Experimental Balance Changes for upcoming Milestone #7

How to Access

⭐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
    
  
  
• 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.



⚙️ General Mechanics Changes




🥱 Weariness

(@)

• PREVIOUSLY: Beasties take extra "Receive Weariness" damage after receiving multiple attacks in the same point. Each attack dealt +10 damage for each receive after the 7th receive in a point.
  
• NOW: Beasties have a "Weariness" value which goes up each time they take any action such as Move, Tag In, any Attack or any Play. Double Blocks and Combo plays increase Weariness for both Beasties. Beasties take 8 extra damage from attacks for each Weariness over 15. Weariness resets to 0 at the end of every point.
  

  Receive Weariness is a mechanic we added to prevent matches from being able to last forever. However, over time, we've felt that it was insufficient for some games. We discussed adding a match timer similar to what's typically seen in competitive Chess, but we're also reticent about introducing new win conditions into the game around timer-based strategy. Instead we're rethinking Weariness to be more impactful in cases that we think it should.

  Similar to the previous design, Weariness applies more to Beasties who spend more time on the field. The new design more directly punishes players for extending matches with many actions. It's also more similar to a timer now in that players must manage their own Weariness, and opponents don't have direct influence over the resource via attack targeting. In practice, as before, our goal is to balance the values such that Weariness never becomes relevant in the vast majority of matches, but does become relevant in exceptional cases.

  
  

  In the current experimental build, for the purpose of testing, each Beastie's Weariness displays above their play options at all times in any networked PVP match. If these changes come to the main branch, Weariness will only display for a Beastie when they're within 5 actions of triggering extra damage from it. Since it shouldn't apply to 95%+ of matches, we don't want to distract players with the information until it approaches relevancy.

  
  

  Note that these changes are not yet covered in the INFO menu!







🍄 Traits



• 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: Makes adjacent allies receive attacks with base POW 70 or more.
    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 the game to go at Gremlur's pace. We do think Gremlur represents a fun and unique playstyle in the game, being difficult to target and remove while making the opponent's life difficult. This adjustment still keeps that alive, but gives opponents many more ways to land hits on Gremlur, particularly with low-power disruption plays.
    
  
  




🏃 Plays



• 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.
    
  
  
  
• Flying Kick^
  
  
  
  • 🔻 90 POW (from 95)
    As a new signature play given to Kasaleet in the previous balance patch, we wanted Flying Kick to be something players would want to actually slot in and use. This existence of Thump at 90 POW in Kasaleet's kit complicated this - with an already perfect "default" attack available, we felt Flying Kick needed to establish itself as a different power tier option to differentiate itself. In practice, though, we've seen that Flying Kick's drawbacks and complexities don't entirely make up for its extra power over Thump, and that in fact it fits into Kasaleet's kit in almost exactly the same way. This established a new baseline power for them that was a bit higher than what it was before - something we didn't really intend. We're attempting a correction here by having Flying Kick fully replace Thump in Kasaleet's kit, at the same power level they've always had.
    
  
  
  
• Hex^
  
  
  
  • 🔄 Haunted (the trait applied by Hex) now always feels 3 TIRED (from 4)
    Hex has always been a contentious play, and we like it that way! But we also appreciate some players' concerns the outsized impact that Hex has on the flow of a match - similar to high-impact like like Demanding Set, it can swing the direction of a game very quickly in either direction, whether it's in favor of the user, or a misplay that gets them severely punished. We want Hex to keep all of its nasty control properties, but this change slightly scales its effect down such that one action can't influence as much of the game all at once.
    
  
  




👹 Beasties



• Kasaleet^
  
  
  
  • 🔻 Plays Removed: Thump
    
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Muscle Memory
    
  • 🔄 Adjusted level-up set
    Corresponding with Flying Kick's tweak, we're taking Thump off of Kasaleet, not because it is too good by itself but because it now occupies the same space and isn't interesting to build or play with by comparison. As compensation, Kasaleet can now Muscle Memory, and in fact is one of its best wielders in the game - though they can't quite hit the same peak as Ambush Crawlurk with the same play, they can do some serious damage with it. Between this, Stomp, and Demolish, Kasaleet still has a wealth of hard-hitting standard attacks to supplement their moveset alongside Flying Kick.
    
  
  
  
• Gremlur^
  
  
  
  • 🔻 Plays Removed: Trickspin, Slice, Stinger
    
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Echo Strike, Nerve Strike, Cornershot
    
  • 🔄 Adjusted level-up set
    We're still evaluating Gremlur's capabilities after seeing how dominant they can be in high-level matches. We're experimenting with taking away their front-row targeting sideways tools, so that they can't threaten 50/50 front row scores while also controlling the opponent's targeting with Slippery. We're also taking away one of their most-used attacks, Stinger, which is otherwise still very highly distributed, not particularly on theme for Gremlur, and effective at mitigating the opponent's damage which in turn de-risks Slippery's retargeting. We're curious to see how Gremlur fares with more straight attacking options, giving them new synergies and options to function as a primary attacker themselves. Echo Strike in particular is sure to have some interesting combinations with Adaptability.
    
  
  
  
• 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.
    
  
  

🚧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!