Breaking down Splatoon 3’s new 11.0.0 update and why you should care

Recently, Nintendo released an update for Splatoon 3, a title which originally released over three years ago. At the time of writing, the developers are still re-running old events, but the game is in the latter half of its lifespan – it isn’t receiving any “true” new content. Or so we thought! For whatever reason, Splatoon 3’s 11.0.0 update makes all sorts of changes that will affect players both casual and competitive.

A quick disclaimer before we begin: I’m not a competitive Splatoon 3 player by any means, but I am a casual player who’s played for well over 1,000 hours in this game. And even so, I can tell you that 11.0.0’s changes are going to change things up significantly.

Starting on the smaller side, the Stealth Jump bonus has been nerfed. Previously, Stealth Jump was run on almost every single clothing set (unless you had Inkjet as a special, in which case you ran Drop Roller instead). With this, enemies at a distance wouldn’t be able to see your Super Jump spot and splat you right as you land. Especially in casual matches, long-rangers like snipers and Splatlings are very common, and without Stealth Jump, they can easily farm your landing spot and gain a big advantage. 11.0.0 makes it so that Stealth Jump reduces the speed of your Super Jump, which means it’s now got a considerable weakness to deal with. Is this a little bit of a pain, given that I have Stealth Jump on every one of my kits? Yes, but in my opinion this is a good change. Now you have to think twice before slapping Stealth Jump on just anything – if you’re playing a frontliner weapon like a close-range shooter, you might wind up preferring a different bonus so your Super Jump speed remains intact.

Next up, this one’s odd: enemies now have health bars. In Splatoon 3, Inklings and Octolings can take about 100 points of damage before they get splatted. 11.0.0 adds a health bar to allies and opponents that lasts around 3 seconds after they take damage, and disappears if they hide behind a wall or swim in their ink. Thermal Ink and Point Sensors will also reveal enemy health bars at all times, even if they’re hiding in ink. This change, I’m mixed on – it’ll be easier to see that you’re actually dealing damage to opponents, and I feel like it’ll be most helpful to see how your teammates are doing rather than how close your enemies are to being splatted. It’s especially helpful if you’re playing with random teammates and can’t communicate with them over voice chat or the like. In any case, I think it’s interesting we’re getting a health bar (what appears to be an important mechanic) so late into this game’s life cycle. I’m not sure what to make of it – is this testing for Splatoon 4 years down the line? Who knows.

Here’s the main change of the update: Flow Aura. When a player defeats a string of consecutive opponents, the player has a chance of being put into a Flow Aura state – this chance increases if the player inks a lot of turf or assists with allies (damaging an enemy that a teammate then splats). Flow Aura automatically inks the ground for you to swim it, and it also provides bonuses to run speed, swim speed, ink resistance, as well as Intensify Action (which steadies your fire when jumping and speeds up Squid Rolls and Squid Surges). This is a substantial boost, to say the least, and I can definitely see where they’re going with this. But as a casual player, I think Splatoon 3’s most serious flaw is spawn camping – this is especially common in Turf War, where the 3 minute timer must count down to 0 before the match ends. A lot of little things contribute to spawn camping – it’s much worse on some maps than others, with Brinewater Springs and Lemuria Hub coming to mind as some of the ones I’ve been spawn camped on the harshest. It’s also related to matchmaking; if a team is easily spawn camping their opponents, they probably shouldn’t have been matched together in the first place. It’s hard to say exactly how else Flow Aura will change the pace of the game – we’ll just have to see over the coming months.

We’ve already gone over just about all of the major changes. If you’d like to see all of the minor changes to weapons, you can do that over at our patch notes report. The only other somewhat-major change here from a casual perspective is to Reefslider, which now generally deals much more damage. More specifically, the radius of the explosion that deals 220 damage has been extended by 20%. In exchange, the explosion inks slightly less and the charge dash doesn’t travel quite as far.

For being so late into Splatoon 3’s life span, the 11.0.0 update sure adds a lot of substantial changes. What do you think of them? Are they positive changes, or are they just disrupting a settled metagame? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.