Followup on Cassie Lang Balancing - New Information

MCOC Team · June 2023

Update on Cassie Lang

Hey everyone, we have an update that we’d like to share regarding Cassie Lang’s Balance Review. We recently discovered a bug in her kit which unfortunately affects her performance. We understand the timing of this discovery is frustrating. We’ll list the bug below followed by how we’d like to address it. The bug:

Cassie's Taunt is currently applying a 90% Attack Reduction instead of the listed 40%.

When we were reviewing her performance data, we were happy with the ceiling of her damage mitigation abilities, as she was performing in range with other tanky Science characters who interact favorably with the Inequity mastery. We interpreted her ceiling shown as players leaning into that strategy, which is why her Balance review resulted in us not needing to make changes at that time. Now that we know this bug exists and has been live since her release, this means that players have been able to reach the ceiling of her Attack reduction with 0 points in Inequity, and in more situations than intended (i.e 1 Taunt to achieve max Attack Reduction plays out more frequently than 1 Taunt + 6 Power Sting Debuffs + 3 points in Inequity, which was what was intended).

Since addressing this bug directly affects her performance, we are adding Cassie Lang into the Beta process alongside Ant-Man (Future) to make sure she’s hitting her original design goals. This means that until their re-release in 41.1 (September), Cassie’s Taunt will stay at the potency listed in the bug above. We saw players using her Attack reduction abilities creatively to answer tricky matchups in Questing and Alliance War, which is something we want to preserve when addressing this bug, and will be something that we keep a close eye on as she goes through the Beta. Here’s the change that we are currently interested in:

Cassie’s Taunt now applies a 50% Attack Reduction.

At 50% potency, the damage reduction should still feel strong and impactful on its own while still allowing her Power Sting Debuffs and the Inequity Mastery to boost it further. Our intention with this fix is for Cassie to remain as effective as she currently is in the matchups that she excels in.

What’s Next?

As a reminder, here’s how the next few months look like. The tuning timeline will be:

40.1 (July) + 41.0 (August): Ant-Man lands on the CCP Beta with his Glancing bug fix and tuning, Cassie Lang lands with her new Taunt Potency.
41.1 (September): Ant-Man and Cassie Lang full release with changes

As a reminder for other Champion rebalance releases, Mantis will update in July followed by Absorbing Man and Baron Zemo in August.