Patch Tuesday – plus EU store is open tomorrow

Robot Entertainment have today released the next OMDU early access patch for the NA region (EU patch is due tomorrow) and this is the first patch for the beta. Its quite a biggie too with patch notes spanning many lines. Luckily REF is here to give you the quick summary on the bigger changes of this patch.

Leadership

First up Leadership. This has changed quite a bit in terms of how it is earnt. Before there was a leadership trickle that players earnt in various ways (eg. killing players and spawning minions). Directly from the patch notes Robot had to say:

Early in the game, trickle is the dominant way to get leadership (later, minions are lot more valuable). Minions, being lower level, are harder to score with and provide less leadership when you do manage this. Early hero kills are similarly pretty low-value (although a few of them will allow a player or two to do a few things early). This trickle was 5 leadership per second, per player (1800 total per team, per wave).

We think this arrangement contributes to the current slow pace start of the game and also makes sitting on defense as a group a lot more attractive and a lot less of a risky.

Post patch leadership will now be earned by the player being close by to friendly minions. Leadership will no longer be gained by means of trickle as described above. This sounds like quite a drastic change, but trust me you wont feel drastic effects when playing. Lets dig down into the patch notes to see how this works:

You now earn leadership ANY time you are within a short distance from ANY of your minions. So, if you are on offense and are moving with your waves, you will earn leadership for your team (you’ll see leadership flyoffs for this).

The base amount of leadership earned by staying with your minions is 35 leadership per second. If only one player is escorting, that’s all the team will get. If another player is there, the team will get 1.5x (52.5 per second). A third takes it up another notch (61.25 per second).

The goal of this change is to try and speed up the early game and make it more risky for too many players to be sitting on defence. It adds more strategy into the mix as teams who spend more time on the offensive and can balance their defence effectively will be able to score big returns in leadership.

This remains obviously quite a significant design change, and as we’re in beta Robot will be very interested in hearing community feedback on this change via the forums. If you have feedback – good, bad or even just in-different, be sure to hollar on the official forums.

Smolder

Some important changes for those who like to play as Smolder. Robot felt there were a number of design issues with Smolder in particular with regards to her primary attack and defensive ability post wave 3:

Her prior incarnation had area of effect damage everywhere, but not for much of a reason. Why would you ever flame form and then run through enemy minions to set up an ignite when you could (when you could get it to work) just charge up a giant ranged fireball and set everything alight from safety? Plus she had little escape, and her defensive ability fell off after the enemy hit Level 3 at their war camps.

To help alleviate the Smolder concerns her primary attack has now changed, it is no longer chargeable and she instead just fires larger single shot fireballs that are slower moving. Her “Q” ability that provided her fire form now additionally provides crowd control immunity. With these changes it is felt that Smolder will be better balanced particularly in the later game amongst other heroes. See the patch notes for full details on the Smolder changes.

Dieting Heroes

All of the heroes have been on a diet! Ie. all the heroes have been made smaller in size. This has been changed to help make “collision” where you collide with other players (and also getting stuck in terrain) less painful. From the patch notes:

In internal testing, this has been positive – it is easier to get past heroes, harder to body block, more ranged shots hit (instead of being stopped by colliding with the cubic meter of air under your Bloodspike ally’s axe), and you don’t get caught on terrain as often.

Initially this seems like a positive change, but again one where feedback will be welcomed via the official forums.

Improvements to Wi-Fi connections

There have been numerous reports on both the NA and EU forums about difficultied playing on Wi-Fi connections. Good news is that improvements have been made in this patch to help resolve some of those connection problems (lag).

Changes to sprinting

This change is a little deeper in the patch notes but is quite important to be aware of before you next play. By default your hero will now spring (ie, run) rather than walk. Instead of holding SHIFT to run you now hold it to walk. This change might feel a little strange and might take a bit of getting used to. As before, hit up the forums to give your feedback.

More more more

There are TON of addtional things changes in this patch. The above is a mere summary of what we think are the more important points. We encourage all budding OMDU players to check out the full patch notes over on the OMDU website. The full patch notes can be found here:

https://forums.orcsmustdie.com/discussion/1013/build-number-10058

Store opens for EU tomorrow!

For EU players we have some great news to share! Gameforge have posted that the EU store will be open for business from tomorrow once you have downloaded the patch.  Purchasable card packs, heroes and vanity ahoy! Gameforge are also running a promotion where you can earn even more gold in your founders pack if you upgrade before 11am CEST tomorrow. Check out the comments from Gameforge:

To reward all the players that bought a Master or War Mage pack or Upgrade before the in-game shop was opened, we will grant even more Gold: Masters will get a total of 157.500 Gold and War Mages a total of 31.500 Gold with their Pack.

Don’t miss out on that extra gold which is perfect to go towards heroes, card packs and skins!