay to Shields. Guardian is also getting a minor bump to still allow it some room to either encourage a Wrecker purchase from your opponents or augment a Shield-heavy composition. Speaking of, Resilience is returning as the premiere CC counter Item! With that change, Sentinel has been re-envisioned as a CC damage mitigation Item, making when you do get locked up less lethal if purchased. We also have a new version of Rejuvenate that both pushes it back into the hands of the person receiving heals but instead of countering Anti-Heal, it allows you to gain Overheal in the form of Shields. These changes are meant to finally bring Shielding to almost any character, even those whose kits and Cards don’t feature a large amount.
Alongside these larger changes, we’ve also finetuned the pricing of Blast Shields to accommodate its slightly more niche use and Bulldozer is being reverted to its S2 values to encourage its purchase when team composition leans heavy into Deployables.
Due to the changes to Wrecker, we'll be adjusting most base Shield abilities slightly upward to compensate for the early game pressure Wrecker may cause. Our goal with the Shielding changes are not to make Shields irrelevant, so we'll be watching closely to make sure the push and pull still remains both with and without Items.
Barik has slowly slipped from his comfortable spot as a safe Frontline pick to struggle to stay competitive against most compositions. After assessing where the weaknesses in his kit reside, we've decided to amp up his Cards to be more impactful and provide him stronger build options. We also are increasing Dome Shield's efficacy substantially to make it a larger threat to handle for opponents.
Buck is a strong yet niche Flank, mostly owing to his heavy reliance on Cards and Talents to cover gaps in his base kit. While this design is enduring and we intend to preserve most aspects of it, it has also led to his popularity and play rate dropping over time. We're shifting some of his cooldown Cards effects slightly into base, giving him a bit more room to create builds that don't spend the majority of points on those options. We've also reverted Bulk Up back to one of its stronger states and partially given Ensnare some damage back to bring back the version of Buck that lives in many veterans memories.
After the changes we made to Vatu's animation canceling, we wanted to go across the roster and ensure the cancel timings made sense for both animation and gameplay balance. As a part of that investigation, we found several cases where we could make animation canceling better and more fluid for several Champions. Any change you see like this one on Caspian is meant to make timings consistent across the game!
Cassie has been in a similar spot to Buck, however her popularity remains higher despite lower efficacy. These changes are meant to buff the playstyles on Cassie that haven't had as much room for success, specifically ones that focus on her sustaining herself and surviving duels. Big Game is also getting a slight increase to also have its value on lower-health targets a bit more competitive with Exaction.
Dredge has been performing well for himself after the return of Blast Shields, however there have been some long-standing areas of tension between his design, his balance, and his fluidity. We want to make Dredge more dynamic to play and also more interesting to fight, as such we're adjusting his Talents to reduce some of the efficacy of Scuttle and turn Hurl into a skill shot reward as opposed to a spammable option. We also are buffing a variety of his Cards to give him alternative build choices and to play around with and potentially surprise opponents with new game plans.
Khan has been a bit stagnant in his loadout useage with Storm of Bullets providing a significant DPS that outweighed his other benefits. To shift him away from this, we've partially put Storm of Bullets into base kit while reducing its effect to match the Live version. In essence, this is a buff to his other Talents. Vortex Grip is also seeing an additional change, allowing Khan to enable his team to burst a foe he grabs by Weakening them. We've also tightened up his Ultimate pull time to make it feel more consistent on both sides of the cast. P.S. We're keeping an eye on Lian's Shield and still considering directions to take it into the future
Here we go again. After Crystalline Battery's niche, fun but ultimately ineffective time in Live, we took a step back and considered all the change we've made to her the past few years as well as success we have had with designs elsewhere. This new Talent, High Voltage, gives her a flexible Carbine playstyle that synergizes both with her kit but select Champions across the roster to gain a potent damage buff.
Enjoy up to 20% Crystals for the holidays! This sale is ongoing until January 3rd, 2025.
General Fixed an issue where the new Title for Trials of the Realm wasn't visible or available. Fixed an issue where the new Titles from the Flashback Pass weren't equippable. Fixed an issue where the Street Style World Tour Event Pass Buy All wasn't providing all of the levels o
General Updates Ska’Drin Celebration Event Pass For our final Event Pass of this year, we've commissioned community artists for our 2D cosmetics as well as created 5 recolors in the Event Pass that bring some Limited Skins forward with new looks! Makilla Makoa (Volcanic) Shaman G
Crowd Control is a very core part of the Paladins experience, from fueling part of the ability loop to a major frustration point as the tension of between the amount and severity of CC effects evolved over time. This is the first step in a series of changes we hope to make to communicate Crowd Control more clearly, eventually with the goal of updating and improving Crowd Control to be both more robust and less frustrating. This starts with calling out similar effects that players can reliably expect to behave the same and also highlighting specific effects that can act differently based on context. Generic highlights have been given to widespread effects, with certain more niche effects having unique tags. (e.g. Rei’s Spirit Link)
Our vision moving forward is a more dynamic way to interact with these effects beyond the Items currently used to counter them, like Ignite and Burn having interplay where teams can combine them for unique effects, or Allies can stack things like Linked and other defensive buffs to shutdown less-coordinated pushes. Stay tuned for more on this front in Year 8!
After testing what this would look like within Onslaught and Arcade, we are now expanding this out to casual Siege to see if it aids issues around party matchmaking and helps prevent unfair matches!
Truly Talented is receiving yet another sandbox update, this time focused on shifting the LTM from simply about Talents to a different speed of play. As the notes may suggest, we’re pushing this mode to fulfill what many players felt when they initially played it: nostalgia for a prior version of Paladins. Instead of being about emulating exactly what Season 2 was like, Truly Talented provides a heightened version of gameplay that hits that same feeling of basic kits with deeper customization. Initial Credits as well as earn rate are reduced to lean into power plays and thoughtful Item purchasing, and Yagroath has been removed for Atlas to have the roster match the era we’re aiming for. Maps have also been adjusted to reflect this direction while keeping ones players love!
When we originally removed Blast Shields, we stated consistency in the Direct & Area systems as our biggest concern. Behind the scenes, we had a lot of abilities that were not categorized at all, under the wrong umbrella, or hybrid damage types on one ability that made readability difficult for the average player. This system was left behind as well, with newer Champions either ignoring or breaking previous conventions due to irrelevancy to the end user. Revisiting this system allowed us to re-conceptualize the divide and do a pass over all the abilities to create new guidelines to make things more predictable and learnable for players as well as easier for us as developers to upkeep. Obviously, these changes mean very little unless…
The legendary pair return! Haven and Blast Shields both are being brought back and will be able to interact with the expanded Item Store for the first time, allowing for a mix of classic and brand-new builds. Our goal with the reintroduction of the Direct/Area damage system is to offer Champions and loadouts that have lost relevancy since its removal to shine in certain compositions once more (e.g. blasters, damage type swap Talents), as well as reduce the overall amount of effective DR closer to what players were used to in S2/early S3. We expect this change to initially make the overall TTK a bit quicker, but as players adapt and learn it should level out closer to current feels.
Since its release in 7.1, Hoard has been topic of debate amongst the community. Late game value vs. early game efficiency in a hectic match of Paladins was the original design goal and we felt it hit the mark for the experiment - at first. Once the dust settled the item became much more binary, only really seeing play in the most greedy of builds. This was partially due to the fact that the Item had no payoff, the trade-off of increasing your economy for a dead item slot became too much for most players and Hoard soon fell off the radar for most Champions. With all that said, we’ve given Hoard a bit of an overhaul. Now at max level - which you’ll notice is much more expensive than anything else in the store - Hoard replaces its economy effect with a powerful 10% strength version of all other yellow Items. While the original design heavily valued the dead item slot as part of the trade off, this new version places value in Hoard as a late game item. A gamble to see if you can prolong the game long enough to really ramp up your stats vs other more traditional end-game builds. It still technically has the same trade-off as before, but now rewards making the commitment for sticking through the game as a hoarder instead of punishing you.
In the spirit of popular community requests and leaning into our past, Nimble is also seeing its value brought back up to where it was in the early days of Paladins, but without a price increase. Enjoy the slightly faster pace of play!
Over the years, the design philosophy behind Cards has shifted and evolved alongside the system itself. After our recent efforts on modernize and standardizing other systems has proven fruitful, we’ve been turning our eyes towards more Card reworks and adjustments to slowly shorten the gap between various Champion’s loadouts and improve the overall interest in Cards for both new and experienced players. These changes are first steps into future adjustments spurred by the pain points modern Champions have had with damage amplification Cards as well as Card designs and scaling that didn’t hold up to older Champion options. Over the next several updates, we’ll continue to take a look at specific types of Cards or specific Champions that could see their options improved to fall into our new standards and expectations across the roster.
Barik has been struggling slightly the latter half of this year, mainly as the meta shifts around him yet he sits static with some key QoL issues. While this is not as comprehensive as we’d like to give him, it’s a very popular community request to swap these Talent unlocks, and it will push him into a better spot for us to assess the next areas we can tighten up his gameplay loop. Forgefire hasn’t been feeling quite as impactful as we’d like, so we’re also giving it some targeted buffs to up the threat level of his mini–Flame Turrets to add some risk if they are ignored. We’ll continue to keep an eye on his performance into the new year!
Betty’s Ultimate has often felt underwhelming compared to her other bombastic peer, and her flight struggles compared to someone like Drogoz due to her windup being so vulnerable. We’ve decided to give her immunity the second she hits her Ultimate so she can try and get the Rocket out before taking lethal damage, as well as having it fly faster after she jumps off to encourage her to use it a bit different than the King himself. Ride the Rocket was also one of the stranger damage amplification cards, which we have reworked to give a beloved older effect to this newer blaster. She also will benefit quite a bit from the return of Haven & Blast Shields if teams do not Itemize around her, so watch out for the Queen!
Snow Globe had some oppressive matchups when fighting Evie - constantly getting bombarded by her powerful CC led to incredibly lopsided matches. We’ve reduced the strength of the Slow on these mini-versions to allow more opportunity for escape. On another Ultimate note - Cold Acclimation as a Card quite literally never saw play, so we’ve taken a big swing at it and made something entirely new. Cold Acclimation facilitates aggressive play within your Ultimate and gives Evie that extra little bit of survivability to outlast a big team fight.
It was incredibly frustrating as Io to launch your Ultimate and have it instantly detonate on errant collision. Begone frustration! Now Io’s Ultimate travels along the surface it hits, leading to sneaky shots that can send people flying and generally more successful Io Ultimates.
Kasumi has been in a much stronger spot since our last set of changes, but there are still lingering issues on both sides of her duels. We're continuing our work on Yokai Doll's behavior, now adjusting the cone at multiple levels to function a bit closer to a hitscan weapon. Kasumi will now have to be much more precise (within a Cassie arrow of her target) as well as have more control on who she is aiming at when enemies are bunched together. This in conjunction with the addition of damage falloff will preserve a bit of her special targeting while not feeling too out of place in a shooter-centric environment. We've also adjusted a few of her Cards to no longer affect the damage output of her abilities but still offer helpful buffs, including rolling old functionality into Haunted Ground! Overall, we think these changes will make Kasumi more consistent and enjoyable but we'll continue to look at feedback on her!
Lex has been underperforming ever since Heroism was shifted in the Banners Fall Update to increase the cooldown substantially and Wicked Don't Rest was nerfed. Instead of retreading older ground, we decided to simplify and streamline this playstyle. Heroism now is back to being the CC-immune, on demand parry pick but with no resistance to damage. This also allows us to bring the cooldown back to normal values.
We also finally got to dig deeper into how Lex's recoil and camera works, reducing the amount of shake by 65%. We've left some in for feels and balance implications, but Magnums should now perform similarly to other fast rate of fire weapons in this department. Death Hastens also was finetuned to have recoil that matches stronger handguns like Androxus and Saati, while still having lower camera shake overall.
Back with a vengeance, we’ve given Nyx players the ability to facilitate a Poisonn game plan with this card after removing the functionality at base. Its a cheeky card that lets you sneak in that extra % of Health that could turn a fight in your favor.
Omen has been performing relatively well, and so we’ve taken the opportunity to shake up his kit and remove some frustration points when fighting against him. We’ve reduced the ramp time on his weapon to smooth out his game flow, but reworked some of his more problematic cards into mark-focused functionalities. These reworks encourage mark management in a way Omen never really had to do before, rewarding him with powerful effects if the uptime is kept high. This has long been a part of his kit players could ignore, and we’re excited to give Omen more varied playstyles.
Rei has been performing well in Double Support compositions and certain Solo Support scenarios, however there are some pain points that are felt on both sides of her kit we want to address now that she's in that spot. A combination of several cards having lackluster scaling alongside the dominance of Magic in the Blood has left her choices when buildcrafting a bit more limiting than we'd like. To remedy this, we're moving current Magic in the Blood into base as a new Passive and empowering a wide variety of her Cards to be more enticing options.
In conjunction with more power going to...all her Envelop cards, we're taking another look at the ability and trying to better balance out the value provided at base with investing in those Cards. We've removed the small damage done near an Enveloped target to add a bit more clarity for opponents, and added potency to the more unique Jump Height effect.
Finally, Spirit Link and Focus have had a strained relationship where the link operates differently in more ways than listed. To clean up this dilemma, we're buffing the base Link to be more lenient on breaking and shifting Focus where the total duration is equal to the Link's break timer at base. Basically, Focus now breaks whenever the earliest opportunity for Spirit Link at base to break is. We've also reduced to cooldown penalty to accommodate this power shift, as we still want this playstyle to be potent in the right hands while allowing Restraint a lot more room for play.
Saati has also begun to enter a spot across levels we're pleased with, however there is still one community pain point we'd like to address: Ricochet. The identity of a trickshot conflicted heavily with its spamable nature and lack of thought that had to go into positioning and use, so we've flipped the design a bit on its head. It still requires an initial shot to freeze it in the air and hit a trickshot, but then the next shot will immediately detonate it into an explosion. We've adjusted this to feel more impactful and give reason for Saati to quickly throw a coin up & shoot it for some massive Area Damage. We've also updated a lot of her Cards to accommodate this change as well as Spare Change getting a buff to make it still feel impactful with this version of the coin.
Seris has seen a lot of changes this year, and with this set we intend to finally bring her design forward into 2025 and beyond. Soul Collector has been the predominant way to play her, adding a minigame to her loop that most players enjoy more than anything else. So, we're bringing that into her core and looking to rebalance her around a basekit version that requires a bit more investment but equal payoff. With the Talent slot empty, we're taking a lesson from our work on Grover and still keeping Seris with a proper Damage Talent, now augmenting her Passive much like her sister has with Exterminate.
Finally, we've got a design fix to Bane that makes its effect clearer and preps us for future Card adjustments once we've seen how this initial shakeup plays out. Seris is a very popular Champion and performs well in average matches, but has struggled at the high end. These changes should help her there by allowing Forsake & Internal Torment more room, but we'll be keeping a close eye to ensure she doesn't end up descending the Realm into darkness.
Grandpa is on the loose again, crushing it in both high and low skill lobbies and generally being a nuisance. We’re shifting around his overall bulk to make him more susceptible to Wrecker, and reducing the effectiveness of Protection to alleviate the steam rolling a pocketed Champion can do. Finally we’re toying around with Induction and Infusion - two very unpopular cards - to breathe some new life into drafting a Torvald Loadout.
After bringing down Blastflower, we want to give WIllo a bit more options across her Talents and loadouts to still feel rewarding no matter which playstyle you're looking for. Nightshade now will fuel itself a bit better, encouraging using it in burst combos and to shutdown plays more frequently, while Scorn is taking some inspiration from her Scorched Earth past and will give Shield busting capabilities back to her.
Yomi has long been Zhin’s most dominant option and a reoccurring meme of overly simplistic Talent designs. While basic Talents do have a place, Yomi offered so much value with no investment or change in play from the player. So, we’ve reworked it to instead offer a brand-new way to play with Whirl, turning it into a powerful combo starter that even synergizes if your team knows you are selecting it. This is something quite new for Paladins in how it functions so we’d like to give an example: If your ally Fernando is actively fighting someone with his Flame Lance, his Burn will allow your Inferno Blade to gain this damage buff! If you don’t draft into this synergy, the Talent is still strong with your own Whirl but to fully invest in the fantasy you should coordinate with allies. Meanwhile, Guillotine has lost a lot of its identity ever since we took away its faster regeneration rate. Considering it’s all about securing kills, we’ve added an additional effect where you are refunded some cost if you finish them and survive!
Greetings Champions! Ahead of Wednesday’s release of the Ska’drin Celebration Update, we wanted to sit down and talk about some of the feedback we received during the recent PTS cycle and what we’ve adjusted based on the testing you all took part in! Let’s hop right in: Hoard Cos
The ideas we’re exploring with this update to Hoard seemed to be something a majority of PTS players were intrigued by, but the balance state wasn’t in a place where the value of the Item would be worth the wait. To help ease this, we have brought down the final tier price to be a bit earlier in the match at the cost of the passive earn buff we were going to do. This is to incentivize a very conscious playstyle with Hoard: you’re behind on Items compared to your foes but with aggressive play will be rewarded. This type of asymmetrical Item design is a brand new idea and one we will be watching quite closely to see if it has a place in Paladins!
We’ve heard loud and clear that people want QoL buffs for our beloved dwarf! He’s been slowly slipping from his staple safe meta status and his painpoints are becoming more prevalent with age, so we plan to take a look at the various Cards and other buff areas suggested to us in Discord and across socials. However, this update was already quite heavy on balance and with our time before the holidays, we wanted to focus on improvements to existing PTS changes. We will come back early next year with him at the top of our list!
We know, we know. This Card sees near nonexistent play and wouldn’t be on most player’s radar for a buff. However, we’ve been making it a slow and steady goal to revisit unimpactful Cards across the game and give them a bit more oomph. This one was an old nerf that in the modern game makes little sense to preserve and perhaps can be an interesting filler in a few loadouts.
For those worried we’d be taking away a very niche yet beloved aspect of Begone, no worries! After PTS we went back into the changes we were making and adjusted the threshold that her Ultimate would break to allow her to floor grind once more. For those out of the loop, Begone has a unique interaction when aimed directly at the ground, where its speed is significantly slower and it travels less distance. This is something we slot into the Vine Tech category of “original unintentional, but now adopted into design” so enjoy it! Just know Begone will always self-detonate after 4s.
We’ve accelerated some of our work on Kasumi’ Yokai Doll based on continued feedback around her weapon. We want to directly address the common point around making her weapon a hitscan first: A large amount of how Kasumi functions is intrinsically tied to her targetter (e.g. Savage Tear and Bitter Betrayal cannot function without it) and the work to reconfigure her to move that tech elsewhere isn’t practical or even necessary for what most players actually desire (fair aiming & consistent conveyance of her threat levels). So, that takes us to the addition of damage falloff to Kasumi’s kit. This change is designed to bring her even more in line with other Flanks with similar threat ranges and allow her some more poke at the cost of reduced effective range. Combined with the targetter adjustments we’ve made on her, this will be the most precise Kasumi has ever been asked to be. On top of that, we heard feedback around Curse and DR feeling too oppressive when able to be stacked so easily, so Essence Drain has been shifted over to Movement Speed to allow a bit more mobility in her customization.
This concept simply missed the mark on how Khan currently plays and what players feel he needs to be viable off of Storm of Bullets. Similar to previous PTS reverts in the past few updates (e.g. VII), we’re gonna take some additional time to iterate on changes to his Talents that better match what players want to see on him.
With the removal of DR and cooldown penalty on Heroism, this change felt a bit too harsh and impacted many more playstyles than we intended with the alteration. Lex is someone we’d like to revisit next year after we see the changes to Magnum’s recoil and screen shake in Live for a bit, mainly as he has lacked a healthy variety of Talent selection no matter which is predominant in a given period while also being one of the weaker Flanks in the current meta.
Historically, we’ve always been very wary of Envelop buffs as the ability can be quite potent when used in the best case as well as provides a lot of effects through Spirit Link. However, this nerf in particular felt unnecessary after watching PTS and hearing the feels issues it caused on the character. We’ll still be watching Rei closely to ensure that the Card pass she has received doesn’t shift too much power into Envelop overall.
Hitting the Ricochet explosion proved a bit harder than we expected for most players on PTS, so this nerf to Ult generation feels less necessary than we anticipated. It’s worth calling out the way this card interacts with the explosion is it procs for every enemy within the blast, so the newer Cards will synergize well with this and the frequent Wallbang playstyle will be alive and well, just with a bit more skill required.
At various points throughout the year, multiple corners of the community have described our recent balance style as “tons of cooking, but sometimes things get burnt”. In this case, we could tell aspects of Seris came in burnt onto PTS. Basekitting Soul Collector was a step too far to some, and Volatile Rift as a concept simply was too much power into an Ultimate talent (the opposite of the problem we normally have with those designs), as well as a catalyst for a long discussion on Discord and socials about basekitting Talents and the effects it has had over the years.
After talking amongst ourselves as well as weighing all the critiques and feedback, we had both a solution for this instance and a goal moving forward. We often have leaned on basekitting Talents for a few reasons, from not wanting to nerf/remove playstyles that players really enjoy but trivialize choice in customization (Soul Collector, Aegis, Adrenaline Junkie, etc.) or taking particularly underwhelming gameplay loops and providing them with more options (Hell or High Water, Life Link, etc.). Seris has had potentially more basekitted Talents than any other Champion, a problem that stems from a meeting of those two painpoints. She often finds herself either reliant on 1 Talent over all others or requiring shifts into base to make up for aspects of her design that are limiting in the modern game (i.e. channeled healing).
We’re still going forward with our basekitting of Soul Collector, with a very different perspective on basekitting Talents as well as renewed goals for her moving forward. While we could attempt to buff or design even more Talents to rival it, Seris has had 3 different Talent reworks this year alone taking a stab at that exact issue. Meanwhile, Soul Collector not only remained the best (though Forsake has rivaled it in niche scenarios) but also the most fun pick for Seris every time we reference surveys. At base, the character’s loop just lacks that level of engagement due to her very passive style of heal and escape tools, so we stand by this being the better move for her into the future. However, we also are instead giving Seris a Talent that once again mirrors Furia, with Resuscitate being her version of a Passive Talent ala Exterminate. This will restore Soul Collector to its strongest form by augmenting her % per stack back to current Live values while also allowing 16 stacks.
That said, we want to move away from basekitting Talent unless there is a clear design issue that it resolves better than alternative solutions. Recently, we simply removed Rampant Blooming from Grover for this exact reason. We explored all options (including basekit) but deemed it unnecessary due to both the playstyle it would encourage at base as well as overtuned Healing output. We love that the community is so engaged not only with the surface level “X Champion is getting stronger” but are concerned about concepts like kit bloat and technical debt. It's something we plan to continue to work on with you all!
While we have still seen a lot of feedback of this Talent being too frustrating to fight against, this was not the time to take a swing at it as Sha Lin is underperforming by most metrics and players utilizing this Talent are fighting an uphill battle more often than not. We want to take a more holistic look at Sha Lin in the future as our previous Dev Notes commented on, so expect an update on his status in the future!
Torvald has been one of if not the most dominant off-tank Frontline for a long while now statistically, even when his pickrate fluctuates or Champions like Terminus and Yagorath rival him in some situations. That said, our goals were not to make him feel worse to play but to lean him further into Itemization and customization. So, Recharge is being adjusted to still provide his full Shield back to allow those smooth recoveries while preserving our want to make him more susceptible to Wrecker. Seriously, buy Wrecker against him. Please?
This Talent is us experimenting early with ideas we have for 2025, similar to Hoard, but we heard players concerned its bonus was a little too weak for how situational it could be and the investment of spending your movement to engage. We’ve given it a slight bump to change some breakpoints into Zhin’s favor as well as indicate to the user when the bonus is active. One last reminder: With Haven & Blast Shields coming back, Zhin has a very mixed amount of damage output. Buying either one will weaken about half of this combo (Haven for the two weaker swings, Blast for the Whirl and heavy swing) so Zhin players will want to keep that in mind when deciding their targets.And that's all! There are some additional bug fixes that we've made as well as some minor known issues headed into update day, but we'll make sure to communicate those to you all as we work to end off the year best we can! Thanks for reading and your support! 💚
General Updates Ska’Drin Celebration Event Pass For our final Event Pass of this year, we've commissioned community artists for our 2D cosmetics as well as created 5 recolors in the Event Pass that bring some Limited Skins forward with new looks! Makilla Makoa (Volcanic) Shaman G
Crowd Control is a very core part of the Paladins experience, from fueling part of the ability loop to a major frustration point as the tension of between the amount and severity of CC effects evolved over time. This is the first step in a series of changes we hope to make to communicate Crowd Control more clearly, eventually with the goal of updating and improving Crowd Control to be both more robust and less frustrating. This starts with calling out similar effects that players can reliably expect to behave the same and also highlighting specific effects that can act differently based on context. Generic highlights have been given to widespread effects, with certain more niche effects having unique tags. (e.g. Rei’s Spirit Link)
Our vision moving forward is a more dynamic way to interact with these effects beyond the Items currently used to counter them, like Ignite and Burn having interplay where teams can combine them for unique effects, or Allies can stack things like Linked and other defensive buffs to shutdown less-coordinated pushes. Stay tuned for more on this front in Year 8!
Truly Talented is receiving yet another sandbox update, this time focused on shifting the LTM from simply about Talents to a different speed of play. As the notes may suggest, we’re pushing this mode to fulfill what many players felt when they initially played it: nostalgia for a prior version of Paladins. Instead of being about emulating exactly what Season 2 was like, Truly Talented provides a heightened version of gameplay that hits that same feeling of basic kits with deeper customization. Initial Credits as well as earn rate are reduced to lean into power plays and thoughtful Item purchasing, and Yagroath has been removed for Atlas to have the roster match the era we’re aiming for. Maps have also been adjusted to reflect this direction while keeping ones players love!
When we originally removed Blast Shields, we stated consistency in the Direct & Area systems as our biggest concern. Behind the scenes, we had a lot of abilities that were not categorized at all, under the wrong umbrella, or hybrid damage types on one ability that made readability difficult for the average player. This system was left behind as well, with newer Champions either ignoring or breaking previous conventions due to irrelevancy to the end user. Revisiting this system allowed us to re-conceptualize the divide and do a pass over all the abilities to create new guidelines to make things more predictable and learnable for players as well as easier for us as developers to upkeep. Obviously, these changes mean very little unless…
The legendary pair return! Haven and Blast Shields both are being brought back and will be able to interact with the expanded Item Store for the first time, allowing for a mix of classic and brand-new builds. Our goal with the reintroduction of the Direct/Area damage system is to offer Champions and loadouts that have lost relevancy since its removal to shine in certain compositions once more (e.g. blasters, damage type swap Talents), as well as reduce the overall amount of effective DR closer to what players were used to in S2/early S3. We expect this change to initially make the overall TTK a bit quicker, but as players adapt and learn it should level out closer to current feels.
Since its release in 7.1, Hoard has been topic of debate amongst the community. Late game value vs. early game efficiency in a hectic match of Paladins was the original design goal and we felt it hit the mark for the experiment - at first. Once the dust settled the item became much more binary, only really seeing play in the most greedy of builds. This was partially due to the fact that the Item had no payoff, the trade-off of increasing your economy for a dead item slot became too much for most players and Hoard soon fell off the radar for most Champions. With all that said, we’ve given Hoard a bit of an overhaul. Now at max level - which you’ll notice is much more expensive than anything else in the store - Hoard replaces its economy effect with a powerful 10% strength version of all other yellow Items. While the original design heavily valued the dead item slot as part of the trade off, this new version places value in Hoard as a late game item. A gamble to see if you can prolong the game long enough to really ramp up your stats vs other more traditional end-game builds. It still technically has the same trade-off as before, but now rewards making the commitment for sticking through the game as a hoarder instead of punishing you.
In the spirit of popular community requests and leaning into our past, Nimble is also seeing its value brought back up to where it was in the early days of Paladins, but without a price increase. Enjoy the slightly faster pace of play!
Over the years, the design philosophy behind Cards has shifted and evolved alongside the system itself. After our recent efforts on modernize and standardizing other systems has proven fruitful, we’ve been turning our eyes towards more Card reworks and adjustments to slowly shorten the gap between various Champion’s loadouts and improve the overall interest in Cards for both new and experienced players. These changes are first steps into future adjustments spurred by the pain points modern Champions have had with damage amplification Cards as well as Card designs and scaling that didn’t hold up to older Champion options. Over the next several updates, we’ll continue to take a look at specific types of Cards or specific Champions that could see their options improved to fall into our new standards and expectations across the roster.
Barik has been struggling slightly the latter half of this year, mainly as the meta shifts around him yet he sits static with some key QoL issues. While this is not as comprehensive as we’d like to give him, it’s a very popular community request to swap these Talent unlocks, and it will push him into a better spot for us to assess the next areas we can tighten up his gameplay loop. Forgefire hasn’t been feeling quite as impactful as we’d like, so we’re also giving it some targeted buffs to up the threat level of his mini–Flame Turrets to add some risk if they are ignored. We’ll continue to keep an eye on his performance into the new year!
Betty’s Ultimate has often felt underwhelming compared to her other bombastic peer, and her flight struggles compared to someone like Drogoz due to her windup being so vulnerable. We’ve decided to give her immunity the second she hits her Ultimate so she can try and get the Rocket out before taking lethal damage, as well as having it fly faster after she jumps off to encourage her to use it a bit different than the King himself. Ride the Rocket was also one of the stranger damage amplification cards, which we have reworked to give a beloved older effect to this newer blaster. She also will benefit quite a bit from the return of Haven & Blast Shields if teams do not Itemize around her, so watch out for the Queen!
Snow Globe had some oppressive matchups when fighting Evie - constantly getting bombarded by her powerful CC led to incredibly lopsided matches. We’ve reduced the strength of the Slow on these mini-versions to allow more opportunity for escape. On another Ultimate note - Cold Acclimation as a Card quite literally never saw play, so we’ve taken a big swing at it and made something entirely new. Cold Acclimation facilitates aggressive play within your Ultimate and gives Evie that extra little bit of survivability to outlast a big team fight.
It was incredibly frustrating as Io to launch your Ultimate and have it instantly detonate on errant collision. Begone frustration! Now Io’s Ultimate travels along the surface it hits, leading to sneaky shots that can send people flying and generally more successful Io Ultimates.
Kasumi has been in a much stronger spot since our last set of changes, but there are still lingering issues on both sides of her duels. We're continuing our work on Yokai Doll's behavior, now adjusting the cone at multiple levels to function a bit closer to a hitscan weapon. Kasumi will now have to be much more precise (within a Cassie arrow of her target) as well as have more control on who she is aiming at when enemies are bunched together. We've also adjusted a few of her Cards to no longer affect the damage output of her abilities but still offer helpful buffs, including rolling old functionality into Haunted Ground! Overall, we think these changes will make Kasumi more consistent and enjoyable but we'll continue to look at feedback on her!
Lian's Shield has always had a bit of a tough time on a character like Khan, whose goal is to move between Bulwark and aggressive options frequently as well as Bulwark being quite weak in the late game unless heavily built into, so we're shifting the identity of this Talent to instead be a holdout tool where Khan tries to keep it up to escape or bait the enemy team into breaking it, providing a buff to his allies!
Lex has been underperforming ever since Heroism was shifted in the Banners Fall Update to increase the cooldown substantially and Wicked Don't Rest was nerfed. Instead of retreading older ground, we decided to simplify and streamline this playstyle. Heroism now is back to being the CC-immune, on demand parry pick but with no resistance to damage. This also allows us to bring the cooldown back to normal values. With this change, we did want to close the frustration loop Wicked Don't Rest causes for good, so the card is being swapped to a heal on use of Combat Slide, giving him a way to spec back into survivability.
We also finally got to dig deeper into how Lex's recoil and camera works, reducing the amount of shake by 65%. We've left some in for feels and balance implications, but Magnums should now perform similarly to other fast rate of fire weapons in this department. Death Hastens also was finetuned to have recoil that matches stronger handguns like Androxus and Saati, while still having lower camera shake overall.
Back with a vengeance, we’ve given Nyx players the ability to facilitate a Poisonn game plan with this card after removing the functionality at base. Its a cheeky card that lets you sneak in that extra % of Health that could turn a fight in your favor.
Omen has been performing relatively well, and so we’ve taken the opportunity to shake up his kit and remove some frustration points when fighting against him. We’ve reduced the ramp time on his weapon to smooth out his game flow, but reworked some of his more problematic cards into mark-focused functionalities. These reworks encourage mark management in a way Omen never really had to do before, rewarding him with powerful effects if the uptime is kept high. This has long been a part of his kit players could ignore, and we’re excited to give Omen more varied playstyles.
Rei has been performing well in Double Support compositions and certain Solo Support scenarios, however there are some pain points that are felt on both sides of her kit we want to address now that she's in that spot. A combination of several cards having lackluster scaling alongside the dominance of Magic in the Blood has left her choices when buildcrafting a bit more limiting than we'd like. To remedy this, we're moving current Magic in the Blood into base as a new Passive and empowering a wide variety of her Cards to be more enticing options.
In conjunction with more power going to...all her Envelop cards, we're taking another look at the ability and trying to better balance out the value provided at base with investing in those Cards. We've removed the small damage done near an Enveloped target to add a bit more clarity for opponents, and shifted the potency of effects towards the more unique Jump Height effect. This still leaves her feeling about as fast as prior if players utilize our buffs to Nimble, Threat and Subject, and other sources of Movement Speed.
Finally, Spirit Link and Focus have had a strained relationship where the link operates differently in more ways than listed. To clean up this dilemma, we're buffing the base Link to be more lenient on breaking and shifting Focus where the total duration is equal to the Link's break timer at base. Basically, Focus now breaks whenever the earliest opportunity for Spirit Link at base to break is. We've also reduced to cooldown penalty to accommodate this power shift, as we still want this playstyle to be potent in the right hands while allowing Restraint a lot more room for play.
Saati has also begun to enter a spot across levels we're pleased with, however there is still one community pain point we'd like to address: Ricochet. The identity of a trickshot conflicted heavily with its spamable nature and lack of thought that had to go into positioning and use, so we've flipped the design a bit on its head. It still requires an initial shot to freeze it in the air and hit a trickshot, but then the next shot will immediately detonate it into an explosion. We've adjusted this to feel more impactful and give reason for Saati to quickly throw a coin up & shoot it for some massive Area Damage. We've also updated a lot of her Cards to accommodate this change as well as Spare Change getting a buff to make it still feel impactful with this version of the coin.
We want to make a longer visit to Sha Lin's kit and current balance state in the future, but as a part of our CC pass we wanted to tackle this specific pain point for many players fighting Sha Lin and open the door to future changes to the most daring, famous, and handsome adventurer in the Realm.
Seris has seen a lot of changes this year, and with this set we intend to finally bring her design forward into 2025 and beyond. Soul Collector has been the predominant way to play her, adding a minigame to her loop that most players enjoy more than anything else. So, we're bringing that into her core and looking to rebalance her around a basekit version that requires a bit more investment but equal payoff. With the Talent slot empty, we're taking a lesson from our work on Grover and still keeping Seris with a proper Damage Talent, now augmenting her Ultimate playstyle and opening up some new tricks for her when it comes to Convergence plays.
Finally, we've got a design fix to Bane that makes its effect clearer and preps us for future Card adjustments once we've seen how this initial shakeup plays out. Seris is a very popular Champion and performs well in average matches, but has struggled at the high end. These changes should help her there by allowing Forsake & Internal Torment more room, but we'll be keeping a close eye to ensure she doesn't end up descending the Realm into darkness.
Grandpa is on the loose again, crushing it in both high and low skill lobbies and generally being a nuisance. We’re shifting around his overall bulk to make him more susceptible to Wrecker, and reducing the effectiveness of Protection to alleviate the steam rolling a pocketed Champion can do. Finally we’re toying around with Induction and Infusion - two very unpopular cards - to breathe some new life into drafting a Torvald Loadout.
After bringing down Blastflower, we want to give WIllo a bit more options across her Talents and loadouts to still feel rewarding no matter which playstyle you're looking for. Nightshade now will fuel itself a bit better, encouraging using it in burst combos and to shutdown plays more frequently, while Scorn is taking some inspiration from her Scorched Earth past and will give Shield busting capabilities back to her.
Yomi has long been Zhin’s most dominant option and a reoccurring meme of overly simplistic Talent designs. While basic Talents do have a place, Yomi offered so much value with no investment or change in play from the player. So, we’ve reworked it to instead offer a brand-new way to play with Whirl, turning it into a powerful combo starter that even synergizes if your team knows you are selecting it. This is something quite new for Paladins in how it functions so we’d like to give an example: If your ally Fernando is actively fighting someone with his Flame Lance, his Burn will allow your Inferno Blade to gain this damage buff! If you don’t draft into this synergy, the Talent is still strong with your own Whirl but to fully invest in the fantasy you should coordinate with allies. Meanwhile, Guillotine has lost a lot of its identity ever since we took away its faster regeneration rate. Considering it’s all about securing kills, we’ve added an additional effect where you are refunded some cost if you finish them and survive!
Balance Vora Cards Unified in Purpose Reduced scaling from 6|6 ➡️ 5|5 What May Come Now has an ICD of 6s Yagorath Ultimate Devour Reduced pull speed from 390 ➡️ 370 Bug Fixes General Fixed an issue where the World Tour Event Pass timer was not properly displaying its end date. Fi
OG Street Style & Street Style: World Tour Event Passes For the special occasion of Street Style as a theme returning, we’re excited to offer 2 Event Passes this update! The first is OG Street Style, a remake of the original Street Style Event including all the cosmetics earn
We’ve also added tech that allows you to preview rewards from the Event Pass in the menu, restoring the ability for people to see all the earnable content in one place. NOTE: Event Pass Chests now expire when a new Event Pass replaces it, with a timer on the chests indicating when that will occur. OG Street Style will run until late this year, and Street Style: World Tour will continue on into early 2025!
In our continued investigation of Aim Assist, we’ve discovered a number of inconsistencies and problems with our current implementation. Back in the Dark Tides update (1.6), we implemented a new (for the time) Aim Assist system that made it easier to customize settings on a Champion-by-Champion basis while standardizing how Champions receive it. However, as the team evolved and changed over time, these specific practices and assumptions about the game became less and less true. One of these core assumptions was that projectile Champions do not benefit from AA, but this isn’t accurate. Characters as old as Grover and as new as Caspian have had Aim Assist magnetism (i.e. a pull towards a character’s center mass when your reticle is very close) while other projectile characters listed above have not. In order to improve on these systems in the future and carry forward that original goal of a standard players can rely on, we’re doing a large reset. All Champions will now have the same benefits from Aim Assist magnetism; however, the maximum strength of Aim Assist magnetism has been reduced by 20% across the board. In practice, Paladins will still feel good on controller and these specific Champions should feel better to play on controller.
Moving forward, our goals will be to measure specific pain point characters and adjust them up or down to provide a comfortable and fair play experience. We’re starting with the select group of Champions that are receiving focused bullet magnetism nerfs (i.e. how generous we are when their reticle is near the head of a target). Outside of these specific adjustments, we’ll continue to watch the ways controllers perform between PC and Console respectively to ensure that crossplay environments like Ranked are given more integrity and even play across the Champion roster. We plan to take a look at Aim Assist tracking next (e.g. how much the reticle follows targets in motion) since we know that has been a source of frustration as well. We’ll keep players updated on our progress!
Azaan has persistently remained in the bottom percentile of our Frontlines, glory days long behind him. We’re giving him some general quality of life improvements to his cooldowns and health to give him a bit of a bump.
Measured Cadence is by far Caspian's highest pick rate and win rate Talent, while his other two Talents share below average rates. So, we’re taking a shot at reverted It's Got Some Heft & improving Everywhere at Once as we continue to work on making our devilish rogue the most devious he can be. Everywhere at Once had a strong upside, permanently setting Deadly Momentum’s cooldown to a low value - but that wasn’t enough to justify the choice. It's difficult to ask Flanks to directly engage enemies with their ability generally saved for retreating, especially when the upside of 1 stack per hit wasn’t valuable enough to expend the cooldown. We’ve taken the Talent and moved some of the values around, keeping its identity relatively similar to previous where it encourages aggressive use of Deadly Momentum. With an additional charge and heal-on-hit, it gives Caspian an aggressive initiation tool without neutering his escape.
Entropic Breach has always been a bit unimpactful outside of the most specific moments, and Corvus often finds himself in a position where his team dies if he tries to properly utilize it. The Abyss has decided to grant him another boon, allowing him to heal his Allies within just as much as he harms his foes. Now, this Ultimate can more easily allow for some saves and pushes from your team and makes its presence on the battlefield more important.
Grover finds himself at a crossroads, where on one side lies Talents rife with utility and the other lies Rampant Blooming being the only way for him to have impactful healing on his own. After a lot of thought, we wanted to try something new for him. Blossom is being brought back up to its potency felt previously but Rampant Blooming is no more, instead replaced by a Talent all about being an anchor for the team’s buffs. This means Grover’s healing is only augmented by Cards now, allowing us greater control of his output and allowing more room to balance him in a way that allows him to stay relevant across his Talents. Whirlwind is also gaining an even more powerful Movement Speed increase throughout its duration, offering him another reason to utilize his Ultimate in the late game regardless of Anti-Healing.
Kasumi is slowly sneaking into a place we’re happy with, but she’s still lacking some of the speed and burst many associate with our Flanks. We’ve brought her base movement speed up to the middle of her adoptive class, alongside a buff to Savage Tear to allow it to be weaved better into a combo while adjusting Essence Drain to compensate. The largest changes we are making are to Spirit Traps, increasing their damage and making them much harder to spot before you’re in the effective range. They now share the same detection distance as Stealthed enemies and once you fully see them, that’s a sign you’re in the blast zone!
Kinessa is still performing well above where she had prior to her refresh, but we’d like to continue to iron out pain points players feel as and against her. We’re bringing a little bit of speed back to the Sniper in exchange for removing Octopressor from her Talent lineup, replaced by a complete 180 on her usual gameplan with them. Now, they will empower her with a damage amp on her Carbine Mode, making her able to duel in medium ranges. We’ll continue to look into other changes on her as needed!
Koga has been ripping and tearing his way through matches, consistently performing very well compared to other Flanks. We’re tweaking him across the board to give us more design space going forward - as well as to alleviate some pain points when playing as and against him.
We’re moving Adrenaline Junkie into base at a weaker level to smooth out his game flow, since that Talent felt necessary more often than not to facilitate optimum Koga. Hellkite Claws have been a persistent damage tool since its buff, making it frustrating to fight against as Koga cleaves through an entire team. To keep its utility but reel in the obscene DPS it can pump out, each projectile will do less damage per penetrated enemy, making it less oppressive when engaging a group. Finally, we’ve added a new Talent in Bullet Time. This incentivizes aggressive use of Shadow Step during fights to boost your damage, but comes at the cost of a precious resource. Watch your timings and you’ll come out alive, just don’t get greedy!
Since her release, Lillith has had some serious ups and downs. Specifically downs looking at the past couple months, fighting tooth and claw for her current position as second worst support in the roster. Keen to rise from the dead, we’re giving her some love to most of her kit. With Blood cost reductions across the board, on top of a bit of extra Blood Health, Lillith will be able to stay in a fight and do her job for much longer. We’ve also reworked Cursed Accord, this time giving it a powerful effect of damage resistance penetration, turning her into a Champion supercharger that you’ll be smart to focus ASAP.
Mal’Damba has been finally performing at a level that feels befitting his reputation as an honest Support…maybe a bit too easily though. This change is aimed at raising the floor higher slightly by being harsher when players miss his heal while not hampering his optimal play.
Octavia misses seeing frequent deploys, so we wanted to revisit her kit and try to inject more fun into the average game for her. She’s by no means weak but generally a lot of players struggle to find something in her kit that excites them enough to play her, so these changes aim to shift her power in ways that allow her more to play with. Firstly, her Marksman Rifle has had a pass on how its gunplay feels. Her hipfire has been retuned to be much more manageable if you pace your shots, allowing more time outside of scope. When in scope, you’ll now suffer from significantly less screen shake & visual recoil which helps her feel like the trained shooter she is. Commanding Leap has Hell or High Water coming into base kit, making one of our simplest abilities into one that has a lot more utility and enhances her hybrid Damage-Support identity. Distortion Field is also finally living up to its name, distorting gravity for those inside. Everyone within will have gravity and jump height distorted, and enemies will suffer their Slow even while in air. Finally, her Cards and Talents have seen some adjustments to allow these additions to shine. Paratrooper turns a weak spot for her into a strength once more, giving a powerful amount of damage output when she leaps into action!
Ruckus is performing well at the higher levels of play, but outside of that space he’s struggled to be picked and utilized. Aerial Assault has always been something that makes Bolt feel better to pilot around in, so we’re shifting the best part of it into base to both help how Ruckus feels but also allow for more Talent diversity than he currently sees. Flux Generator, however, feels a bit too potent compared to the others without a nerf to its Shielding bonus so we’re proactively tuning that down as well.
We’re still watching the short and long-term on both of these Talents before we look to shake Seris up again. Internal Torment is having its functionality clarified better (i.e. it already did this teamwide Reveal) and Forsake is receiving a small buff to its cooldown to give it a better chance at keeping up with other burst options across the Support class. We’ve been listening to the discussion around her across social platforms and will continue to iterate without taking away the approachability that has made her Paladins' most played Champion.
Snipers fill an important niche in FPS, serving as counter to aerial superiority and picking off stragglers of poor team coordination. That can be frustrating to fight against however, and so we’ve had to be careful over our patches when altering snipers. We’re taking a pass at Strix to fill out the fantasy of lying in wait and securing a high-value kill, while still keeping him fun to fight against with decent counter play.
Most significant of these changes is firing from Stealth now pierces up to 10% of damage resistance - giving Strix a way to alleviate one of his hardest counters at the cost of using his Stealth. While this may seem extreme, it elevates Veteran as a counter item, since if you don’t have DR, nothing changes in the engagement with Strix. Not to mention he’ll almost be guaranteed out of Stealth energy if he's constantly dipping into it for the piercing, so take that opportunity to sic your Flank on this defenseless fowl.
Here we go again. VII has been a unique addition to the Flank class, and a perpetual challenge to balance in a way that feels fun for the player and fair for the opponents. We took a longer step back from his kit and are now reapproaching with a different outlook. Our goals with these changes is to simplify VII into the core of his identity: best in class movement, ambush-style engagement, and cooldown management. Burst Mode is being brought up in damage but down in range, bringing him closer to his peers when it comes to effective dueling range. (We’re aware this leaves Automatic in a weird spot, we plan to address this in a subsequent update). We’re also hitting the maximum range on his Grappling Hook, but allowing him more access to it. We’re also standardizing his pull speed at around Terror 3 to start, allowing us more control of how fast his peak movement is. Explosive Dodge is getting a unique effect inspired by Raum’s favorite game genre: immunity for a small window on dodge. This allows VII some neat tricks for those skilled enough to pull off timings.
We also went back to the drawing board on Overcharged, and after weighing the options have reimagined Decree 77 into a new, more thematic Talent. Execute Article VII allows him to access a Tribunal staple Execute via lasering down targets with his eye. Note that this Execute procs after the damage of the blast, meaning it can confirm into itself when used correctly. Terror, meanwhile, is being reworked to give VII some added survivability on hook, allowing him more options on which Cards he wants for sustain.
While Talus remains mainly a Champion whose dominance is most felt on a controller, his weapon has a bit too much forgiveness regardless of input, especially during Overcharge. These changes are designed to ask Talus to be a bit more focused when aiming during the ability as well as spraying for longer durations without pausing. We’ll continue to look into his performance across inputs and platforms for further adjustments!
We heard loud and clear that the Kunai changes from Tidal Surge simply weren’t it for high level players, so we’re reverting those back to their previous values. As a part of this, we decided to adopt a popular community request for him to aid the fluidity of play: animation canceling his reload. This allows him to now use Shadow Bombs & Dash to finish reloading once he’s passed .6s of his reload time, raising the skill ceiling a little bit more for him. Speaking of raising his skill, we’ve removed the DR from his dash at base to push him to use Cards for his survivability. Finally, Enveloping Shadows is losing its ICD but now requires players to land more Kunai to reap the full reward of his cooldown reduction.
Burst Mode has a specific issue when it comes to useability on KB&M, so we’ve adjusting the hip fire to be significantly more controllable and allow those on the input a better experience on this Talent than previous obtainable.
The latest innovation in Deepwerks technology allows Vivian to use her optics to focus beyond any felt recoil from her Light Machine Gun, encouraging its use when you need an added bit of control to decimate your opponents.
The Maw holds many emotions, and none are quite as potent as jealousy. Watching VII fling himself around has pushed Vora to embrace her corruption further, unlocking new potential. Tendril now will have 2 charges at base, allowing her more mobility at base without relying on her Ultimate. In addition, we’ve taken her two infrequently used Talents and replaced them with devastating new options. Parasitic Pull allows Vora to utilize her unique launch tech on allies as well, providing them strong Shields or DR from her Cards before diving onto opponents. Eclipsed Affection, meanwhile, allows Obliteration to chain together combos and Eliminations that will hopefully one day finally let her triumph over Io.
Willo has experienced a resurgence in popularity (and win rate) now that she can hover above and rain fairy-death on her foes. She's having a little too much fun with this, and fighting her can be a frustrating experience, so we’re adding a caveat to incentivize her touching down every so often and offer an opportunity for counter-play. Similarly Blast Flower has been performing really well, too well, but we like the new popularity it has garnered. We’re giving it a slap on the wrist to bring down the overall power while keeping the playstyle intact.
General Reverted changes to Gyro Aim Sensitivity. Fixed an issue where the Street Style: World Tour Event Pass is using the wrong backer. Fixed an issue where Vora & VII's new Talents were not available in instance. Fixed an issue where the Login and Main Lobby menus were swa
In a future update, we plan to remove/rework Cards that amount to a damage amp. This nerf is meant to allow Kasumi more flexibility in buildcrafting until then, while preserving her upcoming buffs.
Greetings Champions! This Developer Insights blog aims to shed light on how our PTS process works, from the version that we use internally to the final version that becomes the Live build and everything in between. In the past, Evil Mojo has discussed PTS and veteran players may
Color-coding is used to signify the necessity of a change, with Green being “Can ship as is” and then a scale that goes to Red of “Revert before Live!”. The only Red entry for this update was the Gyro Sensitivity changes (sorry Gyro players for the scare, we didn’t have enough internal people to test those changes well!), but that also doesn’t mean it’s the only revert. Azaan’s Eternal rework was an Orange, which after discussion felt best to revert instead of trying to force in changes. You’ll get the full list of changes between PTS and Live sometime next week before release!
OG Street Style & Street Style: World Tour Event Passes For the special occasion of Street Style as a theme returning, we’re excited to offer 2 Event Passes this update! The first is OG Street Style, a remake of the original Street Style Event including all the cosmetics earn
We’ve also added tech that allows you to preview rewards from the Event Pass in the menu, restoring the ability for people to see all the earnable content in one place. OG Street Style will run until late this year, and Street Style: World Tour will continue on into early 2025!
In our continued investigation of Aim Assist, we’ve discovered a number of inconsistencies and problems with our current implementation. Back in the Dark Tides update (1.6), we implemented a new (for the time) Aim Assist system that made it easier to customize settings on a Champion-by-Champion basis while standardizing how Champions receive it. However, as the team evolved and changed over time, these specific practices and assumptions about the game became less and less true. One of these core assumptions was that projectile Champions do not benefit from AA, but this isn’t accurate. Characters as old as Grover and as new as Caspian have had Aim Assist magnetism (i.e. a pull towards a character’s center mass when your reticle is very close) while other projectile characters listed above have not. In order to improve on these systems in the future and carry forward that original goal of a standard players can rely on, we’re doing a large reset. All Champions will now have the same benefits from Aim Assist magnetism; however, the maximum strength of Aim Assist magnetism has been reduced by 20% across the board and Gyro is taking an additional 20% reduction to the sensitivity in application. In practice, Paladins will still feel good on controller and these specific Champions should feel better to play on controller.
Moving forward, our goals will be to measure specific pain point characters and adjust them up or down to provide a comfortable and fair play experience. We’re starting with the select group of Champions that are receiving focused bullet magnetism nerfs (i.e. how generous we are when their reticle is near the head of a target). Outside of these specific adjustments, we’ll continue to watch the ways controllers perform between PC and Console respectively to ensure that crossplay environments like Ranked are given more integrity and even play across the Champion roster. We plan to take a look at Aim Assist tracking next (e.g. how much the reticle follows targets in motion) since we know that has been a source of frustration as well. We’ll keep players updated on our progress!
Azaan has persistently remained in the bottom percentile of our Frontlines, glory days long behind him. We’re giving him some general quality of life improvements to his cooldowns and health, while adjusting Eternal to reinvigorate its atrocious playrate and middling win rate.
Let's talk in brief about Caspian’s Talents. Measured Cadence is the elephant in the room, with the highest pick rate and win rate, while his other two Talents share a middling 47%~ win rate and more importantly an abysmal 11%~ pick rate. This illustrates to us that Caspian’s Talent selection just isn’t really engaging or conducive to other playstyles, and that his other playstyles just aren’t as fun. So we’re taking a shot at Everywhere at Once as we continue to work on making our devilish rogue the most devious he can be.
Everywhere at Once had a strong upside, permanently setting Deadly Momentum’s cooldown to a low value - but that wasn’t enough to justify the choice. It's difficult to ask Flanks to directly engage enemies with their ability generally saved for retreating, especially when the upside of 1 stack per hit wasn’t valuable enough to expend the cooldown. We’ve taken the Talent and moved some of the values around, keeping its identity relatively similar to previous where it encourages aggressive use of Deadly Momentum. With an additional charge and heal-on-hit, it gives Caspian an aggressive initiation tool without neutering his escape.
Entropic Breach has always been a bit unimpactful outside of the most specific moments, and Corvus often finds himself in a position where his team dies if he tries to properly utilize it. The Abyss has decided to grant him another boon, allowing him to heal his Allies within just as much as he harms his foes. Now, this Ultimate can more easily allow for some saves and pushes from your team and makes its presence on the battlefield more important.
Grover finds himself at a crossroads, where on one side lies Talents rife with utility and the other lies Rampant Blooming being the only way for him to have impactful healing on his own. After a lot of thought, we wanted to try something new for him. Blossom is being brought back up to its potency felt previously but Rampant Blooming is no more, instead replaced by a Talent all about being an anchor for the team’s buffs. This means Grover’s healing is only augmented by Cards now, allowing us greater control of his output and allowing more room to balance him in a way that allows him to stay relevant across his Talents. Whirlwind is also gaining an even more powerful Movement Speed increase throughout its duration, offering him another reason to utilize his Ultimate in the late game regardless of Anti-Healing.
Kasumi is slowly sneaking into a place we’re happy with, but she’s still lacking some of the speed and burst many associate with our Flanks. We’ve brought her base movement speed up to the middle of her adoptive class, alongside a buff to Savage Tear to allow it to be weaved better into a combo. The largest changes we are making are to Spirit Traps, increasing their damage and making them much harder to spot before you’re in the effective range. They now share the same detection distance as Stealthed enemies and once you fully see them, that’s a sign you’re in the blast zone!
Kinessa is still performing well above where she had prior to her refresh, but we’d like to continue to iron out pain points players feel as and against her. We’re bringing a little bit of speed back to the Sniper in exchange for removing Octopressor from her Talent lineup, replaced by a complete 180 on her usual gameplan with them. Now, they will empower her with a damage amp on her Carbine Mode, making her able to duel in medium ranges. We’ll continue to look into other changes on her as needed!
Koga has been ripping and tearing his way through matches, consistently performing very well compared to other Flanks. We’re tweaking him across the board to give us more design space going forward - as well as to alleviate some pain points when playing as and against him.
We’re moving Adrenaline Junkie into base at a weaker level to smooth out his game flow, since that Talent felt necessary more often than not to facilitate optimum Koga. Hellkite Claws have been a persistent damage tool since its buff, making it frustrating to fight against as Koga cleaves through an entire team. To keep its utility but reel in the obscene DPS it can pump out, each projectile will do less damage per penetrated enemy, making it less oppressive when engaging a group. Finally, we’ve added a new Talent in Bullet Time. This incentivizes aggressive use of Shadow Step during fights to boost your damage, but comes at the cost of a precious resource. Watch your timings and you’ll come out alive, just don’t get greedy!
Since her release, Lillith has had some serious ups and downs. Specifically downs looking at the past couple months, fighting tooth and claw for her current position as second worst support in the roster. Keen to rise from the dead, we’re giving her some love to most of her kit. With Blood cost reductions across the board, on top of a bit of extra Blood Health, Lillith will be able to stay in a fight and do her job for much longer. We’ve also reworked Cursed Accord, this time giving it a powerful effect of damage resistance penetration, turning her into a Champion supercharger that you’ll be smart to focus ASAP.
Mal’Damba has been finally performing at a level that feels befitting his reputation as an honest Support…maybe a bit too easily though. This change is aimed at raising the floor higher slightly by being harsher when players miss his heal while not hampering his optimal play.
Octavia misses seeing frequent deploys, so we wanted to revisit her kit and try to inject more fun into the average game for her. She’s by no means weak but generally a lot of players struggle to find something in her kit that excites them enough to play her, so these changes aim to shift her power in ways that allow her more to play with. Firstly, her Marksman Rifle has had a pass on how its gunplay feels. Her hipfire has been retuned to be much more manageable if you pace your shots, allowing more time outside of scope. When in scope, you’ll now suffer from significantly less screen shake & visual recoil which helps her feel like the trained shooter she is. Commanding Leap has Hell or High Water coming into base kit, making one of our simplest abilities into one that has a lot more utility and enhances her hybrid Damage-Support identity. Distortion Field is also finally living up to its name, distorting gravity for those inside. Everyone within will have gravity and jump height distorted, and enemies will suffer their Slow even while in air. Finally, her Cards and Talents have seen some adjustments to allow these additions to shine. Paratrooper turns a weak spot for her into a strength once more, giving a powerful amount of damage output when she leaps into action!
Ruckus is performing well at the higher levels of play, but outside of that space he’s struggled to be picked and utilized. Aerial Assault has always been something that makes Bolt feel better to pilot around in, so we’re shifting the best part of it into base to both help how Ruckus feels but also allow for more Talent diversity than he currently sees. Flux Generator, however, feels a bit too potent compared to the others without a nerf to its Shielding bonus so we’re proactively tuning that down as well.
We’re still watching the short and long-term on both of these Talents before we look to shake Seris up again. Internal Torment is having its functionality clarified better (i.e. it already did this teamwide Reveal) and Forsake is receiving a small buff to its cooldown to give it a better chance at keeping up with other burst options across the Support class. We’ve been listening to the discussion around her across social platforms and will continue to iterate without taking away the approachability that has made her Paladins' most played Champion.
Snipers fill an important niche in FPS, serving as counter to aerial superiority and picking off stragglers of poor team coordination. That can be frustrating to fight against however, and so we’ve had to be careful over our patches when altering snipers. We’re taking a pass at Strix to fill out the fantasy of lying in wait and securing a high-value kill, while still keeping him fun to fight against with decent counter play.
Most significant of these changes is firing from Stealth now pierces up to 10% of damage resistance - giving Strix a way to alleviate one of his hardest counters at the cost of using his Stealth. While this may seem extreme, it elevates Veteran as a counter item, since if you don’t have DR, nothing changes in the engagement with Strix. Not to mention he’ll almost be guaranteed out of Stealth energy if he's constantly dipping into it for the piercing, so take that opportunity to sic your Flank on this defenseless fowl.
Here we go again. VII has been a unique addition to the Flank class, and a perpetual challenge to balance in a way that feels fun for the player and fair for the opponents. We took a longer step back from his kit and are now reapproaching with a different outlook. Our goals with these changes is to simplify VII into the core of his identity: best in class movement, ambush-style engagement, and cooldown management. Burst Mode is being brought up in damage but down in range, bringing him closer to his peers when it comes to effective dueling range. (We’re aware this leaves Automatic in a weird spot, we plan to address this in a subsequent update). We’re also hitting the maximum range on his Grappling Hook, but allowing him more access to it. We’re also standardizing his pull speed at around Terror 3 to start, allowing us more control of how fast his peak movement is. Explosive Dodge is getting a unique effect inspired by Raum’s favorite game genre: immunity for a small window on dodge. This allows VII some neat tricks for those skilled enough to pull off timings.
We also went back to the drawing board on Overcharged, and after weighing the options have reimagined Decree 77 into a new, more thematic Talent. Execute Article VII allows him to access a Tribunal staple Execute via lasering down targets with his eye. Note that this Execute procs after the damage of the blast, meaning it can confirm into itself when used correctly. Terror, meanwhile, is being reworked to give VII some added survivability on hook, allowing him more options on which Cards he wants for sustain.
While Talus remains mainly a Champion whose dominance is most felt on a controller, his weapon has a bit too much forgiveness regardless of input, especially during Overcharge. These changes are designed to ask Talus to be a bit more focused when aiming during the ability as well as spraying for longer durations without pausing. We’ll continue to look into his performance across inputs and platforms for further adjustments!
We heard loud and clear that the Kunai changes from Tidal Surge simply weren’t it for high level players, so we’re reverting those back to their previous values. As a part of this, we decided to adopt a popular community request for him to aid the fluidity of play: animation canceling his reload. This allows him to now use Shadow Bombs & Dash to finish reloading once he’s passed .6s of his reload time, raising the skill ceiling a little bit more for him. Speaking of raising his skill, we’ve removed the DR from his dash at base to push him to use Cards for his survivability. Finally, Enveloping Shadows is losing its ICD but now requires players to land more Kunai to reap the full reward of his cooldown reduction.
Burst Mode has a specific issue when it comes to useability on KB&M, so we’ve adjusting the hip fire to be significantly more controllable and allow those on the input a better experience on this Talent than previous obtainable.
The latest innovation in Deepwerks technology allows Vivian to use her optics to focus beyond any felt recoil from her Light Machine Gun, encouraging its use when you need an added bit of control to decimate your opponents.
The Maw holds many emotions, and none are quite as potent as jealousy. Watching VII fling himself around has pushed Vora to embrace her corruption further, unlocking new potential. Tendril now will have 2 charges at base, allowing her more mobility at base without relying on her Ultimate. In addition, we’ve taken her two infrequently used Talents and replaced them with devastating new options. Parasitic Pull allows Vora to utilize her unique launch tech on allies as well, providing them small Shields or DR from her Cards before diving onto opponents. Eclipsed Affection, meanwhile, allows Obliteration to chain together combos and Eliminations that will hopefully one day finally let her triumph over Io.
Willo has experienced a resurgence in popularity (and win rate) now that she can hover above and rain fairy-death on her foes. She's having a little too much fun with this, and fighting her can be a frustrating experience, so we’re adding a caveat to incentivize her touching down every so often and offer an opportunity for counter-play. Similarly Blast Flower has been performing really well, too well, but we like the new popularity it has garnered. We’re giving it a slap on the wrist to bring down the overall power while keeping the playstyle intact.
Greetings Champions! In this Developer Insights blog, we're going to be sharing some larger changes coming to various game modes in the Street Style: World Tour update! Oh yeah, if you missed our announcement , Street Style returns with all new skins for Tyra & Seris, adding
We’ve often gotten complaints about how frequently smaller parties would find themselves face-to-face with a full stack of opponents within the Onslaught queue. To help ease these pains, we’re adding some logic behind team sizes in both Onslaught and Arcade that incentivizes teams of similar sizes queueing against each other. This should only slightly affect queue times, mostly for those in a group, but also increase match quality in these faster-paced modes. Alongside this, we wanted Arcade to have a single ranking type to allow the MM to improve over time, so it will leverage player’s Onslaught stats as a baseline to iterate on.
Veteran players will remember the earliest iteration of Payload, where Checkpoints were available to increase push timers and help prevent spawn camping behaviors. We’re excited to get this system back up and running for Arcade, allowing Payload to play out at a pace much closer to the other modes within the playlist. However, the Checkpoint and multi-round versions of Payload have never coexisted, so some new mechanics had to be built to facilitate the merging of the two iterations. Checkpoints will provide the first team attacking a static amount of time, and the second team a scaling amount of time to ensure that Team 2 always has less time than Team 1 as the modern Payload functions. This is basically a brand-new iteration of how the mode handles Checkpoints, so please provide feedback as you play!
Survival hasn’t seen significant changes since its return earlier this year, but now that it’s joining as the most infrequent mode within Arcade, we want to start looking to modernize the mode in a way that makes it feel distinct and enjoyable to more players. We’re increasing the speed of the fog and round wait times to get players right back into what makes the mode unique faster.
After positive feedback and player interest in Siege, Stone Keep (Classic) is replacing Stone Keep (Day) in the Ranked queue to provide the competitive experience with a version that has cleaner visibility.
Greetings Champions, and welcome back to another series of Developer Insight blogs! In this series, we’ll explore various aspects of the October Update, including adjustments and additions to features and maps and several sandbox changes. To kick off this update, we wanted to sit
NOTE: All the values shown below are test values from Dev. The exact effects and numerical choices will change based on testing and feedback from players.
In essence, it behaves similarly to old Persistence, giving Azaan health sustain throughout the match, but it additionally now Cleanses him after he takes enough damage. This provides the Talent with more late-game power and lets Azaan play around the trigger to facilitate daring escapes or aggressive dives. It remains a solid selfish Talent, but we’re excited for everyone to try this change out and see the combos that can be done with your team when this Talent triggers!
While Everywhere At Once has remained mainly the same, it has received some buffs to make it more utilitarian. We’ll let you think on what those possibilities could be as we go into It’s Got Some Heft, since its new form is the first iteration of its ability in Paladins. Choosing this Talent now gives Caspian flat bonus damage when backstabbing an opponent (triggering within a roughly 120-degree cone) with either of his weapons, while most importantly draining 2% of their Ultimate charge! This gives Caspian a really unique and powerful reward while flanking, potentially turning off key Ultimates in important team fights. We wanted to facilitate a play style for Caspian where he sticks to the shadows and steals what his opponents value most, leaning into his thief origins.
Wisps of Sylvanus takes Blossom’s passive aura and imbues it with small Movement Speed and Crowd Control Reduction buffs that give his team a bit of a boost when fighting around him. This also means that Grover no longer has a strictly Healing talent, now instead offering 3 different tools that augment him beyond his heal output. This is something fairly new to the Support class, but the experiment allows him to return to his place as either a synergy-based solo healer or a complement to a main healer in dual Support compositions.
Crystalline Battery turns an offensive tool into a personal stim machine, giving Kinessa increased fire rate and damage by charging her Carbine Rifle with the energy from her Mines. This buff only affects the Carbine Mode, keeping Steady Aim as the distinct Sniper option but giving her a unique way to become a proper threat to other rifle characters in the midrange. This does come at the cost of damaging herself, meaning it should be used in duels where Kinessa is confident she can keep the advantage.
Initiating with Shadow Step now gives Koga some strong buffs to bring his opponents down quicker, but putting him in a precarious position by spending Stamina. Balancing playstyles is an important aspect to us when it comes to Talent creation, we want all to be enjoyable and viable while offering different boons to the Champion. So when we see an almost always picked Talent (aka Adrenaline Junkie) we see that as a fault in the gameplay loop of the Champion and work to remove the stranglehold it has on the other Talents. Oftentimes this means giving a version of it in base to shore up the weaknesses of the Champion and make them more engaging by giving them a new tool to replace it. It's a delicate game of push and pull, but giving Champions more toys in the box gives players more expression and more importantly, more opportunities for fun.
Giving her marked allies bonus Ultimate charge generation and healing her for more Blood Health when they get an Elimination, this Talent is focused on keeping her team marked and aggressively pushing. Uniquely it also gives them Damage Resistance penetration, ignoring up to a set amount completely and reducing anything past that by that amount. This lets Lillith keep her team on pace with overly defensive Champions and push through those tough-nut-to-crack Frontlines.
This will put a mark on your back as the supercharger Support, so make sure to play it safe and stick to your team! Supports usually rely on Healing to be the main way they support their team, so we wanted to experiment with ways to facilitate off-support playstyles and less healing-centric game plans.
Paratrooper takes what was once a weak spot for Octavia and makes it into a strength, allowing her to float for longer and deal more damage after using Commanding Leap. Damage amps are a quite potent effect, especially on a character with as much potential as Octavia, but this is balanced by asking her to put herself in a vulnerable position to utilize it. We think it can lead to a lot of powerful plays through smart positioning.
NOTE: This will still be his Level 2 Talent. We just thought he needed more sevens for this blog.Execute Article VII brings back the eye laser Ultimate many early VII players may remember, with new potency added to make it a more compelling option than prior iterations. Now, the laser blasts in a 20-unit area for 1000 damage after lock-on, however, anyone left below 25% Health after that blast is Executed. It’s a unique version of an Execute, one that thematically fits the assassin of Corvus and offers him a strong burst-down option.
Parasitic Pull allows Tendril to attach itself to allies, meaning Vora can catch a lift from a Drogoz or Octavia launching into battle. When she does grapple an ally, she shares her Tendril Card effects with the target as a special thanks for the support. If you happen to Tendril an enemy, you apply a small damage over time to them as a way to kickstart a combo to Elimination.
Meanwhile, Deafening Silence hasn’t really made sense as an Obliteration Talent and never saw widespread play. Similarly inspired by other Flanks and effects that haven’t been available to Vora, we went back to the drawing board of her inspirations and narrative.
Eclipsed Affection allows Vora to chain Obliteration casts together more effectively, giving her 2 seconds off cooldown passively and 50% of the cooldown whenever she gets an Elimination. On top of this, if she uses it with max Darkness stacks, the Slow applied is much more effective. Her feelings may be doomed, but so are any foes that dare try and survive her flurry of attacks with this Talent.
Street Style Maeve has surprised the Realm with a block party! 😼 Cards to the Max is active as this weekend's LTM, raising the roof on everyone's Card levels. In addition, Event Pass XP is doubled this weekend as the party gets started!
Balance Io Talents Sacrifice When activated, the 50% Health back Io receives is now True Healing. This was something that has felt true for a while due to how the Talent functions, but recent Anti-Heal changes showed that Io can indeed get hit during this transition. We've made t
This was something that has felt true for a while due to how the Talent functions, but recent Anti-Heal changes showed that Io can indeed get hit during this transition. We've made this now a proper True Heal so the Talent's text remains accurate.
We were overly cautious in how the transition in functionality would benefit Seris, leading to this card becoming too weak for lower-level use case. We're buffing it back to a place where it functions very similar to the previous version of the Card, providing 2|2 Ammo every .5s over the 1.5s period.
Yagorath's changes mostly put her in a spot we and the community were happy with, except for some pain point areas. Her Crit Spots made her more vulnerable than expected and led to her struggling to stay alive even in situations she deserved to, so we've now limited them to only being available during her Ultimate. This keeps the design fantasy (and helps counter her pull speed buff) while not impacting her neutral game nearly as much. As for Acceleration, players noticed an issue where Yagorath would slow slightly during the launch if she was already in movement. We've removed that so now she can continue to make jumps and feel fluid when using the ability, while still preserving a window for counterplay.
Greetings Champions! It's been a while. Now that Reality Warp is released, let's get a bit back on track! Here's what happening in the Realm this week: Hotfixing Reality Later this week, we plan on releasing a hotfix focused on resolving issues and quick changes to balance from R
This was something that has felt true for a while due to how the Talent functions, but recent Anti-Heal changes showed that Io can indeed get hit during this transition. We've made this now a proper True Heal so the Talent's text remains accurate.
We were overly cautious in how the transition in functionality would benefit Seris, leading to this card becoming too weak for lower-level use case. We're buffing it back to a place where it functions very similar to the previous version of the Card, providing 2|2 Ammo every .5s over the 1.5s period.
Yagorath's changes mostly put her in a spot we and the community were happy with, except for some pain point areas. Her Crit Spots made her more vulnerable than expected and led to her struggling to stay alive even in situations she deserved to, so we've now limited them to only being available during her Ultimate. This keeps the design fantasy (and helps counter her pull speed buff) while not impacting her neutral game nearly as much. As for Acceleration, players noticed an issue where Yagorath would slow slightly during the launch if she was already in movement. We've removed that so now she can continue to make jumps and feel fluid when using the ability, while still preserving a window for counterplay.The full hotfix notes will be published when we are able to release it to players, so stay tuned! We appreciate players patience as we tackled the launch issues as well as take time to prepare further changes to balance, both new and retouching these in the October update.
General Updates Special Quests For the duration of 7.5, you can play one match to unlock the Coldsnap Furia skin previously given away during Hi-Rez promotions. Players that already own Furia will instead receive crystals. In addition, playing 10 non-practice games of Siege, Team
Anti-Healing Scaling has long been a point of feedback from experienced players as something that should be quickened in order to reduce frustrations around healing in the early & mid-game. These changes are directly aimed at that feedback; however we’re closely watching the effects on the average lobby and players less intensely focused on this mechanic.
We’ve been investigating how to improve our bot’s behavior and logic in various scenarios, this specific update is aimed to ease frustrations around when a player leaves the match & a bot takes over their place. As a reminder, please report any malicious AFK behavior at the end of the match to help us cut down on rampant leavers, but this change should help along the way!
The original buff to Blast Shot overperformed, so we’re bringing it down a bit in both strength and duration. We’re keen on Cassie keeping this additional utility to enhance her moment-to-moment decision making during a match, but we’ll continue to keep a watchful eye on her power level.
Jenos has been lagging behind other Supports for a minute now, so we want to give him some basic but effective buffs to Astral Mark to help boost him back up. This also has the side effect of buffing his Astral Mark Cards, so its a win-win for our resident ascended monk.
While Kinessa’s refresh hit a lot of notes we were hoping for, her strength and utility has come in a bit more overtuned than we intended. We want to take a look at a few more problematic chunks of her kit (e.g. Oppressor Mines & moving away from a Talent for them) so these changes are intended as a continued effort of adjusting her to keep a lot of what players have loved about her changes while ensuring the frustration currently felt is lessened over time.
Heroism has been left in a weakened state for a while, and we want to slowly bring it back to relevancy without trivializing Lex’s other options. Shaving a second off the cooldown penalty feels right as a first step to letting the Hand of Justice improve at his duty.
Similarly to Jenos, Makoa has been struggling in his category to make a splash, but we’re trying something a little different for him. Before we get to the buffs though, we’re currently still investigating Ancient Rage’s collision issues. The theming behind it is strong enough to us that we feel its worth to keep for now, but we’re reducing the total size growth of his collision to prevent some instances of the stuck-in-place bug. We’ll be continuing to investigate this and searching for a fix. That being said, buffs! Makoa’s been on the weaker side of Frontlines lately (consistently in the bottom 3 in terms of winrate) so we took the kitchen sink approach for him today as we continue to work on his core issues. We’ve buffed a majority of his cards to give him more freedom of loadout while also increasing his overall loadout power to give players more options to optimize their turtle power. Most significantly, we’ve adjusted Sea Legs and Harden to always activate even if Dredge Anchor misses, greatly boosting Makoa’s average durability. Even if his durability is challenged, the reworked Ebb and Flow means Makoa can always try spinning to solve his problems and get out of sticky situations (or initiate some crazy dives if he’s got Ancient Rage), either way Makoa will be able to duke it out in the frontlines much more effectively.
We’ve been hearing frustrations surrounding Moji - and her data supports it - so we’re knocking some of her stats down as well as giving her a little quality of life change. We’re moving Spit Shine’s Healing into base as a reduced value so that Jubilation / Realm Runner can have more space to shine at Talent Selection, since Mojis tended to overwhelmingly lean towards Spit Shine to support their team while staying safe. To compensate for this increased consistency, as well as to bring her stats more in line with what we’re comfortable with, we’re reducing the size of Magic Mark and the Healing from Sparkle. With these changes Moji will have to be more aware of her team at any given moment to maximize her Magic Mark’s value, while also requiring more situational awareness to maximize her reduced healing against Anti-Healing. Finally, with Spit Shine moving into base, we’re revamping it to instead give allies movement speed on mark detonation. This’ll let Moji facilitate aggressive team wide pushes or escape from danger if she’s able to properly manage the marks range.
Combat Medic has slipped behind Pip’s other Talents in selection and viability, mainly due to being in a tough spot compared to the flexibility of Mega Potion and Catalyst. We’re giving Combat Medic’s fire rate increase a bit more strength to make it feel a bit more compelling and give Pip more DPS/HPS potential when using Potion Launcher.
Similar to Mal’Damba’s changes to his cards to accommodate his burst healing, we’re adjusting Seris' two channeled heal cards to now work with Forsake. Blood Pact is staying similar in power level and function, while Spirit Leech is seeing its numbers brought down slightly to leave a bit more value in putting the card at a higher level. We plan to continue to watch Forsake and Internal Torment’s performance to look for improvements, while keeping in mind the benefits of the older Talent set and considering them as needed.
Hot off the heels of Kinessa, we wanted to take a shot at one of our other notorious snipers. Strix faced a fair amount of issues, and with these changes we’ve tackled quite a few of his pain points while we continue to work on making Strix the best (and still enjoyable to fight) sniper he can be. We’ve added stealth energy generation into his pistol at base, giving more merit to swapping weapons to keep invisibility available. This will probably be one of the biggest changes feel-wise, since getting caught doesn’t mean there isn’t a chance anymore - landing enough shots opens up a chance to sneak away just in time. Speaking of stealth, we’ve incorporated a bit of Nocturnal into base, making stealth overall better for all Talents on Strix, since Nocturnal had a strangle hold on his selection rates. Now Nocturnal allows Strix to stay in stealth indefinitely as long as is standing still, letting him line up the perfect shot or narrowly dodge a scouting Flanker. The stranglehold wasn’t just apparent in his Talent selection, Guerrilla Tactics also had a lion’s share of his loadout points on average. We’ve spread the power out a bit not only through his pistol change but by also updating Roost into an energy generation supplement while taking some of that generation away from Guerrilla Tactics. This requires the card to have more investment to get the same bang for your buck as before, but still keeping it in a powerful place with how much energy you get out of it. With more opportunities for stealth through duration and generation, we wanted to give all of Strix’s Talents some love to utilize said stealth. We’ve shifted Unauthorized Use into a more utility role, retaining its damage identity but also providing a powerful debuff that Strix and his team can capitalize on for aggressive plays. We’ve also moved Crack Shot’s stats around, giving his pistol perfect accuracy at the cost of fire rate, putting both his weapons into a new playstyle with one Talent selection and pushing Strix into a much more skirmisher oriented role. There are a lot of game-feel changes to Strix that we can’t wait for you all to experiment with as we continue to work on our notorious snipers. Don’t worry though, all the extra Strixs running around doesn’t mean you’ll need to turn down your brightness. Flashbang now turns your screen gray instead of white. Hurray for eye health (remember to blink often)!
Yagorath has continued to be one of the most polarizing designs and disruptors of game flow, and the team has taken many swings at trying to balance her viability with her enjoyment to play and fight against. The goal of these changes is simple on paper but difficult to deliver: shift Yagorath to feel more engrained with traditional Paladins gameplay. This starts with how she feels to play, from her movement to her vulnerabilities. We’ve smoothed her movement in Travel Form to make her feel more responsive and fun to roll around as, while also slightly reducing the penalty for hitting her Crit Spots. We say Crit Spots because we’ve also brought back a discarded idea from her original design: multiple Crit Spots! Now, if you shoot Yagorath in her tail, it will also count as a Critical hit and deal double damage. This was done in order to allow more counterplay between her and opponents, as well as reinforce her fantasy of being a boss-style character by asking players to do something unique to counter her. Meanwhile, Acceleration has acted as a major crutch when it comes to her ability to poke and relocate from backlines to her team, so with the base improvements to her movement we wanted to shift this ability to a more skillful tool. On activation, she now reaches her base speed over .5s before rolling out at the abilities' enhanced pace. This is intended to allow players to punish her for using it as an escape in moments where she's not careful, so we’ve given it small buff to make it feel better to use frequently and to get from spawn to objective. Hardening also leans into the idea of Yagorath playing around her team more, with the Acid Pool she gains on Corrosive Acid now base kit with an added new effect: providing DR to teammates standing within her pool. Yagorath’s design lacks a lot of tools for her to maintain point presence, but now she has some tricks to help her team survive by her side and make a play for control. Piercing Quills and Caustic Acid have always had a strained relationship, both being limited resource abilities that players tend to spam. We wanted to help make Quills in particular feel a bit more distinct, so we’re removing all the resource capping and instead giving it a simple cooldown between shots. This allows players to focus on Acid management better as well as makes for a more engaging tool to use at range, especially if done to help hold an objective or finish off an escaping kill in off-lanes. These changes also meant we had to adjust various Yagorath cards slightly down to account for the increased uptime, including a rework to Futile Efforts. Devour is also seeing a speed buff on how quickly she pulls people close to compensate for the changes to her survivability. All in all, these adjustments to her kit are meant to make her feel more fun to play as well as more manageable to fight against.