Alliance War Season 28

With Season 28 right around the corner, we thought you'd like to know what's new and exciting about this season!

Tactic Updates (Live: July 21, 2021)

Different Maps Different Tactics

Starting Season 28, we will be adjusting how Tactics are presented to different Alliances depending on which Alliance War Map you are fighting on.

We will also tune the potency of the tactics independently on each map.

This will allow us to better tailor the experience for different user groups. For example, expert Map players have the rosters to be able to adjust the Defender Placements and Attacker selections from Season to Season. Without regular turn over of at least one of the variables driving those decisions, war can quickly become repetitive and stale as you encounter the same Defenders over and over. However, a Hard Map player would struggle to keep pace with rapid Season over Season changes, but the less extensive rosters also limit the ability to always place “the best” defence, making the repetition less of a problem so offering a wider choice of Tactics helps make each war against each opponent feel different.


Expert Map - Pre-Defined Tactics

• 1 Attack, 1 Defense Tactic will be pre-defined for use on the Expert Map each season.
  
  S28:
  - Attack: Slow Your Roll
  - Defense: Untouchables - 3
  
  
• Alternating seasons we will swap out either the Attack and Defense tactic, so each season in Expert Tier 1 of the Tactics will be updated.
  
  
  
• Goals:
  - Increased variety of champs used on Defense to increase the diversity experienced from Season to Season in high tier war.
  - Not increase (decrease, if possible) the amount of pre-planning required of officers.

Choice of Attack and Defense Tactics on Challenger Map

• 3 Attack and 3 Defense Tactics will be available to choose from. Same as previous Seasons, and the tactics themselves are unchanged except for the Untouchables rework.
  
  S28:
  - Attack: Damage Over Time, Slow Your Roll, Power Down
  - Defense: Untouchables - 2, High Ground, Regenerator
  
  
• Goals:
  - Allow for a wider variety of competitive strategies based on creating more viable champions on both Offense and Defense due to the maximum choice of Tactics.
  - Not increase the amount of pre-planning required of officers.

Attack Tactics only on Hard Map

• 3 Attack Tactics to Choose From, No Defense Tactics. Only Attack Tactics are available on the Hard map. The Attack Tactics available match those in Challenger.
  
  S28:
  - Attack: Damage Over Time, Slow Your Roll, Power Down
  
  
• Goals:
  - Increase the number of viable Attackers based on the available tactics.
  - Weight a bit more self-selectable power back into the Attacker side to help balance more difficult defenders with growing health pools.

Untouchables Reworked

Old Description:
Whenever the defender Triggers a Miss or Evade they gain a Resistance charge granting a 30% Damage Resistance Passive effect lasting indefinitely and stacking up to 3 times. Intercepting the opponent will remove 1 Resistance Charge. Additionally all evade abilities gain a flat 15% Ability Accuracy.

New Description:
Whenever the Defender Evades or causes an attack to Miss they gain 17.5%/25%/50% of a Bar of Power over 2.5 seconds. If the Defender's Evade or Miss abilities fail while they're suffering a Slow or Concussion they instead gain 35%/50%50% of a Bar of Power over 2.5 seconds.

Champion Pool: (Unchanged)
Guillotine2099, Domino, Hit-Monkey, Mr.Fantastic, Nightcrawler, Ultron, SpiderGwen, Professor X, Invisible Woman, Black Widow (Deadly Origin), DarkHawk, Mysterio, Stryfe, Black Widow, Mordo,Spider-Man ,Spider-Man Morales, Symbiote Spider-Man, Stark Enhanced Spider-Man, Stealth Spider-Man, Spider-Ham, Wasp, Quake, Ebony Maw, Hood.

Tie-breaker (Live: August 4, 2021)

Fight Duration

• Ties Suck!
  
• There are way too many of them in High Tier war right now.
  
• So we are going to track the total in-fight duration of all members of an Alliance to break ties.
  - *Note* The time tracking starts when you get the “Fight” callout, so the visible in-fight timer will disagree with the recorded duration by ~4 seconds (the length of the run in animations).
  
• There are no Points for this, and it will only be checked against if standard scoring results in a tie.
  
• Stop gap to help mitigate ties while we continue to investigate larger scoring/mode changes to help reduce/eliminate ties more gracefully.
  

Undo Button (Live: August 4, 2021)

Enabled on all Maps
You asked for it, but we held off until we were sure it was not subject to abuse for an unfair advantage. Now that we’re happy with it, here you go!

Tier 1 Expanded (Live: August 4, 2021)

Tier 1 Cut Off Extended

• Increased the percentage of alliances able to be in Tier 1 from 0.1% to 0.16%.
  
• Tier 2 is unchanged.
  
• Total % of Alliances in Tier 1 + Tier 2 is unchanged, we’ve just adjusted the balance between the two.
  
• Why?
  - There is a cohort of Tier 2 alliances who are pushing hard to move up towards Tier 1, we want to make sure there is enough space at the bottom of the Tier 1 bracket to allow for up and coming alliances to move into the highest score multiplier to challenge the top Alliances.
  

Map Changes (Live: July 21, 2021)

Hard Map Timer Increase

• Some seasons back we increased the fight timer on the Expert and Challenger maps to help account of the larger health pools of R3 6-Stars.
  
• It’s become clear that the Hard map is experiencing a similar challenge, so we’re increasing the fight Timers on the Hard Map as well to help reduce Time-Outs.
  

Final Boss Island

• True Focus, on both Challenger and Expert Maps, has been added to all nodes on Final Boss Island.
  
• We all know that there are a couple of Champions in the game that play by different rules than everyone else. They have been left pretty much unchecked for a good long time now, but that has also resulted in them becoming default options whenever an alliance comes up with a clever new defensive placement to just invalidate the fight.
  
• That being said, we do not want to totally remove them from War, they are champs that many players have become extremely skilled with, and we do not want to just entirely remove them from such an important game mode.
  

Node Updates

Path Node Updates

Node 1

OLD:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Fury
Running on Fumes

NEW:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Fury
Running on Fumes
While They’re Down - 2
Heal Block (Debuff)

Node 10

OLD:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Fury
Long Distance Relationship

NEW:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Fury
Long Distance Relationship
Insult to Injury - 2
Heal Block (Debuff)

Node 27

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Unblockable
Spry

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Steady Buildup - Unblockable
Special Burst Lockdown - 3

Node 8

OLD:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Power Drain
Return Policy - 3
Heal Block (Passive)

NEW:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Power Drain
Return Policy - 3
Divine Barrier - 2
Heal Block (Passive)

Node 17

OLD:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Power Drain
Blood in the Water - 3
Heal Block (Passive)

NEW:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Power Drain
Blood in the Water - 3
Divine Barrier - 2
Heal Block (Passive)

Node 34

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Weakness
Feat of Indestructible 2
Heal Block (Passive)

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Weakness
Opportunist - 3
Divine Barrier 3
Heal Block (Passive)

Node 44

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Weakness
Rich Get Richer - 3
Heal Block (Passive)

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Weakness
Rich Get Richer - 3
Divine Barrier 3
Heal Block (Passive)



MINIBOSS NODES:

Node 21

OLD:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Buff Imbalance - Power Drain
Matador
Cold Turkey III

NEW:
Champion Boost 150%
Health Boost 100%
Shifting Hazards - Incinerate and Poison
Blood in the Water - 3
Power Bond

Node 24

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
E.M.P. Modification
Enhanced Energy Attacks
Burden of Might
Rolling Thunder

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
E.M.P. Modification
Bubble Shield - 3
Burden of Might
Aspect Of Evolution

Node 46

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Strike Counter - Power Rate
Buffet - 3
Boost Buff (Armor Up) 3

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 100%
Strike Counter - Power Rate
Outlast
Buffet - 3
Chitinous Thorns

Node 50

OLD:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 300%
Recovery - 200
Indomitable
Vigorous Assault

NEW:
Champion Boost 200%
Health Boost 300%
Recovery - 200
Safeguard
Indomitable
Vigorous Assault


Season 28 is live on TBD.