A new update is available today for Paragon, and in short, it includes major changes to Epic Games’ multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA). The “Monolith” update brings faster gameplay with a new map and a complete rebalance of each Hero.
The heart of the update is the map, which is also called Monolith. Compared to the Legacy map that veteran players are familiar with, this new area is smaller so that both sides can start fighting as soon as possible. In addition to the smaller map, the overall movement speed of each Hero was increased to make each encounter even more exciting and intense. The concept of cooldown reduction as a bonus that you could buy was also eliminated. Instead, the overall cooldown times of all abilities were reduced to make gameplay even faster.
The studio made many changes to each Hero, but there was also a unified modification across all characters--namely, the fact that your main attacks are now called “basic” damage whereas activated powers are designated as “ability” damage. This makes it easier for you to see the matchup between two heroes when you compare their basic and ability damage outputs. These new nomenclatures help not just in offense but in defense, as well. Furthermore, every card now has a unifying Power stat that helps to increase both basic and ability damage. Depending on your character, you could see an increase in ability over basic damage and vice versa.
In addition to these major changes, Epic Games also added new classifying traits for each Hero, an updated system for consuming mana, and walls of fog on the map that can make for some surprising encounters. The list of Hero changes (as well as the game’s many cards, or player items) is long, to say the least, but you can read them in detail in the update’s release notes.
The overall goal with Monolith is to make a faster, yet still enjoyable MOBA experience. Instead of spending the first few minutes traveling from the main base to your designated lane, the new map (combined with the other gameplay improvements) ensures that you get to the action faster without sacrificing any of the features that make Paragon unique from other games in the genre. Depending on the success of the Monolith update, Epic Games might not have to add any major changes to the game for quite some time.
