Welcome to Season 3 of Ability Arena. You can find the entire changelog here.

Season 3 brings a lot of new Gods, as well as a better way to unlock them! Without further ado, lets dig in.

We listened to the community feedback and we've improved the way you unlock Gods. Firstly, we deleted the old God Chest completely. In its place we've added the Galaxy God Chest 1.

This chest, which is purchased with the same amount of Gold (10,000), will not drop any duplicate Gods unless you own all of the non rares. Much like treasures you open in Dota, this chest has 3 Rares with escalating odds.

Of course, if you choose to continue to open chests to find the rares, any duplicate Gods you receive will still give 5 points towards the Golden version.

Going forward, we currently plan on releasing a new God chest every couple months that will be considerably smaller in terms of God quantity.

To celebrate the new Chest, we went a little ham and made 8 new Gods.

Santa Greevil

Santa Greevil is our Season 3 Battlepass God which unlocks for free at level 40. He is heavily inspired from one of our favorite games, Hades. The tooltip can be overwhelming, but it's relatively simple. Santa Greevil players will automatically get a Good or Bad gift depending on if they win or lose a round. Your opponents have a few seconds to accept a gift just as the battle starts. If they accept, then the same rules will apply to them.

Good and Bad gifts are usually team buff/nerfs that will last the entire game. We've sprinkled in some rare choices that I won't spoil right now.

GLaDOS

GLaDOS is our first God from the Portal universe. She can be unlocked via a chest and is also available with PLUS this month. As a God she will create two portals that allows 2 units to share HP and mana. An example would be a frontliner who is receiving HP because the backline DPS is lifestealing. She creates a lot of interesting interactions that we hope you will discover.

Boneless Aghanim

This God can be unlocked via a chest, but he will actually replace the old Lifestealer. So if you ever unlocked Lifestealer in the past, you will now have Aghanim's latest form. This is a relatively simple God that will allow players to utilize the very popular "Level 2 shop strategy", without actually having to stay at level 2 shop.

Lifestealer

With the old Lifestealer gone, we've decided to create a brand new one that is Free to all players. This one is sure to be more fun (at least it has been in internal testing). I'm really curious what type of units players will build to synergize the best with Infest.

Chaos God S3

A new Battlepass brings a new Chaos God which will unlock at level 20. This means the old one has been removed, as will this one upon season's completion. As you can read, this version of Chaos God is completely different and instead focused on the shopping mechanic.

Cave Johnson

This God is a Rare in the new Galaxy God Chest. He brings an obvious drawback of no healing, but with some crazy benefits based on what attribute your hero bodies are. This God has been a real breath of fresh air as you can play him in many different ways. You are also forced to either ignore or not prioritize certain spells that have felt like a necessity in previous metas.

Bathtime Aghanim

Yet another Aghanim graces us with his presence. This version is the Very Rare in the new Galaxy God Chest. You can only have 3 spells upgraded at max level (1 to Standard, 1 to Super, and 1 to Gaben) and they only last for one round. But it forces you to make decisions that you normally wouldn't have to. For instance, how many total spells should I be getting? Perhaps getting less spells so you know what is getting upgraded is the better choice. This God takes elements from the original Aghanim and amplifies them into some really cool late game scenarios.

Techies

And last but not least is Techies, who is the Ultra Rare in the Galaxy God Chest. He is separated into 3 skills which are tied to the individuals Squee, Spleen, and Spoon. When you upgrade to shop level 2/4/5, a random one becomes available. If you unlocked the Sticky Bomb, what kind of spell damage hero will you create in order to maximize your buff? If the Taser is unlocked, will you place it on a tank or will you use it to protect your fragile heroes from backline jumpers? If you get the Proximity Mine, what kind of carry will work the best with your lineup? And of course you can put these skills all on the same hero if you want.

New Spells

Between these spell additions/subtractions and our balance changes, the goal was to lower the physical damage build potency by a bit, while still allowing them to stay relevant.

Blast Off

A new silence enters the pool, but it comes at the cost of cast animation. The fact that you are also putting yourself in harm's way makes this a spell that forces you to think of new ways to potentially initiate or counter-initiate.

Chakram

This adds more pure damage to the game, this time on a spell caster that doesn't care about auto attacking.

Essence Shift

I am intrigued to see if this spell becomes popular. It gives attack speed, but kind of requires attack speed to get ramped up (Focus Fire anyone?). It also can give damage if you are an agility hero, but it is difficult to get stacks up considering it follows suit with a lot of our other spells in that mechanic only being unlocked at Super.

Mana Shield

Another spell being added that allows new things to occur. Now a tank can make use of mana replenishment spells. This also allows int melee heroes to shine a bit more potentially.

Sun Ray

Percentage based damage at a cost of both HP and channel time. We also get to introduce Holy Locket to the game which is awesome. This also happens to be one of my favorite Gabens in the game.

War Cry

Now you have a way to defend yourselves against physical DPS.

Benched Spells

Elder Dragon Form

This was one of the most picked up spells, regardless of what type of strategy you were working with. We'd like to see what the game looks like without it for a while.

Moon Glaives

This one sounded good in theory, but in practice was a buggy mess. It had many interactions we were not originally intending and they are not easy to fix.

Omnislash

A very boring spell that no one seemed to favor, outside of some fringe physical lineups.

As usual, lets divide this into sections.

Gods

We are taking a slightly new approach to balance where we buff Gods to be at the same level as our top performers. In other words, we are raising the bar for how well a God should perform on average.

• Aghanim: upgrade chance from 25/30/35/40/45 to 20/30/40/50/60%
• Alchemist gold required from 11/10/9/8/7 to 10/9/8/7/6
• Bloodseeker attack speed per stack from 30 to 40
• Centaur HP per round from 50 to 60
• Centaur retaliate damage from 20% to 25%
• Jmuy cooldown reduction from 10/20/30/40/50 to 30/35/40/45/50
• Ogre Magi spell point requirement from 0/25/50/75/100 to 0/20/40/60/80
• Phantom Assassin critical strike chance from 15% to 20%
• Rubick spell points required from 0/11/22/33/44/55/66/77/88 to 0/10/20/30/40/50/60/70/80
• Tower God fortification duration from 1.5 to 1.75

Spells

Quality of Life
These are changes that will make these spells feel better to use.

• Blink now has the silence/damage from Super by default
• Brain Sap Super additionally adds +Health to the unit equivalent to the amount sapped
• Corrosive Haze Super replaced with: now allows Corrosive Haze to stack on the unit. Remove the healing reduction
• Culling Blade cast range from 175 to 225
• Double edge cast range increased +100
• Jingu Gaben soldiers now have +400 attack range
• Purification cast range increased from 550 to 800
• Sunder Super additionally grants +400 cast range

Underperformers
These spells either weren't picked up very often, or weren't upgraded often enough to our liking.

• Burrowstrike Super additionally increases cast range to 1300, grants 2s cooldown reduction, and +0.3 second stun duration
• Life Break Super additionally adds: every unit hit in the path of the Life Break takes 100% of caster's self-damage as magical
• Resonant Pulse Super additionally: grants 1s of Magic Immunity for every unit hit
• Static Link Gaben replaced with steals attack speed as well, and duration still lasts the entire round
• Warpath Super and Gaben swapped

Cause it's cool
These were created because they are badass.

• Eye of the Storm Super additionally grants Lightning Rod: caster also gets hit by Eye of the Storm, gaining the opposite effects (healing and +armor) for half value.
• Leech Seed additional Super: Leech Seed becomes a puddle that leech seeds from every unit standing in it
• Purification Super additionally grants Gaben's Blessing: casts 2 more Purifications on the same unit, seperated by 3s intervals
• Reality Rift Super additionally casts level 2 Chaos Bolt on target
• Reality Rift Gaben Chaos Bolt additionally summons a Phantasm Illusion on target hit

What the Hell were we thinking?
::horse::

• Duel cast ranged reduced by 500 (to regular Dota numbers)

AI changes
As always, we're looking to improve AI across the board. In many cases we are picking between two interactions, both of which will get complaints. But we think these changes will feel way better than the previous iteration.

• Black Hole AI changed to cast on closest unit instead of searching for multi-target
• Reality Rift AI fixed to cast on farthest target in range
• Wild Axes AI fixed to target units farther away
• Windrun should now cast off cooldown (was previously casting after taking damage for the first time)

Win Streaks

We've added win streaks to the game. Currently there are 3 (Fire (unlocked on Store), Santa Greevil (unlocked on Battlepass), and Galaxy (unlocked via leaderboard/tournament placement). They have 3 levels of intensity, triggering at 3/6/9 round wins in a row. We'll be adding a new Win Streak for each future Battlepass.

Store redesign

The Store has been redesigned to look a lot cleaner, which aside from looking a lot better will also allow us to add more things to the store in the future. We've also rearranged the quick access bar, which now includes the free daily PLUS coins button and promo code section.

Battlepass

Here are the featured items in this month's Battlepass

• Level 10: Santa Greevil Emote Pack #1
• Level 14: Santa Greevil Emote Pack #2
• Level 19: Santa Greevil Finisher
• Level 20: Chaos God
• Level 23: Epic Sound Pack
• Level 28: Santa Greevil Winstreak
• Level 30: Santa Greevil Arena
  
• Level 34: Santa Greevil Emote Pack #3
• Level 35: Galaxy God Chest 1
• Level 39: Santa Greevil God Avatar
• Level 40: Santa Greevil God Unlock
• Level 100: Diamond Santa Greevil Avatar

War Chests

War Chests got some love. You can now roll multiple items per chest (up to 5). We've also removed Temporary PLUS and God chests from dropping. This means that there is now a higher chance to get the coveted Finishers and Terrains.

In a future update we will add Temporary PLUS drops as part of the quest system.

Thanks a lot for reading! Work has already begun for the 3.5 update in mid-season and 4.0 in January. We hope to add a new mechanic to the game by Season 4 as well as tweak the damage formula. These things require a lot of testing and we don't want to rush it out.

And lastly, we plan to hold a God creation contest some time in December. So stay tuned for details on that!