October 3, 2018
Welcome, All Lightseekers,
Today we have some fantastic news regarding changes to Ranked Play going forward!
On top of this, we also are making important changes to four digital cards.
All of the below changes are coming in the next game update. At the moment this update is slated to be released in the week beginning on the 15th of October. With that being said, let’s begin!
Kicking off with our “Ranked Matchmaking”, as you get a higher rating the search window for opponents gets bigger in order to compensate for players being more spread out. This has been increased further; so as an example for our players, in Platinum I, your search window has increased by 2 brackets over time.
Your change in “Rating” when you win or lose a game depends on how far above or below the opponent was compared to you. The windows ranging from weaker to stronger have been adjusted to accommodate for the increased search window. These changes will now also begin to affect players in the Master Rank.
So that covers our Ranked Play changes, but what’s in-store for the cards? Well let’s take a look.
The Ranked Play format in Lightseekers has seen a huge number of players battling it out in thousands of games over the last two months. In that time we’ve seen different strategies vie for supremacy, with a big shake up coming in the form of Kindred coming to the digital game and towards the end of the season we started to get a handle on the ‘top’ decks for the game. A few of these exist because there aren’t reasonable ways to counterplay against them in a best of 1 game format like the Ranked ladder, so we are going to be making changes to the following 4 cards for Ranked Season 2 in an effort to build more diversity in what is played.
Starting with Treanu, his “Ability” now only lets you draw cards if the target doesn’t have maximum health. Not only this, but the heal provided to the target can no longer trigger other effects. At the moment, Treanu edges out a lot of Nature Heroes as the default ‘best’ due to the way his Ability affects early game decisions, and favourable interactions with Spirit Channeler.
The updated text is as follows: “[Ability]: If your target is not on maximum health, [Draw] 2 cards. Your target heals for 3. This heal cannot trigger other effects.”
Next up is Paralysis Bug. Due to some interactions we have seen with this card and new Kindred Heroes such as Asivak, this pesky Insectoid no longer stops card draw but instead only affecting Defends. As a quality of life change (and to bring its formatting in line with cards such as Shadow Wraith), the number of cards to draw has been moved to the corner value.
The updated text is as follows: “[Draw] X cards. Your target cannot [Defend].”
Wind Controller has also had the keyword ‘Burn’ added to it. The interaction of this card with Tornado to create the ‘Infinite Ushi’ deck, leads to games that take excessively long times to complete, whilst also minimising ways for players to effectively counteract it.
The updated text is as follows: “[Burn] [Played] Attack and Defend combos and [Expired] Buff combos are immediately moved back into your hand (after applying their effects). This does not apply to [Burn] cards.”
Lastly, Granite has received a change to the damage increase when the deck is empty. This is now 3, down from 5. Granite has been the long-standing best Hero in Mountain when it comes to battling out the long game, in fact it is often an inevitability that if Granite manages to get to his empty deck, he will often be able to close out the game in a matter of a couple of turns due to the huge damage boost. We’re hoping that by lowering this, there is more chances for players to meaningfully interact with Granite in this phase of the game.
The updated text is as follows: “Increase damage done to other heroes by 3 if your deck is empty.”
These changes will be added in the next game update. We will provide every player a Full Shard Refund on all digital copies of each of these cards, as well as letting you keep them in your collection so you can try out their new versions.
At the moment the physical versions of these cards will have no changes for tournament play, though we do have an upcoming announcement regarding physical banned & errata’d cards soon.
Please let us know what you think to these changes on the forums and social, we look forward to seeing you in-game!