Happy new year, everyone! We hope 2021 is better than 2020 and wish you a year of health and happiness.

Season 7 Begins

• January 4: Season 6 ends at 8am PST / 5pm CET. Ranked disabled. Player ratings are soft-reset
• January 5: Patch 7.00 is released
• January 6: Season 7 begins at 8am PST / 5pm CET. Ranked games re-enabled

2x Chaos Featured Game Mode
This featured game modes lasts from January 4 to 6. The rules of 2x Chaos are:

• Random roll (6 new fighters) every wave
• Waves have 2x the number of spawns
• Start with 300 gold instead of 250

Sponsored Tournaments
We are now sponsoring community tournaments and leagues with essence for organizers and premium essence for winners. See the official thread for qualification and details.

LIHL Diamond Division
The LIHL (Legion TD 2 In-House League) now has two divisions: Grandmaster and Diamond. The Diamond Division is intended for competitive players outside of the ~top 50. Winners get premium essence and qualification into the Grandmaster Division. See the official thread for signup instructions and details.

7.00 Patch Notes

New Secret Cards: Fiesta & Et tu, Brute?

Visit the Card Trader each week to reveal how secret cards drop in-game

New Feature: Online Guild Members
- You can now see a list of online guild members in Global Chat
- Players who are in-game will have names shown with an asterisk (*)

New Feature! Fighter Role Icons
- Fighters now have role icons to quickly communicate whether they are tanky, DPS/support, balanced, or an aura

Thank you to Maraudaur for the suggestion

Pathing & Targeting
- The wave and mercenaries now run directly downwards instead of diagonally towards the bottom-center of your lane. This makes pathing more consistent whether you built at the top or bottom of your lane.
- Separation (when two units overlap) is less bouncy and less random. This makes units less likely to loop-de-loop
- When a ranged unit pulls aggro (typically when furthest in front), it is now less likely to run forward
- Tank mercenaries now spawn less ahead of the wave. This makes tank mercenaries less likely to dramatically affect pathing behavior
- Center units (minibosses, bosses, and some mercenaries) now more consistently go right with an even height and even range split

Together, these changes make pathing more consistent and splitting more reliable. There may be some needed positioning adjustments. Thank you to Pennywise and Shadowings for help with testing and feedback

New Mechanic: Shutdowns
- When a team is significantly ahead, they are considered “on fire.” Making anyone on that team leak will grant a shutdown bounty of gold to your team. Only one shutdown bounty can be awarded per wave.
- Power score is used to determine whether a team is ahead. Power score is based on your team’s gold, mythium, and income. For every 500 power score one team is ahead of another team in 2v2 (1000 in 4v4), a shutdown bounty of 50 gold is accrued.
- Decreased leak gold given to the leaking player and to the opposing team by ~5% to avoid gold inflation

Legion TD 2 is a snowbally game - when you get ahead, you typically stay ahead and get more ahead. As players have gotten better at the game, the game has become even more snowbally, with one early game mistake, risk, or unlucky pathing/targeting deciding the game. Early game decisions and advantages are still highly impactful, but this change makes it more possible to come back.

Power Score
- Improved formula to be more accurate and to not fluctuate at unexpected times
- Now updated at the end of the battle phase instead of at the start. This is because power score changes typically happen during the battle phase
- Fixed a bug where power score was computed incorrectly when using Pack Rat’s Treasure Hunt
- The length of the power score bar now rounds to the nearest 100 to avoid giving away too much information, especially early game

Recommended Value
- Now takes into account your attacking opponent’s unspent gold to help hide worker count when “shifting” gold (notably with 2-worker Grarl openings)
- Tweaked numbers to be more accurate

High Elo Duos
- Disabled the harsh duo penalties for top 40 players. Due to a technical limitation, it still affects the rank 1 player (in a future patch, it will be fully disabled)
- If players abuse this by smurf boosting to the top of the ladder, we will re-enable it

XP Gain
- Significantly increased XP gain from levels 3 to 7. This helps players level up faster and gain more essence to unlock mastermind options and special builders

Cards
- Increased drop rate
- Card Trader no longer carries the same cards two weeks in a row
- Card Trader now carries secret cards on a fixed rotation (rather than completely random every week), so each secret card will appear once before appearing again a second time, and so on

Guilds
- Application cooldown: 24 hours –> 6 hours
- Essence gain from contribution increased: 1% per 3000 –> 1% per 2000
- Guild War now shows # of wins to help you keep track

Game Coach
- Added a new recommendation if you leak hard while doing a long save (be careful about saving too long and starving yourself)

Thank you to Babelfish for the suggestion

Postgame Stats
- Added a new wave stat: Average Leak % Per Wave
- Now shows your avatar next to your name instead of which legion you picked
- Improved net worth calculation: now considers 2x workers correctly as 50g instead of 100g
- Fixed a bug where workers in the queue weren’t counted for net worth calculation
- Fixed a bug where mercenaries hired right before income weren’t counted towards the income stat
- Fixed a bug where power score of the final wave would be shown incorrectly on the main screen

Classic Queue Loading Screen
- Now shows your total non-ranked wins instead of current rank
- Your number of wins now changes color at different thresholds

Classic has hidden Elo, which can sometimes mislead players about the fairness of the teams. This change makes that clearer, especially for highly experienced non-ranked players

FairPlay
- More aggressive AFK detection
- Improved griefer detection

Game Client
- Fixed a rare bug where hitting the Play Again button with an out-of-date client wouldn’t trigger the patch maintenance popup
- Fixed a bug where applying to a guild via the guild’s profile, rather than the Browse Guilds menu, would get stuck at “Loading…”
- Fixed various bugs where middle-clicking (guild member on the Guild page, card in collection, etc.) would put the client in an unresponsive state

Stability
- Added additional multithreading to fix some rare instances of dropped frames resulting in general instability (may result in different glitches though - can easily rollback changes if needed)
- Fixed a rare bug where some portions of the UI didn’t function properly if the game couldn’t write to disk
- Some performance optimizations with pathfinding
- Fixed a long-time bug that caused occasional stuck units, especially in 4v4. (Region boundaries were slightly misaligned between different data structures in some situations)

Chat
- Tweaked colors. Now that we’ve added party chat, guild chat, and other chat types over the years, it was due for an overhaul to avoid reusing colors.
- Global Chat now displays a warning if you are sending messages too quickly (being spammy). The limit is stricter if you have a Toxicity alert. The limit only applies to in-game messages, not those sent from a Discord client.

Other Fixes & Improvements
- APS and Butcher are now less likely to be recommended by the unit recommender or built on waves 1-4
- When No Save mode is enabled, workers gather mythium 5% slower
- Improved VFX for Immolation and Chain Frost
- Fixed a bug where the game would think you leaked if another unit died while a reviving unit (Eternal Wanderer, Samurai Soul, Guardian Angel) was in the middle of reviving
- Fixed a bug where last week’s Weekly Challenge winner displayed the wrong score
- Fixed guild leaderboards’ “around me” section which wasn’t working properly in some cases
- Fixed a 1440p+ bug where Power Score was wider than it should have been
- Added Masters Cup 7 badges and LIHL 2 badge

Balance Changes

4v4
- Workers now gather mythium 5% slower. With the introduction of shutdowns, games will have more gold and workers, leading to longer and laggier games. This change is needed to keep things in check.
- Fixed a bug where Soul Gate wouldn’t start summoning units if no other units owned by that player were aggroed (typically when one player builds in the front and another builds Soul Gates in the back)

Legion Spells

Guardian Angel
- Maximum health on revive: 1900 >> 1750

Hero
- Damage and damage reduction: 6.25% >> 6%

Sorcerer
- Ability damage bonus: 18% >> 17%

Titan
- Health: 1300 >> 1250

Villain
- Damage amplification: 30% (15% for ranged) >> 32% (16% for ranged)

Fighters

Proton / Atom
- Attack speed: 1 >> 1.06
- Ionic Force: Attack speed gain: 25% >> 20%
- Fixed a bug where Proton’s backswing was unintentionally reducing its effective attack speed at 7+ stacks. Overall, their DPS is affected as follows:

Dark Mage
- Fixed a bug where Mind Warp would sometimes cast on the 2nd best target instead of the best target

Harpy
- Damage: 23 >> 22
- Projectile speed: 1400 >> 2500

Sky Queen
- Projectile speed: 1400 >> 3000
- Fixed a bug where Sky Queen’s backswing was unintentionally reducing its effective attack speed at 10+ stacks of Acrobatics. At max stacks, Sky Queen now attacks 13% faster.

Kingpin
- Big Game Hunter: Heal: 10% >> 8%

Nekomata
- Health: 640 >> 600
- Damage: 32 >> 31
- Attack speed: 0.9 >> 0.91
- Spirit Offering: Health gain: 280 >> 290

Nekomata was much more stat efficient at zero stacks. It’s now weaker at 0-4 stacks and stronger at 5+ stacks

Fire Elemental
- Attack speed: 0.769 >> 0.794

Rogue Wave
- Delusion: Ability damage bonus: 16% (8% for bosses) >> 14% (7% for bosses)

Zeus
- Attack speed: 2.33 > 2.47

Pyro
- Health: 1730 >> 1750
- Attack speed: 2.5 >> 2.56

Sacred Steed / Pegasus
- Pegasus: Health: 2550 >> 2580
- Adjusted the following synergies:
-- Great Boar: +114%
-- Red Eyes: +67%
-- Fenix: +25%
-- Fire Lord: +25%
-- Head Chef: +25%
-- Gateguard: +5%
-- Azeria: -7%
-- Violet: -9%
-- Desert Pilgrim: -9%
-- King Claw -10%
-- Harbinger: -20%
-- Lord of Death: -25%
-- Hell Gate: -25%

Honeyflower
- Health: 1250 >> 1270
- Fragrance: Damage: 10 + 0.15% max health >> 10 + 0.05% max health

Deathcap
- Health: 3500 > 3850
- Noxious Scent: Damage: 30 + 0.3% max health >> 30 + 0.15% max health

Mass Deathcaps are now less oppressive late game

APS
- Health: 900 >> 920
- Attack speed: 1.49 >> 1.52

MPS
- Health: 2300 > 2450
- DPS: 142 >> 153
-- Damage: 95 >> 101
-- Attack speed: 1.49 >> 1.52

Grarl
- DPS: 56.9 >> 57.1
-- Damage: 74 >> 60
-- Attack Speed: 0.77 >> 0.95

Rather than over-nerfing Grarl’s stats, we’re nerfing its flexibility as an opening. This change makes Grarl take three attacks (instead of two) to kill wave 2, but buffs it on other waves

Ocean Templar
- Health: 2200 >> 2000
- Attack type: Magic >> Pure
- Resonance: Regeneration: 1% >> 1.5%

Now more versatile, rather than only being viable on a small number of waves (11, 15, 18, 20)

Lost Chieftain
- Damage: 172 >> 185

Yozora
- Health: 1470 >> 1500
- Wintry Touch: Attack speed slow: 1.5% >> 0.75%

Arctaire
- Health: 4180 >> 4340
- Damage: 131 >> 133
- Frozen Veil: Attack speed slow: 2.5% >> 2%

Arctaire and especially Yozora were providing too much value and stalling in base races late game

Priestess of the Abyss
- Health: 950 >> 920

Azeria
- Health: 3200 > 3000

Berserker
- Health: 2150 >> 2180

Fatalizer
- Health: 6280 >> 6370

Hydra
- Damage and damage reduction penalty per stack of hatching early: -15% >> -17.5%

Soul Gate
- Hellion: Health: 1060 >> 1020
- Nightcrawler: Health: 530 >> 510

Hell Gate
- Elite Hellion: Health: 2700 >> 2600
- Elite Nightcrawler: Health: 1350 >> 1300

Millennium
- DPS: 143 >> 142
-- Damage: 300 >> 245
-- Attack speed: 0.48 >> 0.58

Doomsday Machine
- DPS: 352 >> 350
-- Damage: 740 >> 605
-- Attack speed: 0.48 >> 0.58

Decreasing frustration and making it more viable to build multiple Millenniums and Doomsday Machines. Millenniums now perfectly 1-shot Snails

Mercenaries

Brute
- Maul: Max stacks: 9 >> 6

Nerfing 3+ Brutes to reduce frustration and encourage other mercenary choices at ~180 mythium

Centaur
- Attack speed: 1.82 >> 1.74

Waves

(5) Scorpions
- Attack speed: 0.95 >> 0.98

(14) Killer Slugs
- Attack speed: 1.27 >> 1.24

(16) Cardinals
- Attack speed: 1.22 >> 1.2

(17) Metal Dragons
- Health: 3220 >> 3270

(19) Dire Toads
- Attack speed: 0.274 >> 0.278
- King health increased by 5% on wave 19 only