Patch Notes 1.8: Battle Balancing -The RNGpocalypse Has Come

Explorers! It’s finally happened.

We’ve been asking for chess and playing checkers for quite some time now, and if you’re at all familiar with articles I’ve written, you’ll know how much I’ve wanted this change for a long while.

RNG has plagued even the most hardened and devout of JWA players since the pre-release beta. But it finally took a massive blow, and we’re hopeful that the blow is enough to keep this game far more skill oriented and far less luck-dependent.

If you’re unfamiliar with what RNG is, RNG stands for random number generator – and it occurs every time your creature does anything. When your creature attacks, the damage it deals is based on a simple formula – base attack * (buffs – debuffs) * move multiplier * critical hit chance if critical hit is rolled. So the simplest version, if your creature has 1000 base attack and uses a move like Armor Piercing Impact (which has a 1.5 move multiplier), assuming your creature is not buffed or debuffed and doesn’t get a critical hit – you do a flat 1500 damage to the opponent. This all works great.

But 5% of the time (or more), you get a critical hit multiplier for every creature in the game. These critical hits appear as giant golden jaws or golden outlines or golden claws, and the text for the damage is like triple the normal size when you land a critical hit. Worse yet, these critical hits can truly change a whole game for you, because they multiplied any move by an additional 1.5x the total move.

To put this in numbers, I am fortunate to have a super-boosted Thoralodosaur – one of the best Therapods (chompers) in the game. The base damage on this monster is 2617 (Level 28 and Tier 7 damage boost). So on a normal rampage, it does 5234 damage, enough to kill most things in the game. And 40% of the time, it critically hits, for 7851 total damage – enough to kill most things even if boosted crazy amounts in health in the game.

But this causes all sorts of variance in a battle. When my Thoralodosaur crits a few times, it can wipe a whole team. When it doesn’t, I can lose it and lose the match. Thus, random number generators (the thing rolling the dice to see if this was a 40% chance critical hit or if it was a 60% chance non-critical hit) controls a lot of every single game. Especially when considering all of these things affected by random numbers – some of which might happen two or three times in a single turn.

· Cloak/Dodge
· Critical Hit Chance
· Stun Chance
· Random Dinosaur Selection in each match
· Random Dinosaur order in each match

And that doesn’t even begin to crack the surface on the variance in your opponent being selected (match making), the random team they get (better or worse than average), how that team aligns with your team (you might have lost before the first card was played just because they have all your counters), how many trophies you win or lose based on their current ranking… etc.

Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of random chance. But now, with patch 1.8, we’ve got the overhaul.

Dodge has also plagued us in the world of RNG for a long while. We’ve all faced an unstoppable Indoraptor or Indominus Rex that seemed to dodge literally everything we threw at it. But now, instead of having a 50% chance to negate 100% of the damage? Creatures with dodge will have a 50% chance to negate 66% of the damage.

So on every turn, dodge or not, a cloaked or dodged creature WILL TAKE DAMAGE.

It could be full damage. It could be just 1/3rd of the full damage. But it WILL TAKE DAMAGE.

This is incredibly massive. It greatly reduces RNG because a barely living Indoraptor or Procerathomimus or Monomimus or Erlidominus or Indominus Rex, can still be knocked out, even if it keeps dodging.

While stuns will still be annoying, this puts a massive dent in the RNG that has been plaguing the arena for quite some time. We should see MORE consistent results because of these changes, and things that have been massively overpowered (like Thoralodosaur) take a dent, while tanks may be more viable once more. We are so thrilled for these changes and can’t wait to see them in action!

We are so excited about all the new things patch 1.8 is going to bring to the table. Pretty much everything the community has been begging for – from a nerf to Dracoceratops and Dracorex Gen 2, to balancing changes with critical strikes and cloaking, to more free ways to engage with the world and earn DNA for players who aren’t paying large sums, this patch has a ton to offer.

We’ve broken our patch notes for 1.8 down into six separate guides, giving you the rundown on all the changes. If you’ve missed the other guides, click the links below.

Get ready explorers! It's going to be fun!