LogFAQs > #972927711

Mercenaries Changelog, Part 7:

We are concluding our changes to the current roster of standard battle mercenaries with this changelog. Our changes are as follows:

Zenos: We are adjusting Zenos' Test Of Your Reflexes to 15 EXP, increasing its AP cost by 1 on a successful activation, and changing it to a button-mashing contest with a 24 hour submission window out of deference to players' busy schedules. This should preserve the fun of this ability while removing the time-sensitive component.

Liquid Snake: We're clarifying how Liquid interacts with mental abilities so as to make matches with him a little easier to interpret. We are otherwise pleased with him and plan no further changes for him.

Kefka: We are increasing Kefka's clown form to 3/week as an anti-cheese measure. We don't think he's worth 3/week battlewise at all, to be clear. This is just a way to prevent some degenerate ability combos from going off too easily.

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In addition, we want to talk about 7/week mercenaries and their role in the Mercenaries ecosystem. We know people are down on them, thinking of them as useless paperweights, and would like to shed some light on what role we believe they serve and how we're treating them going forward.

First off, we consider 7/week mercenaries to be automatic ability bots. Their ability is battle worth strong enough to automatically cleanly win you matches provided all other factors (this is to say: your supporting cast and ability hax vs the enemy's) are relatively equal. 7s were autowin machines unless you had very specific setups in Mercs 4 (two 6s, posssssssibly three strong 5s, anything else did not work) or you hit them with abilities until they fell over. Needless to say, we don't believe this to be the case anymore, and we're full glad of it. No mercenary's existence should be an excuse to turn brain off and write SOLOS regardless of who they're facing. That just makes the game more boring and linear, and that's not really what we are about.

THIS SAID...it's clear 7/weeks have some issues right now. They are hit disproportionately hard by the bounty hunter changes, as they cost the most money to pay down, and paying ruinous GP costs on top of enormous min bids is very unappealing. It would cost 100 GP to deploy Raiden in mid tier once, even if bought for min. That is just too much money to get a whopping two matches out of him. As such, in an unprecedented move, we are actively adjusting 7/week mercenaries to be cheaper to buy at baseline than 6/weeks overall. Not 100% cheaper (we want Master Chief to be able to duel 7s in mortal kombat consistently), but enough so that a strong 6/week will cost more than a strong 7. We want the initial deployment to be less painful in terms of the damage they do to your teamcomp, so that relying on a true top end mercenary is viable. We plan on deploying a few extra 7s on top of the ones we have right now at launch, too. More on this below.

Raiden: We are adjusting Raiden's min bid to 75 GP from 86 GP, swapping his Your Memes End Here and base abilities around, reducing the cost of the latter to 15 EXP, reducing his parry's cost to 25 EXP, and making it so it goes off on any non-Peacetime Global abilities that trigger it (as well as clarifying it can check for activation any number of times per week until it goes off successfully). We want to make him a bit more enticing a purchase, and believe this will achieve that goal nicely.

2B: We're adjusting 2B's minbid down to 76 GP to make her a more appealing purchase.

Nero: We're adjusting Nero's minbid down to 76 GP to make him a more appealing purchase.

Sol Badguy: We're temporarily putting Sol in the icebox, to return at a later date. We were satisfied with his respect, but a caveat to this satisfaction is that Sol was conceived as a mercenary, by design, factoring in that a number of voters would look at his feats and go 'I don't believe this, this is too powerful for Mercenaries!'. We judged that the risk of him getting universal respect in the hands of any leader was just about nil, and considered the potential upshot of him getting argued by a charismatic owner to truly get full unquestioned respect to be a neat upshot that would make him the new 'most powerful battle mercenary' yardstick. With how risky 7s are as a purchase by default, however, releasing a mercenary who has to be argued past initial distrust to get full respect is not appropriate for the launch weeks 7/week lineup. As such, we'll be replacing Sol with two to three other 7s who are guaranteed to get easy automatic respect with very little persuasiveness required. 7s, at least early on, are supposed to serve as easy anchors of respect a leader can lean on to know they will get a baseline level of hype for their teams. We want to make sure they serve that purpose for now.

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That is all for now. Next up, supports and Phantasmal mercenaries.