Alliance War Season 19: Updates to Path Identities and New Nodes! [ June 30]

Summoners,

After his defeat at the hands of the Summoner and Carina, the Grandmaster has been an elder without a calling. Despite the problems and conflicts that the Grandmaster and The Collector have caused, they are still Carina’s family, and she loves them very much.

Instead of banishing them to a far off land, she’s worked with her council to create a plan to keep the two of them busy, and out of trouble.

The Universal Gamesman

Carina knows that a game with changing rulesets and unpredictable pieces is the perfect distraction to keep En Dwi Gast out of trouble. Under her supervision, The Grandmaster will transform Alliance Wars into his tournament, where he seeks the strongest Alliances every season to crown as his victors!

Recreating the Battlefield

The Grandmaster has never been shy about wanting to mould the Contest to his vision, and making sure his presence is noticed. He’ll be starting with the Maps on which you fight.

So first, we’re going to take a look at the new Nodes, Path Identities, and Layouts of the Grandmaster’s New Maps. All Map Changes will take effect on June 24th!

New Maps

First, we've got 2 Brand New Maps! One for Alliances playing on Easy and Normal, and one for Alliances playing on Intermediate, Hard, Challenger, and Expert. If you'd like to take a closer look, we've attached the High-Resolution versions of these maps to this post.

These new more simplified Maps eliminate Portals and bring the entire Battlegroup back together and key points throughout the Map.

Easy and Normal:

Intermediate, Hard, Challenger, and Expert:

New Local Nodes

The Grandmaster has crafted the following nodes for Alliances on the Intermediate, Hard, Challenger, or Expert Maps.

Path Identities

If you like to plan ahead, the Grandmaster is happy to provide you with a list of all buffs on all nodes across the Maps. There are lots to look at, so we've attached the lists of Nodes in the next post.

Matchmaking Updates

The Grandmaster wants to ensure that his tournament stays as competitive as possible. To do so, he is updating the parameters of Matchmaking. Matchmaking will now emphasize your Alliance's War Rating above all else. This will ensure that Alliances vying for the crown will be competing against other top Alliances.

This will be a big adjustment for a lot of Alliances. Currently, many Alliances are either have an inflated War Rating or a Deflated War rating due to the current system. To expedite the process of Alliances finding their "true" War Rating, we will be reducing every Alliance's War Rating by 50%. This will affect every Alliance in-game and will accelerate the rate at which Alliance's find their true position faster because of the concentrated War Ratings of all Alliances.

The Change to Matchmaking and the War Rating reduction will occur on July 8th.

What's Next?

There's still so much to reveal about Season 19 and beyond. Next week, we'll cover:
- Reward Changes
- Defense Tactics and Attack Tactics
- Alliance War Solo Events

Remember, Alliance Wars Season 19 Starts on July 7th, and there will be no war starting on July 5th!

Stay tuned for more information on everything else about Season 19!

Comments

Rotelly

@Kabam Miike this will make stun immune nodes almost impossible, you will no longer be able to bait a heavy or special attack and then punish.

It forces you to take at least block damage

MaRvEl_MoNsTeR

Maybe we should try it before bringing the pitch forks out

Giome

i was hoping that the new defender tactics would make a very disappointing aw change slightly better but you officially managed to make war even worst. I’m really concerned for the future of this game at this point.

Rektor

To add — I think they should just make it retroactive. There have only been 3 alliances that won a war season: KenOB 11, NY718 5, MNG 2

And some players won seasons in more than 1 of those 3 alliances (ex: 2 in MNG and 9 in KenOB)

So it’s nothing in terms of how many accounts would have to have their prior war champion titles counted. Under 100 accounts probably for all 18 seasons.

There are many good players who haven’t won a war season because it’s actually pretty difficult to win a single war season— let alone 5, let alone 10, let alone 10 seasons straight, which KenOB just did. I think it’s a little unreasonable to ask us to do it all over again for a title we’ve already earned.

Gamer

Stubborn is a new Defense Tactic: Whenever a #Defensive Defender’s Attack Misses, is Evaded, or Dodged, they gain 1/2/3 Indestructible Passive(s). 1 Indestructible Passive(s) are removed whenever the Attacker Blocks a Hit or is Struck. This’ll node is awfully designed. Take doom ect put him one agersiv furv oscillation and tunes vision your guys need to make a pration mode war just gone stick either war and I’m not sure if u listen at all what ever u guys do it just streak op the op since of your end goal war less stress the. Reduce the difficulty one node like that’s

Leox

Hi! Do you have a database where we can take the nodes name in spanish or any other language? some of your translations are not linear and is difficult to know what are they about, also a database with the description of the nodes, I had to research on youtubers´ videos to know what are some nodes about because I have just finished the act 6.1 and found that some nodes for the challenger difficulty are just in the act 6.3 or 6.4, I´m looking to have this in order to planifie the defense for my alliance.

thanks in advance!!!

Kade7175

Yo ive been with my alliance for over 2 years. These are my friends. And the only way i can get better rewards from THE WORST GAME MODE is switch allis?this is garbage. Gold 3 needs a buff. All rewards need a BUFF this is a month of work. Everyone is using their best champs, pots revives that are way more costly then story ones. Boosts plus time coordination. This is a joke. It falls soo flat its not even funny. And lets keep in mind the hassle switching alliances is. People get kicked right before the rewards come out or kicked a week before so they cant get the 5 wars to get the rewards. Its a trash game mode and they couldnt boost the rewards to make it better for the middle of the road players.

Pharted

So we should plan for every war in Season 19 to be against the Stubborn tactic, and we basically can’t use Quake, Ghost, Stealthy, or Sparky for AW offense anymore.

Stellar

Time to diversify your attack team i guess

Timone147

I went from barely motivated to play AW to not motivated at all. Unless I was willing to grind upper plat tiers(which I’m not in the current design of war which is not changing but a reskin of the same old) this does nothing.

I am shocked that the decision was to use AW to further divide the community progression. I understand rewarding those who grind and spend on high plat and masters but basically this vast difference in increase from a large increase at the top to tiny amount in the lower plat tiers to nothing basically at gold 1/2 is really unfortunate.

I think this is intended to get people playing for the plat2 and above again who have since decided it’s not worth their time. This won’t inspire people to play the game mode again like that. Nothing was fixed that demotivated people. This will inspire more to just say screw war. I feel like we doubled down on the mechanics we don’t like and then increased the rewards only in the higher tier to be more tempting or even required for progression to try and get /force people to play competitively again.

Menkent

It's not like gold alliances are casual players at this point. My alliance has never finished higher than gold1 but we're top 250aq. Gold3 rewards are nothing for us.

LordSmasher

Maybe its best to introduce a two tier war system, those who want to scrap for the great rewards and those who want to have fun with lesser rewards and without constantly thinking "defender + node + tactics = what do I do?".

Mcord11758

Agreed leave the rewards as is for the those who want to have fun without all the nodes and bs and multiply them by 2.5 for those who feel like dealing with the nodes

DNA3000

On the one hand, the rewards are nothing special. On the other hand, if Kabam made rewards too high now, with the state of war being twelve rounds of cleaning the monkey cage after taco tuesday at the zoo, I might feel forced to actually jump into the cage and try to get those rewards. So I'm a bit ambivalent about the rewards. If they set the rewards to zero, I could stop doing war altogether, or deliberately lose every fight by seeing how far Joe Fixit and Netflix Daredevil can get if I play with my feet.

Mqc19

Rewards increase in lower platinum tiers in nominal. More notable the new tactics sound miserable, and as it reads the offensive counters aren’t nearly significant enough. Same old war.

Stubborn and/or flow to take over and we are back where we were a few months ago.

Polygon

I was suspecting the hidden agenda to make the game more anti quake/ghost after seeing these new double medium/light champs released, but with these new defensive tactics its clearly not hidden anymore. As if the new local nodes werent horrible enough...

Rotelly

the goal is to increase unit spend on potions

Chrisco66

Positive things with prolonged fight timers & removing hidden nodes. But stubborn? Cmon guys. Remove tactics. Lack of rewards don’t warrant the items that will be used. Not worth it

Stellar

No ! I think the goals is to make the wars less static by diversifying the defenders et attackers used during war.

For now, the majority of alliances use flow and put Mojo, guillotine 2099, Warlock etc... in defense while attacker mainly use Quake, Voïd etc...

Using this (anti ghost/Quake) defense will force attacker to take #defensive attackers to get a better chance

RagamugginGunner

Plat 4 and lower rewards need a complete overhaul. AW is just awful for the majority of ppl. These "rewards" won't make ppl like me who've stepped down from the game want to come back and deal with AW again. Tune down the impossible node/DT/champ combos and up the rewards. Listen to the community, like you said you would.

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Greywarden

That was the goal but not what happened. All that happened is what everyone said would happen. Kabam created another ridiculous defense tactic that will dominate the whole season.

The new nodes are enough imo and tactics should just be scrapped if not for this season, indefinitely.

adramelch

Several members of my alliance were feeling tired of the pressures of war and underwhelming rewards, but were all waiting to see what the changes would be before making any decisions. At least Kabam's announcements helped us in finally deciding to forget about wars completely from now on.

Stellar

Well that's the problem with every game.
Each time dev design something to make their game more difficult/challenging/fair, you have smart gamer that find the weakness in the design and use it to their advantage.
When the weakness is exploited by everyone, dev find a way to counter balance the weakness...until new smart gamer find out a new weakness...

RagamugginGunner

Regardless of their goal, the reality of the situation is that we'll find the worst node/DT/champ combo and stick with it all season. It took all of 20 min to find some impossible combos and that's w/o even trying.

I really hate their pattern of braking AW with a tactic only to "fix" it by introducing an even worse tactic. We had Siphon wars before it was nerfed and Flow was buffed. Then we had Flow wars. Now that Flow has been toned down a bit and they've introduced an even worse DT everyone already knows they we're in for Stubborn wars. That's a perfect name for the whole situation as well.

unknown

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Mart83

How is it forcing people to take defensive attackers? Have you seen the attacker tactics for stubborn, might as well not have bothered

Worknprogress

That's how roll outs of new tire resources works though. They were selling 2% crystals for silly amounts of money recently. If you're not playing at the top levels then those things trickle in for free some time after people were already paying for that trickle. Being upset at getting any t5c at a gold ranking currently is ridiculous.

Those items take considerable amounts of time to accumulate if you're playing in lower tiers as they should.

Menkent

The condescension is thick there. Gold is not "low tiers." These are alliances full of cavalier players who run map6 and many have at least done first completion of act6... maybe even a path of AoL.