Patch 2.7

Patch 2.7, or A Betta Meta, is one of the Patches of Orcs Must Die! Unchained.

Overview
This time around, there are so many changes that it's practically like a new game! Except that whole part about killing orcs!

Here’s a rundown:


 * New campaign mode for Survival
 * Tinkering adds trap upgrades
 * 3 new Survival maps
 * The meta has been revamped
 * The defense/offense role system has been revamped
 * Rebalancing turtle strategies

Campaign mode
This is a whole new way to play the survival game mode. Players can now battle across more than 50 challenges as they level their account and upgrade traps. Speaking of which…

Tinkering
Traps have always been the core of Orcs Must Die and we want to make sure they continue to feel important and special. With this update, you can upgrade your traps, improve their stats and visuals, and apply new parts to customize their operation.

Additional Maps, Traps, Traits, And Survival Mininons
A ton of new stuff awaits: 3 new survival maps, 5 new traps, 5 new traits, and 4 new survival minions.

Meta Revamp
We have rebalanced the entire meta-game to provide a more fun and rewarding experience. The skull store has been removed. All cards are now crafted with materials that drop during games, are picked up through the new salvage system, are rewarded from quests, or are dropped as part of new bonus rewards in chests. The dashboard UI has been updated with an all-new “workshop” to provide a one-stop shop for all things crafting-related.

Killing Turtles
No, we're not asking you to kill living, breathing turtles. “Turtles” are players who employ a defense-heavy strategy. This is fine in general--we want a range of valid strategies--but our game was heavily rewarding playing very defensively for a long period of time.

In general, farming is supposed to provide a counter for defensive strategies. Your opponent is safe behind their defenses, but this leaves you unopposed to gather resources. However, farming in OMDU becomes obsolete late in the game when minion portals hit their maximum level. This rewarded players for sitting back and waiting for their minion portals to hit the cap, regardless of how slow their progress was relative to their opponents’.

To counter this, we are allowing overflow minion portal experience to continue upgrading minions. This rewards teams that continue to farm and apply pressure in the late game rather than falling back onto defense.

In addition, we have increased trap damage by 50% and doubled the strength of the leadership aura. These increases make waves that are not led by heroes a lot easier to clear, escorting minions a lot more important, and prevents heavily upgraded minions from wrecking lanes when players allow them to go out alone.

Role system Revamp
Hero roles are gone. Players can now select any role they wish as a perk during hero selection. Each role provides associated bonuses.

The more we have done to produce a less linear game, the more we have seen players want to play in more diverse ways like playing Stinkeye on offense or Oziel as a roamer. The old role system was causing us to make design decisions that pigeon-holed heroes into one kind of play. We feel we can make better heroes by focusing on coming up with a solid set of interesting abilities for a hero and not worrying about ensuring that a certain ability intended for a defensive hero is weak when used on offense.

Allowing players to select a specific role also helps new players understand that there are team roles to fill and encourages players to fulfill these roles by rewarding them for doing so.

Meta

 * All cards can now be crafted and cost a varying number and type of crafting materials.
 * Crafting materials can now be gained from chests and quests.
 * Material drops during survival games can now be multiples (you do not get one of whatever you grab with each pickup).
 * There are chances for bonus drops in every chest. Oak chests have a fair chance for an additional bonus drop, Iron chests have a good chance for up to two bonus drops, and *Runebound chests are guaranteed to drop three bonus items. In other words, the chance of better or higher quantities of bonus items is increased with more valuable chests.
 * There are three new chests available in survival games. These will start to drop as you progress to higher survival levels, replacing the normal oak chest that occasionally drops. *In rift maps (endless survival matches), chests always drop if you achieve certain waves: the higher you get, the better the chest.
 * The old account and hero level system has been replaced. Account level is now the sum of your hero levels.
 * With every account level increase, you gain more health and damage in survival games (and ONLY survival games) with ANY hero you play. Hero level does not determine power in survival games; your account level does.
 * The power you gain with account level is non-linear. By the time you hit account level 100, you have the majority of the power increases available for survival games. However, you do still get slightly more powerful for every level above 100.
 * The "Store" and "My Stuff" pages have been redesigned. The store is now where players can spend gold to purchase heroes, chests, potions, and skins. The workshop is where players craft new cards for their collection.
 * The number of deck slots has increased from 6 to 8.

Survival Flow

 * A new campaign mode has been added. There are 50 levels with difficultly ranging from account level 1 to account level 100.
 * Normal, Hard, Veteran, and Endless have been removed. Players can now queue for a match balanced around the team's average account level or select a specific level for their team.
 * After level 80, players can collect or craft keystones which provide access to endless levels. Higher level survival games reward better resources to use for leveling up traps and getting parts. Endless maps provide the best rewards.

Tinkering

 * Players can now improve the tier of their traps with crafting materials. Traps can be upgraded three times and the ability to do this unlocks at account level 25, 50, and finally 75. Each tier up makes the leveled trap substantially better and also opens up a new socket that will accept a part.
 * Parts can be crafted and will drop in certain chests. These can be used to customize the operation of traps.
 * Part-acquired bonuses and modifications for traps apply only in survival games.

New Survival Maps

 * Crogon Keep
 * The Wall
 * Frostbite

New Traps

 * Power Generator: generates coin when enemy minions are in front of it.
 * Fire Cracker: a cheap, fire, floor trap with a three trap x half-trap footprint.
 * Arcane Phaser: a cheap, arcane, floor trap that vanishes after firing 10 times.
 * Ice Spike: an extremely small, extremely cheap, triggered, ice, floor trap.
 * Lightning Rod: A cheap, small, ceiling trap. Every times this trap fires, it gains a charge. Every few charges will cause the attack to chain to an additional target.

New Traits

 * Not Scared of Statues: +12% damage to guardians.
 * Rip That Sucker Open: +12% damage to caches.
 * Cache Whisperer: killing a cache grants +15 coin in addition to the normal reward.
 * Never Knocks: +15% damage to gates.
 * Soldiers Took My Horse: +12% damage to soldiers

New Survival Minions

 * Kobold Pups: they are easy to kill but occasionally decide to take a bite out of nearby players.
 * Dynamite Archers: these archers fire a slow-moving arrow with a stick of dynamite attached. Dynamite explodes, damaging nearby players and barricades. Attack dynamite to destroy it.
 * Fire and Ice Ogres: these tough minions are resistant to fire and ice.

Offense tutorial

 * We have added a siege (offense) tutorial.

UI

 * The minion portal UI has been redesigned for clarity.
 * There are no longer card locks in the minion portal, and minion cards can no longer be sold.
 * Hero card backs now have bars showing their relative strengths in the following attributes: offense, defense, pillaging, damage, survivability, support/control, and unchained strength.
 * Trap and gear card backs now show far more details.

General

 * Caches now have collision.
 * Many, many, many (but not all) bugs have been fixed with matchmaking and parties.
 * Ranged, instant attack heroes now have hit bloom, causing their attacks to become more inaccurate as they fire. In addition, base accuracy has been reduced.
 * Designer Comment: We made this change for two reasons. First, we wanted to punish holding down the primary attack button and creating a constant stream of damage. Second, we wanted to make instant ranged attacks harder to land at longer distances. We think this improves the overall gameplay of instant, ranged attacks.


 * Heroes no longer have a defined role. Instead, players now select a role before each match, providing unique bonuses.
 * Offense: an offense player plays minions and leads them into the enemy rift. +8% leadership aura strength. +8% experience from leading minions.
 * Defense: a defensive player places traps and prevents enemies from reaching the rift. These players start with coin and gain +10% experience from killing minions.
 * Pillaging: a pillaging player roams the map to destroy caches and catch enemy players off-guard. +18% experience from caches.
 * All traps now deal 50% more damage, but the escort aura has been increased to compensate.
 * Designer Comment: This change sounds more significant than it turns out to be. In general, this allows defense players to leave their lane more easily when a lane is not escorted, but it also requires teams to escort more often to make progress. As a result, this should minimize games where both teams feel intense pressure from tier 4 minions without anyone escorting their waves. A side benefit of this change is that killbox effectiveness is easier to evaluate because the range of killbox damage has been increased.


 * The team score HUD in siege now only grants 1 point per 4 rift points rather than 2.
 * Doubled the value of combos in the rating score.
 * A new end-game sequence has been added in siege matches.

Speed, Camera, and Animation

 * Heroes move substantially faster. These changes should up the pace of the game without making the game harder to read.

Minions

 * Minions' coin cost is reduced by roughly 50%. This change was made to allow offense to change their minions more easily, allowing teams to counter enemy decisions intelligently.
 * Steady has been redesigned: it now reduces the damage of powerful attacks substantially while at low health.
 * Designer Comment: This provides players with an effective strategy against the steady mechanic. While steady is still strong against burst damage, skilled players can now utilize their burst damage early on rather than waiting to use it to finish minions off.


 * Fixed a bug that caused hobgoblins healers and dwarf shamans to be much stronger than intended in the last patch
 * Troll health regeneration delay increased to 7 seconds, from 3.
 * Non-boss minions now gain 3% health and damage for every 1,000 minion portal xp gained at tier 4.
 * Designer Comment: In general, farming is supposed to counter defensive strategies. However, at tier 4, farming becomes obsolete due to minion portals reaching max level. This change is designed to reward teams that continue to farm and apply pressure in the late game rather than falling back onto defense. The change to trap damage prevents lanes from applying extreme unescorted pressure.

Bosses

 * All bosses now ignore players unless their description states otherwise.
 * Designer Comment: This change was made to prevent kiting, which is a tactic used by experienced teams to essentially nullify the effectiveness of a boss. In the future, we may introduce bosses that target heroes in ways that are much more difficult to exploit.

TikLik

 * AI fixed. He will now properly use his abilities.
 * Heal changed from 120 flat health to 25% of max health. This is a significant late-game buff.

Vitality

 * Now properly resurrects allied minions every 7 seconds. This was not functioning reliably before.

Traps

 * All traps that are not a hero-seeker or a utility trap no longer affect heroes.
 * Designer Comment: We didn’t like the difficult to understand rules about what traps can affect heroes. This was causing frustration and feelings of being randomly slowed/damaged.

Hero-Seeker Tesla

 * Hit radius reduced by 15%.
 * Damage decreased to 30 from 40.
 * Cost reduced to 1,500 from 2,000.
 * Re-fire delay decreased to 2.8 seconds from 4.
 * Designer Comment: We wanted to make the strategy of spamming hero-seekers more difficult without nerfing their cost effectiveness significantly.

Healing Well and Mana Well

 * Restoration speed lowered by 50%.
 * Restoration duration increased from 10 to 15 seconds.
 * Cooldown increased to 6 seconds from 4.
 * Designer Comment: In general, the healing and mana wells minimize recovery downtime too significantly, making it hard for offense to capitalize on defensive mistakes. This was a large contributor to drawn-out matches.

Shield Powerup

 * Damage blocked reduced by roughly 15%.

Dragon's Lance

 * Damage decreased by 11%.

Freedom Trinket

 * Now properly removes freezes.

Ice Amulet

 * Damage increased by 15%.

Dobbin

 * Tunnel can now be seen through fog of war when nearby.
 * Tunnel teleport time increased to 3 seconds from 1.5.
 * Dobbin tunnel shield now properly stacks with the shield power-up.
 * Designer Comment: In general, Dobbin's tunnel is not that powerful in the hands of teams that do not communicate. However, in the hands of teams that do, it can be very difficult to defend against. The goal with these changes was to weaken the tunnel in a manner that allows the enemy team to counter its use. This will cause the skill level required to use the tunnel to be similar to the skill level required to counter the tunnel. Less-experienced players should not be hit as hard by the change.

Master

 * Mana shield max damage reduction lowered to 72% from 75%

Smolder

 * Dragon’s Breath damage increased by 6%.
 * Designer Comment: Keep in mind, naphtha no longer affects players.

Stinkeye

 * Health increased by 5.5%.
 * Totems no longer take damage from traps.

Zoey

 * Chaos Blast can no longer be used while disabled as was originally intended.

Siege-Mode Unchained Fortress

 * Crogon health is no longer displayed on the minimap.
 * Designer Comment: We find gameplay more surprising and fun when players have imperfect information due to fog of war.

AI

 * Bots will now attempt to capture neutral objectives.
 * Bots can properly adjust their vertical attack angle to attack enemies.
 * Many additional bugs with bots have been fixed.

Last Minute Updates

 * Tutorial was showing 0 skull rewards before the players started. They were granted correctly.
 * Tiklik will not show up in the workshop currently. He can be found in chests and once rewarded, will work.
 * Fixed chest ordering to be Tin, Iron, Rune in the store
 * Shield Power Up trap was removed for now due to a bug.
 * Updated chest loot tables

Some Issues with Chests
Reward rarity will be hard to notice in chests – the cards do not show rarity on the card face. Also, in most cases, the opening animation does not change, so you don’t see the more impressive blue light and stuff flying around when you get an epic or legendary card.

If you click “continue” on a chest with multiple drops too quickly, it will close the entire chest. If this was on the first reward in a five reward rune chest, you won’t see any of the other cards rewarded. (You do still get them, the animations just don’t play.)

Because of a rev to some dash elements, skulls are not showing in post-game rewards. You are getting them, they just do not show in the dialog.There is a new reward algorithm for PVE. It did not make it in for this release. In addition, not all of the materials drop during PVE games yet. Both will be fixed shortly, but PVE will not reward correctly until we do so.

There are three new chests that are rewarded for higher level PVE games. In non-endless, these chests have a chance to drop, like oak, and replace the oak chest. In endless, these chests are guaranteed at certain waves – if you get high enough, you’ll always get the chest reward. Functionally, these are in and work, but these chests got the shaft when we revised the others. So, for now, my guess is the rewards in these chests are, at best, insane. At worst, your monitor catches fire when you open one of these.