News Liste Paladins

The ideas we’re exploring with this update to Hoard seemed to be something a majority of PTS players were intrigued by, but the balance state wasn’t in a place where the value of the Item would be worth the wait. To help ease this, we have brought down the final tier price to be a bit earlier in the match at the cost of the passive earn buff we were going to do. This is to incentivize a very conscious playstyle with Hoard: you’re behind on Items compared to your foes but with aggressive play will be rewarded. This type of asymmetrical Item design is a brand new idea and one we will be watching quite closely to see if it has a place in Paladins!

We’ve heard loud and clear that people want QoL buffs for our beloved dwarf! He’s been slowly slipping from his staple safe meta status and his painpoints are becoming more prevalent with age, so we plan to take a look at the various Cards and other buff areas suggested to us in Discord and across socials. However, this update was already quite heavy on balance and with our time before the holidays, we wanted to focus on improvements to existing PTS changes. We will come back early next year with him at the top of our list!

We know, we know. This Card sees near nonexistent play and wouldn’t be on most player’s radar for a buff. However, we’ve been making it a slow and steady goal to revisit unimpactful Cards across the game and give them a bit more oomph. This one was an old nerf that in the modern game makes little sense to preserve and perhaps can be an interesting filler in a few loadouts.

For those worried we’d be taking away a very niche yet beloved aspect of Begone, no worries! After PTS we went back into the changes we were making and adjusted the threshold that her Ultimate would break to allow her to floor grind once more. For those out of the loop, Begone has a unique interaction when aimed directly at the ground, where its speed is significantly slower and it travels less distance. This is something we slot into the Vine Tech category of “original unintentional, but now adopted into design” so enjoy it! Just know Begone will always self-detonate after 4s.

We’ve accelerated some of our work on Kasumi’ Yokai Doll based on continued feedback around her weapon. We want to directly address the common point around making her weapon a hitscan first: A large amount of how Kasumi functions is intrinsically tied to her targetter (e.g. Savage Tear and Bitter Betrayal cannot function without it) and the work to reconfigure her to move that tech elsewhere isn’t practical or even necessary for what most players actually desire (fair aiming & consistent conveyance of her threat levels). So, that takes us to the addition of damage falloff to Kasumi’s kit. This change is designed to bring her even more in line with other Flanks with similar threat ranges and allow her some more poke at the cost of reduced effective range. Combined with the targetter adjustments we’ve made on her, this will be the most precise Kasumi has ever been asked to be. On top of that, we heard feedback around Curse and DR feeling too oppressive when able to be stacked so easily, so Essence Drain has been shifted over to Movement Speed to allow a bit more mobility in her customization.

This concept simply missed the mark on how Khan currently plays and what players feel he needs to be viable off of Storm of Bullets. Similar to previous PTS reverts in the past few updates (e.g. VII), we’re gonna take some additional time to iterate on changes to his Talents that better match what players want to see on him.

With the removal of DR and cooldown penalty on Heroism, this change felt a bit too harsh and impacted many more playstyles than we intended with the alteration. Lex is someone we’d like to revisit next year after we see the changes to Magnum’s recoil and screen shake in Live for a bit, mainly as he has lacked a healthy variety of Talent selection no matter which is predominant in a given period while also being one of the weaker Flanks in the current meta.

Historically, we’ve always been very wary of Envelop buffs as the ability can be quite potent when used in the best case as well as provides a lot of effects through Spirit Link. However, this nerf in particular felt unnecessary after watching PTS and hearing the feels issues it caused on the character. We’ll still be watching Rei closely to ensure that the Card pass she has received doesn’t shift too much power into Envelop overall.

Hitting the Ricochet explosion proved a bit harder than we expected for most players on PTS, so this nerf to Ult generation feels less necessary than we anticipated. It’s worth calling out the way this card interacts with the explosion is it procs for every enemy within the blast, so the newer Cards will synergize well with this and the frequent Wallbang playstyle will be alive and well, just with a bit more skill required.

At various points throughout the year, multiple corners of the community have described our recent balance style as “tons of cooking, but sometimes things get burnt”. In this case, we could tell aspects of Seris came in burnt onto PTS. Basekitting Soul Collector was a step too far to some, and Volatile Rift as a concept simply was too much power into an Ultimate talent (the opposite of the problem we normally have with those designs), as well as a catalyst for a long discussion on Discord and socials about basekitting Talents and the effects it has had over the years.

After talking amongst ourselves as well as weighing all the critiques and feedback, we had both a solution for this instance and a goal moving forward. We often have leaned on basekitting Talents for a few reasons, from not wanting to nerf/remove playstyles that players really enjoy but trivialize choice in customization (Soul Collector, Aegis, Adrenaline Junkie, etc.) or taking particularly underwhelming gameplay loops and providing them with more options (Hell or High Water, Life Link, etc.). Seris has had potentially more basekitted Talents than any other Champion, a problem that stems from a meeting of those two painpoints. She often finds herself either reliant on 1 Talent over all others or requiring shifts into base to make up for aspects of her design that are limiting in the modern game (i.e. channeled healing).

We’re still going forward with our basekitting of Soul Collector, with a very different perspective on basekitting Talents as well as renewed goals for her moving forward. While we could attempt to buff or design even more Talents to rival it, Seris has had 3 different Talent reworks this year alone taking a stab at that exact issue. Meanwhile, Soul Collector not only remained the best (though Forsake has rivaled it in niche scenarios) but also the most fun pick for Seris every time we reference surveys. At base, the character’s loop just lacks that level of engagement due to her very passive style of heal and escape tools, so we stand by this being the better move for her into the future. However, we also are instead giving Seris a Talent that once again mirrors Furia, with Resuscitate being her version of a Passive Talent ala Exterminate. This will restore Soul Collector to its strongest form by augmenting her % per stack back to current Live values while also allowing 16 stacks.

That said, we want to move away from basekitting Talent unless there is a clear design issue that it resolves better than alternative solutions. Recently, we simply removed Rampant Blooming from Grover for this exact reason. We explored all options (including basekit) but deemed it unnecessary due to both the playstyle it would encourage at base as well as overtuned Healing output. We love that the community is so engaged not only with the surface level “X Champion is getting stronger” but are concerned about concepts like kit bloat and technical debt. It's something we plan to continue to work on with you all!

While we have still seen a lot of feedback of this Talent being too frustrating to fight against, this was not the time to take a swing at it as Sha Lin is underperforming by most metrics and players utilizing this Talent are fighting an uphill battle more often than not. We want to take a more holistic look at Sha Lin in the future as our previous Dev Notes commented on, so expect an update on his status in the future!

Torvald has been one of if not the most dominant off-tank Frontline for a long while now statistically, even when his pickrate fluctuates or Champions like Terminus and Yagorath rival him in some situations. That said, our goals were not to make him feel worse to play but to lean him further into Itemization and customization. So, Recharge is being adjusted to still provide his full Shield back to allow those smooth recoveries while preserving our want to make him more susceptible to Wrecker. Seriously, buy Wrecker against him. Please?

This Talent is us experimenting early with ideas we have for 2025, similar to Hoard, but we heard players concerned its bonus was a little too weak for how situational it could be and the investment of spending your movement to engage. We’ve given it a slight bump to change some breakpoints into Zhin’s favor as well as indicate to the user when the bonus is active. One last reminder: With Haven & Blast Shields coming back, Zhin has a very mixed amount of damage output. Buying either one will weaken about half of this combo (Haven for the two weaker swings, Blast for the Whirl and heavy swing) so Zhin players will want to keep that in mind when deciding their targets.