Dota Underlords Mid-Season Update To Bring Balance Changes

A big update for Dota Underlords is rearing its head – you can see it on the horizon if you squint and tilt your head just so. Instead of letting you stew in horror at all the potential changes, the developers at Valve have decided to release the full change log ahead of the patch. That way, you can mourn your favorite heroes and items even before they get nerfed to oblivion.

I’ve been playing the game casually, but I have no idea why Axe is juggling plates in the image above. Probably an allusion to the process of balancing a game like this. Let’s get the objectively good news out of the way first. Once the update hits, we’ll be getting more Battle Pass XP from matches and challenges, along with the ability to change our loadouts. There will be a new board too, and the devs claim they’ve “removed code that caused crashes and kept code that doesn’t cause crashes”.

Then there are the gameplay changes like not allowing you to waste a healing ability on a unit that cannot be healed. The preparation phase for the sparring matches has been shortened considerably, which should make for a more dynamic experience. And then come the balance changes. There are 150 pages of those, and they include tweaks being made to heroes, alliances and items. You can view the full list of changes over yonder, but here’s a quick “best of”.

Kunkka has been nerfed both by increasing the cooldown and lowering the damage of the Ghost Ship. Medusa has been bumped up to tier 5. Alliance items no longer have tiers – instead, they appear at random tiers and scale in power. Losing a neutral round will no longer remove two items – instead, all three will be from the previous wave’s pool. Neutral round monsters have also been rebalanced – nerfed in most cases.