Weapon and Unit Balance Adjustments - Developer Log

Hello Warlords,

In this article, we’ll be sharing a summary of our recent Weapon and Unit balance adjustments, alongside a look into our future design direction.

This series will be continuously updated, as we want to maintain an open dialogue with the community and listen to everyone's feedback.

For our recent Nodachi updates, we took the Life Drain mechanic as a starting point and reworked the combat cycle centered around the Bloodlust and Blood Rage passives.

Taking Blood Blade as an example: we redistributed the effects of the Life Drain attribute to strengthen the utility of different skills in the rotation, significantly improving the overall effectiveness of life stealing.

Regarding Runes, we noticed that the impact of the Heroic Strike rune on the weapon's overall power had gone beyond a reasonable scope. In this adjustment, we shifted some of its stats directly into the Hero's Specialty. This ensures that the Nodachi's power remains in a controllable and healthy range, whether the rune is equipped or not.

Additionally, we optimized animation transition frames, engagement logic, and damage detection logic, alongside targeted buffs to specific skill stats. Our goal is to ensure that your custom skill combos excel on the battlefield, both for killing Heroes and clearing Units.

These adjustments have been live for about a week. Compared to last week's data, the average damage dealt to Heroes has increased by around 50%, and average damage to Units is up by over 30%. In terms of Damage Absorption, the Nodachi now ranks second among all weapons, sitting just behind the Sword & Shield. Notably, the performance of low-to-mid-level players saw a significant boost, proving that these adjustments have lowered the skill floor and allowed more players to experience what this weapon has to offer.

However, the issue with the Heroic Strike rune hasn’t been fully resolved. As a limited-time seasonal performance booster, it was originally designed to balance seasonal strength, highlight unique traits, and enhance the combat cycle experience. Yet, after accumulating stats over several updates, the pick rate and impact of this rune in mainstream playstyles have continued to climb. This has kept the entry barrier for the Nodachi relatively high at the start of a season or for returning players.

We’ve already received plenty of battlefield feedback from you, and we’ll be further tweaking the feel and power of the Nodachi based on those comments. For instance, we’re looking into optimizing the Guard Break feedback when casting Dragon's Leap during Blood Rage, tuning it to match the operational rhythm you're already used to. We also hope Nodachi masters will continue to share their thoughts and discuss the weapon with us.

Our recent tweaks to the Musket focused heavily on its Hero-killing capabilities, aiming to bring players back to the core combat experience of the weapon.

On a control level, we optimized the combat camera, close-range target ballistics, and ammo energy drop-off to improve overall handling and performance when dueling enemy Heroes.

For clearing Units, we simplified the logical execution for throwing explosives, buffed the damage multiplier of Blackpowder Grenade, reduced the cooldown of Caltrops, and added a new mechanic: this skill now slows down both enemy Units and Heroes, helping you land your other abilities more consistently.

For survivability, we added a knockback crowd-control effect to right-click basic attacks, reduced the stamina cost of rolling, and shortened the cooldowns for Close Combat and Skirmisher. These adjustments were made to give the Musket a highly viable close-to-mid-range combat option: the risks are higher, but the rewards are meant to match.

As basic attacks return to their roots as a high-output, close-to-mid-range tool, more players are opting for full Agility builds and running Hero-killing skills like Scatter Shot and Fine Gunpowder. Looking at the data, both average damage dealt to Heroes and average Hero kills per match have seen a massive rise.

The new knockback effect on basic attacks, combined with the reduced cooldowns and optimized handling for Skirmisher and Close Combat, has helped the Musket maintain a notably low death rate in the current meta. It can now comfortably sustain its damage output right on the front lines.

We don't have any specific tweaks planned for the immediate future, but we’ll keep a close eye on live combat data and player feedback to evaluate our next steps. If any of you Musket veterans have new ideas, please let us know!

The Glaive is a weapon many players have dedicated themselves to mastering since they first started the game. However, as other weapons have been continuously released and adjusted, its stats and gameplay feel needed a buff to keep up with the modern battlefield.

Looking at its skill tree, God of Battles and Heat of Battle form the offensive and defensive core of the Glaive, defining its identity. Building on this, we redefined the roles of each skill and experimented with different playstyles. We want each skill to have a distinct utility that directly answers a player's needs in the heat of combat.

In terms of gameplay feel, we optimized the transition frames and engagement logic across all skills to ensure attacks connect reliably and combos flow a lot smoother.

Following the latest updates, the Glaive's overall damage numbers have seen a highly respectable increase. However, its Damage Absorption hasn't quite reached the level expected of a Heavy Armour weapon. Because the Glaive relies on wide, sweeping motions with slower wind-ups, landing hits can sometimes be precarious. Relying entirely on raw skill damage buffs to solve this issue could end up pushing the Hero's power level to an unhealthy extreme.

We plan to further boost the Glaive's damage output to better align with its Heavy Armour identity. The specific approach will involve enhancing existing or introducing new passive mechanics. This will provide more stable defensive support and damage windows during engagements, ensuring the combat flow isn't entirely dependent on landing one single skill and opening up more breathing room for outplays.

Balancing risk and reward is the foundation of creating tailored player experiences. The Bastard Sword was the very first weapon to feature a customizable Specialty system. By focusing on the three armor types—Light, Medium, and Heavy Armour—it aims to highlight unique strengths while balancing out risks and rewards.

Looking at current data, we’ve noticed that the "reward-to-risk ratio" for Medium Armour players using the Specialty system is trending too high. They are dealing damage on par with Light Armour users, while enjoying error margins close to that of Heavy Armour. This deviates from our original design intentions.

Moving forward, we will stick to the core principle of balanced risk and reward by reapportioning the damage, defense, and mobility across the Bastard Sword Specialty system. We want to ensure that Light, Medium, and Heavy Armours each possess distinct advantages while maintaining clear, identifiable limitations.

Specific adjustments will include: reducing the "invincibility" window during dodges and capping the stamina cost of dodging; tweaking the damage output and armor penetration for the Medium Armour Bastard Sword; and increasing the rewards for the Heavy Armour playstyle, allowing it to perform up to the standard expected of a Heavy Armour weapon in all-armour combat.

Thanks to their unique Last Stand state, the White Plume Guards can absorb ridiculous amounts of damage while holding their lines. Factoring in the current season's tags, their Leadership cost dropped even further, giving them an incredibly high overall cost efficiency. This put defenders at a massive advantage when contesting a Settlement. Backend data also revealed that while their damage output ranks in the lower-middle tier among Shield Units, their Damage Absorption leads by a massive, unintended margin. Because this distribution strayed far from our design goals, we prioritized shortening the time window during which their Last Stand state can absorb major damage.

Furthermore, we’ve been continually fixing edge cases and unintended interactions since their launch. For example, repeatedly tapping the 'X' key to Form Up would constantly refresh their crowd-control immunity. Entering formations outside of using the active skill White Plume Formation—whether during the process of moving or holding the normal formation—should not grant CC immunity, so we've patched this out.

Whether in Siege Battles or Ranked Battles, the defensive hit-absorption of the White Plume Guards is currently 1.5 times higher than the second-place unit. This proves that the overall damage output from Heroes and Units is currently not enough to break through the White Plume Guards' defensive lines, especially given the global reduction to Unit damage output at the start of the season.

Under current mode rules, defensive stats that sit this far above the average heavily favor the defending team. If attackers cannot break through a defensive position for extended periods, the match pacing drags, resulting in Stagnation and hurting the gameplay experience for everyone involved.

Our logic for tweaking the White Plume Guards remains focused on one core idea: preserving the damage-absorbing identity of their Last Stand state, while ensuring they don't experience a steep drop-off in numbers once the state ends (using various recovery tools). We want them to remain a reliable frontline tank when contesting a Settlement, just not an unbreakable one.

The duration of the Last Stand state triggered by the Long Live the Han skill will be reverted. To balance out their baseline damage reduction against their overall match performance, the base damage reduction provided by White Plume Formation and Shattering Bash will be lowered, but the block drain penalty will be slightly reduced. Overall, the goal is to keep their damage absorption potential intact, but raise the mechanical skill floor required to sustain it.

The current damage output of the Queen's Knights, especially against other Units, is higher than most Melee Infantry and even beats out the majority of Cavalry, trailing only behind certain mechanic-heavy Ranged Units and a few specific Cavalry Units.

Their primary damage skill, Run 'Em Through, provides them with an "invincibility" effect for nearly a third of its duration, allowing them to bypass substantial amounts of incoming damage. Currently, there is basically no counterplay to this invulnerability. This allows them to dish out immense pain while dodging most of the retaliation, resulting in an overall survival rate that far exceeds our design expectations.

The duration of the invincibility effect on Run 'Em Through will be reduced, and their defensive capabilities will take a slight nerf. The goal here is to ensure the Queen's Knights have clear tactical counters on the battlefield, rather than boasting excessively high numbers in both output and survivability at the same time.

That wraps up this update on Weapon and Unit adjustments and our future design directions. Next week, we’ll be kicking off our Vanguard PTR testing for these changes, and we look forward to the help and feedback from all you veteran players.

Combat balance is an ongoing, dedicated effort, and the true impact of any adjustment always needs to be tested in live matches. Because of this, we’ll regularly share our internal thoughts and development direction to maintain open, honest communication with all of you. We’ll also keep a close eye on community discussions. With the Conqueror's Blade League (CBL) approaching and top competitors already gathering, we’ll be watching the performance of every Class and Unit closely. We will also be inviting captains, commanders, competitors, and streamers to join us for roundtable discussions so we can improve the game together.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about anything covered above, please don't hesitate to let us know. We really do read every comment. Thank you everyone!

— The Game Design Team