Valve's Dota Underlords Leaves Steam Early Access Soon

Dota Underlords, Valve’s own take on the Auto Chess genre, is leaving Early Access and officially launching on February 25 on PC, iOS, and Android. Along with the announcement Valve has also released the final update before launch, introducing a new character to the game.

In the month before launch, Valve will be working on polishing up remaining work on the first season for Underlords. Season 1 will include changes to the current meta–through character and item rotations–as well as a new content with City Crawl and a brand-new Battlepass with all new rewards.

Valve states in the update notes that it will be revealing more details about Season 1 in the coming weeks, but will otherwise be silent on other updates until then. To soften the blow, Dota Underlords will be receiving a new character in the shape of Enno–a poison-dealing thief that has randomly assigned builds.

Enno is an extremely mobile character that will be able to zip around the board during fights, as well as exit it entirely in moments of danger. The twist is that you’re not really sure what type of Enno you’re going to get. Enno features two core builds that are randomized, which will force you to make an educated gamble on whether either will be useful to your strategy. The full breakdown of Enno and some gameplay snippets can be found on the official Underlords website.

Along with Enno, the final Early Access patch includes some tweaks to balance and general performance changes. The full patch notes can be found below:

ADDED ENNO

• A ranged menace, Enno leaps around the board poisoning enemies and generally wreaking havoc.
• Enno will be one of the four Underlord options available at the end of Round 1 in Knockout and at the end of Round 9 in Standard and Duos game modes. One of two Enno builds (detailed below) will be randomly presented.

POISON

Added a new status effect, Poisoned. Poisoned units take 15 physical damage per second and healing is reduced by 10% for 5 seconds. Poison effects can stack up to 5 times.

GENERAL CHANGES

• Improved lighting used by the Underlords.
• Fixed issues with low resolution textures on the Underlords on mobile.
• Further fixes to the map not loading when starting a match.
• Fixed an issue where a dead unit on a cell could prevent a live unit from being selected.
• Fixed wrong rank icon sometimes being displayed on the post-match screen.
• Fixed more places where an Underlord’s base ability icon or name would be shown, rather than the version of that ability used by the Underlord build.
• Added more pizzazz to the Underlord picker.
• Target Buddy has begrudgingly put away his holiday hat, since it’s apparently “not the season” anymore.

UNDERLORD CHANGES

• Jull:
  • fixed Barrels of Fun barrels hitting Spiderlings.
• Hobgen:
  • fixed enemy Spiderlings causing other enemies to take decreased damage from Implosion and Shockwave.

UNIT CHANGES

Venomancer:

• Venomous Gale:
  • Now applies poison to its targets.

ITEM CHANGES

• Blade Mail:
  • Fixed bonus armor error in description.
• Orb of Venom:
  • Instead of applying damage, Orb of Venom now applies poison.

ALLIANCE CHANGES

• Brute:
  • Fixed an issue where Brutes could switch targets mid-swing.

Dota Underlords is free-to-play, and can be downloaded via Steam, Apple’s App Store, and the Google’s Play Store.