Balance
- Flare Gun
-- Arming range of 200m, flare will not light until after 200m to reduce chance of lighting a cloud in front of your own ship and revealing yourself
-- Fire stack application moved from AoE to Direct to ensure that Flare can still apply fire stacks at any range.
- Flamethrower
-- Changed hit logic: will not completely penetrate ship and will instead stop when the center of its sphere collider hits the target ship.
-- Anything within the sphere collider’s radius will have the chance of fire stacks being applied. Increased fire stack chance to 22% (from 18%).
-- Commentary: The Engineer repair game comes down to time to complete action and number of actions that need attention at any given moment. Previously, the Flamethrower would penetrate the entire ship and potentially set all components on fire. For experienced players, this was not an issue due to expert use of Chemical Spray. However, for the less experienced this created an extremely debilitating state of play (even causing us to remove Flamethrower from Novice) in both psychological and systemic ways—too many actions needing attention and too many things taking damage over time. Now that the Flamethrower will not penetrate, this will decrease the number of things needing attention and hopefully give Engineers some room to breathe. Coupled with an improvement to the Extinguisher, reactive play should be more manageable. With Engineer Stamina in mind, Flamethrower now places more stacks of fire on components. This places emphasis on the time aspect of the Engineer game where Engineer Stamina can be used in.
- Extinguisher
-- Increased fire resistance time to 4s (from 3s)
-- Decreased repair cooldown time to 2s (from 3s)
-- Developer Commentary: mentioned above
- Heavy Carronade
-- Increased jitter to 6 degrees (from 4)
-- Pitch arcs reduced to -20 to 10 (from -30 to 15)
-- Reload time increased to 7.5s (from 5.5)
-- Range reduced to 400m (from 425m)
-- Direct damage increased to 17.5 (from 17)
-- AoE damage reduced to 10 (from 18)
-- Commentary: In short, the HC was low risk and high reward. It was clear that it needed some tweaking. Pitch arcs and reload time were adjusted with new Gunner Stamina in mind. When using Gunner Stamina, the values revert back to their previous values (or very close to). The effective range decrease will introduce additional risk but provide the same reward of 2 vanilla shots to kill the balloon. The AoE shatter damage decrease addresses another complaint that the weapon is effective at not only balloon lockdown but also component lockdown. For example, if the target ship’s engines are destroyed then there is no means for them to escape. This is problematic since the chance for the target ship to recover from a balloon lock is slimmer if engines or weapons are destroyed as well.
- Carronade
-- Direct damage reduced to 6 (from 8 )
-- The adjustment to direct flechette damage now means that more than one clip is required to destroy a balloon. Compared to HC, the Carronade is slower at destroying balloons but is still quite effective against mechanical components and since it has more shots per clip than the HC, Carronade can actually destroy more components per clip compared to HC. Despite requiring a reload to destroy the balloon, don’t forget that there is Gunner Stamina that can augment this in addition to the fact that Carronade is a Light weapon (more slot spaces). With the distinctions between HC and Carronade, each weapon should have clearer advantages over the other.
- Heavy Clip
-- Reduced jitter reduction to -70% (from -100%)
-- Commentary: In hindsight, -100% jitter likely wasn’t the optimal choice as it collapses several decision spaces. In light of the Carronades, it meant that any adjustment to their jitter wouldn’t matter since Heavy Clip would remove all of it. Keep in mind that Heavy Clip, even with -70% jitter, is extremely powerful. In the case of the HC, the new jitter of 6 would be reduced to 1.8 degrees with new Heavy Clip. Even with a 1.8 degree jitter, the HC will be able to get most of its shot onto a balloon at 400m. For other weapons like Gatling, Light Flak, and Hwacha, their jitters are extremely small to begin with so even with new Heavy Clip you’ll be seeing new jitter values in the range of 0.375 to 1.2 degrees. The Hwacha can still take out a swath of components at 400m+ range.
- Hwacha
-- Reduced jitter to 4 degrees (from 6)
-- Developer Commentary: related to Heavy Clip change
- Reload Mechanic
-- When a new ammo is being reloaded into a gun, you can step off the gun and the gun will continue reloading the ammo that you intended to put in. You no longer have to be at the gun for the last second of the reload to load a different ammo type. Like before, you will still be able to change which ammo you’d like to reload up until the very last second without forcing another reload. This means any player can run to every gun on a ship and load a new ammo type into each gun without having to sit there for the reload cycle.
- Wilson's Notes and Evadne’s Reports default unlocked and have no XP reward
- Sequenced class achievements XP rewards restructured to reward less at the beginning and more at the end. The total XP rewarded for completing an entire sequence is roughly the same as before (give or take a hundred due to rounding error).
-- Commentary: We’ve received several reports that new players are completing Novice too quickly. After diving into the statistics into where new players are getting their XP from, we confirmed that the bulk of the XP was from various achievements. Some were from the notes, which are very easy to unlock. We’ve unlocked all of those since they’re useful information to have from the beginning, but we’ve also removed their XP rewards. Furthermore, players were getting the lower sequence class achievements fairly quickly as well. We’ve re-tuned the XP curve on achievements to an exponential curve rather than linear. Previously, XP rewarded = sequence * 1000. In other words, Sequence 1 rewarded 1000 XP and Sequence 2 rewarded 2000 XP. This is a lot for lower level players. This change will not affect the XP you’ve already accumulated but will affect all future achievements you unlock. Hopefully this will be sufficient to prevent players from leaving Novice too soon.
- Moved in game manual to web for ease of maintenance and update
- Class selection in character customization UI no longer changes your currently selected class.
- Store title and description revisions
- Timestamp for notifications