UPDATE TO ECHO DAMAGE FUNCTIONALITY AND ITS IMPACT
Greetings Summoners,
Today, we’d like to talk about a collection of effects we’re going to refer to as “Echo Damage.” This includes certain named abilities like Resonance, Reverb, Trauma, and Overload, as well as unnamed mechanics that deal bursts of damage or inflict debuffs based on the “damage dealt” by a Champion’s attacks. These abilities are an interesting way to scale damage on Champions, but as some of you may know, they have an exponential and warping interaction with Vigor and other effects that increase or decrease “all damage dealt.” If a hit that would deal 100 damage benefits from a 100% Trauma, then the Champion will also deal a burst of 100 damage. If that Champion is also benefitting from a 100% Vigor, then the hit is doubled to 200, but then the burst of damage is calculated based on that larger hit before being doubled again to 400. The same thing happens in reverse with a 50% protection, and it becomes more pronounced as either the echo or the damage increase/decrease grows larger in potency.
We consider this a problem because effects that increase or decrease all damage dealt are by far the most even way to scale output across a wide variety of Champions and Classes. Just providing Attack Rating (like with the Power Shield node) is less effective if a Champion already has Furies or other Attack increases in their kit, for example, and aggressively scaling things like Resistance or Armor gets very weird very fast due to quirks of the diminishing returns system. So far, the game has leaned on large increases to damage dealt primarily in two modes - Alliance Raids and the Big Things variation of Alliance War. While the interaction between global damage increases and Echo Damage effects is undeniably fun in these modes, it’s also proven inherently impossible to balance around, which will only become a larger and larger issue as we aim to scale damage benefits in upcoming new game modes and encounters.
Because of that, we are planning to update how these effects calculate their damage to remove the exponential scaling of this interaction. It’s important to note that in all other cases, these effects will remain unchanged. They will behave identically with armor, resistances, critical hits, and attack rating modifications, but will no longer double-dip on global damage modifications. This means the affected echo damage Champions will deal less damage in situations where a damage increase like Vigor is in play, and more damage against a damage decrease like Protection.
We understand that this may worry some who invested in these Champions with this interaction in mind, and so we’re taking a number of steps to mitigate that impact.
- First, we will carefully review the pool of affected Champions to assess whether any of them need compensatory changes to continue performing at least as well as they are now. We can immediately say that Gentle and Silver Samurai will be seeing adjustments to preserve the way their Echo Damage effects interact with Daunted, and should perform at the level you expect them to
- Second, we will also be making a change to how echo damage types interact with Ability Accuracy modification. Currently, the bursts of damage can fail independently on each hit. We’re changing it so those bursts cannot fail due to Ability Accuracy Reduction once the parent Buff or Debuff succeeds. This will be a significant improvement in certain matchups, such as when facing Domino or a Glancing effect.
- Third, we will take a look at Raids and make adjustments to ensure that these Champions remain among the best options. Even though most Summoners aren't using these champions in this mode, enough are that we consider them a firmly entrenched part of its identity at this point. We intend to preserve that. Making them stronger in a controlled and satisfying way for this mode will take some time, though, so we are planning to rotate Echo Damage Champions out of the Raids pools for the short term. We will bring them back in future rotations. We also understand that some other characters continue to underperform in Raids, and so plan to do a full pass on Raids Boosts to ensure as many characters as possible feel more viable. You can expect to see those Boost updates soon. The eight Champions with Echo Damage Effects that are being rotated out of the upcoming Raid pools are America Chavez, Falcon (Joaquin Torres), Northstar, Shang-Chi, Hulk, Luke Cage, Red Guardian, and Rhino.
- Fourth, we will perform a tuning pass on Big Things before its next iteration. This is far enough out that we don’t want to commit too early to any particular implementation, but our goal is to ensure that there remain plenty of available solutions to each boss without this exponential echo interaction warping the meta. We’ll also be taking a look at defensive echo interactions, which you can read more about below.
- Lastly, we will be doing a pass of mechanics that can have this same impact on defense, such as Enchantress’s Abjuration Damage or the Thorns effects of characters like Killmonger or America Chavez, to ensure that our future use of global damage increases does not unintentionally magnify certain threats beyond our design intent.
We’ll close by letting you all know that this is not a change we make lightly. This interaction is a cool thing to discover on the player journey, and we did try to work around it, but ultimately we feel that this is the best way forward for the health and integrity of current,
and future game modes on the near horizon. This will avoid broader, rougher fixes like damage caps or immunities that would hurt the affected champions and many others besides them in a larger way.
We’re looking to make this change in the June update, and wanted to give advance notice well before this update makes its way into the game so that you can make the most informed decisions about your roster growth before then.
*As a footnote after answering questions, "Echo Damage" is not the same thing as "Burst Damage."
For example, Jean Grey's Special 2 Burst Damage is not Echo Damage - Rhino's damage from "Trauma" is.
