Best Of

Greetings Summoners,

Sometimes we encounter bug fixes that warrant more detail than we put in our Release Notes. Today, we want to talk about a couple bug fixes coming to Baron Zemo in our August 52.0 release so that everyone can understand the bugs, the fixes, and their impact. With that said, let’s talk about the abilities.

The first bug is in one of his synergies, which also applies to himself anywhere that synergies are active:

• "Thunderbolt Champions: Gain +3% Perfect Block chance and take 5% less damage from special Attacks for each #Thunderbolt on the team. These bonuses are doubled when fighting #Villains."
  

The notable bug with this synergy is that the 5% less damage is actually resulting in 5% MORE damage from opponent Special Attacks (excluding blocked hits). We will be cleaning this synergy up so that Baron Zemo and any #Thunderbolts on the team correctly mitigate rather than increase their opponent’s Special Attack damage, including hits to block. Overall, this is pretty straightforward and a bump up for Zemo’s survivability in questing content.

Zemo’s second bug is a bit more niche and complex, related to the following ability:

• "Whenever the Opponent Purifies a Debuff or is Immune to an effect, Zemo gains a Fury Buff increasing the Attack Rating of his next hit by 200%. Max stacks: 15."
  

The bug with this ability relates to any time multiple Purifications or Immunities trigger at once–for example, when Zemo lands the final hit of his Sp1 against a Rooted, Bleed-Immune opponent and tries to apply 7 Bleeds at once. In these cases, instead of the Furies being gained to set up a big next hit, the Furies will erroneously apply to and be consumed by the same hit that triggered the Immunities. When this happens, the icons for those Furies never become visible.

To help understand the exact impact of this bug and its fix, we can walk through the Photon matchup, one of the most common ways for the bug to pop up. Often, as Zemo lands hits and approaches ~1.5 bars of Power, Photon will have applied enough Debuffs to trigger Zemo’s first Root of the match. Zemo can use this opening to land his Sp1, which currently results in a large final hit due to the bug with the 7 Bleeds attempting to apply at once. After the fix, the final hit will instead benefit from only 1 Fury and grant 7 Furies to set up a large next hit. Instead of the final Sp1 hit having the extra Attack, his next Medium against the Rooted Photon will, to continue the example. The final hit of Zemo’s Special 1 has almost the exact same base damage as his Medium Attacks, so the overall damage output will not be changing - simply moving to the following hit.

As we hope you’d expect, we thoroughly tested the balance impact of this change, particularly in terms of Damage and Ease of Use. For both balance attributes, the impact of these bug fixes was small enough that the attributes still reflect his performance. His Damage is generally the same or better, and his Ease of Use is generally still the same or marginally lower. The main tradeoff specifically for matchups where you land an Sp1 against a Bleed Immune, Rooted opponent is that in exchange for getting the Furies to use in the best way for that fight, you’ll need to land the hit where they apply. To give a hint towards what type of strategies can now be employed post-fix, in Battlegrounds the timing of that first Sp1 into Root will often line up when getting access to a Striker for the first time, allowing you to use the Furies for the full Striker and your next Medium Attack, since the Striker hits aren’t considered to be Zemo’s Attacks.

See below for a sneak peek at what exactly we’re talking about:



We feel it is important to fix these bugs due to the in-fight impact and the lack of clear interaction they can have with other mechanics throughout the game. For the second bug in particular, it effectively resulted in “instant Buffs” which intentionally don’t exist elsewhere and can lead to unintuitive or frustrating interactions–or the lack thereof, like how only post-fix can he leverage his Furies in combination with Strikers.

TL;DR

• Anywhere that synergies are active, Zemo’s opponents will deal less damage against him their Special Attacks
  
• Against opponents who are Bleed Immune and Rooted, Zemo will now correctly gain Furies after the final hit of his Sp1, shifting the “big hit” from that Sp1 to whatever his next attack is
  
• Against all opponents who don’t trigger multiple instances of Immunity or Purify all at once, Zemo’s Furies will continue to work the same way
  
• These changes will go live with the 52.0 update on August 5.
  
• Baron Zemo looks good in purple