For example, they stated that ice shards were too powerful during multiplayer: Taking a hard look at PvP—you know, blasting friends to bits—we noticed that spamming ice shards, often with arcane and lightning, was a very good tactic. Further testing confirmed this. Even further testing confirmed this even further. In short, just spamming the same arcane ice shards over and over was an easy way of winning 8/10 competitions. Yeah, fun stuff! But we knew that we had to do something about the balance—the question was what.
They realizes that using x4 Ice and x1 Arcane would create 12 shards to attack with, so the first step was to lessen the damage, ”The solution was to divide the damage based on the number of ice shards—not in a 1:1 way, but gradually, to even out the damage.” However, spamming ice shard attacks was still a problem. Their solution laid in the charging of the spell: ”Ultimately, we made the physical component in the ice shard damage depend on how much force you charged up, much like the earth element. This leveled the field a bit more, by making it worthwhile to charge your ice shards – if not to full, then at least for a second before releasing them.”
They also fixed the exploit with beams and shields (”It used to be that if you fired a beam at someone, you could strike them even through a personal shield….We’ve now changed this so that beams will always explode at the caster, or at the nearest merge. This means that using beams will not be the same no-brainier it used to be.”) and buffed the resistance shield to completely block any level of energy of that type (”They now offer full protection to any spell containing that element. This means that if I have lightning resistance, then even the almighty QFQFASS beam won’t hurt even the slightest bit.”)
No release date has been announced yet for the Magicka patch, though.
