The designers behind Kill Team keep a close eye on how the special operatives of the 41st Millennium are getting on, ensuring that the game stays balanced and fun for all players. With this in mind, they’ve been working hard on the latest Balance Dataslate.
Get your (virtual) hands on the new Kill Team Balance Dataslate here.
Wondering why those changes have been made? Here are the Kill Team developers to explain them.
Kill Team Studio: Every month we collect tournament data from around the world. We then evaluate this data and use it to inform future Balance Dataslates to ensure any changes we make are accurate and appropriate for what’s happening on the ground. There are different ways we do this, but the primary statistic we look at is average win rates.
In an ideal world the game would be perfectly balanced if every faction had a 50% win rate, but in practice this is very difficult to achieve. Therefore we aim for every faction’s win rate to sit between 45-55%.
From May’s data we can see only the Corsair Voidscarred, Void-dancer Troupes, and Pathfinders fall outside our ideal range, and just a 2% win rate separates six of the top seven factions – a healthy mix! This is further evidenced by the varied spread of podiums and top 10s we saw at tournaments. Overall, we feel this bodes well for the current state of the game, with plenty of factions fighting it out, and allowing player skill to make the difference.
Corsair Voidscarred were our top-performing faction in May, but along with the Hunter Clade, they are being picked less over other factions. In the case of Corsairs, this could be due to their new models – a hobby delay caused whilst people collect and paint them. In the case of Hunter Clade, however, we feel they lack some tools to perform as well as others. This was particularly evident in April, where their win rate was as low as 28%. Therefore, we’ve given them some much needed improvements in the Balance Dataslate to bring them up a notch.
With a hefty 68% win rate, Void-dancer Troupes showed you could clown around in April long after April fools. We didn’t want to rush out a patch too soon, though – often, new teams land strong as opponents don’t know their tricks, but over time things can settle. Fortunately, that may have happened with the Void-dancers – their win rate fell to 56% in May, 1% above our ideal parameters. They can still be a difficult team to play against though, particularly for newer players, so we’ve deployed some focused tweaks to help. We will continue to monitor them and see if future data supports our theory. Similarly, we will monitor the Corsair Voidscarred and Legionaries, our two newest teams, as we gather more data.
Finally, it's fair to say grenades have become very prevalent across the killzones. The Indirect special rule is incredibly useful, and while we are happy with how grenades work thematically and mechanically, their efficiency and prevalence is noticeable. We’ve therefore used the same change we made to the Kommando’s dynamite in the previous Balance Dataslate (maximum of one), applying it to each offensive grenade in the game. We feel this change will have a significant impact on Pathfinders, Novitiates, Wyrmblade and Veteran Guardsmen, in particular, trimming their potential slightly.
Overall, we feel the Kill Team meta was pretty healthy in May, with a good variety of teams doing well. Going forward, we will keep our finger on the pulse and monitor things closely in Q3.
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