Quite a juicy week: we got two skins, information on the next update, and lore for the new hero. I think this is a perfect week to start our new recaps—from now on the recaps will focus solely on the news—we won’t be covering the King of the Hill matches like we have in the past.

As always the live stream began with some general news. 1.5 is coming this next week and iPhone users will have to download a now merged app (previously the iPhone and iPad apps we’re separate). Also, they thanked the San Fran LAN partiers for helping test 1.5.

Surprise Birthday evidently was already working on 1.6 (so 1.5 has probably been locked in and submitted).

There will be stuff coming that will change the meta, something to do with minion miners.

SAW is going to be a thing again according to Zekent, and Wolfie will synergies well with SAW. According to PlayoffBeard, the Wolf is very fun to play alongside WP Ardan.

Vox and Skaarf were both confirmed for nerfs.

Also, the name of the new hero, which was teased in the brand new lore, was correctly guessed by someone in chat. However we do not know who, or what it was. I’m guessing the name is in fact “Fortress,” though.

The first skin reveal was Killa-Joule 9000! Here’s a picture of her tier 1 splash art:

And her tier 2:

As well as the in-game footage of her tier 1:

The new lore takes place far away from The Undersprawl and Taizen Gate we’ve seen so far. This world is very large and we’ve really mostly looked at a very small part of it.

Finally, Stormlord Ardan’s tier 1 was shown:

All of these skins are supposed to take these non-cannon “what if” approaches to heroes. Stormlord Ardan looks at what it’d be like if Ardan allied with the Stormqueen against Catherine. Killa Joule looks at what it’d be like if Joule joined the Mech Pilot Academy and got to upgrade her mech. Shogun Ringo looks at what it’d be like if Ringo followed the straight-and-narrow path.