#game-balance

#game-balance

Jetpack Cat's minor perk Claws Out--which grants her a quick melee attack that damages and slows enemies over time--now has a longer cooldown, increasing from six to eight seconds. The bigger nerf is directed toward the major perk Territorial, which gives her Purr healing ability the trait of damaging nearby enemies--that damage has been reduced from 50% to 33%.

Booting up Safeguard in the new season of COD: BLOPS7 was like returning to an old friend's house after years away to hang out. Something I've always appreciated about the mode was how it gave the defense a way to fight back that wasn't just "Kill the other team." You can instead focus your damage on the robot, and if you do enough, it will stop moving and have to reboot.

Over the holiday season, despite my best efforts to play more Hollow Knight: Silksong and Expedition 33, I felt the weird haunting pull of League of Legends again. There are so few five-player versus five-player competitive experiences with such a rich cast of characters that I've essentially grown up alongside. League of Legends is entering its seventeenth year in gaming and it looks like it has no intention of slowing down yet.

Now and then, a patch adds something that makes you wonder how it got through testing. Most competitive game fans pore over patch notes, combing through every change to make sure their favorite fighting game or hero shooter is "fair" and skill-based. Well, Dragon Ball FighterZ got a last week, and even if you don't play Arc System Works' anime fighter, you should see this absolutely dirty new tech for one of its many Goku variants.

To help make that happen, the game's developers will soon release an expansion fully capitalizing on that TV series for the first time, and I got to spend a few hours playing that update to see if it's any fun. The important work is a lot less flashy: combat overhauls, bug fixes, balance updates, quality-of-life improvements, and technological tweaks-all of which have been added to the game over time. Ultimately, that little stuff adds up to be more impactful than the big stuff for players.

Opinions from the Commander Format Panel varied. Some believe Commander is more fun without them, others would like more time to see how the Commander Bracket system is adopted before doing anything here.