[2020] Big Balance Beta - Patch Notes [Updated 05 Aug]

Patch notes for the Big Balance Beta will be contained in this thread.

Original Beta Patch patchnotes:
Melee weapon changes
Ranged weapon changes
Talent changes

Patch 1

Weapons

• Blunderbuss - Increased max ammo from 12 to 16
• Grudgeraker - Increased max ammo from 14 to 16

Shotgun weapons have a strong presence with powerful damage but they have always had an issue with sustain. Adding a couple of extra shots should help somewhat with this.

• Sword & Dagger - Re-added 10% additional critical strike chance for Light attack 3 & 4, heavy attack 2 and push attack.

This change was abit heavy handed. The intent was never to invalidate the weapon, but rather further emphasize the requirement for precise attacks to maximize it’s efficency. The bonus critical strike chance has been added back into the later attacks of the weapons combos to reward players that plan their attacks and dodge around enemies.

• Shade Volley Crossbow - Max ammo capacity increased to 45 to match Saltzpyres crossbow.

Bugfixes

• 1h Sword Markus and Sienna - Fixed an issue where the 3rd attack did less damage against the first target hit.
• 1h Elf Axe - Fixed an issue where the push attack had 200% increased critical strike chance instead of the intended 20%.
• Halberd - Fixed an issue where the wrong attack would trigger if you held the charge until the end.
• 1h Mace Sienna - Fixed an issue where the first heavy attack got registered as a light attack for the sake of procs…
• 1h Axe Bardin and Saltzpyre - Fixed an issue where the heavy attacks got registered as light attacks for the sake of procs.

Talents
Ranger Veteran

• Smoke Health Regnereation - Fixed so it does not only heal for 1. Reduced the intended health gain from 8 to 3
• Fixed a crash due to Bardin using Disengage in the end portal with the attackspeed talent activated.

Unchained

• Fire Aura - Added damage on top of the pulsating weak dot.
• Health to cooldown - Fixed situations where the effect didn’t function as anticipated

Foot Knight

• Damage Soak - Fixed situations where the effect didn’t function as anticipated

Bounty Hunter

• Party movement speed buff - Lowered speed bonus from 20% to 10%

Ironbreaker

• Party Block Power - Increased the duration of stacks from 5 to 10 seconds.

Patch 2

General changes

• Added pseudo random distribution to critical strikes and procs.

What this means is that everytime you attack and don’t trigger a critical strike, the chance of you triggering a critical strike increases slightly. This should help flatten the bell curve slightly when it comes to large periods of either no critical strikes happening, or all critical strikes triggering in a row.

• Generic damage reduction effects now stack multiplicatively rather than additively.

Previously some careers have had the potential to stack damage reduction effects in such a way that they become impervious to damage. This was changed to address the stacking of damage reduction, while also opening up more options to add more sources of damage reduction into the game.

Footknight

Designer general comment - I think that the missguided nature of the current changes we proposed to Foot Knight stems from the fact that statistics in themselves do not paint the entire picture of how people feel about a class and the choices presented within that class. Looking at the pick rates of current live talents both power increase talents (“Have at Thee” and Taal’s Champion) we see both of them almost never getting used. We made the assumption that people who wanted to play Kruber in an offensive fashion would just pick between the Mercenary and the Grail Knight, this was obviously NOT the case.

Our goal with the changes was to present the defensive and supportive nature of the class with options to that type of gameplay. Options to control, buffs, auras. But removing both of Krubers power options does not only, like many of you voiced, make him a one trick pony, but it also severely limits the choices the players have when choosing weapons and working with breakpoints for those weapons.

We hope that these new changes can cement Foot Knight Kruber as a heavy duty frontliner who can support his team with control and buffs, but also lay down the hurt when his team needs more of a bloody battering ram.

• That’s Bloody Teamwork! (Reworked) - Merged with Defensive formation into “Increase damage reduction of Protective Presence by 5% per nearby ally.” Moved to tier 4 mid row.

• Stagger Cooldown Decrease (Moved) - Moved to tier 5 right row.

• Have at Thee! (Restored) - Returned to its former spot at tier 2 mid row.

• Rock of the Reikland (Modified) - Now also doubles the radius of Kruber’s Aura.

• Damage Soak (Removed)

The main goal of this talent was to provide players with a choice of single target damage reduction, where the player could make choices in where the damage reduction was needed the most. The damage soak / blocking part was put in place to provide some drawback to making a player super tough. This decision was just bad and forced players to just block in fights and made not taking a shield on Kruber even worse. The new streamlined version of this talent “Tag Team” hopefully fulfills the same goal of single target damage reduction and player agency, while giving offence Kruber some defensive tools to work with.

• Tag Team (New) - “Kruber gains 10% power. The closest ally to Kruber gain 50% damage reduction and 10% increased power. Passive aura no longer affects allies.

Dwarven Ranger

• Passive Ale Drop (Modified) - Gives 3% attack speed and 3% damage reduction for 300 seconds per stack.

We removed the movement speed part of the Ale because players could achieve a pretty ludicrous velocity through stacking multiple movement speed buffs.

• Smoke Health Buff (Merged) - Merged smoke health buff with smoke attack buff into one.

Making two choices out of Bardin’s ult talent row a buff choice gave players only two options in how to use the ult. Giving Bardin players something more to give to the team besides lots of ammo felt like a good idea. But removing the bomb talent in the process left a void that could not be filled.

• Ranger’s Parting Gift (Restored) - Reverted removal of Ranger’s Parting Gift

Bounty Hunter

• Last Shot Power - Increased duration of buff from 10 to 15 seconds.

• Melee Kills Reload - Added effect: Killing an elite while out of ammo restores 20% of max ammunition.

Melee kills reload combined with a ranged weapon with Scrounger (Crits restore ammo) combined with Last Shot Power already makes for a pretty deadly combo, but it is only really viable on weapons who feature small clip sizes. We are adding some more ammo generation to the talent to make it a bit more attractive while playing with large clip size weapons.

Unchained

• Health to Cooldown - Increased health cost from 2.5 per tick to 5 per tick.

Health to Cooldown offers a safety valve to overheating as Unchained. Coupled together with Bomb Balm the opportunity cost was too low which caused Sienna to be able to repeatedly use her magic without any cost. The health cost was increased to try and combat this while still making the talent an interesting pick.

Ironbreaker

• Tunnel Fighter - Reverted back to old behaviour reducing the cooldown of Gromril Armour. Increased cooldown reduction from 7 seconds to 10 seconds.

The stacking bonus resulted in poor gameplay behaviour where the Bardin player was encouraged to, at best: Constantly get hit by enemy attacks to try and get as much cooldown bonus as soon as possible. Or at worst: Encourage allies to shoot at the Ironbreaker to break the Gromril Armour shield. This was deemed undesirable and thus has been reverted to the old behaviour. To make it more competitive with the other options in the tier, the bonus cooldown was reduced further.

Handmaiden

• Ariels Benison - Reworked to increase revive speed by 50% and grant 20 health back to the revived hero.

The new instant revive talent offered an improved supporting angle for Handmaiden. But removing the bleed from the dash was not the correct way to go about this since it hampered an otherwise interesting offensive choice. The Ariels Benison perk has been functionally outdated since the change to introduce automatically blocking while reviving. Compromising this to give her improved revive speed as a perk with a slight bonus to the revived ally helps out the career identity.

• Speed on Block - Effect now triggers on both Block and Push.

Putting forced reliance on blocking feels bad on a career that’s as focused on dodge gameplay as Handmaiden is. Instead we’ll experiment with adding more focus on weaving in pushing in the attack combos to gain the effect of the talent.

• Insta Ress - Reverted back to Bladedancer.

See notes on Ariels Benison.

• Cleave Buff - Reverted back to Power from Pain. Increased duration of critical strike chance buff from 10 seconds to 15 seconds.

While the cleave bonus is a powerful effect, it felt suboptimal to move away from crits that also provide additional cleave inherently. To make it more competitive with the other choices in the talent row, the duration of the buff was increased.

Bugs

• Fixed an issue where Handmaiden could move through enemies indefinitely.