Greetings Summoners!
The Team has been hard at work on the fix to both Hulkling & Valkyrie, and we’re hoping to have both of these updates in your hands before the end of next week!
You should notice a significant increase in damage from both of these Champions - here’s a sneak peek:
The team decided that the simplest fix to these champions was just to increase the damage they deal on each hit by the same amount that Armor Penetration used to in its bugged state. This will result in a very clean and predictable improvement in their performance, but it does also mean that we’ve had to accelerate something we were planning to ship a little further down the road. As some of you know, up until now, effects that increase and reduce damage dealt have been strictly additive. As an example, an effect that increases damage dealt by 50% (such as a Vigor buff) would counteract an effect that decreases damage dealt by 99% (such as a Protection Passive or a boss’s Corrupted Armor), and result in a reduction of 49%. Additionally, two 50% Protections would add together and stop all incoming damage.
We do not consider this current function to be a healthy one for many reasons, and so have been in the process of reworking it to more closely match the way Fury and Weakness effects interact, the same way we reworked Prowess and Cowardice last winter. This change has actually been in the code for a while now, but disabled while we worked on edge cases. Since Hulkling and Valkyrie will both soon have always-on, powerful damage-increasing effects, and we don’t intend for these fixes to their damage to grant them a new ability to punch through Protection and Story bosses, we will be enabling this refactor soon alongside the updates to their kits.
Like we said, this is happening a bit sooner than we would have preferred, but we consider it important to make these characters what we intended them to be as soon as possible, and so we were okay with having to fix a couple of edge cases. One of those edge cases was with Deathless Thanos, specifically, whose Protection Passive would have been unintentionally nerfed by the refactor due to some code we’re still polishing on our end. Because of this, his data for 55.0 has a fix in place that reinforces what his Protection at full energy should already be doing, and stops all incoming damage. As some have noticed, this does mean Daunted effects no longer punch through his Protection. That is how this interaction is supposed to work, as they were never intended to have that effect, but it was our mistake to have that particular fix in place before the other changes were made that necessitated it, and crucially, before we had a chance to explain all of this to you. We plan to leave this fix in place, since it will be needed very soon when Hulkling and Valkyrie are fixed.
We apologize for the confusion that the timing mismatch has caused. Going forward, you should see a more consistent interaction between effects that increase and reduce damage. Damage increase effects, like Daunted, will be added together and increase damage by the indicated amount, and then damage reduction effects, like Protection, will reduce that total damage multiplicatively, the same way weakness reduces Modified Attack. The most obvious consequence of that is that champions with their own Protection effects will no longer reduce damage to 0 when combined with Protection node buffs. Two 50% Protections would now add up to a 75% reduction, for example.
We appreciate your patience as we dealt with Hulking & Valkyrie, and we’re excited to get these updates live so everyone can experience them performing as originally envisioned.
