Hi-Rez Studios is on a retooling spree. The latest god to receive the fine-tuning hails from the Roman pantheon with new equipment from his forge. That’s right, Vulcan, God of Smithing, has followed in the footsteps of He Bo, Hel and others to receive partial to full ability revamps.
For Vulcan, this includes a completely new 3. The penultimate key now launches a Magma Bomb, acting like a skillshot Thumper complete with knockback. Backfire received a return to its original design, providing Vulcan a backwards push when fired. The ability will no longer stop when it hits an object, making it a true dash. His ultimate now increases 30% across all ranks.
The patch includes the typical changes, updates and such. First up, the Golden skins for Chronus, Athena and Ares. That’s backed by a voice pack for He Bo. Correct, no new pack this week. Ah Muzen Cab was once again nerfed fairly hard while Ares was made even more dangerous.
Full patch notes after the cut.
Ability Makeover: Vulcan
- General
- New loading screen card.
- Backfire
- The backward dash movement on this device has been re-enabled. It will also now slide against angled walls and surfaces, rather than come to a complete stop. Note: The movement now acts like a traditional dash. He will no longer have invulnerability frames, or lose the point in Domination while moving.
- Inferno Cannon
- The tooltip now indicates that this turret takes 50% additional damage from non-god sources.
- The Inferno Cannon’s current target will also now have a targeting beam drawn to them, similar to those of Towers
- New #3 – Magma Bomb
- Vulcan returned to the workshop and re-emerged with a new gadget. His Thumper XVI has been replaced with the Magma Bomb. The Magma Bomb is a ground target projectile that explodes on impact, damaging nearby enemies, dealing magical damage, and stunning and knocking back enemies within the explosion radius.
- Volcanic Overdrive
- The bonus protections have been removed and replaced with 30% damage reduction across all ranks.
- This ability now also grants CC immunity while active.
- Misc:
- Vulcan received some visual FX upgrades to his melee attacks and other miscellaneous areas
- Vulcan should no longer play his intro animation twice/
New Skins:
- Golden Chronos
- Golden Ares
- Golden Athena
Voicepacks:
- He Bo’s voice has been updated.
General
- The free god rotation is now Cupid, Ao Kuang, Thanatos, Sun Wukong, and Ares.
- Implemented a possible fix to an intermittent issue in which players would load into a map without any devices or abilities.
- Fixed an issue in Assault where towers range did not align properly with the ground indicator.
- Fixed an issue in Conquest in which players could ping far outside of the map.
- Fixed an issue in Joust in which jungle camp help volumes displayed the wrong information.
- Wards should once again have a visible preview mesh in the targeter when being placed
- Wards are now team colored (red for enemy, blue for friendly).
- Protected Recall and Aegis can no longer be used simultaneously.
- Fixed a bug in which the end of match lobby was showing different stats than the in-match scoreboard.
- Fixed a chat-related crash condition
Spectator:
- In Assisted mode, the camera height is now locked. Director mode however still allows for up/down camera movement.
- Spectator minimap opacity is now set to 50% at all times.
League:
- Added new loading screen frames to show League status.
Items:
- Frostbound Amulet
- Reworded tooltip to be more clear that the slow only affects enemies damaged by your abilities
- Frostbound Hammer
- Reworded tooltip to be more clear that the slow only affects enemies damaged by your basic attacks
- Fist of the Gods
- Cooldown increased from 60s to 90s.
- No longer grants the 10% instant kill on Fire Giant and Gold Fury that the Hand of the Gods ranks do.
- Teleport to Towers
- Ranks 1 and 2 of this item will now properly be interrupted on damage taken, and also fixed an issue where hard crowd control was NOT interrupting.
Gods:
- Ah Muzen Cab
- Bees!
- Reduced damage from 10 per tick to 5 per tick.
- Reduced physical power scaling from 15% to 5%.
- Bees cannot spread from minions to gods.
- Hive
- Reduced the maximum number of deployed hives from 8 to 4.
- Increased the cooldown from 8s to 16s.
- Bees!
- Aphrodite
- Back Off!
- This ability will no longer originate from Soul Mates, instead always originating from Aphrodite herself for damage and knockback.
- Back Off!
- Arachne
- Tangled Web
- The ground target for this ability should now highlight eligible targets
- Cocoon
- Increased stun duration from 1s to 1.5s
- Increased projectile width from 3 to 5 ft
- Tangled Web
- Ares
- Bolster Defenses
- Aura protections granted increased from 10/15/20/25/30 to 20/25/30/35/40
- Shackles
- The Shackle damage and cripple is now removed from targets when he dies.
- Fixed an issue where sometimes firing another Shackle wouldn’t actually fire.
- Successive Shackles after the first can now be fired at twice the previous rate.
- The ground target now properly highlights only one god at a time.
- Bolster Defenses
- Athena
- Defender of Olypmus
- Reduced damage from 350/500/650/800/950 +100% of your magical power to 350/450/550/650/750 +90% of your magical scaling.
- Reduced allied damage mitigation from 25% to 20%.
- Defender of Olypmus
- Bakasura
- Eat Minion
- Minor animation adjustments.
- Eat Minion
- Bastet
- Open Wound
- Additional damage against wounded targets increased from 15% to 20%
- Open Wound
- Chang’e
- Moonlit Waltz
- The evasion now occurs 0.1s earlier to better match the animation
- Moonflower Dance
- Now also deals 50/80/110/140/170 (+30% of magical power) magical damage to enemies within range
- The bonus healing to Chang’e for healing teammates has been removed
- Moonlit Waltz
- Chronos:
- Accelerate
- Increased cooldown from 15s to 17s.
- Decreased attack speed bonus from 20/25/30/35/40 to 15/20/25/30/35.
- Accelerate
- Cupid
- Heart Bomb
- Cooldown reduced from 12 to 10s
- Flutter
- Attack Speed increased from 5/10/15/20/25% to 10/15/20/25/30%
- Heart Bomb
- Fenrir
- General
- Added new basic attack hit fx.
- Brutalize
- Addressed issues with him leaping and getting stuck in map walls sending him up into the sky.
- Ragnarok
- Addressed an issue where sometimes he would shrink and end up stuck in a map wall.
- General
- Freya
- Banish
- Now interrupts Teleport to Towers.
- Valkyrie’s Discretion
- Reduced magical scaling from 45% to 35%.
- The ground target for this ability should now highlight eligible targets
- Banish
- He Bo
- General
- Modified Default Voice Recordings
- Removed the two water spout animations during recall to avoid confusing players.
- General
- Mercury
- Made you look
- Now applies damage to all targets instantaneously. Note: This means golden bow will now only proc once per enemy hit by the ability, rather than a potentially unlimited number of times.
- Special Delivery
- Fixed an issue where targets would continue to be tossed if Mercury was silenced while spinning around the target.
- Sonic Boom
- Reduced physical damage scaling from 120% to 100%.
- Made you look
- Odin
- Odin’s Shout
- This ability now also grants Odin an additional 5/10/15/20/25 Physical Power passively
- Duration of the attack speed buff decreased from 7s to 5s
- Odin’s Shout
- Sobek
- General
- High Seas skin turned the lifetime of the mist particles to 1s down from 3s.
- General
- Thanatos
- Harvester of Souls
- Now correctly indicates that this also grants 5s Cooldown Reduction when delivering the killing blow to enemy gods
- Death Scythe
- Adjusted the projectile FX to better fit the collision radius of the projectile
- Harvester of Souls
- Tyr
- Fearless
- Fixed a spelling error in the tooltip
- Fearless
- Vamana
- Colossal Fury
- The health regeneration while in giant form increased from 3% per second to 5%
- HUD now properly reflects what can and cannot be used during ability.
- Re-addressed him visually being stuck in big form. (hopefully fixed now)
- Colossal Fury
- Ymir
- General
- New loading screen card.
- General
- Zeus
- General
- New loading screen card.
- Detonate Charge
- Reduced the magical damage scaling from 25% to 20%.
- Aegis Shield
- Movement speed bonus changed from 25% to 10/15/20/25/30% per rank.
- General
- Zhong Kui
- Demon Bag
- Bonus protections granted for each captured demon reduced from 3 per demon to 2
- Recall Demons
- This ability will no longer heal allied players
- Demon Bag