1.6 Meta Report

Welcome to the 1.6.X Meta report. My name is Metalmine and I will tell you my thoughts about this patch.

Introduction
1.6 Introduced many many new features and quality of life changes that drastically changed the difficulty curve of the game. As such, there is a meta shift to how the game is played. Mana Scientist is no longer the single best Monster to have in the game as there are other newer units that can contest that now. However, it is still incredibly good to bring 5 into a difficulty you're not familiar with. Blindsense is no longer required at all, but still a good passive skill to have and Mystic One is still required on everyone in your Dark Lord's room. Earthquake is still the single best offensive ability in the game as it does both damage and provides hard crowd control, much needed when the heroes decide to hold a full on raid in your chambers.

What changed since 1.5?

 * Cool-downs for active skills are now dependent on their targeting category.
 * AI pathing is now more aggressive.
 * Trial Card rework in Trial Difficulty and Legend Difficulty.
 * Corruption Costs
 * 10 New Heroes and their Corrupted counterparts
 * Repeatable relics
 * Divided Merchant functionality

Cool-down
The change to cool-downs can be considered a nerf to room wide and dungeon wide skills, as the rate at which they happen have been reduced to a level that is no longer ridiculous.

AI pathing
New pathing changes during 1.6.0 were so aggressive that heroes would head almost DIRECTLY to the Dark Lord's room and as a result, few runs can survive beyond the first few dozen days. After the pathing nerf to those changes in 1.6.1, it is now much more manageable and have almost returned to what it was like prior to the change, albeit still more aggressive than 1.5.x

The upper right and bottom right corners of dungeons with only one entrance are no longer very likely to have heroes pass through them.