Hey all,

Balance Team here again with an update on Gorr, the God Butcher and Valkyrie and a touch more:

Valkyrie

We’re pleased with how Valkyrie’s been doing in the Battlerealm! Her kit features a unique playstyle, rewarding you for hitting into the Opponent’s block and manipulating your Combo count effectively. Generally, champions with unique loops take a bit longer for players to pick up and figure out where they’re best used. Valkyrie appears to be following that trend, with promising results! We’re seeing players start to use her effectively in different game modes, with some pretty tricky AW fights included. All in all, we’re happy with where she is currently at in the Metagame and won’t be making any changes to her kit right now.

Gorr, the God Butcher

Based on our evaluation of Gorr’s performance in the Battlerealm so far, we’re looking to make a few tweaks to his kit. A few things stood out to us during Gorr’s evaluation:

Gorr’s damage ceiling is currently in line with our targets. However, his Damage output drops significantly in more complex environments, indicating that his day to day loop is currently too stressful to execute without the help of Synergies, or a low complexity encounter. While a drop in Damage output is to be expected as the fights become more difficult, Gorr’s drop was low enough for us to look at tuning him up. 

We were happy with the Utility elements in Gorr’s base kit, and are looking to make a change to his Sig Ability. One of Gorr’s intended Metagame targets was to counter Auto-Block (looking at you Peni Parker) with his Undermine ability. When looking at matchups that feature Auto-Block, Gorr is currently under-performing in comparison to some of his Cosmic counterparts who target Auto-Block (e.g. Angela, Hercules, Knull). 

We have 2 goals in mind with Gorr’s re-tuning. The first is to make his day to day loop easier to maintain in more complex fights. We’ll be looking to increase the duration of his Shadow Magic Buffs to help keep his loop going. The second goal is to increase his effectiveness vs. Auto-Blockers, and we’ll be looking at his Undermine Buff duration to address that. 

What happens next?

Like last month, we had enough time to pair Gorr’s changes with another small value-only update… America Chavez! As her original design intent was to be a “Mystic Brawler that should feel like a truck”, we’ll be looking at increasing her damage output to match that goal. When our 37.1 build hits, we’ll be running a Beta for players to take re-tuned Gorr and America out for a spin and give us some feedback on whether his changes are hitting his goals or not!