This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

After the official Twitter account got a little too excited and announced the update before it was ready, Splatoon 2 version 5.2.0 is now officially live.

The update makes a wealth of balance changes to primary and secondary weapons, as well as adjusting the stats and charge criteria for certain specials too.

Nintendo have been keen to stress that they’ve made the balance changes based on stats gleaned from high level play:

“The changes in this update are designed to lower the abilities of a portion of all weapons and specials that, based on analysis of statistical data, had obtained an advantage in results.
Our intention is that this will entice players to explore these weapons, while retaining their individual strengths of the weapons in scenarios where they are advantageous.
We reference various sorts of statistical data for these adjustments, but in particular for those which lower the abilities of certain weapons, we've focused on data from matches between players of high Rank.
We will issue future updates after looking carefully at changes resulting from this update, as well as the overall state of statistical data over the long term.”

They’ve also made some adjustments to the punishment for frequent disconnects, and adjusted the unlock criteria for Tracks 20 through 26 in Squid Beatz 2.

For the full patch notes click here.

Let us know what you think of the changes down in the comments!

Source: Nintendo