During my time on Paladins, we had paused new character development in favor of addressing prior designs and kits that had either aged poorly or had intense conflicts with the way players were playing and our designs were overlapping between character kits, Items, customization like Talents and Cards, and game modes. One such specific case of difficulty was Lillith, a uniquely complex Support who had her own healing and health mechanics that made her an anomaly in Paladins. My first set of changes done to Lillith were a part of the Support Shifts mentioned in Game Design Documents, but she ended up needing several larger revisions to her kit, the first of which was her Blood mechanic.
Lillith has a unique healing resource that she both used as extra health as well as the way she could apply healing through her abilities. This introduced two major tensions to her experience, one for the player playing her and the other for all her opponents. If she managed regeneration of this resource well, she would have the highest health pool of any Support by nearly 30%. If she managed this resource poorly, she was by far the most fragile character in a given match. This put a lot of stress on her Blood regeneration design, which needed improvements. The previous designer of the character was absent, so my first step in diagnosing this problem was to graph out her resource consumption.
In this graph, I used a very common gameplay pattern for her (place 2 healing auras, then an escape tool) over the course on 9 seconds to chart the various routes we could take her regeneration. In the Dev version, we lowered the gap between her values if she is draining Blood from enemies versus borrowing some from her allies and after extensive testing, the more standardized curves that eased her ability to generate Blood were deemed more fun to play with. However, this led to her abilities feeling quite overtuned and led to the major balancing pass on her abilities as shown in Game Design Documents. There were later adjustments done to her Talents and customization independent of these adjustments, but we saw her playrate jump almost 20% and her average winrate land around 52% in high-level Ranked and 50% gamewide. These were the balance notes for Lillith in that update:
Further changes were planned for Lillith to further simplify her kit as her complexity remained a pain point for player enjoyment, but balance wise we had leveled her out into a comfortable space. I designed a further set of changes aimed at making Lillith’s skill floor a bit lower while retaining her ceiling, but those changes remain unreleased. I’ll update this specific Deep Dive if they are released in a future update or when they are no longer relevant to Paladins’ live play state.
Kryptek Game Design Portfolio 