v11.01 Major Update

[h3]News[/h3]
- Check out Lisk's Developer AMA and Jules' Gameplay & Balance AMA from this past month! These AMA ("ask-me-anything") events are run every month, so keep an eye on reddit for the next ones.
- Next Nova Cup: February 24-25
- Join the Tournament Discord to participate and receive tournament notifications. View all past Nova Cups here: Legion TD 2 Esports Portal.
Major Updates
[h3]New Mercenary: Robo[/h3]


Long-ranged. Wields a mini flamethrower from afar.
Robo Stats
- 40 mythium mercenary
- Type: Power mercenary (reduced income)
- Role: DPS
- Ranged / Magic / Fortified
[h3]Classic Modes Overhaul[/h3]
A near-complete overhaul of the Classic experience!

On Wave 6 and 16, gain a random Legion Spell from the following: Divine Blessing, Guardian Angel, Hero, Magician, Protector, Sorcerer, Titan, Vampire, Villain.

Everyone must dual build!

Random roll with only T1s and T6s. Start with 8 income.

All fighters are stationary, but have +500 range. All enemies are melee ranged.
Harpy, Sky Queen, Great Boar, and Red Eyes received compensation buffs in this mode only.

- When you summon multiple copies of the same mercenary, they merge together to form a gigachad one with combined stats.
- Abilities are also scaled. Safety Mole's Safety Aura scales to 4x power (instead of 8x for other abilities)
- Mythium costs & incomes returned to normal.
Retired Classic Modes
Leak2Win, Ordered Chaos, and Blitz have been retired. They may be reworked at a future date, but for now we’re excited about the new lineup.
[h3]Mastermind Reworks[/h3]
Reworked Mastermind: Redraw

- Reroll UI Button renamed to “Redraw” and uses a different icon to differentiate it from traditional Reroll.
- Now gives you unlimited redraws! Each redraw costs 1-50 gold, scaling with wave number
The goal is to better fulfill the fantasy of assembling that perfect build. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on the initial rework. As always, we will monitor closely and make changes as needed.

Reworked Mastermind: Lock-In

- Income: +3 → +4
- Now auto-drafts a roll (using the automatic roll recommendation), rather than drafting a roll yourself
- New “Lock-In Random Fighter” button, which gives you +6 gold
The goal is to make Lock-In the premier New-Player-Friendly Mastermind pick. Drafting is difficult and intimidating for new players, and being behind on income was a sizable disadvantage. The new Lock-In avoids the burden of drafting and closes the income disadvantage gap.
Additionally, Lock-In is now a viable option for veteran players who can randomize a Lock-In for bonus gold.
Reworked Mastermind: Kingsguard

For those who missed the hotfix patch notes, Kingsguard had been reworked to the following:
- Old: +2 income. Start the game with 2 of each king upgrade.
- New: +2 income. Your king gains +22% attack speed.
[h3]Improved Pathing & Targeting[/h3]
Pathing & targeting should behave more consistently now, without any core logic having been changed. This should make battles more consistent across the board, though not completely deterministic.
As an example, we ran a 1,000 battle simulations with a Gateguard built at (1, 7) against a Snail on Wave 1 as follows:

- On the previous patch, it cleared 76/1000 times, with leaks varying between 43-58% (Screenshot)
- With the improvements, it cleared 1000/1000 times.
Guess we should remove “slot machine simulator” from the Steam Store tags.

Game Balance
[h3]General[/h3]
Leak Gold
- The player causing the leak now receives ~35% more gold, and teammates receive comparatively less gold. You did the work, you should get the payoff.
- In other words, players who apply pressure and break their opponent are now more individually rewarded. This makes chain-income sending and playing selfishly less individually rewarding.
Thanks to Bert in Discord for the suggestion.
[h3]Masterminds[/h3]


- Damage and damage reduction: 8% → 8.5%
Low win rate.


- Attack speed: +20% → +22%
- Now displays a Kingsguard icon for every player on the opposing team that took Kingsguard. This no longer reveals which specific player picked Kingsguard, only that some player(s) picked it.
Slightly low win rate and pick rate.
We’re happy with the recent rework, but Kingsguard is still slightly underperforming.




- Health decreased by 7%, base damage decreased by 50%, and attack speed decreased by 2%
- Lightning Hammer: Percent current health damage: 6% → 12%
- Upgrade Spell: 7% → 5%
- Upgrade Attack: 10% → 14%
The king is now slightly weaker against small leaks and slightly stronger against big leaks. Overall, slight nerf to compensate for weaker mercenaries this patch.
[h3]Fighters[/h3]



- Attack speed: 1.06 → 1.08
Low win rate and pick rate.




- Attack speed: 1.047 → 1.064
Low win rate and pick rate.



- Attack speed: 0.94 → 0.92
High win rate.



- Wolf Pack: Max stacks: 10 → 12
Low win rate and pick rate.



- Health: 280 → 330
- Stone Skin: Damage Reduction: 1 + 30% → 1 + 20%



- Health: 1050 → 1250
- Granite Skin: Damage Reduction: 1 + 35% → 1 + 25%
Gargoyle and Green Devil are now slightly stronger on their own, but weaker with “Chieftain Cheese” health-stacking.



- Health increased by 4.5%
Very low pick rate.



- Attack speed: 0.99 → 0.97
- Chaos Hound / Cerberus: Attack speed: 0.99 → 0.97
Compensation nerf for being indirectly buffed by pathing and mercenary changes


- Health: 4000 → 4050
Low win rate.




- Health decreased by 2%
High win rate.



- Attack speed: 1.03 → 1.015
High win rate and pick rate.



- Attack speed: 1.27 → 1.22
High win rate and pick rate.



- Damage: 39 → 49
- Attack speed: 2.17 → 2.44
- Full Throttle removed



- Health: 2860 → 2800
- Damage: 102 → 135
- Attack speed: 2.17 → 2.44
- Bullet Rain removed
Gatling Gun was perpetually one of the least-picked units in the game, despite having a high win rate. It was difficult to position well, and even if you did, things outside of your control were often the difference between your Gatling Gun partially tanking and dealing maximum DPS, and tanking too much and quickly dying - a fine line between polar opposite results. We’re removing their faster attack speed and higher damage taken when attacking closer targets, but keeping their identity as immovable, long-range, fast-attacking fighters.




- Attack speed: 2.04 → 2.22
- Brawler and Duelist now cap after 20 stacks (~10 seconds of attacking the same target)
Stronger in general. Weaker in extreme cases, particularly against wave 20.



- Particle Wave: Damage: 9 (3 to bosses) → 10 (5 to bosses)
- Particle Wave now caps after 10 stacks (~10 seconds of attacking the same target)
- Solar Flare: Stacks 3 times → Stacks infinitely



- Purification Beam: Damage: 24 (8 to bosses) → 28 (14 to bosses)
- Purification Beam now caps after 10 stacks (~10 seconds of attacking the same target)
- Solar Flare: Stacks 3 times → Stacks infinitely
Stronger in general. Weaker in extreme cases, particularly against wave 20.
[h3]Mercenaries[/h3]
Mercenaries have been significantly power-creeped over the years, which caused long-saving mythium to become too strong in the mid/late game. We’re scaling this back with nerfs to all mercenaries, which will shift the power budget of mercenaries back into income.
These changes will shake up the meta, and while we do our best not to make overly disruptive changes, we believe this is the best long term solution - and perfect timing for it, given it's early in the season and there's a brand new 40-cost mercenary!
High-income mercenaries are nerfed roughly 20% and power mercenaries are nerfed roughly 10%.


- Health: 290 → 240
- Damage: 12 → 9
- Attack speed: 0.96 → 0.93


- Health: 350 → 290
- Damage: 35 → 29


- Health: 600 → 500
- Damage: 25 → 19


- Health: 880 → 800
- Damage: 61 → 53


- Health: 950 → 760
- Damage: 27 → 20


- Health: 1300 → 1030
- Damage: 62 → 48


- Health: 700 → 600
- Damage: 40 → 35


- Health: 760 → 700
- Damage: 46 → 41


- Health: 950 → 800
- Damage: 113 → 94


- Health: 1700 → 1500
- Damage: 88 –> 72


- Health: 1320 → 1000
- Damage: 84 → 70


- Leadership Aura: Damage: +5 → +4


- Health: 2350 → 2150
- Damage: 125 → 113


- Health: 1800 → 1450
- Attack speed: 1.32 → 1.23
- Froggo: Health: 500 → 400
- Froggo: Damage: 36 → 32


- Health: 2950 → 2700
- Attack speed: 1.31 → 1.16


- Health: 4100 → 3700
- Damage: 187 → 168


- Attack speed: 2.2 → 1.96
- Death Stare: Now does 40% reduced damage against the king


- Health: 4200 → 3800
- Attack speed: 1.77 → 1.54


- Health: 5750 → 5200
- Damage: 295 → 266


- Blood Rush: 10% attack speed + 40 damage → 40 damage


- Damage: 55 → 131
- Attack speed: 1.9 → 2
- Needle Spray (triple shot) removed
Needle Spray wasn’t serving its original purpose of countering cheap units and instead was just increasing battle rng, so we’re removing it.


- Health: 6970 → 6230
- Damage: 281 → 251
[h3]Waves[/h3]


- Poison-tipped Pole: AOE damage: 25 → 20


- Health: 65000 → 62000
Maccabeus was too strong. Combined with being hard-countered by certain builds, wave 20 was problematic. This nerf encourages trying to clear wave 20, rather than stall as long as possible.
[h3]Balance Watchlist[/h3]
The dev team is constantly monitoring game balance, between looking at data and listening to community feedback. If anything is being more closely monitored than usual, it will be listed in this Balance Watchlist section. For this patch, the following are on the watchlist:
- Mercenaries and game pacing
Improvements & Fixes
[h3]New Feature: Classic Modes in Custom Games![/h3]

- You can now select which Classic Mode shows up in the Custom Game room
- A simple majority vote (+1 yes vote) is enough to pass in Custom Games (as opposed to Classic, which requires +2 yes votes)
- Disabled old Chaos, Hybrid, Prophet, and No T1 Modes, (they are largely redundant with the Classic Modes & Masterminds)
- Improved MVP formula
[h3]Emotes Refresh[/h3]
New: Community Emotes!
There's nothing more sophisticated than using the right emoji at the right time, and it is our mission to give players the tools to do that.
- doofFiesta

- drachirWHAT

- lwonSMAR

- julianOHNO

- kingdanzz

- mrslickinsRespectable

- ofmaNerdge

- pennyPog

- pennyShiko

- fast

Plus, some Emotes QoL!
- Emote UI Options display has been improved to make it easier to configure your Emote lineup (Screenshot)
- Emotes by default now display without the white chat bubble (after some feedback & evaluation, we think they look better without the bubble. Apologies it took us this long to make this change).
- Emotes are now their own tab in Options
- Added a “Use Emote” quest to the weekly quest pool
As a compromise, an option called “Hide white bubble background behind emotes” has also been added to display the bubble for players who do like the pop-out appearance; just set that to OFF to keep the current behavior.
[h3]New Feature: Targeted Units HUD Display[/h3]

The HUD now displays the units that the currently selected unit is targeting & targeted by.
Aside from looking cool, this could help players better understand which fighters are taking aggro.
[h3]New Feature: Nekomata Undo Spirit Offering[/h3]

You can now undo Nekomata Spirit Offering stacks! Hold SHIFT to toggle on the Undo button.
Hell, it's about time.
[h3]New Feature: Guild Discord link[/h3]

Guilds: Added a “Guild Discord link” field - publicly viewable, editable by the Guild Leader only. Link must start with "discord.gg/"
[h3]New Feature: Top Games Rewards[/h3]

Making it onto the Top Games leaderboard now rewards 1000 Essence & notifies you with an inbox message.
[h3]Minor Improvements[/h3]
- Campaign: Campaign opponents now react with emoji if you long save against them (: pleading : when you long-save, : mild_panic : when the send finally comes)
- Classic: Takeover Bots when Dual Building now build & upgrade fighters (not very intelligently, but at least they build something instead of just workers)
- Graphics: Units now smoothly scale up/down when changing size
- HUD: Unit lifebars now scale more with large HP units
- HUD: Unit hitboxes now scale with model size
- HUD: Sacrifice now shows the amount of gold you’ll receive (similar to Sell, Pawn Shop, etc.)
- HUD: You can now pause/unpause the game with F9 (rebindable in Options). Pausing is now also rate-limited to 1 pause/unpause per second to help prevent cases of two players accidentally pausing/unpausing at the same time
- HUD: Turned off white chat bubble for various emotes
- Loading Screen: Game should now load faster for the first run (resources are slowly pre-loaded while alt+tabbed or not moving your mouse)
- Masteries: Clicking a unit in your Mastery profile page now shows a popup that you can flex (Screenshot)
- New Player Experience: Reordered Reach 20 Workers to come earlier (affects new players from now on only)
- New Player Experience: Greed is no longer automatically unlocked for all accounts, to encourage new players to learn the game with Lock-In
- Sandbox: All fighters now always sell for 100%
- Sandbox: -save/-load now supports Champion builds
- Sandbox: -load now immediately loads a build from the clipboard (no more popup)
- Sandbox: -lockwave command now freezes workers, restores gold/mythium, and automatically uses -clear if you leak
- Sandbox: You can now type all debug commands without a "-" in front, i.e. simply typing "greedisgood" or "start" or "wave 5" or "load" etc.
- Sandbox: New command: “-reload” which quickly uses -load with the most recently loaded build
- Weekly Challenge: Now supports Champion builds
- VIPs: Removed VIP display in Chat, Discord, and in-game. The “VIP” distinction was something leftover from release and has been retired indefinitely
[h3]Fixes[/h3]
- Campaign: Fixed a bug where Campaign opponents were mistakenly playing their “uh oh” sound every wave
- Gameplay: Fixed a bug where Eco Detection was wrongly kicking in when almost, but not full leaking Wave 1 (e.g. solo Casket vs. Snail or solo Elite Archer vs. Snail)
- Graphics: Fixed a bug where Eternal Wanderer/Samurai Soul weren’t properly tinted after reviving
- HUD: Fixed a bug where the Estimated Mythium tooltip would incorrectly show an extra mythium (it was rounding to Ceiling instead of Floor)
- HUD: Fixed a bug where Champion didn’t properly show up on the Enemy Tab scoreboard, or showed up twice
- HUD: Fixed a bug where you would be unable to place new towers after shift+building, then selling a shift-built tower, then trying to build one in the same spot
- HUD: Fixed a HUD bug where mercenaries sometimes didn't display as grayed out when out of stock
- Menus: Fixed a long-time bug where finding a match while purchasing a card from the card trader would cause the HUD to lock up in-game after entering a menu (such as viewing someone’s profile)
- Menus: Fixed a bug where slower computers would fail to load the Codex properly
- New Player Experience: Fixed a bug where the Incoming tutorial (third mission) bot didn’t build anything
- Sandbox: Fixed a bug where Legion Spells in -save/-load were causing the game to break
- Singleplayer & Co-op: Fixed a singleplayer/co-op bug where shutdown bounties were sometimes not cleared after using a Restart
- Fixed a spectator bug where emote names would mistakenly show up as _Closed
- Singleplayer & Co-op: Fixed a bug where shutdown bounties were sometimes not cleared after using a Restart
- Stability: Fixed a bug where Dual Build players being unable to build after reconnecting
- Stability: Fixed a bug where the game would fail to fully load the HUD after loading into game
- Text Commands: Fixed some cases of the "-lifetime" command not working as expected
- UI: Fixed some cases where |n mistakenly showed up in texts instead of being rendered as a new line
Community Highlights
[h3]January Nova Cup[/h3]

Legion TD 2's premier monthly tournaments are back for the new year! The January Nova Cup just finished this past weekend. Check out the VODs & results here to see some top level Legion play.
https://beta.legiontd2.com/esports/
[h3]Game Translations[/h3]

Legion TD 2's translations continue to be greatly improved, thanks to major contributions from community members! If you'd like to contribute to improving the game's texts further, visit the following link:

HUGE thank you to everyone who has helped up to this point!

Closing Remarks
This patch marks one of the rare times where the game's meta will be shaken up, but we feel it will be worth it to make a more compelling meta. As with all changes, these are heavily driven by thousands of games of data as well as player feedback through Discord, Reddit, and Steam. We are excited as well to give Classic Modes a major overhaul, along with refreshing some of the less popular Masterminds. Not to mention the new mercenary!

We've also taken the time to deliver a variety of QoL changes that have been highly requested, such as finally being able to undo Nekomata stacks.
As always, with any major patch, we'll keep a close eye on things and rapidly hotfix as long as needed.
Thank you again for playing Legion TD 2! We hope you continue to enjoy the game.

If you've enjoyed the game, but haven't left a review yet, please consider posting a short (hopefully positive

If you enjoy these updates, please give it a Thumbs Up, too!
And as always, if you have constructive criticism, let's chat about it. Discord and /r/LegionTD2 on reddit are our main channels of communication, and aside from the development team, there are community helpers who can ensure your feedback is heard, as well as answer pretty much anything you've ever wanted to know about the game. If you want a guaranteed answer from the devs, the monthly AMAs on /r/LegionTD2 are your best bet.
Sincerely,
The Legion TD 2 Team