Let's talk about the conclusion first: The impact of this 2.1 patch on the competitive rhythm is greater than expected, especially the adjustment of the prop refresh mechanism in the “Treasure Hunt-Capture the Flag” mode, which forced many teams to reconstruct their starting operations.
In previous versions, everyone was used to grabbing the middle line directly at the beginning, using the "Compass" to quickly locate the treasure chest, and then relying on highly mobile characters such as "Wind Sound" or "Iron Lady" to attack quickly. However, after the update, the effective detection range of the compass has been reduced by about 15%, and a new "Shadow Wood" prop has been added to place phantom traps at fixed points. This change directly makes the early vision game more complicated - in the past, you only had to prevent the opponent from grabbing points, but now you also have to prevent the opponent from setting up an ambush on the only way to pass.
I have watched several recent high-end games, such as the "Beijing Fighting Team" vs. "Genting Gold Team", which is a typical case of version adaptation. In the first round, the Genting team failed to adapt to the trap mechanism and was squatted twice in a row by the "Ghost Hand", the auxiliary character of the "Beijing team". They lost two gold charms at the beginning, and their rhythm collapsed. However, in the second game, the Genting team quickly adjusted and replaced the original pathfinder position with the analyst-turned-player "A Leng", who focused on anti-trap reconnaissance. They forced the mid-term resource battle to the later stage and won by relying on a wave of team battles with few mistakes.
In terms of balance, this update has weakened the "Iron Lady"'s digging skill, raising the cooldown from 8 seconds to 12 seconds, but added 0.5 seconds of silence to the "Scholar's" sealing technique. I think this is a bit overkill. Although Iron Lady was indeed very strong before (the winning rate once exceeded 56%), her suppression power in map exploration has declined significantly now, allowing the originally unpopular "dumb" character to enter the game with high sustained damage. I hope that subsequent hot repairs can slightly adjust Iron Lady's basic movement speed, otherwise the competitive rankings may have to be shuffled again.
In addition, I would like to mention that the corner design of the new map "Three Floors of the Underground Palace" is very unfriendly to melee characters, especially bulky characters like "Barbarian Sword" that can easily be kited to death by long-range enemies. However, this also allows mid-range control characters such as "Hidden Weapon" and "Silver Lock" to have room to play, which can be regarded as an encouragement to diversity in the version.
In general, this update makes competitive confrontation more towards tactical games rather than pure operations. For the audience, the game becomes more enjoyable; but for the players, the pressure on memorizing point positions and trap distribution is indeed great. Looking forward to more exciting counter-attack routines in subsequent professional games 🤔