Welcome to the Rivals of Aether 1.2.0 patchnotes! There are plenty of exciting additions to Rivals today including two new characters, Halloween seasonal colors, a brand new ranked season, and more. Read on for all the detailed notes and other good stuff.
New Characters – Ranno and Clairen
Ranno, The Poisonous Pacifist and Clairen, The Flame’s Salvation are now available on Steam! These Rivals come as a DLC two pack and can be added to your roster for $4.99.
Ranno is our third Rival to represent the water element while Clairen fights on the side of flame. Pick them up today on Steam or try them for free in their tutorials, accessible through the solo menu in game.
Halloween Seasonal Colors
The Rivals are ready for Halloween with festive costume colors available in all gameplay modes. Be on the lookout for spooky Orcanes and mummy Maypuls as you scare your way through ranked and exhibition.
Ranked Season 3
Patch 1.2.0 marks the beginning of ranked season 3 for the online ladder. This means that everyone gets a clean slate and fresh climb starting at 1000 ELO in ranked mode. All records from last season have been immortalized on the Steam leaderboards, and new icon rewards will be available to you depending on the rank you achieved.
Congratulations to everyone who secured medal placements (bronze players at 1200+ ELO, silver at 1500+ ELO, and gold at 1800+ ELO).
- Parry Cooldown – Missing a parry now gives it a 20 frame cooldown. We added this to prevent people from spamming parry back to back, as the reward for landing the parry was too high in some situations (and it was frustrating to play against).
- “Random” Stage Selection – When choosing random on local stage select, you can no longer get the same stages you played on in the previous 2 games. This technically makes random, well, less random… but it feels better since brains are dumb. Online stage select already behaves this way so this brings local up to speed.
- Outward Sending Hitbox Normalization – We’ve normalized all outward hitting moves so that the sides don’t kill off the top blastzone earlier than the top of the move. This makes our intent for these types of moves actually line up with the execution. Knockback has been adjusted to keep relative power levels the same based on the new formula.
- Shine (charged and uncharged) knockback has been adjusted to be the same when hit from the side, but will now be a little stronger on the top and bottom. Increased from 5+.55 > 7+.65.
- Forsburn’s Combust sweetspot knockback has been increaesd from 4+1.1 > 7+1.3. Sourspot increased from 4+0.9 > 6+1.1.
- Absa’s Dspecial knockback changed to 5 + 1.5.
Bugfixes
- The Spirit Tree really wants you to pick it – Fixed a bug in local stage select that allowed The Spirit Tree to come up on random even if it was banned.
- What happened to my dodge – Fixed a bug where you would lose your air dodge when getting hit during its startup, but only if you air dodged out of a tumble.
- I’m taking you down with me – Fixed a game crash that happened when bashed clone explosion was parried.
- AZCards’ Long Lost Bug – Fixed a bug that stopped Kragg from destroying an opponent’s pillar in the ditto.
- Angles
– Removed angle flippers on Etalus ice shards.
While Ori and Sein were close to how we wanted them to feel on release, Sein ended up hogging more of the spotlight than we liked. This patch we’ve toned down some of their moves that were simply too good and gave Ori a few quality of life improvements as well.
We’ve specifically targeted charged flame to subdue the little orb of doom and have also made the duo easier to use with default controls.
- New Charged Flame mechanics have been changed:
- Hold special for 15 frames to initiate charged flame.
- If you let go before 55 frames (about 1 second) it will stay charged until you tap it again. If you let go after 55 frames it will blow up as soon as you release.
- Maximum hold time has been reduced to 4 seconds.
- Sein now has 10 frames of startup before exploding.
This change is intended to make charged flame less oppressive in coverage, more difficult/impressive to time correctly, and more user friendly with default controls.
- Charged Flame active frames decreased from 12 > 4.
Twelve active frames was TOO MUCH. - New Dash attack can now cancel into anything after hitting the sweet spot successfully.
- Dash attack sweet spot size increased from 8x8px to 20x20px.
- Recovery increased from 16 > 18.
- Sour knockback angle changed from 361 > 45 (only higher on grounded opponents).
- Base knockback increased from 8 > 9.
- Fstrong recovery increased from 18 > 20. On-whiff recovery increased from 27 > 30.
- Team-up Fstrong recovery increased from 18 > 24. On-whiff recovery increased from 27 > 36.
Spamming team-up Fstrong was too good. It’s already a great kill move that lasts a decent length so we’d like to encourage people to be more precise with it. - Team-up Fstrong hitboxes reduced in size.
- Team-up Ustrong and Fstrong multihits now pull toward the center during hitpause.
This fixes an admittedly funny issue where Ori could send enemies flying if they traded with this attack. - Ori can no longer fastfall on hit to prevent Ustrong from rising.
- Both Ori and their target are now invincible when aiming Bash (Dspecial).
This makes bash usable in free for all and doubles.
Wrastor is a tough bird to balance since he constantly walks (flaps?) a fine line between too good or not good enough. While it’s fun when you’re getting the reads, he’s more often frustrating to play as than not – especially against heavies who take too long to KO.
To alleviate this, we’re making some changes this patch to allow him to wrack up damage faster while still being a stylish glass cannon.
Wrastor dies very early so this gives him a little help in making him very slightly harder to KO horizontally.
This used to be one of Wrastor’s signature moves but recently it’s looked a little lackluster. We’re increasing the size to make it a more enticing option.
Maypul has been suffering a little bit from the same problems as Wrastor in that she’s very powerful in theory, but fails to reach her potential when played online. To add to this many of her hitboxes also feel slightly unreliable. To compensate we’ve made quite a few of them bigger this patch as well as tweaked the properties of a few other key moves to make her more forgiving to play.
Maypul dies very early so this gives her a little help in making her very slightly harder to KO horizontally.
The reward didn’t match the commitment for this move. This change makes it still easy to punish on whiff, but gives Maypul more reliable aerial follow-ups if she hits.
This makes the move connect consistently similar to other moves with two parts like Zetterburn’s forward and down strongs.
We’re giving a bit of Zetterburn’s recovery back so he doesn’t get snuffed out too early offstage.
- Wall jumping after down special has been reverted to give Zetterburn his jump back, but only once until he touches ground again.
This should give Zetterburn some nice recovery mixups while not swinging the pendulum back to pre-Ori patch where his recovery near the wall was monstrous.
Kragg throw rock. Kragg tall rock need improvement. Kragg smaller rock need improvement too.
This change was made to avoid situations like Zetterburn fair sweetspot breaking a pillar from above, causing Zetterburn to die if he autocancelled the fair.
These moves now interact with the rock by moving it instead of outright breaking it.