The Undisclosed Patch Notes for Petal’s Seed Recharge

It’s been a long while since I created an undisclosed patch notes post, but this information was just too good to pass up. After a lot of in-game testing with Petal, recording the footage, and reviewing it multiple times with a stopwatch, here’s all the juicy details you should know about Petal’s seed recharge mechanics.

Default Recharge Times

The description on Petal’s seed recharge is as follows:

Petal stores up to 6 seeds as charges, gaining a seed every 15 seconds. Petal gains charges faster the more charges she already has.

Through experimentation, I’ve been able to create a more detailed version:

As you can see, there’s a 1.4 second difference in the recharge time between each tier of missing seeds. As expected, the idea here is that the more seeds you keep in reserve, the faster you’ll get new ones, so there’s a bit of a mini resource game here which may affect how you decide to spend seeds.

Now, this appears extremely simple and straight forward, but it’s not. Let me present a scenario to you:

1. I spend all of Petal’s seeds in a team fight.
2. I wait 15 seconds and I’m now up to one seed again. My next seed should take 13.6 seconds to appear.
3. However, after waiting five seconds (i.e. 8.6 seconds left on the timer), I get in another fight and spend my only seed.

The question: how long do you think it will take (in total) between my first seed recharge and my second seed recharge? Seriously. Think about it for a second before you read the next line.

The answer: 20 seconds. Whenever you spend a seed, you immediately reset the recharge counter to the new value – in this case, 15 seconds. So, after waiting five seconds, I sabotaged myself by reseting the counter, thus bringing my total wait to 20 seconds. At an extreme, I could’ve spent a seed after waiting 13 seconds, bringing my grand total to a 28-second wait between seed recharges. Crazy, eh?

That being said, take all of this into account before you start randomly dropping seeds. There’s definitely a strategy to all of this.

The Effects of Items on Recharge Times

Believe or not, bonuses to cooldown speed do affect how quickly Petal’s seeds recharge and at the same rate that it affects any other ability. In other words, if you purchased two Clockworks (+100% cooldown speed), not only would the cooldown on your abilities be cut in half, but the amount of time between seed recharges would be cut in half as well.

Unfortunately, Petal does not gain any benefit from bonus energy or energy recharge. Items with these attributes are suboptimal on Petal and inefficient when it comes to gold. Since Petal’s kit seems to point players towards crystal power builds, I was hoping that the energy attributes could get converted into bonus crystal power – like it does for Ardan; otherwise, this limits the amount of optimal, offensive item choices for Petal to Shatterglass, Frostburn, Broken Myth, Alternating Current and maybe Aftershock.

Recharging Seeds on the Spawn Platform

In a game where your opponents have made their way to your base, I typically find myself periodically going back to the spawn platform to get a quick health and energy recharge, so I was curious to how this would impact Petal’s seed regeneration. Under normal circumstances, you immediately begin to recharge health and energy when you get on the steps. This works slightly different for Petal.

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When Petal initially gets on the platform, her health begins to rapidly recharge – as normal – but her seeds do not. In fact, it even appears that the platform does not recharge her seeds at all. However, after sitting on the platform for five seconds the rapid recharge of her seeds begins to take effect, restoring seeds at a rate of one per second (i.e. super fast). So, while this makes it difficult to do a quick recharge when your base is under siege, it’s still possible to go from zero to full seeds in approximately 10 seconds, which is much better than the 69-second alternative.

Now, go queue up a couple of Petal games and put this information into practice!

— Gadianton