v11.07 Major Update

Expected patch release: Tuesday-Wednesday, August 13-14 (Pacific Time)

[h3]News[/h3]

• Check out Lisk's Game Dev AMA and Jules' Gameplay & Balance AMA from this past month
  
• Next Nova Cup: August 24-25
  
• Join the Tournament Discord to participate and receive tournament notifications. View all past Nova Cups here: Legion TD 2 Esports Portal.
  
• Check out Drachbot to see mastermind, unit, and spell win rates and pick rates

[h3]New Fighter: Warp Wing[/h3]





Warp Wing

• Tier 4 (Cost: 145g)
  
• Role: Supportive
  
• Ranged / Pure / Arcane

Plasma Decay
Reduces the damage of up to 4 nearby enemies by 3, stacking up to 30 times.

[h3]New Fighter: Void Manta[/h3]





Void Manta

• Tier 4 (Upgrade Cost: 270g)
  
• Role: Supportive
  
• Ranged / Pure / Arcane

Plasma Overwhelming
Each target of Plasma Decay now receives 2 additional stacks.

[h3]New Secret Card: Dank Dino[/h3]

Dank Mage has gone too long without friendly competition.


[h3]Double Down[/h3]

• Price reduction: 10,000 essence → 5,000 essence
  
• Weekly purchase limit: 4 --> Unlimited!

Double Down was initially released at a higher price point and with a weekly limit to guard against being too disruptive on the ranked ladder. Now that things are stable, we feel good about the new price point and removal of the weekly limit.




[h3]Classic[/h3]

• Reverted nerf to AOE damage
  
• Reverted health and damage nerf to Hydra
  
• Reverted the change that prevented Sakura from gaining stacks and Bankers from gaining gold on waves 21+ (Eggsack can still no longer be built on waves 21+)

Initiate operation Make Everything Fun Again! We tried being responsive to community feedback about balance issues in Classic, but realized that only moved the problem. By reverting these nerfs, we create more competition for the currently dominant raid boss Lioness build.

Friendly reminder that Classic is an unranked mode with no skill-based matchmaking, and it will be less balanced than Ranked.

[h3]Systems[/h3]

Leak Gold

• Leaking is now less punishing on waves 1-10 and more punishing on waves 11-21.
  
• The exact numbers vary by wave, but in the early game, the leaker will get, on average, 12% more compensation gold, and the opposing team will earn 18% less breaker gold. In the late game, the leaker will get 9% less compensation gold, and the opposing team will earn 11% more breaker gold.

This encourages risky worker pushing in the early game and makes split sending / breaking your opponent for gold more rewarding in the late game.

Attack Speed Bug Fix

• A few patches ago, a bug was introduced that made certain units attack too fast. To our knowledge, the only units that were affected were Granddaddy (wave 10), Killer Slug (wave 14), Gatling Gun, Vulcan Cannon, and Champion Gatling/Vulcan. In recent patches, these units were nerfed and balanced around the existence of the bug.
  
• This patch fixes the bug, so we’re adjusting the attack speeds of wave 10, wave 14, Gatling Gun, and Vulcan Cannon to remain unchanged. These fixes are not shown in patch notes to avoid clutter and confusion.
  
• Substantively, the only changes you should notice are (1) Champion Gatling Gun/Vulcan Cannon is no longer attacking faster than expected, and (2) wave 14 is getting independently nerfed. If there are other, unexpected effects of the bug fix, we’ll address them in hotfixes as needed. Apologies for this bug.

[h3]Masterminds[/h3]

Castle
- Bonus income on wave 11: 45 → 47

Low win rate.

Champion
- Attack speed and damage reduction: 9% → 9.25%

For such a unique and fun Mastermind, Champion's pick rate is lackluster. And now that Champion Gatling Gun is properly balanced, Champion deserves a small buff.

Fiesta
- Gold from leaking: Reduced by 2 on wave 1 and 3 on waves 2-21

Compensation nerf for the changes to leak gold, which are an indirect buff to Fiesta.

Lock-In
- Random: Bonus gold: 7 → 8

Low pick rate and win rate.

Redraw
- Gold cost for Redrawing: 1 to 30 → 1 to 25

Low pick rate and win rate.

[h3]Legion Spells[/h3]

Battle Scars / Divine Blessing
- Attack speed bonus now affects summons and clones
- Battle Scars can now be applied to Soul Gate and Hell Gate

This makes these spells consistent with Hero and Champion and more versatile.

Giant Snail
- Health: 550 → 530
- DPS: Decreased by 1%

High win rate and pick rate.

Glacial Touch
- Damage: 45 → 50

Low win rate and pick rate.

Hero
- Attack speed and damage reduction: 4.25% → 4%

This change was supposed to go out last patch, but it slipped through the cracks.

Lizard Army
- Retired from the game

This spell is overshadowed by Robo Squad and has historically been difficult to balance and make fun. RIP Lizard Army: 2018 - 2024



Thanks to Schakara for the icon.

Magician
- Mana regeneration: 0.57 → 0.55

High pick rate and win rate.

Vampire
Life steal and ability vamp: 23% → 24%

Low win rate and pick rate.

[h3]Fighters[/h3]

Whirlybird
- Damage: 40 → 39

High win rate.

Angler
- Health: 380 → 360
- Damage: 17 → 16

Bounty Hunter
Damage: 78 → 77
Max mana: 120 → 180

The mana change is mostly a ForFun change for players that want a giga chad Kingpin, but in most competitive games, it won’t change much, as it’s usually optimal to upgrade your Kingpin before it reaches max stacks.

Slightly high win rate.

Honeyflower
Attack speed: 1.04 → 1.025

High win rate and pick rate.

Cursed Casket
- Health: 1470 → 1440

Cage of Pain
- Health: 2600 → 2540

Iron Maiden
- Health: 3700 → 3640
- Blade Storm: Damage: 42 → 40
- Blade Storm: Damage Reduction: -2 → -5

Shifting power from Cursed Casket and Cage of Pain to Iron Maiden, and increasing the power budget of Blade Storm’s damage reduction.

Nightmare
- Attack speed: 1.78 → 1.83

Low win rate and pick rate.

Azeria
- Health: 3300 → 3250

High win rate.

Fenix
- Damage: 292 → 298

The removal of Dual Shot on wave 15, AOE damage on wave 18, and Split Shot on wave 19 indirectly nerfed Fenix. Low win rate and pick rate.

Hades
- Mana cost decreased by 2.5%

Slightly low win rate and pick rate.

Millennium / Doomsday Machine
- Attack speed: Attack speed: 0.625 → 0.613

Very high win rate.

[h3]Waves[/h3]

Wave 14: Killer Slugs
- Attack speed: 1.25 → 1.23

Wave 16: Cardinals
- Attack speed: 1.156 → 1.149

Wave 17: Metal Dragons
- Attack speed: 1.681 → 1.69

[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:

• Howler, Sunfang, Antler, and Whitemane are statistically strong, but their power isn’t flashy (compared to units like Whirlybird and Azeria), so players tend to perceive them to be weaker than they are. Perception is important, so we’re holding off on nerfs for now.
  
• Wave 21 Inferno (splash damage) may be on the strong side, but it’s also good for the game when builds with high tier units fare better than cheap unit spam.
  
• Cheap unit spam is stronger than expected on waves 15-19, and we’re still thinking of a good way to address this. Thanks to Kidk and Julian for feedback and discussion.

Smurf Boosting
There was a recent incident of top players duoing with smurfs to boost to the top of the ladder. It's impossible for us to police smurfing, but as this is a matter of ladder integrity, we are responding as follows:

• Reduce the rating and peak rating of the players involved
  
• Modify the duo rating formula to further penalize large gaps in rating. At 2800+ rating, it will now be impossible to smurf boost. This may also penalize legitimate duos with a rating gap, but it's the only way to prevent smurf boosting at scale - without the mod team constantly making subjective judgment calls.
  
• To compensate for the above change, slightly reduce the flat adjustment for duoing. This makes duoing slightly better for players that are very close in rating.

Improvements & Fixes

• Double Down: Fixed a display-only bug where the Double Down message didn’t display properly in the tab scoreboard
  
• Double Down: Fixed a display-only bug where purchasing Double Down didn’t show a confirmation popup
  
• Double Down: Fixed a few cases where the Double Down counter wasn’t updating after finishing a game
  
• Double Down: (Workaround) Double Down is no longer purchasable while in queue, to fix some bugs that resulted when a match was found a split second after being purchased.
  
• Spectator: Fixed a bug where attempting to use -ff as a spectator would crash the game
  
• FairPlay: Fixed a case where players would be mistakenly still marked as suspicious players (the “[!] in postgame”) in the case where no players were able to connect properly. Instead, the punishment is ignored since it is likely the server’s fault in those cases.
  
• Tutorial: Disabled pause/unpause in most tutorials, since players who accidentally paused the game had trouble advancing
  
• Tutorial: Fixed a bug in the Attack Types tutorial that prevented players from advancing

[h3]Game Translations[/h3]


Legion TD 2's translations continue to be 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:

Help Translate Legion TD 2

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



This patch has some exciting meta improvements by buffing risk-taking in the early game and introduces new supportive units to the game - Warp Wing and Void Manta!

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 ) review for the game! If the game reaches 90% positive, Steam will give it more visibility = more players = more freelo better matchmaking!

If you enjoy these updates, please give it a Thumbs Up, too!

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,
Team Legion