The S12 season has officially begun, and the designers have added new content to Summoner Canyon. The advent of mythical equipment has created a new pattern for the alliance, and then today's version changes, I wonder if players think the game is balanced? Can shooters, warriors, and assassin heroes play their rightful role?
Recently the designers talked about the issue of version balancing:
Okay, I know what you're thinking, why is the next version going to give the warrior more attack power?
After the 2021 preseason equipment overhaul, lightly armed warriors like Arrelia and Zhao Xin have become more like unpunished tank killers, but in fact they should not have such treatment. When they have too much health and defense armor, they break the high-risk, high-reward style and transform into a low-risk but still high-reward game. They can even single-handedly kill your front row, rather than an adventurous warrior waiting for an opportunity to strike out. In contrast, Ruiwen has the ability to fight continuously, more aggressively and mechanically, so why would you choose Nessus? (Well, this metaphor is a bit of an exaggeration, but you can see what we mean)
An interesting problem with the warrior equipment field is that a lot of the equipment is very similar, but it works for different heroes and classes. For example, do Oroi (heavy soldiers), Fiona (light soldiers), and Wei (guerrilla fighters) have anything in common? Honestly, not a lot, but they can use the same equipment and are all called warriors. For example, the Thirsty Blood Tomahawk and Straker's Challenge Handguard will make all warriors more adept at team battles, and the Thirsty Blood Tomahawk does this, allowing them to get a huge healing effect when health is low. The positioning of these pieces of equipment began to become blurred, rather than distinguishing three different warrior types. Not all warriors should be good at team battles, and the advent of Straker's Challenge Handguard shattered that.
We considered tailoring new equipment for each class, and even tried to perfect some of the existing underutilized equipment (there were some crazy ideas at the time, such as adjusting the Mythical Dawn to resemble the ancient Mysterious Sword, and the Devour of Mamotius, which gained invincible effects after participating in kills). The explorations were fun, but we also began to realize that it felt like it was built on a shaky foundation. Before adding anything new, we want to make sure that none of the equipment in the current system is the default equipment for each type. For the long-term health of the warrior profession, we must ensure that any equipment does not destroy their weaknesses of this type. When we are able to grasp these basic elements, perhaps we can consider adding new equipment if necessary.
With that in mind, we decided that the most influential thing we could do was to remove the Straker Challenge Handguard from the default types of all warriors. To do this, we rebranded The Dance of Death as a mixed physical/magical damage reduction mechanism. We chose The Dance of Death because this piece of equipment requires warriors to survive the bloodshed and inflict damage on enemies. They can't just take the damage, happily like clams, leisurely waiting for the right time to enter. Unless they can fight skillfully, the Dance of Death will not save them again.
In addition, we've made some other tweaks to the equipment to ensure that light warriors don't accidentally increase their health stats due to crafting damage equipment.
Of course, all of this also requires continuous follow-up attention and tracking outlier heroes or equipment. We still think there's a lot to improve in the system, but we'd rather take a good step toward making the current system better than wait until we can change it all at once.