Patch 1.7 was released on Tuesday, but I wanted to discuss some of the major and minor changes coming in this patch with a brief breakdown!

basic attacks

Two things about this change specifically:

1) SAW and Catherine are now much more effective at immediately casting their ability in melee range. I’ve seen the benefits of this change, and it is glorious! This truly enables Shank-SAW, so I encourage you to give him a shot! It’s as much fun as CP Taka!

2) Heroes now attack more smoothly in combat, as well as when chasing. This enables melee heroes to do quite a bit more damage when chasing after a target. This also helps ranged heroes move into range to attack, rather than endlessly chasing, but never attacking. This change is much appreciated! The game will never be the same!

skins

Some very note-worthy skins dropped this patch including:

Shiro Kage Taka – Tier I

Paragon Catherine – Tier II, III, and WaBeesh

Stormlord Ardan – Tier II

SAWborg – Tier II

Killa-Joule 9000 – Tier II

Right on time to allow us to unlock these awesome new skins, SEMC gave us:

Crafting

Card crafting is really going to enable players like myself who don’t play every hero to get the skins they want. This is putting the power in the players’ hands! Now you can buy any ICE or Glory box and still receive value towards the skin that you’d like.

Card crafting would be even better if SEMC also did something like:

lower cost glory box

This isn’t a misleading title! SEMC lowered the price of the Glory box! I did a bunch of math on how (in)efficient it would be to unlock the 99 Glory box, dust the common cards from that box, and craft the cards needed for the skin you wanted. This new Glory box is a much better bang for your buck!

SEMC wants skins to be prestigous so when you unlock it, you feel awesome. However, they also want you to earn and unlock them by playing the game! This is a neat feature that I wish other games would introduce.

Balance changes

Vox

Vox has been completely reworked to take advantage of his abilities and rely less on auto-attacking things to death with a weapon power build. This is highlighted by the super reduced cooldown on Sonic Zoom, as well as its dependence on Resonance (from either Pulse or Wait For It). Additionally, we may see a resurgence of CP Vox as the crystal ratios for Pulse were increase for a second patch in a row.

Try out the new core of Vox and let us know if you like him more as CP or WP in 1.7.

Taka

Taka has predominantly been played as a weapon hero (thanks in part to math by Gadianton), but this patch opened a lot of possibility with his X-Retsu to be a crystal power or hybrid build benefactor. While the base damage was slightly lowered, I believe that was an attempt to reduce his up front burst damage for weapon builds. The bleed from Taka’s ultimate now deals damage with a 70% crystal power ratio, so 70% of your crystal power translates into bonus damage on that damage-over-time. But wait! There’s more! The three-second duration is now refreshed when Taka gets a Mortal Strike from his perk on the target. This means he can endlessly sustain that bonus damage, completely hybridizing his damage with critical strikes and crystal bleed damage!

Skaarf

Skaarf got a lot of love this patch! Aside from the crystal ratio tuning, his Goop is much more reliable for fights, slowing enemies caught in the burning puddle, as well as having a shorter cooldown. This should make Skaarf more effective as both a chaser and a kiter.

Petal

Has pets! Beware of this menace at level one. Munions do slightly less damage at level one, but have a better late-game and better crystal ratio. I like this change, because Petal was always strong at early levels thanks to her range and her munions. Now, she can scale slightly better into the end of the game without pushing her off the scale.

SAW

SAW got inherently stronger with the attack speed changes of 1.7. However, he also got a few extra bonuses along the way as well. SAW will no longer lose his stacks of Spin Up when he is stunned. If you’re going to stun him, you should also exit the premises so he can’t attack you immediately afterwards!

Krul

Lane Krul is back! Krul is now empowered to be more efficient in lane, not just the bushes! Krul can build stacks of Weakness against the large lane minions. This lets him sustain slightly better in lane by using his Spectral Smite to heal. I highly doubt someone has more lane Krul experience than me, but I’m hoping to see more lane Krul moving forward.

Ringo

This was a really cool change that I can get behind. Ringo’s ultimate, his Hellfire Brew, now deals 100% piercing crystal damage, rather than true damage. While the damage number would have stayed the same on paper, a CP Ringo doesn’t heal from true damage with Eve of Harvest, nor does it get the bonus crystal damage from Broken Myth. Consquently, the CP ratio is down by 15%, but still deals a healthy amount of damage for an ability.

items

Activateable items will now share a cooldown, so a single person on a team can’t have multiple Atlas Pauldrons or Fountain of Renewals and continuously spam the active portion of their items. If you have two Fountains, and you use one, both go on cooldown. The situations where you buy two are very few and far between.

Speaking of Atlas Pauldron, it now has a short charge up time of 0.8 seconds. It was difficult to play against as some heroes before, so this is a welcome change. Krul players will remember this day forever!

Bonesaw now requires you to hit your target a few more times to get your value out of it. SEMC keeps working to find a good spot for this item, so I applaud their efforts. I like that it matches up with my Spectral Smite stacks now. Maybe that’s a Krul thing.

Upgrades to Ironguard Contract are now slightly more cost efficient, providing more health, and in the case of Contraption, even a lower gold cost. Support players rejoice!

Infusions now only provide five weapon and crystal per level rather than six. However, they are still highly gold-efficient. Check out our review of Infusions to see generally when to buy them.

Go check out how smooth attacks feel on the new 1.7 patch! Try some new builds on your old favorite heroes, or check out the improved support items! If you discover any changes that weren’t documented in the patch notes, please let us know in the comments section below!