TL;DR: Starting in v1.9, we're implementing major balance changes to Standard and Ranked to slow the pace, increase the emphasis on strategy, and reward skilled play. Expect slower rotations, more valuable farming, stronger towers, less effective CC, and a more impactful laning phase.
Hello, Champions!
By the end of this year, we’ll have shipped 8 incredible heroes and a ton of new features and improvements. We’re really proud of this but we still have a long way to go in terms of realising the vision we have for Predecessor. We’ve heard your feedback: you want to know about the direction and future for the game, so let's jump right in.
Direction
Firstly, we want to say that we see our core mission as building the next generation home for MOBA players on PC and Console. Notice the “MOBA” part of that statement - we’re not looking to build a hero shooter or a brawler, we love and play MOBAs all the time, and truly believe they offer something special that no other genre can match.
We’ve been hard at work experimenting with Nitro, which we see as key to both onboarding newer players and offering a deep MOBA experience for those with less time. While we have more iterations planned for Nitro, we have heard the feedback that Standard and Ranked modes have also been moving too far in the same direction, and we agree, and want to address that shift.
Starting in 1.9, we’re implementing balance changes to Standard and Ranked that will address a lot of the feedback that we’ve seen.
Our high level goals are:
- Address Game Balance and Feel: To slow down how chaotic and “brawly” games of Standard or Ranked can feel, with more emphasis on tactics, good macro strategy, farming, and outplay potential.
- Reward Skill & Mastery: Players that have invested time into their mechanical skill and game knowledge should be rewarded through greater success.
- Improve Laning Impact: Choices during the laning phase should have more weight and allow for different trade-offs and strategic decisions.
Now that we’ve outlined the higher level goals, here are some specific problems we’re looking to address, and some information on how we are going to do that, starting in 1.9.
Game Pace
For starters, there have been several discussions among the community which raise concerns of the pace of the match, and that Predecessor might be losing some of the tactical MOBA magic that draws many of us to the game. For many, this largely stems from any given match of Predecessor feeling too fast and brawly, with too much emphasis on kills and objectives rather than individual plays, laning and the ability to outhink your opponents.
As a result, we’re slowing down the pace of the match:
- We’re decreasing the base movement speed of Heroes slightly to limit how quickly any given Hero can rotate around the map.
- We are putting more emphasis on Minions & Jungle Camps as a source of gold, meaning farming is becoming more important and players that ignore their lanes will risk falling behind if they roam around and deathball for too long.
- Finally, we’re increasing the time it takes for large objectives such as Shaper and Fangtooth to respawn (and reducing the global rewards for killing them), meaning there will be more moments of downtime between objectives that will allow players the chance to play out their lane for longer portions of a match and engage in larger macro-strategy, rather than feeling pulled to large objective fights as frequently.
Laning Interactions and Player Agency
Many players feel that successfully farming minions and gaining Creep Score (CS) leads isn't rewarding enough. This stems largely from the high amount of gold granted for unsuccessfully last-hitting a minion, combined with relatively high global and passive gold sources. These factors often lead the laning phase to devolve into a "shove-fest," where tactical play, poke, and edging out CS advantages are overshadowed by shove-and-roam heavy gameplay, as the ability to punish and kill an opponent for mistakes is currently quite low. We aim to improve the laning phase, making it more engaging, more tactical, and more punishing for mistakes.
We'll do this by increasing the emphasis on last-hits and their value, making tower plates last longer, increasing the ability to kill your opponent in the lane, and giving minions a durability boost. Ultimately, this will demand more careful thought about lane approach, better define the choice between using abilities for trades versus shoving, make CS leads matter more, make roaming less effective, and increase the opportunities and punishment for mistakes for each laner to capitalise on.
Tower Damage
We’ve received a lot of feedback that towers do not pack enough of a punch, with tower dives feeling too easy to pull off. While we don’t want to prevent tower diving altogether (as it is a necessary strategy that rewards proactive play), we agree that it is currently too easy to pull off prolonged dives.
To help resolve this, we’ve increased the strength of towers throughout the match, while also increasing the number of times a tower’s damage can ramp up with each shot from three to four. The combination of these two changes means that players will feel less vulnerable when playing underneath their towers, and better able to outplay and counter-kill divers that fail to execute their dive decisively enough and outstay their welcome.
Crowd Control
The efficacy and duration of Crowd Control (CC) is a frequent point of debate for players. It’s an important part of the MOBA experience, but we understand the frustration that can come with CC-heavy gameplay, as the inability to react paired with high incoming burst damage can often lead to certain scenarios and deaths feeling less fair than they should.
We believe there is space to trim out some of the excess present in Predecessor and make combat feel a little more freeflowing. As a result, various CC abilities across the game are receiving roughly a 10-20% reduction to their duration or potency.
Movement, Skill Expression, and Positioning
Another problem that can surface at times is the limited potential for players to outplay their opponents in a fight. This can manifest in various ways - from being run down the entire lane by a carry basic attacking you to death, to the inability to predict and juke incoming attacks - ultimately leads to more frequent “stat-check” scenarios where players have no opportunity to outplay their opponent to overcome a deficit.
While this is a difficult problem to resolve entirely, for now, not only are we slowing down the speed of various projectile and explosion-based abilities, we are also increasing the fluidity of baseline movement through increased acceleration and braking when looking to pivot or change directions. In more simple terms, the combination of these changes means that various abilities will be easier to dodge through movement, and that players will have to put themselves closer to the action if they wish to more reliably hit their opponents now that these abilities require more precision.
In combination with the above, we are also increasing the strength of the combat penalty for basic attacking, resulting in players moving slightly slower when committing to a basic attacks. While this may feel a little sluggish at first, this change elevates the positional strategy of combat engagements quite significantly, not only making ranged Heroes easier to escape from or collapse onto and reducing the frequency of run-down scenarios in lane, but it also brings with it a deeper layer of positional considerations thanks to the larger tradeoff between laying down fire and the reduced movement speed that comes with it, or choosing to slow down your damage output to reposition at a better angle.
We believe these changes will also help address how ranged heroes can feel so oppressive in offlane, which is another large point of feedback from players over recent weeks.
Summary
- The average match will feel slower in pace and more methodical.
- Minion last-hits and playing the map will be more important.
- The laning phase will last longer and matter more.
- Excessive roaming will come with greater economic tradeoffs.
- Towers will deal more damage.
- CC will be less powerful.
- Various abilities will be easier to dodge/harder to land.
- Basic attacks will have a greater movement tradeoff.
- Skill expression and individual agency increased.
- Ranged heroes in offlane should feel less oppressive
While there are more balance considerations in v1.9 that we haven’t discussed here, overall, we expect gameplay to feel more methodical and tactical once the update drops.
If you’d like more information, please tune into our Tempest of Shadows live stream on the 8th October, or check out the full patch notes releasing on 10th October.
Please keep your feedback coming, we appreciate and read everything you send our way.
Thank you so much for playing, and see you in game!
Omeda Studios
