Early Access Update #23: Champion Upgrades

0.2.23 (2018-02-23): Early Access Update #23



Rejoice players, for more Champion upgrades are here!





Features:



- Added the "Truly Neutral Weekend" buff, which boosts the power of several neutrally aligned Champions until Monday, February 26th at Noon PST



- Added a new set of Champion upgrades; players should be able to push through another 20-25 areas. Note: due to the upcoming tanking and healing changes, these new upgrades do not include additional health or healing bonuses for tanks or healers







Clarification (no actual change):



- Clarification regarding the chests update: Chests will always attempt to drop at least one upgraded equipment card if one is available (without adjusting the rarity of the items in the chest); it is not guaranteed that this upgrade will be of the highest rarity the chest drops, and only one upgrade is guaranteed (if possible)



- Examples for Gold Chests: It's possible (though extremely unlikely) to get a green upgrade in the same chest you get two purple duplicates (if you had a white or empty slot available); it's also possible (but still unlikely) to get a green upgrade in the same chest as a blue duplicate, even if you have blue upgrades available. The upgrade is not guaranteed to be blue or better, and you are not guaranteed to get more than one upgrade per chest







Balance Changes:

- Ultimate cooldown reduction equipment items have been rebalanced. Epic gear now reduces the cooldown by 1/4th of the base cooldown, rare by 1/10th, uncommon by 1/20th, and common by 1/40th. This was done in order to make it so that shiny and golden c/d reduction epics do not instantly cap your Champions' ultimate c/d at level 1 and also to give value to players whose c/d reduction items have already leveled up from receiving duplicates or using blacksmithing contracts. Note: in some cases this rebalancing resulted in an *increase* to the c/d reduction on lower rarity items



- Ultimate cooldown reduction equipment items now have a max level. After an item is at or above max level, no more of those items will appear in chests (unless they are an upgrade or a shiny item), and that slot will not be a valid target for blacksmithing contracts. For the existing set of c/d reduction items, the max level varies based on the gild level of the item. Normal = 501, Shiny = 251, Golden = 126. These max levels apply to all rarities, so a maxed out non-epic item will not necessarily provide maxed out c/d reduction



- For players whose c/d reduction items are already above these levels, or whose items exceed the max level in the future due to an upgraded gild level, we are planning to create a system to automatically distribute those extra levels among other items owned by that hero, however we do not have an ETA on that system







Changes:

- Clarified the wording of the "Epically Geared" Kelemvor blessing





Fixes:

- Fixed the dates for the Sune favor conversion window

- Fixed an extreme edge case where if you had all the shiny items a chest could drop, additional guaranteed shiny items could potentially downgrade a golden item to shiny

- Fixed several typos. Thank you for the reports!





Coming Soon:

- More events, champions, adventures, and variants (always)

- A rework of offline gold to bring it more in line with gold earned while the game is open; note this rework will hopefully also include a way to account for Barrowin/Regis/etc. style buffs in your party DPS (soon)

- New ways to approach clicking in the game (somewhat soon)

- Updated to health, healing, and tanking specs to make tanking a more viable alternative (after everything else)

- A major rebalancing patch to address the extreme variation in damage between your main dps and your other champions (after tanking/healing is fixed)