Challenge Rating, Single Ability Rank, And You
Hey Summoners! While we’ve already released our general statement about the changes we have made to address the player concerns surrounding our 12.0 update, and detailed patch notes for 12.0.1. While many may simply be happy to see this new update rectify many of your concerns, we also realize that more of you are still confused about the goals of our new systems, what we were trying to achieve with them, and how they work. This post is a more in-depth look at all of that for those that wish to dig deeper.
Single Rank of Abilities
Up until now in the contest, Champion abilities ranked up as your champions did. This was an integral part of higher ranked champions being stronger than their lower ranked equivalents. So looking at a Champion like Black Panther, he had Bleed 1, Bleed 2, Bleed 3, all the way up to Bleed 5 for a 4 star. This worked well for Bleed because Bleed does damage. As Bleed got more powerful for a Champion (doing a larger percentage of the Champion’s attack in damage) your were facing higher ranked opponents with larger health pools. However, if you look at an ability like Evade, it’s obvious that there is a point where it cannot be scaled anymore without breaking the game (picture facing a 100% evade Spider-Man in an Alliance War. Ouch.)
So to solve this problem, we took all abilities and made them a single rank for each Champion, using the values (Chance, Duration, and Effectiveness) from the highest rank (rank 7) that existed for that ability.
What does this mean? Let’s say that prior to 12.0 (and now 12.0.1) a player had a 4 star Rank 3 Black Panther who has Bleed 4 at that rank. Which means he had a 62% chance to cause a Bleed which did 55% of his Attack in damage each time he landed a Critical Hit. Now, that same Black Panther has the equivalent of Bleed 7 which means he now has an 80% chance to cause a Bleed which does 65% of his attack in damage each time he lands a Critical Hit. This clearly results in more damage per Bleed and more Bleeds per fight. This change happened immediately for players as a result of the 12.0 update, without the need to rank these champions up further. So when we removed the ability rank system, we left every ability with the values of the highest rank under the old system. This would have resulted in a buff for every champion in the game, the lower the champion rank, the greater the buff. This would also cause 3 stars to ‘close the gap’ on 4 stars and 4 stars on 5 stars. This would have devalued the best champions in the game, and messed with the gameplay balance all the way through a player’s progression.
Enter: The Challenge Rating.
To help maintain the current status quo between champion rarities and ranks, as well as help maintain relative champion power levels, the Challenge Rating was introduced. It accomplishes the goal of maintaining proper relative champion power by counteracting the “global buff” all champions received as a result of the ability rank flattening. This is why Challenge Rating has a greater effect the larger the disparity between two Champion ranks and rarities.
The actual gameplay effect of Challenge Rating was designed to be fairly limited.
Even in relatively extreme cases (ie 3 stars vs 5 stars) so that the effect of Challenge Rating alone would not be enough to prevent a skilled player from winning.
However, when combined with other changes that impacted block proficiency, parry, crit rating/damage, the total effect of this in 12.0 was much more severe than we intended.
Per our patch notes, we have made changes to the Challenge Rating system that addresses this unintended severity and restores it to our actual design intentions - which is to maintain the status quo between different champion rarities ( 3 star, 4 star 5 star) but not remove a skilled player’s ability to swing above their weight class with those rarities for an extra challenge.
Speaking of ‘other changes’... Diminishing Returns.
Diminishing Returns is a fairly common system in many games that is used to limit the effectiveness of hyper min-maxing. As an example, a 100% damage reduction from stacking armour.
We introduced it to act as a safeguard against unforeseen combinations of abilities, masteries, synergies et cetera creating extremely dominant strategies like 100% block proficiency. This helps to future proof the game, and frees up the Dev Team creatively as we continue to add new strategies, abilities, features, champions, quests, etc, because we don’t have to be as limited when introducing powerful new Abilities, because of they way they combine with pre-existing ones. We also needed to close the gap between the majority of the champion pool, and the difficulty of content that’s being (or already has been) created with the intention of countering the “god-tier” champions. Diminishing Returns helps here, as it has a “normalizing effect” on Attributes. What this means is that actual Attribute effectiveness will trend towards an average value in the middle of the range, because Low Attributes benefit more from increasing their value, while really High Attributes, benefit less. This will help keep some of the hyper focussed builds for being too powerful, and give a more well rounded build or character a place within the Contest.
We have seen many questions regarding why we wouldn’t just buff ALL champions to match the “god-tier” level instead of bringing these “god-tier” champions down to a more reasonable level. If it was as simple as just making ‘all of the numbers bigger’, we may have been able to accomplish this. But not all champions scale simply via an increase of numbers. If you have 100 champions, and 95 of them play nicely within a sandbox, but 5 do not - it makes more sense to change the 5 champions vs the 95 champions.
When we designed content for Labyrinth and Realm, we had to massively inflate the base champion attributes way beyond regular champions in order to provide the level of difficulty needed to challenge the god-tier champions in the hands of also very skilled players. The only two stats in the game that are not impacted by Diminishing Returns are Attack and Health. This is because these two stats easily scale infinitely together, and act as the base numbers for most Champion abilities. As an example, you can increase attack forever because it just does more damage, but if your block proficiency hits 100%, it doesn’t matter what the attack value is anymore, because you always take zero damage.
We have seen many players state they feel they should be able to take zero damage, and we do agree with this to an extent - but it should only occur when combining the right champions (ie Captain America) with player skill (ie Parry). What we were attempting to prevent was a possible future where once again there was the potential for champions to take zero damage across all instances too easily, and without an in-fight skill component. This change was intended only to future-proof against such possibilities, and not to actually diminish or impact a Champion’s current effectiveness within the Contest.
We also added three new attributes to all Champions. These were armour penetration, block penetration and critical resistance. This is where we completely missed the mark on the tuning. The new attributes combined with Diminishing Returns had an unintended impact on the game. As you all told us, what actually happened, is that we increased the difficulty of the game for all players. The change was especially noticeable in really high-end content such as Labyrinth and Realm.
