Aye aye, captains!
Todays update brings with it some much needed balancing changes and I wanted to walk you through them so you can better understand what we did and why.
You can find the full list of patch notes here
1. Frost
Let's start with the most pressing issue, the frost-torp problem.
- Damaging a frozen target removes frost effects.
- Reason: Before, damage would cut down the remaining duration by 50%. In practice, this still left players completely vulnerable for long enough to be destroyed
- Reason: Freezing enemies is a very powerful ability and when combined with damage bonuses from talents and perks, it was starting to warp the metagame a bit too much.
- Frost Blaster
- Effect talents reduced from +10% to +5% each
- End result: total bonus from talents reduced from 50% to 25%
- Reason: The Frost Blaster effect was way too powerful, especially at the higher end. This change brings it down a bit and we will be keeping a close eye on this to see if further reduction is needed later.
- Frost Launcher
- Base slow effect increased (except Legendary)
- End result: Frost Launchers have higher effect at lower levels, but the maximum effect is unchanged (common level 1 goes from 10% slowdown to 20%)
- Reason: Frost Launchers had too low starting effect and were practically useless at the lower levels.
- Minimum Range increased by 130%
- End result: You cannot hit a ship that is right next to you with Frost Launcher
- Reason: Frost Launcher was effective at too many ranges. Like the mortars, it was never meant as a short range item, so now it won't be.
- Flight time of projectile increased by 16,5%
- Reason: The large area of effect plus the low flight time made the effect almost impossible to dodge. This change makes it slightly more possible to get out of the way.
- Talents that increase damage to frozen targets
- All "damage to frozen" talents changed from 10% to 5% (both Mortars and Torpedoes)
- 1 additional "damage to slowed" talent added to Mortimer level 15 and Sinklair level 7
- End result: The total available damage bonus to frozen targets from talents is reduced for all Mortars and Torpedoes
- Reason: These talents were originally created to enable creative combos in the metagame.. In retrospect, the bonus is too large for something that doesn't take much effort and lately, these have become too dominant in the metagame, so we are reducing this combo bonus.
2. Burn
Frost isn't the only overpowered thing in the metagame, so we feel that some changes to the burning bonuses are also warranted:
- Talents that increase damage to burning targets
- All "damage to burning" talents changed from 10% to 5%
- 1 additional "damage to burning" talent added to Bhurt level 17
- End result: The total available damage bonus to burning targets from talents is reduced for all Cannons
- Reason: These talents were originally created to enable creative combos in the metagame.. in retrospect, the bonus is too large for something that doesn't take much effort
- Explosive Cannon
- Splash damage reduced from 100% of base damage to 75% of base damage
- Reason: Explosive Cannon was too versatile, especially on speeders that can control the range and timing of the shots very accurately. This change should make it less useful in some situations
3. Ships
We felt it was time to make some improvements to the early gameplay experience especially looking at the feedback we got around battle matching and power imbalances. To address this, we have changed all the Mk1 and Mk2 ships to have more item slots to work with. This means more weapons and more damage, so we bumped up the hp a bit as well (except for the Defender which was already pretty dominant at the lower levels).
- Shooter
- Mk1: +1 red slot, +1 red slot point, +150 hp
- Mk2: +1 blue slot, +1 blue slot point, +100 hp
- Speeder
- Mk1: +1 red slot, +1 red slot point, +100 hp
- Mk2: +1red slot, +1 yellow slot point, +20hp
- Mk4: +50 hp (the last hp nerf to this ship was a bit too harsh
)
- Enforcer
- Mk1: +1 red slot, +2 red slot points, -1 yellow slot point, +50hp
- Mk2: +1 yellow slot, +1 red slot point, +120 hp
- Defender
- Mk1: +1 blue slot, +2 blue slot points
- Mk2: +1 blue slot, +1 red slot point
- Fixer
- Mk1: +1 yellow slot, +1 yellow slot point, +150 hp
- Mk2: +1 green slot, +1 green slot point, +150 hp
4. Bug FIxes
- Mortars and missiles double damage bug
- Fixed a bug where mortars and missiles would sometimes deal double damage to enemies when they first hit a friendly ship
- Tesla bolt repair blocking bug
- Fixed a but where breaking a stun would not remove the repair blocking ability of the stun
Last edited by a moderator: 14 Nov 2017