This is the main post to discuss general changes from the recent update.

You can see the details for the preliminary tuning adjustments in the Game Updates forum post.



We’re changing the Prisoner’s passive.

With that out of the way, let’s summarize the broad changes that we’re looking at doing in the next update:

  • There are certain characters that have passives which counter a large swath of other characters before combat even starts (Prisoner, Angel of Pain, Death Dog, Warrior Troll)
  • There are certain characters with extremely high usage rates in PVP, especially within certain combos, which despite some additions and changes continue to dominate and frustrate in the arena (Prisoner, Warrior Troll, Mummy Eddie, etc)
  • There are many very rare characters which are not used frequently (if at all) not only in PVP but in PVE (Samurai Eddie, Visions Eddie, Warrior Child of the Damned, etc)
  • Certain defensive status effects can be very problematic to play around or counter (Vanish, damage reduction shields, Void Shields, etc)


We believe that these changes will help to promote a healthier battle environment in the Arena. Previously we have attempted to achieve this balance without touching abilities by adding new Talismans, however this didn’t meaningfully change the kinds of team compositions people used. It became clear that anything new or different we added to counteract certain existing passives and skills would essentially just create a new batch of drastically stronger abilities that would overwhelm the old ones.

In short, we hope this set of changes will achieve 3 things:

  1. Increase the diversity of viable characters in the Arena
  2. Help pave the way for more interesting PVE content set for the coming months
  3. Ensure each of the affected characters can shine within their niche (even if that means some characters won’t be the best answer for almost every encounter)