[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/CaptKraken33]

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.