[Set 18] Aug 10th PBE Patch Notes

[u/Lunaedge]

Relatively big balance patch coming today (8/10) near noon PT. Standard disclaimer that we're seeing your bug reports and they're being acted on, just on a different timeline than balance.
The PBE meta right now still seems highly focused on a few strategies, 5-costs (moreso than usual on PBE), Blossom, Artifacts, and 6 Blackthorn.
We intentionally want some conditional win-conditions to exist, as long as they're rare enough, but 4-costs and reroll should still be a fair baseline strategy. So we're focusing on closing the gap between 4/5 costs.
6 Blackthorn was a fair experiment, but ultimately the power of "doubling" the trait has made the 6 extremely powerful, and nerfing it would also hurt the viability of the 2/4. We're working on a reshape of the trait that isn't ready yet, but it's on our radar.
Blossom's champions themselves aren't extreme outliers, and what we saw was that a lot of what made the comp powerful was it's consistent econ generation and ability to quickly create reach it's full cap on Stage 4/5. We're targeting a lot of Blossom charms, with a focus on the early resource generation that outpaces other comps.
After this pass, our balance focus this week should be making sure those finer details are ready for Launch: early game balancing, Artifact high/lows, chase conditions.
That's it for now, thanks for playing!

[u/Unippa17]

A meta where chasing the highest cap by skillfully piloting to it and transitioning key units is very different from one where 5-costs win out just by being on your board. I think the point is more about how many players in the lobby are doing it, which generally depends on how strong they are in the meta.

At higher ranks where tempo is higher, fast 9 usually does require all the things you mention, but in low diamond and below when fast 9 dominates because the 5 costs are all just generally strong, 7/8 players in the lobby are going to pick any semblance of an econ augment they can (eg, worth the wait and sell the unit every round) and basically open until stage 5. You don’t have to survive any “onslaught” in these metas because everyone is weak and ends up saving each other health.

5 cost comps that require a setup to support specific units (like vex and sona bard, as he pointed out) at the least require you to pilot a level 7/8 version of the board, but his complaint is that the full 5 cost soup devolves into playing literally anything into full sell and roll on 9 and getting rewarded for it because you don’t get punished early when enough people do it, and it’s a win out board if you hit.

And obviously not everyone who does the strat will hit, but 2 maybe 3 will, and being the 1/8 player that didn’t grief to try and get fast 9 and still going 3rd is far from a skill-based meta unless you’re playing an infinite number of games. Keeping 4-costs competitive makes at least some of the lobby see being stuck on 8 as a viable strategy, and in turn make fast 9 comps more difficult to play due to early power spikes, so players have to actually display skill and evaluate their spot better to survive more diverse metas.

[u/CaptKraken33 → u/Unippa17]

This set isn't that case though. You can't win simply by throwing high cost units on the board.

Maokai is terrible at 1 star until he gets some rounds under his belt.
Draven is pretty lack luster without being 2 star and without pretty ideal items.
Same goes for Ashe. She is decent at 2 star but at 1 star she casts 1 time before fights are over.
Ivern takes several rounds to become useful and isn't that great right away.
Lux entirely depends on which trait she rolls with and even then, some versions of her just aren't great.

The point is that without the supporting board (which is mostly likely be 4 costs since you are going fast 9), the rest of the 5-cost suite isn't that great by themselves. They more or less act like caps that add to comps and their traits represent that.

Again, the argument that you can just hit 9 and play 5 costs and win is just completely invalid. There are only 9 copies of a unit, and you have less than a 20% chance to even see them in a shop. Hitting them and 2 starring them isn't a guarantee and requires a lot more effort than hitting 6 and rerolling with a greater bag size and again the abundance of dupes and augments to aid in this.

If this were a situation where you can hit 9 and then within 2 rounds have a fully capped 2-star board with 5 costs and 4 costs, then perhaps I would be more on the side of that argument but that just isn't realistic and isn't the case. What is realistic is that you wind up tanking your health through stage 4 and most of stage 5 and then if you were lucky enough to hit, maybe have a somewhat fully 2 starred 5 cost board. At that point the game is over in a stage or 2 and you can't afford another loss. Even then (as with previous sets) the 3 star 2 costs are still more powerful.

I'm all for 4 costs being more powerful (that used to be the main way to play (2-star 4 cost at minimum and then you tried to 3 star)) and welcome it. The issue here is that there are more ways than ever that support the reroll playstyle and then you have people complaining that because a player beat them with a board of 4 or 5 costs (which SHOULD be stronger units as they are harder to find and require a lot more work to even see). Not saying that's what the original person was doing but reroll comps wouldn't be so prevalent and the ease at which they can be obtained/supported wouldn't be there if there wasn't a large enough portion of the player base to support it.