Season 15 introduces a handful of new items and skills to the game, along with some notable balance changes that should shake things up.
We'll be adding to this along the way, but in the meantime, let's take a look at some of our initial impressions thus far.
General Notes:
- Strange Mushroom, Jungle Ruins, and Tiny Furry Monster lasting up to Day 3 is a pretty interesting change. This opens up more opportunities for free early value, with the most notable cases including the free skills, +2 Income (Pyg), and Small Silver-tier Friend (Vanessa/Dooley/Karnok).
- Reroll Tokens are an awesome addition, giving us a the unique abiility to refresh our encounters. This also improves the drop pool for monsters that receive it, in particular Retiree, who is otherwise quite underwhelming.
- Dooley now has another guaranteed Core upgrade at level 11. This is incredibly valuable, especially since Dooley's items are often extremely reliant on upgrades.
- Mak loses a little bit of access to
Catalysts, as
Athanor and
Laboratory no longer spawn them. It shouldn't change much about early game Transforms, but it does remove some extra value when utilizing either of those Large items (generally as part of your build). - Start-of-combat effects are returning in some capacity, with
Holsters and
Hydrogen Tank reverting to their former states.
Notable Nerfs
Infused Arm Wraps takes a bit of a hit to its scaling, likely to tone down
Waystones builds.
Runic Claymore gets a 1s CD increase, which makes sense given its increased Damage buff (10% to 15%) from the prior patch.
Blank Slate numbers have gone back down, reducing its offensive presence early on.
Book of Secrets goes back to Silver-tier, which in turn hits
Staff of the Wise significantly.
Library now simply functions as a CDR item for non-Weapon builds. No longer will it increase the Cooldown of Weapons, leaving Mak more vulnerable than before.
Private Hot Springs receives a hit to its Freeze duration, going from 4s to 3s. I expect it'll remain strong, though that one second could absolutely make the difference in some fights.
Flagship base Damage has been slightly decreased, so we'll need to put more emphasis on scaling it ourselves.
Rifle is now considerably faster at 2s, but its Damage scaling is now halved. That's a big hit to Vanessa's popular Day 1
Rifle +
Ramrod combo.
Notable Buffs
Knee Brace returns to its former glory! This could be pretty relevant for Karnok as he is strong during the early game, while also having HP scaling mechanics (
Runic Claymore,
Lost Blade) in the late game.
Flamethrower now Burns equal to double its Damage at Diamond-tier. Despite going to a flat 6s CD (compared to its previous 7/5), it's a huge increase to its offense.
Railgun no longer has its Multicast locked to a Quest, and now has +2 Multicast instead of +1? This is a massive buff, and will likely put
Railgun back into the spotlight.
Grill now has much stronger Burn scaling once again, which could bring back the Food Burn builds from the early days of Jules.
Wild Bear gets a sizable Max Health increase, especially at Diamond (going from 25% to 40%). This could be enough to make it more considerable during the late game.
Abacus returns to Silver-tier once again, making Value-scaling more accessible.
Premium Piggles (Red/Yellow/Green/Orange) are back to a 4s CD (from 5s). This is a big deal in terms of speed and efficiency, and could help make the return of Toy spam builds.
Streaming Setup gets a massive increase to its Value-scaling. 5/10/15 from 2/4/6 is huge.
Hang Glider downshifts to Silver-tier, giving Stelle a powerful build-around for start-stop setups. Not only that, but its Damage scaling has been singificantly improved (25/50/100 from 35/75).
Hydraulic Squeezer gets a 1s CD decrease at all tiers, which will allow it to loop even faster.
Scimitar of the Deep now has a higher base Damage and scales on upgrade. This is surprising given how strong it already is, but makes sense as there was no incentive to upgrade it previously.






































































































