This week, The First Descendant has released a hotfix with sweeping character tuning changes to attempt to begin addressing the severe balance issues that have dogged Nexon’s looter shooter through much of its short life.
Firstly, after months of dominating the meta in most areas of the game, Ines has been nerfed. Alongside smaller tuning adjustments, her ultimate ability has had its cooldown significantly increased, and her chain lightning will no longer ignore line of sight obstructions. While these may look like big nerfs, we tested her after the change and found she still steamrolls content easily, so any rumours of her demise you might hear on social media are greatly exaggerated.
Meanwhile, a large swath of characters — mostly male characters, who have tended to underperform compared to their female counterparts — have received massive buffs, with many of them having the damage of their abilities increased by anywhere from 100-300%. While this may seem drastic, the top performers were so far ahead that even now it’s unlikely any of the buffed characters will sit at the top of the meta, though hopefully the gap between best and worst will be much smaller now.
The patch is accompanied by some comments from game director Minseok Joo, who acknowledges that this is just a first step. He mentions that Freyna and the recently added Serena are also over-performing, but the developers have held off on nerfing them for now because they feel that Freyna is not breaking content sufficiently to warrant it and they want to gather more data before deciding how to adjust Serena. He also states that some descendants may require full mechanical overhauls rather than just number tuning, which may explain why Jayber received smaller buffs than most of his peers despite being widely regarded as the game’s weakest character.
