Welcome Fate seekers,
This is a big patch with lots to cover, but let's not bury the lede: We're reverting the shop changes that we implemented at the start of Fates, unbought champions may again appear in consecutive shops. We'll dive deeper into our reasoning below, but in short, it was too easy to get 3-star champions and too difficult to adapt one's gameplan during the course of a game.
This patch will also see some significant work to a few traits. Cultists will now buff up Galio with their combined star level. Divine champions now work a little bit differently to give them greater, but time-gated, power. Moonlight and Vanguard are getting an additional tier to really top off their compositions.
Last but not least, ranked rewards from Galaxies will be delivered this patch. You'll get an emote denoting your final rank from Galaxies Stage II, and a very special Hauntling (or Hauntlings) if you ended in Gold or higher in one or both ranked stages.
Let's get into it!
A combination of recent changes to multiple traits, items, and champions created a truly monstrous Divine comp. We're nerfing a few of the outliers giving this composition just too much strength. Akali is also getting touched to make sure that she doesn't reign supreme in the aftermath of these changes.
We changed the shop odds at the start of Fates in order to make rolling in the shop feel more diverse, valuable and fun (which it did!).
Unfortunately, this change also had a few other side effects that we aren't happy with. First, the frequency and ease of achieving 3-Star units (especially in combination with Chosen) was too high across the board. Just like the last patch, we really want to avoid needing to tune down 3-star power and excitement, so we're targeting their frequency instead.
Additionally, for players who really understood the new shop rule, it became optimal to purposely not buy or speculate on units outside of their current gameplan. This made interesting pivots no longer as viable an option and limited the broader gameplay experience.
Context for Shades: We're reducing their effective time being stealthed by changing how the shade trait triggers. The stealth will now take effect AFTER 3 attacks, instead of on the 3rd attack. Shades will now auto attack 3 times, and then after the third one lands they will stealth and do bonus damage on their 4th attack, overall this is a nerf to the trait.
We want to smooth out the Cultist power curve as currently the trait provides a large spike in one stage and then falls off significantly the following stage.
Going forward, upgrading the Cultist units will help Galio scale into the next stage of the game, while maintaining the big spike that comes with playing 6 or 9 Cultists. This change also makes it so that playing 4 or 5 Cultists, while not optimal, is not totally and completely pointless.