Valve’s autobattler game Dota Underlords is receiving a balance update today, the company has confirmed. This is the first update of its kind since the game went out of closed beta, releasing on mobile and becoming available on Steam to all players.
The update was supposed to have come out last night, but Valve postponed it to today for unknown reasons.
The update is focusing on tuning down heroes and Alliances that are too strong and giving some buffs to those that are too weak. Valve has revealed one of these buffs in advance, and it’s coming to the Dragon Alliance.
The first change is that players will need only two Dragon units to trigger their Alliance bonus instead of the previous three. With only Puck, Viper, and Dragon Knight belonging to Dragons, players no longer need all three to activate the bonus, and they can trigger it earlier since they can buy Puck and Viper before unlocking level four units and having Dragon Knight added to the units pool.
The Dragon bonus will change to let heroes from this alliance unlock an additional ability, which will make them the only heroes in Underlords to have two abilities. Dragon Knight will gain Breathe Fire as his new and now base ability, while Puck unlocks Phase Shift and Viper unlocks Corrosive Skin upon activating the Alliance bonus. Valve has yet to reveal how dual abilities will work in Underlords.
Dragon Knight is getting another huge buff. When the Dragon synergy is active, he’ll start a match in Dragon Form straight away without needing to farm mana to transform, as it works in the game’s current version.
This is just one of the changes coming to Underlords today. When Valve wrote about delaying the update, it said “Keeper of the Light’s horse is more powerful than we anticipated.” This can be a hint that Keeper is getting weaker in this patch since he’s an essential nuker in Mages builds, which has been running rampant in all levels of play.
