Hi everyone!

Some quick announcements. We’re deploying another minor balance patch this weekend (on top of the previous one described here), and we’re also going to be enabling Vendium Scrap in ranked for a test!

Balance Update

As mentioned previously, future balance updates throughout beta will be smaller and will happen gradually as we finalize the stats for most units in Ranked Play. This week, we have 3 changes to announce:

Deadeye Operative – Cost will be reduced from 5BB to 4BB, but HP will be reduced from 3HP to 1HP. We’re pretty happy with the current Deadeye, but we’ve been looking for wards to adjust the unit so that attackers are a better counter to it. Right now, Deadeye’s defensive ability makes a Deadeye rush difficult to counter without simply building Deadeyes in response, and we found in testing that weakening Deadeye defensively helped allow a wider variety of counter-strategies to perform better against it overall. That said, the unit’s overall balance hasn’t moved by very much. The jury’s still out on whether it’s wrong for blue defenders to have low HP, or whether it makes perfect sense for a specialist sniper mech to be precisely the type of blue defender that might have low HP. I tend to favour the latter.

Omega Splitter – Cost increased from 14BBB to 15BBB. This unit has been on our “maybe change” list for what feels like forever. Omega is certainly not the most egregious unit in terms of raw power level at 14BBB, but it’s bought over 50% the time that it’s available, which is quite a lot for a BBB unit. Its strong defensive abilities make it a counter to a number of faster strategies and often lead Omega Splitter to being viable even in cases when there aren’t too many other useful blue units available. We would rather see most Omega Splitter games involve a higher variety of different units on average, and the best way of accomplishing this is to reduce the unit’s power level slightly so that it will require a bit more support to be viable. Of course, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one to make sure it hasn’t been made too weak.

Thermite Core – Lifespan increased from 7 to 8. A very minor change, but why not? Thermite is bought slightly less often than Auride Core at high levels (46% vs 41%), and a number of top players have told us that a buff would help the unit see more play. Accordingly, we’ll be increasing Thermite Core’s lifespan so that it’s equal to that of Gauss Fabricator. Why not more? Mostly because games with huge piles of 30+ Pixies can get a bit annoying (and we tried, trust me!) We could try 9 or 10 lifespan, but we’ll be sticking with 8 for now.

Vendium In Ranked!

Yep, it’s happening. Vendium Scrap will be enabled in all Ranked Play games, starting at the same time the above patch goes live.

We’ll probably leave the unit on for 1-2 weeks for testing purposes (and possibly longer, if the tests are successful).

The first version of the unit that we test will likely have a longer lifespan than the one we’ve been using in the last few events (probably 6, but that might change before the weekend).

You can read more about Vendium Scrap here.

More Blog Content Coming Soon!

“To Beta and Beyond” will make its debut later this week. (Actually, it would have been out sooner, but I’ve spent the last few days battling evil robots.)