Dev Note #85: 3.7 Update Preview #1: Servant Balance Notice

MEME

Greetings Heirs, Since the release of Mildred, many Heirs have been suggesting necessity of adjustment on Mildred. We have been putting deep thoughts to Mildred adjustment internally. We decided to bring balance adjustment on Mildred not only because combination of Mildred and Lucrecia is extremely powerful, but also because Mildred herself is extremely powerful in general. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mildred Combo Skill AoE Damage Adjustment ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The biggest cause of out-performance of teams using Mildred is her Combo Skill's AoE damage. As an AoE DPS servant, Mildred attacks Ranged servants after attacking targeted opponent. The problem with Mildred was that she often wiped out three servants excluding Tank servant, defeating Ranged DPS, Ranged Support, and Ranged Healer servants. While we buffed Potential for AoE Damage Reduction in 3.6 Update so that Heirs could build against Mildred, Heirs that were not able to build the Potential are still vulnerable against Mildred. Also, it is a very difficult for Heirs to fully invest in the Potential just to fight against Mildred. While it is possible to avoid AoE attack from Melee AoE DPS servants because they only attack servants within the AoE attack range, most Heirs often end up having three of their servants attacked when they face Mildred since many Heirs are using Ranged DPS, Healer, and Support servants. Since Mildred wiping out three Ranged servants significantly outperforms Melee DPS servants, we are adjusting the AoE damage of Mildred from current 30% to 20% so that servants with decent HP and DEF can survive Mildred's AoE attack. To expand the explanation for each class: Ranged DPS: Since Ranged DPS servants tend to have lower base HP and DEF, we still believe that Ranged DPS servants will remain vulnerable against Mildred unless they have HP or DEF buff from Passive or well built Potential. Ranged Support: Currently, when the Ranged Support servants are slightly lacking HP or DEF or have only 1 Potential developed, Ranged Support servants will most likely die from Mildred's AoE attack. We have adjusted Mildred so that Support servants will survive Mildred's AoE attack with decent development after 3.7 update. We went through multiple tests based on Heirs' data on Infinite PvP, and we have confirmed that Ranged Support servants survive Mildred's AoE attack in many cases. Our goal is to have Ranged Support servants to lose 50~80% of their HP when attacked by Mildred. Ranged Healer: Currently Ranged Healer servants lose around 60% ~ 80% of HP with decent Gears and Potentials. With adjustment in 3.7 Update, our goal is to have Healer servants to lose around 30% ~ 50% of their HP. While the result stated above may vary based on various circumstances of the battle such as DEF debuffs and ATK buffs, we want to let Heirs know the adjustment above was made after carefully testing under various circumstances with Heirs' teams data in Infinite PvP. We believe that our test results are applicable for in most circumstances. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mildred Combo Skill AoE Range Adjustment ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Currently Mildred attacks as she teleport to the front of her target. After she attacks her target, she draws a circle around her and additionally attacks everyone outside the circle. Since the diameter of the circle is so short, Mildred often ended up attacking Ignis that positions herself between Melee and Mid-Range or attacking Melee servant in ambiguous position. Therefore, we decided to increase the diameter of the circle so that the attack focuses more on Ranged servants. While it is difficult to specify what servants will get hit or not not only because Mildred can attack different servants based on who she is targeting but also because other servants can move around as they position themselves, we focused our adjustment on excluding Melee DPS servants from the attack range. In most cases, Ignis has a high chance of avoiding Mildred's AoE attack. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mildred Skill 2(Dark Stream) Adjustment ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While Mildred's characteristic allows her to attack Ranged servants, her 2nd Skill allows her to attack all enemies in a straight light from the target. Therefore, there were cases where Melee DPS servants that were added to the team to counter Mildred instantly died from Mildred's 2nd Skill under certain circumstance. Therefore, we are changing her 2nd Skill so that her main attack from 2nd Skill does 100% damage to the target while doing 20% damage to servants that take AoE damage. So far, we have went over Mildred adjustment. We put a lot of thoughts and went through various tests until we finalized our decision of Mildred adjustment. After numerous tests, we tried to provide various solutions against Mildred while keeping Mildred's characteristics. While Mildred will remain strong against Ranged DPS servants, Support and Healer servants will be able to survive from Mildred's AoE attack. Heirs will now be able to respond to team using Mildred by utilizing Melee servants as it became harder for Mildred to attack Melee DPS, Support, and Healer servants including Ignis. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AoE DPS Servant Adjustment ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While this adjustment is more focused on Mildred, we believe many Heirs would see this adjustment as start of direct adjustments on AoE DPS servants. Ever since the release of [A] Sphinx, it is true that similar damage ratio of AoE attacks and Single Target attacks has been an issue. We have been increasing the gap of damage ratio between AoE attack and Single Target attack for months, and we are planning on continuing to make adjustments so that AoE attacks don't simply outperform Single Target attacks. As we see this process necessary for overall servant balance, we are planning to finishing this process before 3.9 Update. However, not all servants will be changed across the board like Mildred. While we also considered adjusting AoE damage ratio of all AoE DPS servants from current 30% to 20%, we decided to not make this change because Mildred's AoE attack and Melee DPS servants' AoE attacks have different range. Each servants' AoE attack ratio will be adjusted according to the range of their AoE attack. There are other servants beside AoE DPS servants that have AoE or piercing attack in their 1st or 2nd Skill like [A] Leto or Leto. There are also cases where piercing attack does great amount of damage instead of having narrower range. We will be adjusting these skills so that they do reasonable amount of damage within acceptable range like Mildred instead of killing enemy servants in one hit. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seeking Feedback Regarding Tank Servants ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While performance of Mildred is a problem, we believe that extensive survival of many Tank servants including Lucrecia due to their HP, DEF and Potential is also a problem. (While some Heirs intentionally build team focused on survival, we believe that the real issue is that Tank servant often survives to drag on the game even when the team is not built for surviving.) Therefore, we are considering various ways of allowing Heirs to defeat Tank servants before defeating other servants. We want to assure Heirs that we are not considering direct nerf on Tank servants. Instead, we believe that there are various solutions such as allowing DPS servants to do greater damage against Tank servants or allowing DPS servants to negate certain ability of Tank servants. We are aware that comments of many Top Ranking Heirs on the Tank issue have been gaining popular support. We are looking forward various feedbacks from the community regarding this issue. We would appreciate your feedback. Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions. We believe that servant balance adjustment is necessary for longevity of Heir of Light. While we are aware that there are various issues, we will continue to try our best to improve the balance of Heir of Light through community feedback. Thank you.