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 deliver it all to you all best we can. However, we have a set of adjustments and reversions we'd like to share ahead of the update's release next week, starting with Serpent Beach & Serpent Beach (Classic).

Serpent Beach

• Reverted baseability change to waterfall-side high ground near objective to prevent new, excessive sightlines
• Restored missing rock on Taskforce 2 payload path
• Restored baseability on rocks in the water to maintain parity to Serpent Beach Classic
• Updated several collision volumes to fix an issue with heavy walls.
  • The walls outside of the double door side of both spawn rooms.
  • The walls on the Jag Falls side of the map as you drop down from high ground moving towards the wood ramp on either side.

• Filled some visible seams outside of playable game space when looking through scaffolding on the Jag Falls side of map.
  
• Blocked off a baseable spot on the back of both spawn rooms that let players see into mid.
  
• Investigating collision around mid to prevent players from clipping their heads through it. This issue is also present in some areas on Serpent Beach (Classic).

As a part of these improvements and our dedication into ensuring Serpent Beach's refresh is the best it can be, Serpent Beach (Classic) will be the only version of the map within Ranked in Split 1. Serpent Beach in its new form will still be available in all other Siege queues!

Serpent Beach (Classic)

• Updated several collision volumes to fix an issue with heavy walls.
  • The walls outside of the double door side of both spawn rooms.
  • The walls on the Jag Falls side of the map as you drop down from high ground moving towards the wood ramp either side.

We're continuing to look into other reports and potential improvement areas on the map, but these are what we are confident will be reflected in the version going live in Wekono's Wake. We also are planning in future hotfixes and updates to revisit the map as needed. Now, let's dive into balance!

Balance

Items

Deft Hands

• Removed reload speed cap changes at Level 3
• Decreased price from 225|450|675 ➡️ 200|400|600

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.

Rejuvenate

• Reverting to Live version

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.

Sentinel

• Reverting to close-to-Live version
  • Increase Shield on Elimination from 150 ➡️ 200
  • Increase price from 200|400|600 ➡️ 225|450|675

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.

Wrecker

• Decreased buffed scaling from 60|120|180 ➡️ 50|100|150

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.

Champions

Barik

Accelerator Field

• Increase scaling from 10|10 ➡️ 12|12

Field Deploy

• Increase buff to scaling to 50|50

Healing Station

• Increase buff to scaling to 50|50

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.

Dredge

Abyssal Reload

• Increase the damage (non-Scuttle) from 850 ➡️ 1000

Hurl

• Now procs cooldown restore on hitting absorption effects like Terminus Siphon
• Restored removal of Slow

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.

Jenos

Luminary

• Reverted nerf to healing values

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.

Kasumi

• Reverted change to cone size this update
• Reverting damage falloff addition from previous patch
• Increasing bonus damage against Deployables and deployed Shields from 250% ➡️ 400%

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.

Moji

Morning Breath

• Looking into making this Card restore X% amount of Sparkle on enemy hit instead of % chance, function will be near identical but more consistent.

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.

Vivian

Deflector Shield

• Increase health from 1200 ➡️ 1500

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.

Yagorath

Piercing Quills

• Reverted cooldown nerf
• Transitioned from using cooldown back to Ammo system.

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