September 16 patch: Valve rebuilds the comeback economy and hits Celeste a second time
122 changes, the largest note since July. Comeback no longer rewards teams slightly behind but the players who actually are. Nerfs target heroes above 51% win rate, buffs those below 49%, with exceptions that say Valve reads more than win rate.
Twenty-five days after the August 22 note, and nine days after the silent build that ended the longest silence in the game's history, Valve shipped on September 16 an update of 122 changes. It is the largest since July 28, which had 100. It is labelled "minor". The big late-September update announced by Yoshi still lies ahead, as far as we know.
We reread every line, corrected sixteen parser classifications and translated the whole note into French. Here is what this patch does, and what our numbers say about the heroes it touches.
The comeback economy, rebuilt
The most structural piece sits in five general lines. The fixed bonus souls you earned for being behind, even by a hair, are gone. Comeback bounties are lower across the board. Part of the comeback souls earned by players above the enemy's average net worth is now redistributed to the team's two lowest players, at 70%. Unstable Rift comeback resist is no longer a flat 35%: it starts at 10%, gains a point per minute and caps at 40% at minute thirty. And souls stored in Golden Goose Egg now count towards net worth.
Read together, the intent is clear: comeback should no longer reward a team that is slightly behind on average, but the players who actually are. Those who widened the gap by farming a bloated Goose Egg lose their blind spot along the way.
Nerfs at the top, buffs at the bottom, almost
Of the twenty heroes touched, eight come out weaker and ten stronger. We looked at where they stood in the seven days before the patch, across 88,215 ranked matches.
The eight weakened heroes won 51.2% of their games on average and appeared in 35% of them: Vyper (53.8%), Ivy (53.1%), Warden (52.6%), Celeste (51.9%), Lash (51.7%), Wraith (50.9%), Viscous (49.2%) and Paradox (46.2%).
The ten strengthened heroes won 49.2% and appeared in 29% of games: Graves (54.4%), Kelvin (53.0%), Paige (52.9%), Haze (50.3%), Yamato (48.7%), Lady Geist (48.3%), Holliday (47.6%), Shiv (47.1%), Silver (46.0%) and Venator (43.9%).
So the direction is right, with exceptions that say Valve reads more than win rate. Graves, second-best win rate in the game, gains two health per boon. Victor, first at 55.0%, and Seven, fourth, are untouched. Paradox, at 46.2%, still loses on Kinetic Carbine. And Haze, the most played hero in ranked, present in 53.8% of games, gets a Fixation buff.
Celeste, second wave in twenty-five days
Seven lines, all nerfs: stamina, Light Eater lifesteal, Radiant Daggers T2, Shining Wonder's radius and bounces, and Dazzling Trick, whose cooldown goes from 34 to 38 seconds. It was 32 before August 22.
We had measured the first wave over fourteen days: win rate had not moved, presence had dropped. Since then, the slide continued. In the week before this patch, Celeste won 51.9% of her ranked games, down from 52.5% in early September, and appeared in only 27.9% of them, down from 36.9%. She ranks thirteenth by win rate out of thirty-eight heroes. Valve is hitting again a hero who was already falling back into line. Our automatic measurement will say in two, seven and fourteen days what this second wave changes, and presence will, once more, be the first number to watch.
Warden, Lash, Wraith: the heavily played get adjusted
Warden had not been weakened since June 30. He is, on five lines: damage and fire rate per boon, the Alchemical Flask projectile, and both halves of Willpower T3. He won 52.6% and appeared in 41% of games.
Lash, third most played hero at 52.5% presence, is reshaped rather than weakened: gun falloff and Flog healing go down, Grapple T2 gets shorter, but Ground Strike T3 goes up on both counts. Wraith loses on Card Trick's heart heal and on the T3 slow, and gains on Full Auto's spirit scaling.
Silver pushed, Venator lifted
At the other end, Silver sat at 46.0% with the lowest presence among touched heroes, 13.5%. He gets four buffs and two changes: health per boon, sprint, and above all the general rule on cycle time, which no longer pauses during dashes and light melee. Valve writes itself that this change benefits slow weapons like his first. Venator, last of the touched heroes at 43.9%, sees Ira Domini work with Ricochet and split its shot.
Items: sustain climbs, Veil Walker falls
Three sustain items are buffed: Lifestrike, Leech and Fortitude. Across from them, Veil Walker loses four times, including its Sprint Boots component and its speed bonus after leaving invisibility. Restorative Locket and Radiant Regeneration are nerfed for the second patch in a row. Mercurial Magnum and Spiritual Overflow go down, Golden Goose Egg gives back 10 souls per minute and takes five more points of damage penalty.
The rules that change for everyone
All movement slows drop by about 20%, ground dash slows by 10%, and slows now also drag you in the air. Parrying pauses your reload, and so does getting stunned instead of restarting it. These are feel changes, with no hero's name on them, and they will touch every match.
What we will measure
This patch's page will show the measured impact at two, seven and fourteen days: each touched hero's win rate before and after, on every match, with the noise threshold computed from the heroes the patch did not touch. Celeste's lesson still holds: watch presence before win rate, and never over less than seven days.
Methodology. Classifications reread line by line on September 17: sixteen corrections, including two false hero attributions and three "reduction reduced" lines read backwards by the parser. Win rate and presence computed from deadlock-api's `match_player`, ranked matches started between September 9, 20:00 and September 16, 20:00 UTC, i.e. 88,215 matches; presence = share of matches in which the hero appears. A hero's buff/nerf balance is the number of nerfs minus the number of buffs, bug fixes and neutral changes excluded. Celeste's early-September figures: our J+14 review of September 5.