Greetings Champions! As with the changes we made to Alerts, we are constantly striving to provide a great experience to all of you heroes in Millennium City. With that in mind we have some more updates to announce that we believe will help diversify builds and characters.

As some might know, there are a few issues that have emerged with the current Dodge and Crit system. After talking to some community members, we took a good look at that system and have made some changes to resolve these issues. Balanced content for the future, play more diverse builds and still have them be viable. By addressing the issue now, we ensure a much more engaging and fun experience for players (while still being somewhat challenging) when we add content in the future.

Under the existing rating system, Dodge and Avoidance were an extremely potent defense for anyone who equipped an item with a Dodge rating bonus. This provided so much defense that it was overshadowing other defensive options, and was enabling builds to be far more durable than was ever intended.  The way Dodge was working, the optimal build was just stacking Dodge Rating -- leading to builds that weren't mechanically interesting, with little power diversity.  We're testing a number of changes (and one new power) on PTS that will improve the feel of dodging and re-balance its effectiveness.

Reducing Dodge Rating: Reduced how effective Dodge Rating was as a stat. Much less of your total dodge will come from Dodge Rating.

Flat Dodge Chance Bonuses: Many powers will start to grant flat dodge chance bonuses. This will be easy to keep track of, and allow for more thematic dodging.

New Power -- Fluidity: New power you can slot as a Block. Grants Dodge Chance and Avoidance. Perfect for hero concepts that avoid damage through agility, rather than toughness.

By shifting the main Dodge sources from a passive set of bonuses to triggering off powers, Dodge Tanking will stay valid, but it'll be a conscious choice with plenty of build options. These will reward skill and come with risk, just like other methods of tanking. Building dodge on offense-oriented heroes will still be viable, but its performance will be about equal to other defenses.

The changes to Critical Chance and Offense are much softer. Currently, building Crit outperforms straight Offense builds; the changes we're testing will equalize them somewhat, though there will still be a noticeable gap.

Critical Chance: We're flattening effectiveness somewhat. Low Critical Chance stats will be more effective than currently, and higher Critical Chance stats will lead to fewer Critical Hits than now.

Offense: This stat will account for a larger share of total damage. In the tooltip, Offense will appear to give a smaller damage bonus, but it will actually provide a much bigger actual bonus to damage.

We have completely reworked how Offense scales and where it applies its damage bonus -- for those interested in the math, we've made Offense's percentile bonus multiply Passive bonuses to damage. The net result is that Offense is more effective, so many heroes will be dealing more damage. These changes will give players some variety when building their heroes: Do you build Critical Hits to deal spike damage, or Offense for more stable sustained output? The choice will be yours.

These changes don’t require any immediate power changes, but it does open up new possibilities for designing future powers. You can also stack bonuses from powers more effectively, allowing more diversity in builds.

We’re excited for these changes, bringing more diversity to all players and reducing the gap between optimized and average builds -- so we can balance future content to be more engaging to everyone. Now all heroes can help save Millennium City, Project Greenskin, Fort Steelhead, Vibora Bay, Monster Island, and even the entire Earth from any threat that might stand before them! As always, good luck and godspeed heroes!

Chris “Gentleman_Crush” Meyer