So what you think of the new champion and skye's new skin
TL;DR: I really want to play Maeve, but I’m actually pretty tilted: For months, I’ve been part of that group pushing to get Skye vertical movement, offering a list of suggestions for one thing to give, and then Maeve gets almost all of them in one kit. I’m back to #GiveSkyeVertical, and I hope you are too.
edit: Sorry, I forgot the second part: I could live without the ruffles/frills on the hotpants and the redone thigh-highs, but otherwise I’m definitely picking up the set.
Throw two Daggers every second that each deal 450 Damage.
[RMB] Pounce
Quickly Dash Forward. Collide with an enemy to perform a melee Strike for 600 Damage.
[Q] Nine Lives
Heal for 500 Health and reset the cooldowns of Pounce and Prowl.
[E] Midnight
Enemies within 300ft have their vision restricted to a 30 foot radius for 4 seconds.
[F] Prowl
Move 80% Faster and increase your jump height for 4 seconds. Firing your weapon or using another ability will cancel Prowl.
Cards
Cut and Run
Kills and Eliminations grant 10/20/30/40% Movement Speed for 4s.
Street Cred
Increase your maximum health by 50/100/150/200.
Persistence
You cannot be slowed by more than 60/50/40/30%.
Predation
Gain 10/20/30/40% Movement Speed while out of combat.
Savagery
Pounce heals you for 70/140/210/280 Health on a successful hit.
Sixth Sense
Enemies hit by Pounce are revealed for 1/2/3/4s.
Shred
Reduce the cooldown of Pounce by 0.5/1/1.5/2s.
Scamper
Gain 10/20/30/40% Movement Speed for 2s after Pounce ends.
On Edge
Reduce the Cooldown of Nine Lives by 1/2/3/4s.
Fight or Flight
Gain 10/20/30/40% Movement Speed for 2s when you activate Nine Lives.
Patch Up
Increase the amount that Nine Lives heals for by 50/100/150/200.
Scar Tissue
Gain 5/10/15/20% Damage Reduction for 2s after using Nine Lives.
Walk it off
Heal for 25/50/75/100 Health every second during Prowl.
Streetrunner
Increase the duration of Prowl by 0.5/1/1.5/2s.
Chase
Increase the speed bonus of Prowl by 8/16/24/32%.
Featherlite
Reduce Your fall speed in Prowl by 10/20/30/40%
GENERAL
PVE
NEW WEEKLY QUEST
Win 5 matches of PVE
Reward: 50 Crystals
One time only, cannot be repeated per account
Chat now automatically opens at match lobby
Clicking on Champions Page will now directly go to Customizations
Continued improvements have been made to overall sound and music. Notably the music loudness has been increased for this release. Further improvements are planned.
GAMEPLAY
Improved the slide off physics for rooftops where players are not intended to linger, which will now push you more aggressively.
Improved hit detections for area of effect explosions.
CHEST IMPROVEMENTS
Added options to buy multiple Radiant Chests in bulk quantities.
Bigger bulk options include discounts.
1x Radiant Chest - 50 Crystals (50 Crystals per chest)
5x Radiant Chests - 225 Crystals (45 Crystals per chest)
10x Radiant Chests - 400 Crystals (40 Crystals per chest)
15x Radiant Chests - 550 Crystals (37 Crystals per chest)
20x Radiant Chests - 700 Crystals (35 Crystals per chest)
Added an option to open chests quickly by pressing Spacebar or ESC during the opening.
Added an option to equip an item right when it is dropped from a chest.
BUG FIXES
Fixed issue Mounts in Store not previewing centered.
Fixed end of match lobby from sometimes showing incorrect name.
Fixed Active Quests sometimes showing incorrect count.
Viktor now throws a proper green grenade when using any Code Green Body.
Improved Strongest Wins logic for Movement Speed Buffs.
Fixed an issue where damage falloff on AOEs started too early when shooting near targets head or feet.
Improved hit detection for AOEs, and the warning UI indicator is now more accurate.
Fixed a crash when disconnecting from a game as a spectator.
CUSTOMIZATIONS
Maeve
Heads
Vagrant Clasp
Riff Raff Clasp
Guttersnipe Clasp
Bodies
Vagrant
Riff Raff
Guttersnipe
Weapons
Guttersnipe Daggers
Riff Raff Daggers
Vagrant Daggers
Emotes
Copy Cat
Voice Packs
Maeve
MVP Poses
Rapscallion
Barik
TF2
May now be used as separate pieces.
Colossal Chest
“Based on the feedback from the community on the addition of Emotes and the MVP Poses into the Colossal Chest, we have removed these items from the Colossal Chest and added a new Flair Chest where they can be obtained. Players who received an Emote or MVP Pose from the Colossal Chest in OB42 will receive a refund for the difference in price.”
All Emotes and MVP Poses have been removed from this chest.
New Flair Chest
Contains all Emotes and MVP Poses.
New Valentine's Day Chest
Heartbreaker Skye Collection
Head
Heartbreaker’s Barrette
Body
Heartbreaker
Weapon
Heartbreaker’s Caress
Emote
Smokey Love
Voicepack
Hearbreaker
MVP Pose
Bombshell
Spray
Lovestruck
Heads
Love Specs Pip
Lone Heart Patch Viktor
Rosebud Canopy Grover
Weapons
Loveless Revolver Androxus
Heartthrob’s Staff Grohk
Cherub Crossbow Cassie
General
Spray
McDreamy
Mount
Candy Unicorn
MAPS
Test Map Queue
“We want to personally thank all the players who have been playing the Test Queue and giving regular feedback on our maps for testing. We have removed the current maps and added a new rotation of maps, some with major reworks we are excited to hear your feedback on.”
Ice Mines Redo v2 - Improve payload route. Update and scaled down capture point.
District v2 - Raised the floors around the sea side flank area. Made it easier to get into the second story building above the capture point.
Grotto A
Grotto B
Stride v2 - Update the capture point to improve flow.
Removed Undercity and Atrium
CHAMPIONS - BALANCE/UPDATES/FIXES
Items
Blast Shields
“Blast Shields and Haven provided too much of an easy option against many champions in the game, and with the removal of Aggression doesn’t provide the level of counter-play that we would like. Bringing down the values of both means the Defense tier can lend itself more to Resilience or Illuminate.”
Reduced damage reduction from 10/20/30 to 7/14/21%.
Cauterize
Fixed an issue where Cauterize was stacking with other healing reduction mechanics and different ranks of itself. Healing reduction will now take the strongest present value.
Haven
Reduced damage reduction from 10/20/30 to 7/14/21%.
Nimble
Fixed an issue where if a stronger Movement Speed Buff overwrote Nimble, it would deactivate until you respawned.
Veteran
Reduced credit cost from 300 to 200.
Life Rip
Lifesteal now correctly works off of exact damage dealt to the target. This excludes damage dealt to personal shields and damage that has been mitigated by Damage Reduction.
Lifesteal is now properly reduced by Healing Reduction.
You can no longer lifesteal from deployables.
Cards
Fixed various bugs in which some cards or abilities had Movement Speed Buffs that would stack with other sources of Movement Speed.
Drogoz
General
Improved Drogoz's W.Y.R.M. Jets card performance with high ping.
Salvo
“Salvo has been an under used part of Drogoz’ kit, and we wanted to bring it back into a strong viability. The danger we wanted to avoid was allowing it to deal full damage where it could become an opportunity to burst a target at full Health when it is available. Instead, we are increasing the usability and greatly increasing the size of the explosions to turn it into a strong option against large groups of enemies.”
Increased explosion radius per rocket by 70%.
Reduced the time between Rockets from 0.2s to 0.15s
Increased the accuracy from 90% to 95%
Evie
Blink
Improved Evie's Blink's root under high ping.
Kinessa
Oppressor Mines
Now affected by Cooldown reduction, such as Chronos.
Ruckus
Advance
Now affected by Cooldown reduction, such as Chronos.
Hexa Fire
Hexa Fire Rockets now count as Area of Effect damage.
Improved Ruckus's Hexafire's slow under high ping.
Torvald
General
Fixed an issue with reload UI clipping into Shield UI.
Gaunlet
Fixed an issue where Torvald's gauntlet targeting would not target the lower half of his targets.
Sha Lin
Long Bow
Fixed an issue where Sha Lin's bow would not get interrupted when pulled back, upon getting disarmed.
Planted
Fixed an issue where Sha Lin's animations would get stuck in the planted state during killcam and spectate.
Skye
Hidden
Fixed a bug where activating Hidden would remove the speed boost from Victory Rush. The stronger value will now be used.
Tyra
Trail Blazer
Fixed a bug where this card’s description had values of 50/60/70/80% instead of 50/40/30/20%.
I want to play her, but she’s gonna get nerfed. Hard.
As Raynday works for HiRez, he’s got the opportunity to put together videos now for characters and get ‘em out after the Patch Preview to give us a good showing/understanding for the new champs/content works, you can check that out here. (Also Raynday’s an awesome dude and you should subscribe to him on Youtube/follow him on Twitter.)
Looking at Maeve’s skill list and loadout cards, she’s going to have a potential +112% movement speed bonus for up to 6 seconds on top of gravity reduction cards, additional HOTs attached to her speed boosts and multiple jumps.
srsly wtf she could clear frog isle in like 3 seconds
(Comparatively, Skye can only achieve +57%, ground locked, for ~11.5s; I don’t have the speed/distance numbers for Buck and Andro but I know Evie’s movement speed is incredibly high for Soar and Blink has good distance boosting cards.)
The daggers-pounce-daggers (with a potential extra Pounce+daggers if you can time Nine Lives right) she’s going to be throwing somewhere in the range of 1500-2550 damage inside of a couple of seconds, making her able to savagely shred most of the roster.
The only big downside is that her knives seem to have a very tight hitbox and will require some aim adjustment, even with the generous hurtboxes the characters have. (i.e., Grover and Makoa obviously have gigantic hurtboxes, but Ying and Skye have massive hitboxes relative to their size– you can shoot the open space between Skye’s feet and deal damage, or her model can be 100% out of view and she can still be shot around corners) She’s also direct damage, so Haven nerf or not, she’ll be easier to sort out when you start rolling in defense cards.
While Torvald came in as a powerful off-tank, he didn’t really receive a ton of fanfare as a meta-shaking sort of character– I have a feeling that even after potential nerfing, Maeve is going to be for a long time an insta-lock that rocks the boat with double flank metas– imagine what she’s gonna do with a solid Evie at her side, or even an Androxus abusing flight. Right now I’d say Skye is once again going to be pushed down to the bottom of the flank roster, if not the entire roster.
