Welcome to Sunday evening, mercs and heisters! Let's do Update #215! With this update, we've pushed Stress Limit Breaks into the light so you can't miss them anymore, we've increased the variation of what you can get in a Stress LImit Break including some new temporary negative Traits, added a new negative Trait ability to cause ripples of Stress through your team, fixed a longstanding bug with how Passive Talents could double-activate and waste charges, and improved 2 Talents at the start of a larger Talent polishing project.
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Merc Stress Limit Breaks Visible
With Update #215, we've pushed the previously quiet and easy-to-miss Stress Limit Breaks for your mercs into a pop-up window just like Hype Limit Breaks. You don't have any options here other than to acknowledge the unfortunate change in your merc's status. As always the result is written to the timeline event log as well, but this helps promote these important moments in your merc's career with more visibility.
We've got some nice changes coming to the Limit Break windows in a near-term release, but they are pending testing and merging, so the window is not the cleanest-looking thing right now, but that's where we are right now. Iterate, improve, go fast!
Updated Stress Limit Break Options
Along with making the Stress Limit Breaks visible, we've improved the list of options that could apply here. First, we've expanded the conditions under which results like increasing Pay Rate or Reducing Loyalty can occur. But we've also added temporary negative Traits to match those temporary positive Traits you can get in Hype Limit Breaks.
The new Traits - Disgruntled and Checked Out are options at any point you get a Stress Limit Break while Malcontent and Run Empty are much nastier but will only appear at 6 or more Discontent.
Both Disgruntled and Malcontent have a new possible effect on Traits which is to cause Stress ripples within your team. If a merc with these Traits suffers a +10% Stress, they have a % chance to cause another merc in the safehouse to suffer a similar Stress rise.
Fixed Passive Talent Double Up Bug
We've fixed an old bug with how Passive Talents worked. For those Passive Talents with common conditions to activate (Critical Hit, killing a target, etc) they might activate once in a Turn and then later activate again. This lead to the "re-buffing" ruleset which states that if you have a buff and the same buff is used on you again, the duration is extended as if you were just buffed the first time now.
For Passive Talents, this is a bad rule set - so we've enforced a check with all Passive Talents. If you have the buff (if you have the Savagery buff up) and you activate the Passive Talent (you kill an enemy which would usually fire Savagery's charge) then the buff doesn't fire. That's nice.
Talent Rebalance - More Coming
As we sprint like a wild band of jackals toward our release date, we're polishing every aspect of that game. A huge shout and thanks to @Phreak who has provided some very useful analysis today about the 145 Talents that are in the game. It is a great prompt to do a full scrub down of the list, improve where we can, focus where we can, and make sure everything is delivering fully.
So - more Talent changes, rebalance, buffs and nerfs are going to be coming in the next months. Hold onto your favorites!
With Update #215, we've improved the level point costs for Agent EX's Talent, Armor EX. The ending nodes on this Talent were both 2 point cost which was not intentional. And second, we've helped focus the Cyber Knight's Lookahead Talent solely on predicting enemy movement and then slowing down their Move Speed, so the -Initiative debuff that was there has been removed and the Move Speed debuffs have been punched up to -15%.
v1.9.121 - #215: Stress Below the Street - 2/16/2025
- Merc Stress Limit Breaks now pop a confirmation window to show the timing and result of the LB
- Stress Limit Breaks can now add 30 day negative Traits: Disgruntled and Checked out (or 6+ Discontent), Malcontent and Run Empty
- New negative Traits can "ripple" Stress to other mercs - when a Malcontent Stresses, they make others Stress
- Increased conditions in which a merc can Stress Limit Break for Less Loyalty or Pay Raise
- Added Trait description to all temporary Traits (negative and positive)
- Fixed issue with Passive Buff Talents firing when they are already active on your character (Recoup, Savagery) and wasting charges
- Improved Cyber Knight's Lookahead Talent to focus on -Move Speed (max -30%) and not -Initiative (now removed)
- Reduced level point cost of Agent EX's Armor EX upgrades 3 and 4 (-1 AP, +1 Charge) to 1 pt instead of 2
- Fixed reported map bugs