Altering the proportion of experience required to get to level 2 compared to subsequent levels allows healthier experience gain overall when it comes to gaining experience via laning, jungling and hero kills. All three areas of experience gain will now be able to be balanced and altered more freely and accurately under this new leveling system.
Hero takedowns were giving unhealthy amounts of gold and experience based on the player’s killstreak or deathstreak. For instance, group kills were granting twice the amount of hero experience overall than they should have been, and getting a kill on a much higher level opponent was granting almost half the amount of experience that it should have been. The system has been reworked, and now includes more levels of killstreaks and deathstreaks. Getting kills in groups is now worth far less gold and experience, meaning smarter decision making around MOBA fundamentals like farming, rotating and grouping will be required.
The responsiveness of Basic Attacks was lacking and not up to standard. Increasing the speed of the projectile should help with making Basic Attacks more reliable and intuitive.
As part of ongoing improvements and our quest to make Fault ever more juicy, more tweaks to the camera system, player movement and the movement animations are in order. These changes should combine to make it feel like player movement is not slow and cumbersome.
Movement speed is a core aspect behind the design of heroes, combat and the map. In order to delineate each hero into their separate classes and have these classes have distinct combat advantages, disadvantages and playstyles, a convention has been established for all current and future heroes’ base movement speed.
Lane minions were not in a good spot for a number of reasons. Minions felt like they individually had too much health and were not sensible and intuitive to last hit, so increasing the number of minions per wave spreads out the total health of the wave across more minions. Killing a single minion in a four minion per wave system meant that a more significant portion of the waves damage output was eliminated for every minion that was killed when compared to a six minion per wave system, meaning that it was too difficult to execute finely tuned wave management for the ideal freeze or slow push. This also means that crashing waves into towers will be more impactful since a greater push can be created, therefore rewarding skillful wave manipulation. Additionally, the time to hit level 18 was proving to be too long, leading to even long matches not seeing the peak of most heroes' capabilities. Increasing lane minion experience overall should help lower the time required to hit level 18.
Minions waves in the late game were hindering teams from capitalizing on successful picks, teamfights and objective kills due to how slow they were to crash into structures. Teams should be able to effectively gain a benefit from successful trades in the mid and late game, so increasing minion movement speed across the course of a match will aid with closing out games and rewarding teamwide decision making.
Super Minions are a key element behind late game lane pressure and are meant to ensure lane priority and keep players in lane to deal with the lane pressure. Currently, Super Minions were not strong enough to fulfill this role and were being destroyed too easily. Since a large majority of a minion wave’s damage and sustainability actually comes from the melee, ranged and siege minions, granting additional armor to these other minions enables the wave to sustain through damage better and output more effective damage. Additionally, Super Minions need the ability to sustain through efficient forms of wave clear in order to require either high value damage dealers to deal with them or larger amounts of time to kill.
The 3 raptor system was leading to unhealthy gameplay for many reasons. Their gold and experience values were very high, leading to large amounts of gold funneling and experience leads for teams that could effectively secure the objective. The Favor they were granting was also only going to the killing player, meaning that more funneling could occur on more influential players and leaving the rest of the team from gaining more influence and therefore limiting their impact over the course of the match. Also, having three individual units meant that more portions of the objective’s damage and time investment was eliminated at discrete moments in time, rather than requiring players to fully invest in a set amount of risk for a set amount of time in order to reap the rewards.
Raptors have now turned into the Raptor Objective, featuring one large raptor that grants every member of the killing team 2 Favor, along with limited gold and experience. Doing this shifts the objective away from influencing gold and experience gain and instead offers a more separate form of influence for teams to fight over and secure; Favor. Now each player of the killing team is rewarded for taking the objective, turning it into a more team focused objective that enables all players to gain more influence and have an increasing potential to affect the course of a match.
A large, impactful later game objective needs the capability to reward the killing team with the means of effectively working towards ending the game. The Orb Prime buff will be receiving more means of fulfilling this goal in the future, but the Prime Helix objective itself also requires the means to reward players for securing it. Making Prime Helix grant both local and global experience, along with global gold, will help players gain an edge over opponents in the late game to help close out a match.
We decided to move back to a dynamic lighting pass to reduce hitching while entering busy areas like the jungle. This should fix problems like fps stuttering caused by the environment. A static, more detailed lighting pass will be introduced again as we fix the loading problems caused by it.
Magician is a very powerful aspect throughout an entire match, especially in the laning phase. Although more proper early game sustain items are coming in the future, the mana regen has been decreased in order to require more meaningful decisions to be made, especially when trading in lane in the early game. Too much freedom is currently being given to players to freely use abilities with minor consequences, so requiring players to make more intentional use of abilities will reward better decision making and higher skill expression in execution.
Energy power gold value, amount on items and energy power scalings have all gone through many changes over the past months. Energy power gold value was lowered, meaning more energy power could be placed on items for the same amount of gold, resulting in abilities that scale off energy power dealing more damage. Due to an effort on our part to test and see how these changes would affect gameplay, slow changes to ability scalings have been done in past patches and continue to occur to this day. The changes here should be the last of the changes in regards to adapting to new systems and should hopefully mean more precise balance passes can be performed in the future.
The ability to counteract a Countess was extremely difficult when she was using her Shadow Slip ability and was preventing skill expression when one was in combat against her. Enabling a small recast delay on her Shadow Slip should allow skill expression to exist for responsive players fighting against a Countess, while also increasing the risk for Countess players and increasing the thought process required when engaging on enemy targets.
The ability to rapidly deploy Twinblast’s Grenades was never intended and was leading to a fairly substantial amount of damage and an unhealthy laning dynamic when trading. Adding an internal cooldown will help his Grenade ability to more properly assist Twinblast with being more Basic Attack focused and fulfilling his fantasy and niche.
At Strange Matter Studios, we are invested in rebuilding and improving upon the 3D action MOBA genre.
