Hi everyone,

While most changes in our latest 1.13 update were appreciated, some gameplay tweaks didn’t go down well with the community, who felt they negatively impacted the overall depth and feel of the game.
We are very committed to making Absolver as balanced and as interesting as possible, which is why we made these changes in the first place – they seemed to make sense to us (in theory and in internal playtests), but some issues came to light when the Absolver community actually tested the update. A lot of comments were made online, and although we were unhappy that some changes were badly reviewed, we were also very impressed by the quality and precision of the feedback received! After a few days and some internal discussions, we decided to correct some of these changes as soon as possible, which is why the 1.14 update came live so fast.

The changes we made on Kahlt were clearly not a good solution in term of balancing, but were a good way to mark the success of the ability and have a feeling of impact when it happens. For the moment we prefer to revert Kahlt to its previous state, and as it was already the style with the best winratio, we decided to increase the stamina cost of the “Absorb” special ability a little.
Besides this, having gold link timings not be linked only to the attack’s damages seems like the good direction to us, and it was already the case for some attacks (like handstand kick for instance). That being said, we may have been heavy-handed on this change, so the 1.14 update rebalances this, in order to have a game feel similar to the 1.12 version for a majority of attacks.
We’ve also worked on the standard release durations to have a maximum of 9 frames between goldlink and standard release. This prevents having attack inputs lost when a goldlink timing is missed.
Finally, the knockback of guardbreaking attacks on guarding opponents has been lowered too, making it slightly smaller than the knockback when these attacks actually hit.

The full list of changes is below – as you’ll see, we also finally managed to identify and fix the bug which caused problems with successful avoids (the opponent wasn’t slowed down, and could still goldlink into their next attack). This should come as good news to Windfall mains :)
(Note that only a well-timed avoid will trigger the slowdown, and stop the opponent from goldlinking).

We will keep on monitoring the data we receive from matches, as well as online feedback, in order to make Absolver better and better, so please keep posting and commenting! While we usually don’t have time to directly engage in the discussions, they are very useful for us to keep improving our game.

All the best,
Sloclap Team

1.14 Release Notes

Debug

• [GAMEPLAY] Fixed Revived animation being stuck when the rescuer was interrupted by a hit
• [GAMEPLAY] Fixed avoided not slowing down and not preventing use of perfect link

Balancing

• Kahlt freeze frames have been reverted back to 1.12 state for this patch
• Kahlt stamina cost increased 10 → 15
• Tweaked gold link timings previously changed to have a better game feel
• Tweaked standard release (recovery) to have a lesser difference with gold link timings
• Tweaked knockback in guard previously changed