The September 2017 Patch was a character balancing update for Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2. It was initially released on September 12th, 2017, then re-released on September 21st due to a bug.
Balancing[]
All Party Characters[]
- ▲ Shared Vanquishes count towards Party Time
Dev Notes: Party Time mode is powerful, yet difficult to achieve. To balance this, Shared Vanquishes now count towards Party Time characters, which should increase how often Party Time is triggered.
Armored Heal Station and Armored Bling Station[]
- ▲ Decreased cooldown by 5 seconds
Dev Notes: Increasing the health of these two abilities offsets their slower healing rate and allows players to use them more frequently.
Alien Flower[]
- ▲ Increase ammo from 10 to 15
- ▲ Increase damage of Spore Mist AOE from 3 to 4
Dev Notes: To boost Alien Sunflower’s effectiveness, her ammo clip has been increased and the AOE damage boost makes her primary weapon more effective at painting areas to deny enemy passage.
Arcane Lotus Ability[]
- ▲ Rose can see ally health bars when this ability is equipped
- ▲ Increased movement speed to match Arcane Enigma
- ▲ Heals 25 health on self when activated
Dev Notes: With this ability equipped, Rose can see ally health bars, which allows for more informed decisions regarding when to use her Arcane Lotus Ability. Her increased speed helps her reach injured allies, and the self-healing effect makes up for the ability’s shorter duration, while still allowing her to use it as an escape tactic.
Nec'Rose[]
- ▲ Increased Staff of Jinxing base damage from 5 to 6.5
Dev Notes: We’ve increased her base damage to give her an edge in fights when she doesn’t manage to Jinx her target. The multiplier applied to Jinxed targets remains the same, so her damage against these targets will also increase.
Electro Brainz and Toxic Brainz[]
- ▼ Increased recoil of the Electro and Toxic Beam
Dev Notes: Super Brainz is intended to be more effective at close range. However, the lack of recoil on his weapons made it far too easy for him to pester plants from afar. These changes will encourage close combat and keep Super Brainz primarily as a melee based character.
S.H.R.IMP[]
- ▲ Increased the Shrimpy Lasers' spread of bullets within the reticle
- ▲ Increased Shrimpy Lasers' recoil
Lil' Drake[]
- ▲ Increased Basilisk Blasters' recoil
Dev Notes: The Imp works best at medium-to-close range, but these two characters are a little too good at hitting distant targets. Decreasing their weapon accuracy will push them to get up close and personal if they want to be effective.
Petrified Cactus[]
- ▼ Decrease ammo count from 12 to 8
- ▼ Decrease Egg Blast manual detonation damage from 35 to 32
Dev Notes: Detonation characters like Petrified Cactus have proven to be very powerful in certain situations. The changes to her ammo clip size will require more strategic shots, while also giving zombies further opportunities to close in on her. The damage of her detonation charges in close combat has been decreased to incentivize sniping as her primary mode.
Trivia[]
- There was a glitch involving the patch, where the regular versions of the Party characters could activate "Party Time!" if they got five shared vanquishes, like the buff for the party characters.
- The patch was later removed, and was added back on September 21st, with the aforementioned glitch fixed.
- The then-unreleased ability, the Armored Bling Station, was mentioned in the patch notes, it is unknown whether this was intentional or not.