Valve continue to tweak Dota Underlords in the hopes of keeping players happy, this mid-Season gameplay update flips quite a few things on their head.
I like their sense of humour, with a note about them removing "code that caused crashes and kept code that doesn't cause crashes".
There's a few smaller changes like the addition of Loot Round tips to the Season Info tab, the ability to change equipped items from the Battle Pass and some buffs to the amount XP awarded for your placement in matches and for doing the quests. Meaning you will level up the Battle Pass faster.
Combat will now continue until some abilities are finished, Assassins will no longer hop around if they have an enemy in range, not seeing heroes from the previous shop when you re-roll and units that can't be healed will no longer be targeted for healing. Those all sound good, that's more just fine-tuning what we would expect to see.
The biggest changes come in the form of balancing across many heroes and alliances, something that's going to be quite tricky and will require constant tuning as it does in other competitive games. For example, when you lose to a neutral creep wave, it will no longer remove two of your options. Instead, it will now offer rewards from the previous wave.
Another huge change is to Alliance items, which now have their own category and they're randomly assigned a tier, with each player seeing Alliance items appear at different tiers thoroughly mixing it up. For those who thought the game was RNG-heavy before, it seems Valve have decided to double down on that to make it even more random overall.
You can find all the patch notes here and find the game free on Steam.
I had a rather amusing battle in Underlords recently, with only Morphling left and the opponent had a Bounty Hunter. Both constantly using their ability to move around the board, so I was just watching two heroes hop around never actually doing anything. Somehow though, my Morphling eventually got the better of the Bounty Hunter but it was pretty funny to see.
How are you finding Underlords with all these changes? Let us know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: g000hQuite impressed by how small it is... approx 650 MB download and uses about 1 GB of hard drive space.Every so often you see something that drives home the scale of change in computers over the years. I suddenly flashed on when I was a teen, playing text adventures stuffed into 16K.
There's no note of it in the changelog, but the neutrals after the first three rounds appear to have been massively buffed. The Dinos are now effectively impossible - hardly taking damage and dealing out oodles. Everyone, without exception, fails that round now. The two griffins are also nearly impossible, although I've come close occasionally.
Great game. And the levelling/challenges are helpful in urging that "just one more shot" mentality.
Quoting: scaineThere's no note of it in the changelog, but the neutrals after the first three rounds appear to have been massively buffed. The Dinos are now effectively impossible
All the major changes are listed https://www.underlords.com/updates under july 17, the last section covers changes for all the creep waves.
Once you understand the changes they're much easier to deal with, it used to be free wins, now it's worth considering benching units that don't fit your lineup but will help you secure a win vs certain creep waves.
Round 10 has less health now but gained 20 armor from the new Mega-Warrior alliance
Magic and pure dmg will be more effective, getting 1 demon for pure dmg is easy.
Round 15 deals more dmg but are more fragile, strategy havn't changed much, swap your front/back lines, I like someone like Luna for tight groups.
Round 20 More physical/magic armor major change is the Mega-Bloodbound, split your units in a way that kills them roughly at the same time, Witch Doctor works well vs 2 units or Shadow Shaman hexing the last unit with the 500% dmg bonus.
Griffins got Mega-Elusive 75% evasion, having something like Crystal Maiden is an easy way to gain mana for spells despite missing all the attacks.
Dinos deals a lot of dmg now yes, but the Mega-Warlock is the main problem they'll just keep healing while you keep dying, find a way to prevent the lifesteal from triggering, Disruptor for aoe silence, humans for silence etc.
Theres many different ways to deal with the changes, I love the changes, instead of just being mindless rounds waiting for loot, now you actually need to plan for them, and it might even be worth losing rounds for stacking lower tier global items, big improvement IMO.
I'm smuggler 3 right now, and I seems to have reached my skill level. Gain a rank, then lose it again. Still fun, though.
Changes like this annoy me a little, because it's just not clear what's happening. When you hover over them, their DPS is typically listed as "minus several hundred thousand", some of the alliance say "alliance-type" and you have to read the release notes to get an inkling. I read the release notes, but got bored after pages of info, and didn't get the neutrals note!
So, yeah, not a fan. It's still in beta though and will no doubt change again before going live.
There is no golden rule that applies to every match or round, the game is built around RNG, your mission is to adapt to whatever hand you're dealt, this just adds another layer of decisions. There is no guarantee any decision will work out, you pick the choice with the highest probability of success or sometimes you get the option to make a small sacrifice for the chance of big reward, it's up to you to decide if it's worth it.
All the creep rounds are much more likely to be losses now, but they're definitely all beatable. Your chances will always be better if you have a strong lineup, but you can still greatly increase the chances with minor changes in placement and unit swaps. This goes for Dinos as well, I've beaten them several times and I've seen plenty others do as well at Boss rank.
I think people just need a little time to collecetively figure out what works and the frustration will fade. Not reading patch notes is fine, especially the more beefy ones, but thats just another choice the players need to make, spend time reading dull text for insight or just spend your time playing and enjoying the game at a disadvantage? And yes this is something that will be more frequent during beta, once fully out major changes likes this will likely be seasonal instead.
I'm guessing they will tone it down a bit, but overall i still believe it was move in the right direction, previously the rounds were dull and meaningless, now they reward planning and proper setup, large changes like this will always need calibration following feedback. I'm saying all of these things with it being in beta in mind, it's very clunky and i expect them to smooth it out.
We can definitely disagreee and thats totally fine, i have no doubt many share your opinion currently.
Well, slightly forgivable, because it's beta. But as I say, I still hold Valve to a higher standard, and they've failed here.
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