4.8 Update Notes (Live now!)

[Sairus]

Hey everyone,

Update 4.8 has arrived!

We’re halfway through 2021 and this update is loaded with new features and enhancements as we continue working through our 2021 Roadmap plans! Let’s not waste more time with this intro - check out the new stuff below!

NEW ADDITIONS

PRIZE FIGHTS

Prize Fights will see some significant changes in 4.8, the most important being the introduction of Diamond Prize Fights and Mutual Difficulty Exclusivity.

Diamond Prize Fights

As players’ skills and collections have grown, many players have requested that Prize Fights do the same. We’ve been listening! Starting with Eliza, every Character Prize Fight will now have a brand new Diamond difficulty. This means there are 15 new Prize Fights with devilish new Modifiers now in circulation for you to sink your teeth into.

These Diamond Prize Fights are designed with high level players in mind so there’s some important caveats that separate them from lower rated Prize Fights.

• Your Defense Teams need to be made up of Golds or Diamonds. This is both to make sure you’re a high enough leveled player to be able to compete in Diamond Prize Fights, and it makes sure all the teams you fight will have high Fighter Scores.
  
  
• There are no restrictions on what Fighters you can put on your Attack Teams. Have a lot of Bronze Fighters you want to level up quickly? Bring them along into your Diamond Prize Fight runs!
  
  
• You will encounter more powerful Defense Teams more quickly. In all Prize Fights, as your streak increases you will encounter more and more powerful enemy teams. The rate at which you encounter higher Fighter Score teams in Diamond PFs will be faster than in Gold PFs, letting you hit higher score thresholds faster!
  
  
• Milestone and Event Rewards are increased. Lots more Theonite, Canopy Coins and Skill Points are awarded for completing all Diamond Prize Fight Milestones. If you can rank high enough you’ll also earn Gold Fighters, Gold Relic Shards, and Diamond Keys!

Increased Viability of Gold Prize Fights for Mid Level Players

When Gold Prize Fights were first created, one of their main goals was to give all players a reliable way to earn their first Gold Fighters. As time has gone on, the points required to earn a Gold Fighter have climbed substantially. These high scoring requirements mean Gold Prize Fights are no longer serving their purpose as a gateway to Collection growth.

As such, the inclusion of this new tier of Prize Fight serves a dual purpose: to give end game players challenging new content, but also to lower the points required in Gold Prize Fights by encouraging high level players to try this more rewarding mode.

This leads us to...

Mutually Exclusive Prize Fight Difficulties

Starting in 4.8, you will no longer be able to enter all tiers of Prize Fight during a single event. When a Prize Fight begins you can choose either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Diamond. Once you have chosen a difficulty, you can only compete in that difficulty for the remainder of the event.

With so many Prize Fight difficulties to choose from now, we wanted to avoid spreading players too thinly between the modes. Also, one of the major contributors to unattainably high points in Prize Fights is high level players entering events not designed for them. With this new difficulty restriction expect the points required for Prize Fights to drop significantly!

To accommodate this change, and to generally clean up the Prize Fight menus, Character Prize Fight Difficulties are now shown on a single card. You can cycle between difficulties in the same way you would change difficulties in a Story Chapter. The card border will change color to make it clear what difficulty you’re about to enter.

Due to some unavoidable timing with the planned release of 4.8, Eliza’s Prize Fight will start on Tuesday July 6th (once 4.8 Maintenance is complete) and finish on Saturday July 10th. This means it will overlap with Annie’s Prize Fight, which will start on Thursday July 8th as normal.

A bonus Medici Shakedown Prize Fight will run Monday-Tuesday to cover the time period where the Eliza Prize Fights would normally be available.

HOLODECK HAZARDS

Stanley’s improvements to Holodeck Hazards continue! Starting in 4.8 there will now be BASIC, ADVANCED, EXPERT and MASTER difficulties for Holodeck Hazards.

Now regardless of what level you are, you’ll be able to tackle this Daily Event for all that sweet, sweet XP.

A shark’s work is never done, so expect more upgrades to this mode in the future!

FILIA UPGRADES

In 4.7 we dipped our toe in improving older characters by enhancing Valentine’s Checkmate Incision. This time Filia has been given an upgrade and she’s got LOTS of new toys to play with!

Here are the full details of her adjustments:

• Tuned the hit reaction for the last hit of Gregor Samson. Gregor > Drill Tempered should now work against every character, whether on the ground or after a juggle.
• Drillationship now causes knockback (like Fukua’s version).
• Hairball can now be used in the air.
  • Remember, you will need to unlock Filia’s Advanced Juggle before you can use this!
• Ringlet Spike now comes out one spike at a time, each time you tap the move (similar to Peacock’s “Bang! Bang! Bang!). The spikes now also stay on screen, even if used right in the corner.
• Widow's Peak now causes floor bounce. The camera shake has also been reduced.
• French Twist is now safe on hit.

These changes should make Filia a lot more fun to use, with LOTS of new combo routes available to her. We’re excited to see what you can come up with using these new abilities!

Stay tuned for more pre-existing character upgrades in future updates!

ECONOMY CHANGES

CoC ADJUSTMENTS

• Prism Plumage has been added to the Trinkets tab of the Cabinet of Curiosities at a premium price.

OTHER CHANGES

MISC

• Adjusted the color grading of NPCs on Soundstage 15.
• Medici Tower now features animated neon signs and moving searchlights, including a new billboard teasing Umbrella’s Boardwalk stage.
• Added new internal/external link functionality to the in-game mail. Look out for notifications for giveaways and other events on Twitch in the future!
• Adjusted the filters in Team Select to not display Deployed Fighters when filtering by available Fighters.
• Future Club’s logo has been added to the title screen.

FIXES

• Fixed an issue where Miasma could errantly drain HP from Invincible opponents.
• Fixed an issue where players could get stuck in the Rift Battle tutorial
• Fixed an issue where Filtering by Shiny Fighters would not display Shiny Fighters correctly.
• Fixed an issue where Fighters currently on Deployments could be sacrificed.

COMING SOON

NEW USES FOR DUPLICATE FIGHTERS

You’ll have to stay tuned for more details, but get ready for a new feature in an upcoming update that will give you another use for all those duplicate Fighters you have in your collections. Keep an eye on our social media pages for info!

UMBRELLA

You may have heard that we’re working on another Brand New Character for Skullgirls Mobile and 2nd Encore. Umbrella still has a long way to go, but she is shaping up to be a wild addition to the cast! We’ll have more news to share about her very soon!

Leave a comment below if you have any questions, and let us know what you think of this update, and any features you want to see included in 4.9.

Also, keep an eye out on our social media accounts to stay up to date on new developments, giveaways and contests in the coming weeks!

As always, thanks so much for all your support!

- Hidden Variable

 

[Pandamonium]

Wait, so wetworks, high ruler and vintage wont be available on premiere relic yet?

 

[s4m43l]

NICEEE looks amazing so far, I can't wait to try it out.

 

[Dusty00]

So glad you guys made the mutually exclusive difficulties. It’s going to make the beginning and mid level player experience more true to what things were like pre diamond days. Hopefully this gets applied to Daily mission as well as a new tier to better streamline that other core aspect of the game in 4.9.

Filia looks like a lot of fun with these adjustments and I can’t wait for other characters to get some love in future updates as well. We really need better ways for peacock and pain wheels to trigger their CAs other than double swipe up and down. Eliza and peacock also need to not do boat and banjo so much on defense.

can’t wait to find out more how we can utilize all the dupe characters. I’ve got too many fodders and out of characters to diamond. Really hoping it’s targeted to close the gaps of evolved diamonds va natural diamonds. Stat boosts natural bronze and silver in diamond tiers would make them more viable and worth evolving.

Keep up the good work guys!

 

[Sairus]

Wait, so wetworks, high ruler and vintage wont be available on premiere relic yet?

Correct! They were just in the Revolutionary Relic (which is still available), so they won't arrive in regular relics until at least 4.9.

 

[Turtlewax64]

Generally a fan of the changes, though I have more mixed opinions about the prize fights being exclusive. I acknowledge that it'll be helpful for letting new players get silver and gold fighters more easily, but it makes it less important to have bronze and silver fighters upgraded, now they'll just be taking up space. Might also hurt our theonite income, though I'll need to see the numbers to check and those 500 gold relic shards will easily outmatch it. But I'm also ecstatic to have a way of getting diamond keys other than rift. Now we just need a difficulty for dailies that actually constitutes gameplay for endgame players, and not chores.

 

[DinoMax]

I would like to see in 4.9, more origins in master mode, I no longer have peacocks to use in their latest boss node

 

[rexturtle1120]

While I’m still suprised accursed experiments didn’t get a difficulty change (with decreased rewards to match) I am happy to see that now everyone can try and get beaten up in holodeck.

I’m very pleased with the fighter tuning you did with Fillia! Honestly you could do a whole update about that or tuning charecter SAs and I’m sure people would be pleased. I don’t want to know what exactly is in 4.9 but I reeeeaaalllyyy want to know when it is. We all need somthing to look forward to. In the meantime Diamond prizefight should keep me satisfied. Or maybe pissed off.

i read another users comment about how prizefight exclusivity might make people not want to keep/upgrade silver/bronze fighters. I think I’d have to agree. I won’t write a long paragraph about this specifically but pure silver/bronzes are important to a lot of facets of the game, especially story. And who knows what new challenges requiring maxed silvers will be released when the new origin story modes come out? I think a temporary fix to this could be where random fights in Diamond prizefight require a team of at least two silvers in exchange for extra points. Just an idea, and competly optional.

oh look I wrote a long paragraph, whatever I’m super excited! Hopefully when you do Eliza’s rework you can replace Decrypteds new SA2 with her old one. Just an idea….

 

[CatVacuum]

Thanks for continuing to work on improving the game! It is awesome and I love 99% of what is in this patch, so I will address the only concern I have.

I can see some of the reasoning for making prizefights exclusive, but I think this will be a detriment to newer players as well. All players who have played up to this point, who are already miles ahead in the resource grind, were able to complete all difficulties of prizefights for extra skill points, canopy coins, moves, theonite, keys, skill points, and characters. Now the option to scratch milestone rewards for newer players will be gone, putting them at an overall resource disadvantage.

I think a good middle-ground solution would be making ONLY gold and diamond prizefights exclusive, and leaving the bronze/silver difficulties unhinged. This would still have the desired effects on gold and diamond prizefights, and would not take away one of the best farming methods for all players.

Thanks again for all the hard work, very excited to see how everything pans out.

 

[Hikalgo]

The update was so good what was the need to do this?

 

[FriendlyWolf]

Whooaaa Filia is gonna be so much more fun now! I hope Beo is next, he's kinda lacking in combo potential (difficult but fun when I use him in comp versus).
Diamond Prize fight!! Nice!!

I actually like mutally exclusive prize fights, sure we might not get the same amount of theonite anymore, but it feels much better to actually focus on a single tier of prize fight now.

I used to waste time juggling between bronze, silver and gold because I wanted to get all the theonite and coins so much so that I end up burning myself out and only getting the milestone rewards for gold because I would lose motivation to continue it.

Although I do agree with rex that there should be some incentives to keep bronzes and silvers in your collection. (I have some just to do the prize fights but now that they're mutually exclusive I might not ever use them unless I want to do more story mode challenges)

 

[Diony]

Generally a fan of the changes, though I have more mixed opinions about the prize fights being exclusive. I acknowledge that it'll be helpful for letting new players get silver and gold fighters more easily, but it makes it less important to have bronze and silver fighters upgraded, now they'll just be taking up space. Might also hurt our theonite income, though I'll need to see the numbers to check and those 500 gold relic shards will easily outmatch it.

Not only theonite but Gold, Relic Shard, Skill Points, Moves.

 

[Dusty00]

How do you guys know the new diamond mileage rewards won’t make up for what not being able to grind bronze silver and gold pf? While no screenshots nor specifics were shared in the patch notes, the Twitter image shows the possibility of more theo and canopy coins. It might not be the exact same but I have a feeling you’d get roughly the same amount of rewards without having to do the mindless grinds of bronze and silver PFs. What’s to lose? Besides, by the time you are able to compete in Diamond PF you shouldn’t need resources from those lower tier PF other than Theo and Canopy coins anyways.

Also, bronze and silver are still required to complete story modes. Then there’s Show Me Your Moves pf that I hope they’d update at some point as well.

 

[Atharva73]

I used to love just doing the milestones of all prize fights for the theonite. While I had spoken on ch100 how a higher tier pf could be way harder and locked, I thought it would be either Diamond or the other 3 modes. Theonite farming is going to be hard unless Dia pf pays off a lot.

We get like 55 theonite each prize fight tier by completing all milestones. That is 330 theonite a week. And combined with 10 (VS mission), 20+- (normal missions) you could get around 540 theonite each week. So without counting daily rewards or any special events getting 2000 theonite a month was possible and I think that was pretty F2P friendly even though drop rates still hurt me.

This may be a business move (2000 theonite a month is super good for a gacha) or probably noone was crazy like me so they won't mind this change but please lock into just diamond or other 3 prize fights. That will give a theonite farm when needed and easy experience and gold relic shards as required.

 

[BallotBoxer]

Since we are locking into a single PF tier, does that mean all our teams are being wiped out from the defense database? Meaning the newest of noobs in Bronze will only have "I only have a few fighters!" (Rerun Peacock / Bassline Big Band / Understudy Cerebella) teams at first? All defense teams will be dev dummy plugs in the beginning?

I ask because I keep around a few fighters to be on permanent defense duty (e.g. forever silver/bronze) and wonder if they are now out of the job.

I thought it would be either Diamond or the other 3 modes

I like this notion. I feel bad for the noob that locks into Gold and struggles when they should be gaining strength by dabbling in Bronze and Silver PFs.

 

[Yochiri]

It's a bad Idea because New players need keys the others prize battle and cannot playing for new rules on update!!!!

 

[tequiler]

The update is great, but I think I can agree with the rest here - making PFs mutually exclusive can be bad for either new players or older ones since then bronze and silver characters will have become obsolete for them.

 

[RancorSnp]

Sounds great at first, but it is not without, potentially serious, problems.

Let's start with the main attraction - diamond pf and difficulty thingy.

It's a cool idea, but :
1) Were the milestone rewards re-balanced so that the player gets the same amount of rewards as if they cleared bronze silver and gold? Because if not than SGM which was already nowhere near as generous as currently popular gachas get's even harder to amass currencies
2) Bronze PF is completely meaningless now. It was already shafted by not requiring a themed defense, not having any modifiers, having bad rewards and terrible fighter variety. Now there is no reason for anyone to ever play it, even if you started today, there is no reason not to go for silver PF other than not knowing you should do that one
3)Now splitting the playerbase was actually amazing for early and mid game players but I'm afraid it's not gonna work for diamond pf
The reason why gold pf scores were what they were was tens of thousands of low scoring players, who will now play silver/gold pf - meaning that diamond scores will be either one of two things, either requring players to grind whole 3 days to get the % rewards, or have a negligible difference of like 500k points between top 10% and top 60% - neither is fun.

Just remove the % based reward system, nobody ever liked it. The amount of time required to grind these is the main reason players stop playing, very confident.
Now gold pf will be more accessible but it doesn't change the fact every pf mostly the same players get the rewards, you just shuffled who these players are

Other than that, I really like the idea.

Hollodeck is still daily? - Why? Just make it so players can clear Hollodeck like 14 - 20 times a week, whenever they want. Rush it in one day or do a couple every day - whatever suits you. More than 7 times a week is required.

Filia changes... I feel like are a bit too focused on a specific subset of players that actually create long combos, while offering little to casual player.
While again, I do not dislike that I believe a bit more oomph for a casual player would be welcome, something that would get us to use skills that aren't currently part of Filia's usual kit

 

[Kuragune]

So glad you guys made the mutually exclusive difficulties. It’s going to make the beginning and mid level player experience more true to what things were like pre diamond days. Hopefully this gets applied to Daily mission as well as a new tier to better streamline that other core aspect of the game in 4.9.

one difficult for dailies is something i have been praying for since the beginning, is too time wasting feature :S

 

[Xero-J]

Thank FRUIT Filia got that overhaul!

Gregor Samson into Drill Tempered has been one of my go-to combos, to the point where I had to memorize who it did and didn't work against.