A new experimental balance patch is here! On PC ONLY, players on the experimental branch now have access to some new mechanics and parameter adjustments. We welcome your thoughts, your feedback, and your playtesting! I encourage dedicated coaches to join us in our Discord community to discuss these changes live with other players.
How to Access
Right click Beastieball in your Steam library > Select "Properties" > Go to the "Game Versions and Betas" tab > Select "experimental" from the dropdown menu.
Your savedata is not be at risk when changing to different game branches. If your Beasties have plays on the default branch which they do not have access to in the experimental branch, they will be removed. Or, if you use new plays which are introduced on the experimental branch, they will be removed upon switching back to the default branch.
Plays which have been added or changed will be completely free to tutor to your Beasties at the Beastierball Academy on the temporary experimental build. Take this opportunity to try out new tools and let us know how they're feeling!
⭐New Stuff
There are a couple new experimental feature items we want players to be aware of, and welcome testing/feedback on these during the experimental period. All of these are now available in the SportNet menu.
- Lobbies:
- You can now spectate online matches!
- You can spectate a Lobby either using a Room Code, or by clicking on an active match the "Find A Match" menu.
- If you have Continuous Matchmaking enabled, you can accept Challenges even while spectating other players.
- Options have been added to disable spectators for lobbies as well.
- This feature is very early and experimental, and required changing nearly everything about how lobbies work - expect bugs! Let us know if you find any using the ingame feedback menu (F8).
- An Alternating Serve option has been added to the Lobby Rules menu
- You can now spectate online matches!
- Beastie Analytics: You can now view analytics for past balance patches, organized by the month when they released.
- Leaderboards: Leaderboards have been fully refactored to update live based on current server data. This has a few bonus side effects.
- Player names and team names now update to reflect whatever the player's current name/team name are, including for historic leaderboards.
- This also means that team title will now properly localize and display their team color, as they would when viewed in a PvP match, rather than displaying as plain text.
- Leaderboards will now update live while Bashes are running, so you can watch how the rankings develop over the course of an event!
Additionally, Bash Results will now display in the Leaderboards area for themed Bashes, so results don't need to be posted online anymore. We do still intend to make leaderboards more robust in the future, and let players see their own placements, but this refactor was a necessary first step towards that future feature.
🔧 Balance Changes
- It's been a short time since the previous milestone update, so we aren't aiming to make massive changes this time around. This balance patch is particularly light-touch and is meant to address a few things that stood out to us as potential issues.
- Performer
- 🔄 New effect: When landing a SPIRIT attack, summons +2 RALLY. Surgus has seen waning use and waning success over the last few months. One reason for this we've found is that they compete with their own kin, Shloom, for their role as a Rally attacker. Plus, Performer's design felt a bit less exciting after we introduced Stagecraft, which has a similar but more interesting and powerful effect. This represents a new idea to cement Surgus as having a unique role on Rally teams.
- Slippery
- 🔻 Tweaked effect: While in the back row, makes adjacent allies receive attacks in their place. While we haven't seen Gremlur vastly overperforming in results, we do feel that Slippery made them a little too easy to pilot - even without focused building, it exerts a lot of pressure on the opponent and closes many lines to them, forcing a game at Gremlur's pace. This change shouldn't have a massive impact on the effectiveness of Slippery, but it does narrow Gremlur's own effective space. It also means coaches can't take advantage of Slippery while also leveraging front-row offense or Blocking opportunities.
- Burnout
- 🔼 105 POW (from 100)
- 🔻 -20 STAMINA (from -15) We see Daredillo feeling pretty good with their new Fearless trait, but still slightly overperforming with Acrobat. This change means that Fearless gets one more slight advantage over Acrobat. The changes here also apply to Froofulks and Scauldra, but both Beasties are in an OK spot to receive this small change.
- Wottle
- 🔼 70 MPOW (from 60)
- 🔼 Plays Added: Rainbow, Roll Shot, Sneak Attack (via level up), Heartbreaker Wottle's unique trait is typically used defensively, but it also has offensive implications that are rarely made use of. There's a careful balance in making sure their offense is not so overwhelming to let their serve attacks dominate games, but we realized there were many mind attacks that would have interesting interactions with it while not rising to excessive power levels, so we're giving Wottle a new main attacking type. A Spirit dominant, Mind secondary mixed attacker is actually a very unique stat spread in the cast, and Wottle is now the only one with this spread whose role is on the support side.
- Mudslee
- 🔼 Plays Added: Trait Dance This one is just for fun, and because Moist no longer has some game-breaking interactions it used to.
- Bindiva
- 🔻 100 MPOW (from 108) We're excited to see players exploring Bindiva at a high level, finally! Our changes to their kit in the last patch did the intended job of mitigating general strength while still leaving some nasty offensive lines available, but in practice we're still seeing players get too much value out of Bindiva's offense in the best cases. With this change, Bindiva still has one of the most powerful Dumps in the game and still has all the same easy ways to force them, but can't checkmate out of nowhere quite as easily.
- Daredillo
- 🔻 94 BPOW (from 95)
- 🔻 98 SPOW (from 105) With the addition of Dodge Roll, we've seen Daredillo become far and away the most-used Beastie in PvP, and we think that usage has been well deserved; Daredillo can tank some of the strongest hits in the game, support teammates, AND hits about as hard as anything in the game can, too. They seem just a little bit too good at everything, basically. Since we think Dodge Roll is very fun, and makes sense as a staple tool for them, we're cutting their offense down a touch so that their role shifts just a bit more towards support and away from offense. This corresponds with the Burnout change to ensure that Fearless Daredillo still gets a staple hit that's as strong as it's been, while Acrobat Daredillo now has to eat a higher cost to get the same benefit.
- Supilero
- 🔻 68 BPOW (from 70) We've seen Supilero really come to life since we re-worked Confident, succeeding both defensively and offensively with True Strike. Similar to Daredillo, we're nudging their stats just a bit so that coaches can't rely on their offenses quite as much.
- Beetlback
- 🔼 70 BPOW (from 68) We've seen Beetlback struggling just a bit in results. They've got some fun attacking options, but virtually never have a reason to use them, and are underwhelming when they do; this tweak trades their offense stat with Supilero's and gives players just one tiny extra reason to consider them over other supports.
🍄 Traits
🏃 Plays
👹 Beasties
🚧Other Fixes and Changes
- Many more small fixes and tweaks, but I don't want to write them all out right now.... stay tuned for full patch notes in the Milestone Update!