Update 5.8 Patch Notes

[TheGrillFather]

Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Update 5.8

Welcome to the Disney Heroes: Battle Mode 5.8 Update! This release features a new costume, plus a number of improvements and bug fixes.

Overview

• New! Mayor Bellwether costume from Disney’s Zootopia
• Improvements and bug fixes!

Villaintine’s Events Announcement

Starting on January 29th and running until February 17th, Villaintine’s Events are making their way back to DH, and this year, we’ve got something special.

Gather up your Zootopia crew against foes, and battle your way through a limited-time trial event to earn exclusive cosmetics, including the chance of unlocking a brand new Mayor Bellwether costume! Then, prepare all the villains you love to hate and earn more exciting prizes in a Villaintine’s Special Invasion starting February 12th!

Look forward to a variety of events ranging from Market Discounts, Bonus Chances, a Limited-Time Event Crate, and more. Don’t forget to log in and join the fun!

Patch Season 16 Information

Due to our team’s priorities shifting towards improving game performance, we are taking a pause on the hero balance efforts until we can get the game in better working order. This includes the start of Patch Season 16, pushing the start time 4 weeks later than usual, to February 21st.

Since we are delaying the start of Patch Season 16, we will extend the currently running season, Patch Season 15, to cover that duration.

Changes to the Reflect Buff

The Reflect buff has been a common cause of many infinite combat loops in the game for a while now and we’ve seen a steady uptick of these issues in the past months as more Reflect slowly trickles into the game over time.

Its also been a buff we’ve wanted to revisit since we felt it was over delivering on its intended purpose, simultaneously being a perfect defensive and offensive tool.

In this update we’ll be making some changes to Reflect that push it into its intended use case of being primarily a defensive tool while also making it healthier for the game’s combat overall.

Reflect now works as follows:

• Heroes with Reflect prevent 80% of incoming damage (taking the other 20%).
• 20% of incoming damage is also returned to the enemy who dealt the damage.
• Reflected damage cannot Crit, be Dodged, or Reflected again.

To go along with this change, Rose’s Creature Finder Memory Disk will be adjusted to grant her the Reflect buff.

You’ll also notice that the old Reflect explanation text has been removed from several Skill tooltips since that information is available by tapping on the Reflect icon.

Old Tooltip

New Tooltip

Improvements

• Campaign quick fighting
  • Quick fighting is now available in the normal and elite campaign
  • Progress through campaign nodes and reach higher rarities faster with this feature!
• Game Performance Optimizations
  • Power Promotion has been one of the culprits to game performance issues, so we put in a fix to help servers run a little more smoothly
  • We also made some improvements to certain contest task behaviors to help, but this is a bigger investigation that is ongoing
• Battle Pass changes
  • We’re currently working on major adjustments to the Battle Pass that will go live with the next client update
  • More info will come as we finalize the changes, however, please be informed that the Battle Pass will not be immediately available at the start of February
  • In short, there will be no Battle Pass for the first few days next month!
  • We’re aiming to get 5.9 Patch Notes out to everyone by February 2nd, so stay tuned!

Bug Fixes

• Patched up a visual bug with Kuzco’s Skill 2
• Fixed a bug where the Raid Elite Campaign button fails

This is a full app and server update that is currently planned for Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024.

[Professor_Rune]

About time you fixed reflect
But now you have to rework the stats of all the heroes that rely on self reflect skills so that they can survive getting hit now

[Ozi_swag]

Well I guess we can stick on this for now

[Earond_V]

@TheGrillFather

• Heroes with Reflect prevent 80% of incoming damage (taking the other 20%).
• 20% of incoming damage is also returned to the enemy who dealt the damage.
• Reflected damage cannot Crit, be Dodged, or Reflected again.

FINALLY

Most broken buff FINALLY fixed.

[Ozi_swag]

Yeah that’s why Rose keeps dying every time I use her

[Pipsqueak]

@TheGrillFather

including the chance of unlocking a brand new Mayor Bellwether costume!

Will we be able to get it this time without remortgaging the house?

@TheGrillFather

changes to Reflect

Something was definitely needed here to prevent the infinite looping - but this sounds like an enormous nerf in a lot of cases the Reflect will now do effectively nothing to change the outcome of a dealt attack.

Months ago when the issue started becoming prevalent, I commented this:

“A possible fix without nerfing specific heroes who suffer from this - basically any hero who has a large white skill damage and can also become invincible - would be to alter reflect damage not to trigger Fury (ie. 0 energy would be gained from receiving reflect damage)”

This seems like it would have mitigated the problem without affecting the capability of reflect too much (if anything, actually making it stronger!)

The new proposed reflect changes will mean that any hero with inflated stats will now annihilate an older, reflective hero with almost no tangible recourse…

[Ozi_swag]

@Pipsqueak

Will we be able to get it this time without remortaging the house?

That’s what I was thinking too because I had to buy the battle pass so I can Elsa’s Costume

[Jody_Caviness]

@TheGrillFather

Gather up your Zootopia crew against foes, and battle your way through a limited-time trial event to earn exclusive cosmetics, including the chance of unlocking a brand new Mayor Bellwether costume!

I was initially excited about this, until I realized that (a) it meant that we wouldn’t have a Prize Wall for Bellwether’s costume, and (b) her costume, like Elsa’s, is going to be locked behind a “soft” paywall of having to spend an excessive amount of stamina in order to earn enough threads to unlock it.

Other than that, though, this year’s Villaintine’s Event sounds decent.

@TheGrillFather

Since we are delaying the start of Patch Season 16, we will extend the currently running season, Patch Season 15, to cover that duration.

Since we wouldn’t be getting any effective buffs for the season’s heroes anyway, and since everyone has their first four patch talents, this strikes me as eminently reasonable.

@TheGrillFather

• Heroes with Reflect prevent 80% of incoming damage (taking the other 20%).
• 20% of incoming damage is also returned to the enemy who dealt the damage.
• Reflected damage cannot Crit, be Dodged, or Reflected again.

…Oh dear, that sounds like it might be too much of a nerf on Reflect. And I’m sure making this severe of a change on a mechanic that’s been in the game for over three years is going to be met with fierce resistance, even if it’s one that’s hated by a lot of players.

@TheGrillFather

Game Performance Optimizations

These sound very promising; I hope they mitigate the issues leading to the severe lag enough so that the team can resume their focus on hero balance and other gameplay QoL adjustments. I guess the trial by fire will be the next cap raise in three weeks.

Since there’s been no mention of when/if the Guild and VIP crate heroes will rotate, I guess I’ll just have to assume it’ll be another 2-3 months; and I suppose all the comments about heroes getting locked in other exclusive crates for 9 months have been correct after all.

[The_Real_Numi]

@TheGrillFather

Gather up your Zootopia crew against foes, and battle your way through a limited-time trial event to earn exclusive cosmetics, including the chance of unlocking a brand new Mayor Bellwether costume!

Ah yes, Prize Wall is DEAD. Thanks for the confirmation.

@TheGrillFather

Then, prepare all the villains you love to hate and earn more exciting prizes in a Villaintine’s Special Invasion starting February 12th!

Oh, really? The same as New Year Special Invasion which had terrible rewards?

@TheGrillFather

Market Discounts

Yes.

@TheGrillFather

Bonus Chances

Boo.

@TheGrillFather

Limited-Time Event Crate

Uhh maybe?

@TheGrillFather

and more.

@TheGrillFather

we are taking a pause on the hero balance efforts

Well, the biggest hero balance effort would be reducing disk stats by x100 for heroes that currently at max level disk have tens of trillions. Easy.

@TheGrillFather

Reflect now works as follows:

• Heroes with Reflect prevent 80% of incoming damage (taking the other 20%).
• 20% of incoming damage is also returned to the enemy who dealt the damage.
• Reflected damage cannot Crit, be Dodged, or Reflected again.

@TheGrillFather

making some changes to Reflect that push it into its intended use case of being primarily a defensive tool while also making it healthier for the game’s combat overall.

Yeah, this should have been the original instance when Ian and Reflect was released. It´s uhm… 40 months too late, I guess?

@TheGrillFather

Campaign quick fighting

• Quick fighting is now available in the normal and elite campaign
• Progress through campaign nodes and reach higher rarities faster with this feature!

[Phal]

Small patch notes but the Reflect change is great.
This should make the Rose Ian Joy Meg lines that are near unbeatable right now a lot more manageable… and I wouldn’t worry about other heroes too much since they’ll be rebalanced during the year anyway if they’re hit too hard by this change

[Ozi_swag]

@The_Real_Numi

Ah yes, Prize Wall is DEAD. Thanks for the confirmation.

And now we’ll never get new heroes early as possible in fact everything you said is true that I wish the game can just go a new direction by adding a new challenge

[VicMaster21]

Ok i got Bellwether, i can level up max to get new costumes!

[Captain_Poole]

It’s probably next week’s patch note that we’ll get a new character. We just have to be patient.

[Rex_Hood_LXXXVI]

So…no more prize walls? Well that sucks…and replacing them with new trial events are a horrible choice! I can see it now: you get 3 free tries per day but if you want more each try take 7 million energy to do it.

[Captain_Poole]

There’ll be new prize walls soon. They just have to test new characters before releasing them.

[KrishMortyJunior]

When are we getting the next hero?

[BluEyed_Dragon]

Well, they addressed it. While I agree reflect is broken, I believe the level reflect was modified seems to be unreasonable. I wonder how many toons are going to become less functional, how many counters are going to disappear, and why the damage was addressed vs the duration and cool down which seems to be the more likely cause of the problem where fights get locked up due to reflect. As far as dealing with reflect in fights, reflect can be a headache but there are ways to deal with it. In the days following the update, I believe we will see players complaining about the viability of reflect after this change.

[Phal]

@BluEyed_Dragon

I believe we will see players complaining about the viability of reflect after this change.

That… might be the case
Still, 80% damage reduction is a lot regardless of how much is reflected. When the actual balance changes start releasing it should be very strong… and certainly a lot easier to balance around than it is now

[The_Real_Numi]

@Rex_Hood_LXXXVI

but if you want more each try take 7 million energy

What makes you think it will be ONLY 7 millions? As TheGrillFather said there is an overabundance of stamina (for whales, of course).
So expect the reset to be at least 21 millions.

Eh, Christmas-New Year ones had 16.2 millions per reset. And that was pretty garbage.

[TheGrillFather]

@Jody_Caviness

we wouldn’t have a Prize Wall for Bellwether’s costume

We won’t have a Prize Wall for Bellwether’s costume because we are still in the midst of revamping it! I can’t spoil too much yet (because we’re testing out the changes, and if they turn out to be buggy we will have to make further changes), but we are still looking to get Prize Walls back in the mix by the end of Q1!

@Jody_Caviness

Since there’s been no mention of when/if the Guild and VIP crate heroes will rotate, I guess I’ll just have to assume it’ll be another 2-3 months;

There will be hero rotations with the new hero in a few weeks, but hero rotations is something we would like to review.

@The_Real_Numi

Well, the biggest hero balance effort would be reducing disk stats by x100 for heroes that currently at max level disk have tens of trillions. Easy.

We have pinpointed in our investigation that memory disks have far surpassed a healthy state, and it one of the core adjustments we will be doing with hero balances. Unfortunately, game performance fixes are a full team effort, so even pursuing this “easy” fix has to be pushed back.