Experimental Balance Changes for upcoming Milestone #4 (Updated 03/13)
Beastieball · published · build 22168567
# = Changed in patch on 03/13
@ = Changed in patch on 03/11
& = Changed in patch on 03/09
^ = Changed in patch on 03/05
* = Changed in patch on 03/02
A new experimental balance patch is here! On PC ONLY, players on the experimental branch now have access to some new mechanics and parameter adjustments. We welcome your thoughts, your feedback, and your playtesting! I encourage dedicated coaches to join us in our Discord community to discuss these changes live with other players.
How to Access
Right click Beastieball in your Steam library > Select "Properties" > Go to the "Betas" tab > Select "experimental" from the dropdown menu.
Your savedata is not be at risk when changing to different game branches. If your Beasties have plays on the default branch which they do not have access to in the experimental branch, they will be removed. Or, if you use new plays which are introduced on the experimental branch, they will be removed upon switching back to the default branch.
Plays which have been added or changed will be completely free to tutor to your Beasties at the Beastierball Academy on the temporary experimental build. Take this opportunity to try out new tools and let us know how they're feeling!
⚠️Rendering/Effects Overhaul
This update introduces a lot of new features both visible and invisible. We've updated our underlying game engine and re-written a lot of individual effects and objects. We're still testing with all this to make sure it's stable before going into the next Milestone, but we'd appreciate your feedback on anything that stands out as a visual, technical or performance issue.
On the bright side, you may notice the game's look has improved quite a lot with improved 3d rendering effects. We're excited to fix the remaining issues and talk more about all the changes in detail come next Milestone!
🔧 Balance Changes
- This patch employs very few nerfs but a lot of strategically employed buffs. We aren't seeing many or any Beasties who are overly dominating the meta, which is great! We took the opportunity to fine-tune a few highly-used Beasties, while adding some fun new flavor and tools to lesser-appreciated Beasties.
- (NEW!) Synchronize: On TAG IN, copies BOOSTs from their ally
- 🔄 Given to Crabaret in place of Agile Crabaret is a personal favorite of mine. After taking time to allow the meta to develop, I found that with Agile, their most effective playstyle boiled down to tagging them in to receive a reckless attack and then using Cheer+Dive to try to get a surprise one-shot kill in retaliation. While fun, this was very linear and didn't really feel like it fully expressed the playful personality of this Beastie. With Synchronize, I hope to keep their general playstyle as an offensive pivot, but create more depth and team synergies for them.
- (NEW!) Extrovert: This Beastie's attacks are always strengthened by Rally
- 🔄 Given to Magpike in place of Crafty We were really excited to debut Crafty for Magpike, but in practice it didn't excite players much, didn't seem to synergize effectively enough with anything, and always was out-competed by Trusting. We're trying out a new trait that leans in to Magpike's strength as a high-power attacker, but with a role on totally different teams.
⚙️ General Mechanics Changes
🛡️ TOUGH
We've added one new bit or errata to the effects of TOUGH: A TOUGH Beastie can't change the target of a ball attack.
After testing this condition on traits Decoy and Watchtower and seeing it well received, we've decided to extend this condition to all target-changing effects, most notably NOISY. Although it is generally difficult to combine NOISY and TOUGH, and fun to find combinations that enable it, the situations where it did come up would be uninteractive to play into without meaningfully advancing the game. Ultimately this change will have a negligible effect on what is currently in the game, but it's something we've seen players bristle against and we can see how the game may be healthier without this combination being possible. It means we can now remove wordy errata from traits like Decoy and Watchtower.
✋ Interaction of BLOCKED with flat damage
Previously, damage reduction from an attacker being BLOCKED would be applied before any flat damage adjustments, such as the additional damage added by the Rally field effect or the Cheerleader trait. This order is now adjusted so that BLOCK applies afterward. This means that BLOCK is more effective at curbing damage from these sources, and also makes damage calculation a little bit easier for players to do on the fly.
* The trait Vicious has now been modified such that blocked can't reduce its damage below 30, as written. Precision Strike, the mind attack, now says "This attack does 30 damage" instead of "Always does 30 damage" to clarify that it DOES interact with mechanics like BLOCKED, Cheerleader, etc.
👨👨👧👧 Rally
When RALLY is active, SPIRIT attacks do +20 damage (from +15)
In the previous balance patch, Rally was changed from +50% to +15 damage. This change combined with the BLOCK change now brings Rally's overall power level very close on average to where it was at +50%. The main difference is its impact at the extreme ends of offense; it's much harder to convert a powerful attack into a guaranteed one-hit kill with +20 than it was with +50%, so this is still a healthy mitigation of the dominance Rally had in past seasons. We hope this tweak makes Rally more fun to play, both for its wielders and opponents.
🥱 Receive Weariness
Once a Beastie begins taking bonus damage from Receive Weariness, TOUGH loses its ability to sustain their STAMINA at 1.
Receive Weariness almost NEVER comes up in a match, and this is by design. (For those who may not know what it does; after a Beastie receives 7 attacks in the same point, they begin taking bonus damage from successive attacks). This mechanic only exists to ensure that all games end eventually, and this change is implemented only to support that goal. In general we don't want this to ever interfere with a legitimate match. If it was made more relevant by activating sooner, for example, then it could easily risk becoming a new win condition for players to strive for, which ultimately would be monotonous and unfun.
🍄 Traits
🏃 Plays
- (NEW) Rousing Strike: SPIRIT Attack, 65 POW. Fielded allies feel +2 JAZZED.
- Via level up
- 🔼 Hopra
Unlike Thriller, which applies JAZZED before contact, Rousing Strike applies JAZZED on hit - meaning its first use has lower power, but if you continue to use it it can keep the user and their ally continuously JAZZED on successive hits. Hopra's playbook was adjusted slightly to correspond with this addition - see below for more details.
When Exert was originally added to the game, our intention was for it to be a strong new serving option for Spirit attackers, making them TOUGH so they could safely rush the net on Defense. However, in exchange for this awesome boon we wound up needing to aggressively mitigate its effectiveness, and the resulting play was certainly INTERESTING but it was mostly unusuable unless hyperexploited by certain combinations. The ability to apply TOUGH on an attack also combined with existing TOUGH applications in a way that made it too easy to stay protected for too long. We're accepting our failure on all that and are introducing a much more generic, Spirit-themed utility attack that can fill Exert's intended role alongside Rousing Strike.
You might notice this play is a close to how we initially implemented Demolish. And you'd be right! But this time we're trying a different allocation of POW and on a different set of Beasties. We see this play as a potential new option for Mind-focused teams to fight back against protective opponent field effects (like Rally or Drum), or take advantage of their own (such as Trap) to convert into high-damage attacks. Alongside this change, we also gave a few MIND-focused Beasties access to Clear Field (see below), so that mono-mind teams have more flexibility into some matchups.
These changes offer a fairly big re-thinking of the major SWEATY-applying plays! Previously, Steamer was very ineffective and rarely used. Heat Wave has been variously overpowered, or nearly useless, except when wielded by Beasties that took excessive advantage of it like Mudslee. We've now pivoted Heat Wave into a new and improved sweaty attack that fully sacrifices your offense damage for a hugely impactful status application. We hope this helps center Heat Wave as a staple play for Sweaty-focused passive teams. We also added Wink as a way to give more passive offense utility to a wider range of Beasties, filling a role similar to the Support version of Heat Wave while limiting its capacity to flip the entire game state in one click.
We also created a few new tools for defensive-oriented teams. We want to help expand the role of some Beasties whose effectiveness was curbed by previous patches that mitigated the effectiveness of many healing plays. Rather than strengthen flat healing, which can neutralize the game state in a boring way, we hope these inspire fun synergies that are fun to both wield and play against.
The addition of True Strike in the previous patch seems to have single-handedly shifted the meta towards body offense and raised the profile of many less-appreciated Beasties. We're pretty happy with where things landed overall, but we do feel that the move's power may have made it too much of an auto-include staple attack that ended up flattening body-focused teams a little bit too much. We want to see how it works with a slight step back in power so players can better weigh it against other body options.
We want to try adding more of an edge to these plays to make them more viable on high-level teams. Straightforward power reduction on its own has never been enough to curb offense, as there are many other sources of damage ramping that a player needs to address. These changes make these plays a bit more effective in general cases, and potentially open the possibility of splashing them on a team that otherwise struggles with certain type matchups without having to swap out an entire Beastie to address it.
Although players initially lauded the change from 1 to 2 TOUGH on Shield, after seeing it in play for a while we've decided to walk back this change. At 2 TOUGH, if you clicked Shield on the wrong target and lost a point as a result, your Beastie would remain shielded on the following turn, allowing you to safely tag out the wiped ally without much risk. This made Shield less punishing to mess up with when on the back foot, but it also made it too noncommittal to click in too many situations. This change restores the high-skill margin for correctly reading Shields and in particular it vastly ups the inherent risk of relying on Shield to sustain two low-stamina Beasties on the field, as a misplay can cost you 2 points, rather than allowing you to safely convert 1 point loss into an advantage.
^We're trying a change to 3 ANGRY, primarily to resolve the huge advantage gained when a Beastie Shields and then scores a point, allowing the to Shield again on their subsequent Defense. The secondary downside of 3 ANGRY is it prevents offense-phase support actions on the 2nd offense after they Shield. But they can still Shield every other turn and be interrupted by Provoke as before.
^With the change for TOUGH to no longer allow NOISY to draw in attacks, we felt that Whistle in particular would suffer from a lack of identity, since the ability to Whistle and then Shield was easily its most common and effective use-case. We've reduced its distribution and are giving it new life as a play that enables both offensive and defensive utility at once *is more self sufficient for sustained redirection.
We're also giving a glow-up to Distraction, in line with our reasoning for buffing Whistle and other debuff support plays. Distraction has always been just a bit too weak to be usable. We'd love to see it fit onto more teams.
We think Echo Strike is fun, has distribution to interesting Beasties, and it tends to spice up the games it appears in. But its utility to disrupt is not as stable as we anticipated when we first added it, and we've seen that it can be quite hard to build around. So we're trying out a power increase to compensate for its limited utility value.
Hex is evil, and generally players find it obnoxious. We're aware of the player consensus that this play would work well if it simply applied TIRED to the user and target. However, we want this play to be obnoxious and strange. This tweak now removes its egregious combo with Tractor Beam but keeps it as weird as ever.
We saw some murmurings that Smack could too freely enable some degenerate one-turn kill setups. And we can definitely appreciate its capacity to densely pack a lot of value into one Beastie very quickly. We like the high highs of this play, but are testing out a drawback that makes it more risky and less flexible.
👹 Beasties
- Bildit, Handicoot, Bandicraft
- 🔻 Plays Removed: Chill Out
- 🔼 Plays Added: Clear Field
With the changes to Rally and High Spirits, I took a closer look at Hopra, and I started to take issue with Tornadoball in their kit. It is likely the most high-utility Spirit play in the game and can single handedly shore up a lot of otherwise bad matchups, making it a staple on Hopra sets. But it also is something that felt off-brand for them, and with enough flat damage boosting on top of their high spirit offense it was able to deal a little too much damage on top of its highly effective disruption. Not to mention the fact that Hopra has frequently drawn attention for their high utility on an unusually wide range of teams. With all this in mind, I took Tornadoball off their kit and redistributed it to a couple other Beasties who it fits better with. Rousing Strike takes its place in Hopra's playbook as a very high-utility secondary spirit attack that better fits their themeing.
With True Strike being slightly lower power, we want to give these Beasties back an option to get a bit more power in exchange for less utility.
Wottle has seen gradually increasing usage for the last couple balance patches, and has been a healthy mainstay since the game's initial release. Lately players particularly optimized it towards offensive support using Quick Set, which it turned out to excel at a little bit too well for our liking. In our minds Wottle fits best as a defensive support, while other Beasties are meant to outperform it in offensive support utility. Wottle is good at camping the net and getting blocks, so it should still see a lot of effectiveness using Set, but not as much burst value as it did before.
Vigor Beam has always been a tricky play that lives on the edge of being overtuned. We think it's really fun and interesting on most users, but for Crabaret, who already has so many Rhythm synergies, it felt a little bit too easy to get too much value from this play. It also encourages them to play very boring and safely, tagging in under redirection and maintaining stamina while camping at the net. In line with the changeover from Agile, we want the Crab to play a little more fun and silly on the field without necessarily losing their edge.
@Mirroring the above changes with Crabaret, we took a closer look at how Vigor Beam was distributed and how much damage it could do from different sources and setups, and we found that Riplash wielded the best Vigor Beam in low-risk circumstances. There are still some crazy Vigor Beam users out there who can take advantage of Quick Tag/redirection, but the remaining ones come with less power, less bulk, or poor trait synergies which make it a little more interesting to play around.
We're excited to see Beelb's usage grow since their glow-up in the previous patch! Their ability to stick on the field and build up power until they become a scary threat is central to their playstyle. Confident Pass enabled them to make their ally into a threat as well, and we think this made them synergize a little too well with some partners. We're making them a little more "selfish" to bring their performance in line and make them closer to our vision for them.
These Beasties' move pools became bloated as we piled options onto them over patches and also tried to make Crafty work. Now we're trying a different but roughly equally large pile of options that might synergize better with Extrovert.
Some players have felt that Debugly's use of Twist has been a little too difficult to deal with, since they can lock an opposing attacker out of the game while buillding themselves up with Telekinesis. We think Twist, annoying as it is, fills an important niche in the meta and it isn't something we want to remove from the game. In terms of statistics, Debuglys using Twist also have never particularly stood out as overperforming. But in an effort to make the game more fun, we've passed ownership of Twist to Goofsder, who fits with it more thematically, while lacking the ability to ramp its Mind power on its own. In its place, we're giving Debugly a new high-utility play that can slow down opponent action economy but in a way that's hopefully less frustrating.
🚧Other Fixes and Changes
- The cost of all plays that can be tutored in Beastieball Academy have been reduced by roughly 33%
- &Fixed a few reported interactions, such as Fortify not triggering Protean, Swarm being weird when cycloned, @Foggy ignoring True Strike, etc
- @Fixed an issue introduced during experimental that prevented climbing up ropes
- Many more small fixes and tweaks, but I don't want to write them all out right now.... stay tuned for full patch notes in the Milestone Update!