Epic share upcoming Paragon balance and Mastery changes

Paragon‘s .42 patch has been out for over a week now and players are slowly but surely starting to get to grips with the huge changes. There’s still work to be done though.

Over the next couple of weeks, Epic will be addressing some of the hero balancing issues and the UI. The current Paragon Deck Builder is not exactly stellar so it’s good to see that it’s getting some attention early on. There’s no doubt the new card system takes some getting used to but perseverance is the key to finding a decent build as I have found out this week.

The update schedule is as follows:

v.42.3 (August 29): A round of iteration on cards, gems and updates to over-performing Heroes. Some upcoming bug fixes/improvements:

• UI
  • Significant revision to Deckbuilder!
  • Tabs for Cards/Gems
  • Better displays which card/gems you have selected when browsing
  • New Scoreboard layout to help with comparing Heroes and highlighting important info
• Card Bug Fixes
  • Fixed an issue where certain cards would interrupt abilities and basic attacks. Some of which include Unstable Cyborg, Thunder Cleaver and Vengeful Mire.
  • Fixed a bug where targeted cards could lock onto enemies in the Shadowplane when the card holder did not have vision.
  • Fixed a bug with Numbing Rogue where the debuff aura would be lost on death.
  • Taskmaster can no longer be interrupted by quickly using a Basic Attack after activation.

v.43 (September 19): Monolith visual update, many ability/balance changes to numerous Heroes, Jungle and economy changes.

The other contentious issue has been the cost of Masteries and Epic posted to explain their thinking behind new Mastery system.

Wanted to post this to respond to your Mastery feedback. We hear you and want to provide some context around the changes.

Mastery
The previous Mastery system did not reward you enough for progressing through all 10 levels. Over time, we added more in value (Chests, Crates, Keys etc. and now Crowns!) , but we realized we needed a big change to make it more compelling.

Each Mastery rank now provides a cosmetic reward like emotes, skins, banners, and crowns. Additionally, you can level up to 10 within each rank to unlock chests and specific cards. We think we are pretty close to this feature’s final form: cosmetic and meaningful rewards as you progress.

Prestiging above rank 10
A choice to keep progressing if you wish; it’s very much optional.

Non-card rewards default to a Golden Loot Crate Key at level 11, the 4th tier Crown at 12, and standard loot keys after that.

New Players
Card and gem progression is designed to on-board new players to the system at a manageable rate. New players receive four free Mastery tokens to help them with progression and we are looking to add more to the early game in the near future.

This is something we’ll tweak based on actual data. Current first week results show early game success for new players is up just a bit.

REP cost tho…
Many folks did the math and are pricing Mastery at 200+ games played for the next rank. The key component missing from the math is that most Rep rewards come from Daily Login Rewards and Daily Quests starting with v.42

Yup, we re-centered the source of Reputation from games played to days played. Daily logins and Daily Quests should provide around 200k Reputation per week (on average) to active players. These are values we’ll be looking at over time.

The Near (v.42.3) Future
In 42.3, we have made an initial step to increase the amount of Daily Login and Daily Quest rewards from 200,000 per week to 220,000 per week (on average). Additionally we are adding a chance to get Mastery Tokens that can be used to claim a free mastery rank for any Hero throughout the reward systems.

For more on Paragon .42, check out our guide.