Release 1.3

# Release 1.3 – The Orc Revolution

## Available July 12, 2016

Bionka, the orc queen, is back on her throne, and she’s
leading a full-on orc revolution. The time to summon your magical armies through
the rift is now! Gather up all of your friends and create an army of
trap-wielding, butt-kicking mages and monsters to defend your rifts. We’ve made
it easier than ever to invite old friends and make new ones – and then to band
together for a good fight.

## New Hero: Bionka

Bionka’s high health, high damage, and difficulty with initiation and escape make her an easy hero to understand, but a difficult hero to master. In contrast to the Orc king, Bloodspike, who sacrifices his minions to buff himself, Bionka sacrifices herself to protect her minions. This orcish synergy with Bloodspike makes her a dangerous foe.

* **Mace to Face**: Bionka swings her flail in a wide melee attack.
* **Slam It Down**: Bionka slams the ground with her flail dealing heavy damage.
* **Bionka Bounce**: Bionka jumps up and bounces on the ground, knocking enemies up into the air in a radius.
* **Beat Dem Back**: Bionka winds up her flail to unleash a devastating medium range attack. Attack causes a heavy knockback.
* **Sing an March**: Bionka sings a lullaby that reduces the damage taken by minions in its radius. If a minion dies in its radius, Bionka is dealt the damage. Skill can be cancelled.
* **Unique Glyph - Orcish Field Promotion Glyph**: Promotes 5 orc minions that cross it per wave. Light orcs are promoted to medium orcs, medium to heavy. Glyph expires after 20 promotions.
* **Passive - Orc Momma:** Bionka's health regeneration is increased proportionally to the number of nearby friendly minions.

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## New Survival Battleground: Bionka’s Throne Room

Luxurious by orc standards, the Throne Room is the main room of Bionka's Dark World Palace. Its vats of acid, bridges, and turns make it treacherous for invaders and defenders. Bionka's left some nasty surprises there for the Order and a beautiful statue of herself for her babies to remember her by.

## New Survival Battleground: Baths

This classic OMD battleground returns! Someone has poisoned the water in the Order Academy Baths, and Cygnus is pretty sure the Unchained are to blame. Pay them back by obliterating their forces on this simple, one-lane, one-door battleground. Don't forget to bring your floor traps, physics traps, and barricades.

## New Feature: Five-Star System

Introducing the new Five-Star system! Players will now receive a rating of 0 to 5 stars when they complete a survival match. This rating takes into account rift points lost and completion time. Do you have what it takes to master every level? Read the official guide to find out how you can earn 5-stars.

## New Feature: Guilds

We have added a new community feature: guilds. Guilds allow players to group together based on common interests and shared goals. In addition, guilds can compete with each other for guild points on the guild leaderboard. The highest ranking guilds (ranked by the amount of points earned) will receive rewards at the end of the season. You can read our official guide for guilds to help get you started.

## New Feature: Survival Party Downscaling

One of the most highly requested features is a method to downscale higher-leveled players to play with lower-leveled friends. Now, when a player groups with another player that is more than ten levels below them, their level will be scaled to be no greater than ten levels above.  The matchmaker will take this into account and provide correctly-tuned content and rewards when choosing a battleground.

## New Feature: Friend Referral

Players are now able to refer their friends and get rewarded! If your friend registers for an account and wins 5 matchmade (survival matchmaking, siege coop matchmaking, or siege PvP matchmaking) games, you will both receive a runebound chest. Even better, if your friend wins 20 games, you both win 2 runebound Chests, and at 50 wins, you both win 3 runebound Chests and an exclusive Blackpaw skin. Visit
the Refer-a-Friend (feature is
live on July 12) for more information.

## New Boss Art: Tubifore

Tubifore is a multi-armed, barricade-crushing force.  He is replacing Orfum in siege mode.  Anyone who previously owned Orfum will now own Tubifore instead.

## New Guardian: Bartender

The new Bartender Guardian is here to serve up some pain. With a rolling pin in one hand and a beer in the other, this stout giantess fiercely protects her kitchen and her allies' rifts. Invaders and bad tippers beware!

**IMPORTANT: Standard survival play has been capped at 3 players.**
 After much consideration, we have decided to remove 4 and 5 man survival games
(with the exception of endless mode). The more we iterated on survival’s design,
the more we realized that the game plays better with fewer players on medium-sized maps instead of more players on large-sized maps. We understand this will be a contentious topic, but we think the overall gameplay experience will be better overall.

## Survival Balance:

* Fewer minions will aggro players in games with a higher player count.
* Minion damage increased in games with a higher player count.
* Kamikaze kobold speed has been reduced by 25%.
* Barricades gain more health with each tier upgrade.
* Wall Building PhD grants 0.5% of the barricade’s max health each second rather than a flat +2 per second.
* Several maps have had their waves adjusted.
* Endless has been heavily rebalanced and now exclusively supports 5 players. Players can try endless with fewer than 5 in a party, but better be prepared to have a hard time. Leaderboards will be reset because of this change.
* Fixed a bug that caused minion portals to show the wrong status on the minimap.

## Dashboard UI:

* Players can now add friends from the post-game screen.
* Win count now only shows matchmade wins. Total wins will be displayed in a different location in a future patch.
* Non-cards, like materials, keystones, and trap parts, now have different appearances in the workshop.

## Tab Screen:

* Revisions have been made to the tab screen to make it easier to read. For example, the vertical separators have been removed and we have made the column icons more readable.

## Meta:

* Recipes are now unlocked as players level up their accounts. Players unlock all recipes by level 30, with the exception of rift keystones which are unlocked at level 80.
* We already hotfixed an issue with XP being used to calculate rewards. Essentially, the more XP you earn in a game, the more materials you get. Bonuses, like the 25% you get for playing matchmade games and the 25% you get for playing with a hero you own, were not working for this--now they do.
* Partial rewards were previously not being accounted for correctly. They will now round up in all cases. For some materials, this isn’t a huge change. For materials that reward lower numbers (say, rift cores) this can be substantial--like +100% substantial.

## General Siege Balance:

* Player kill experience has been lowered by 25% at the start of the game. This reduction fades as players level up.

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>  Designer Comment: This change is being made to lower the chances one team could get far ahead in the early game. This should lead to closer matches.
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## Shield Powerup:

* Damage reduction provided by powerup reduced to 20%, down from 50%.
* The powerup no longer expires after you take a certain amount of damage.
* Duration reduced to 15 seconds from 25.

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>  Designer Comment: This change lowers the shield powerup’s capability to block burst damage and makes the shield powerup easier to understand. Also, regularly resetting a shield powerup previously provided players with a constant 50% mitigation, which would now only be 20%. However, in the average case, we expect the trap to be relatively similar in strength.
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## Traps:

 All traps have had another timing pass to fix various bugs reported by the community.

* **Power Generator:**
	+ Now loses 8% of its maximum health each time it generates coin.
	+ Downtime increased to 80 seconds from 30.

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>  Designer Comment: This change mostly targets survival. We believe the power generator is currently too powerful in this mode. We are looking into additional changes for it in the future.
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* **Push Trap:**
	+ Now refires once every 10 seconds, down from 14.
	+ Upgrading the push trap will no longer decrease the cooldown as significantly.
* **Barricades:**
	+ Gains 32.5% trap health per survival trap tier, up from 30%.
* **XP Siphon (Trap Part):**
	+ Generates 3 XP, down from 5.
* **Double Struts (Trap Part):**
	+ Reduces all damage taken by 40%, rather than reducing melee damage by 50%.
* **Fire Resonator (Trap Part):**
	+ Damage bonus decreased to 35% from 50%.
* **Ice Resonator (Trap Part):**
	+ Damage bonus increased to 70% from 50%.
* **Controlled Resonator (Trap Part):**
	+ Damage bonus decreased to 35% from 50%.

## Minions:

* **Hunters (All types):**
	+ Health reduced by 40%.
	+ Damage taken from traps reduced by 75%.
	+ Damage increased by 30%.
	+ Move speed increased by 25% when running.

> Designer Comment: Hunters feel like tanky meatballs that slap you with noodles. They’re super obnoxious and tanky, but don’t deal significant damage. This change is designed to make them feel more like assassins while also allowing the enemy to eliminate them more easily.
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## Heroes:

* **Bloodspike:**
	+ Fixed a bug that was causing his passive to occasionally spawn more piggies than intended.
	+ Fixed a bug that allowed Bloodspike to execute an allied boss.
	+ Fixed a bug that allowed Bloodspike to deny experience from the other team.
	+ Chance for delicious meals to spawn increased to 14% from 6%.
		- Delicious meals now last 12 seconds, up from 8.
* **Stinkeye:**
	+ Totem of Speed slow strength lowered from 30% to 20%.
	+ Demotivation weaver now increases the slow from 20% to 30%, down from 50%.
	+ Arcane Anomaly mana cost reduced from 80 to 65.
	+ Arcane Bowling Ball charges increased from 4 to 6.

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>  Designer Comment: We’ve been putting a lot into how we should change Stinkeye. In general, we came to the conclusion that refocusing Stinkeye’s strengths into his Arcane Anomaly would make the hero less frustrating, add more ways to react, create more build options, and bring the hero into a better state overall.
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* **Maximilian:**
	+ Sturdy Decoy health reduced by 25%.

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>  Designer Comment: Max’s win rate is quite high and we want to pull him back in a way that doesn’t take away from the core fun of the hero. His decoys have proven to be very powerful and don’t have a way for the enemy to reduce their effectiveness, so we decided to start here.  We are considering larger changes to his decoy in the future that we think will make the trap more interesting while keeping its intended strengths.
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* **Cygnus:**
	+ Feign Death duration reduced from 12 seconds to 5.
	+ Dead Useful: Cast time lowered from 3 seconds to 0.5.

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>  Designer Comment: The vast majority of Feign Death’s power comes from the first second of use. We believe 5 seconds is more than enough time for Cygnus to force enemies to stop attacking him. We don’t believe this change is very significant, despite it sounding large.
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* **Gabriella:**
	+ Primary attack now deals an additional 50% bonus damage vs. minions.

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>  Designer Comment: Gabriella has been on a balance roller coaster. In general, because so much of her power is oriented around her Kinetic Pulse, she can either succeed in using it and be very powerful, or fail and become useless. We think this is too binary and want to improve her effectiveness while her Kinetic Pulse is not available. This is a large change, so let us know how it feels.
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* **Hogarth:**
	+ Ambush! slow increased from 25% to 30%.

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>  Designer Comment: Hogarth’s win rate is reasonable right now, however, we have heard many concerns about him being too weak. We want to buff him slightly in a way that allows him to initiate fights more effectively.
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* **Tundra:**
	+ Icicle Burst cooldown increased from 3.0 seconds to 3.5.
	+ Icicle Burst mana cost increased from 20 to 23.
	+ Icicle Burst damage increased from 18 to 21.

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>  Designer Comment: This change maintains Icicle Burst’s DPS but lowers his freeze up time against minions. This is Tundra’s role, but with the splash damage weaver, Icicle Burst became too effective at halting waves.
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