Commanders, we fixed an important issue: You now get the level-ups that you deserve!
A detailed discussion with one Commander revealed an error with the XP progression and the "soft" level cap, giving you much fewer level-ups than intended.
We fixed that issue with this patch, meaning you will now get about 10-15 more levels on average in any Operation. Of course, this had a major impact on the difficulty progression and some other systems. So we will be balancing some of the XP drops and bonuses to XP gain over the course of the next updates.
But we didn't want to delay this fix and managed to run a first balancing pass with these changes:
- The Academy room provides up to 50% XP bonus now (was 35% at max. level).
- Generic Upgrades for XP bonus give 4% per level instead of 2%.
- The drop rates for XP were adjusted for mini-bosses and Supply Drop objectives. Both drop more golden dogtags now, particularly in Elite Ops.
- The XP progression curve was adjusted slightly to climb at a more linear rate, offering some more frequent level-ups in the mid-to-late stages of operations.
These values and rates will be adjusted in the future, alongside other improvements and additions of synergies.
We fixed and improved some other things, too:
- Added some missing translations for DE & ZH.
- Disabled the Film Grain post-processing effect, as players reported issues with it. We will reintroduce it as a setting in a future update.
- Scorch's Lv3 Corrosive Fuel skill shows stat improvements correctly.
- Nubetube's Multi-Launcher skill should apply the additional grenades correctly.
- Fixes some instances where the "tag icons" for Gear and Mercs were not behaving as intended.
- Added a "tag icon" legend to the Armory menu.
- If enemies get reset to a valid position, their VFX should no longer flash across the screen.
- Fixed some underlying animation controls for various menus that caused unnecessary workload.
- PhenX homing missiles should be destroyed more reliably when PhenX is defeated.
- Increased Storage Room buff to Carry Capacity.
- Fixed an instance with PhenX not behaving correctly when preparing to dash around.
Some known issues remain that we are already working on:
- The "Charger" enemies may leave an invisible knockback zone on the ground when dying or moving away after a dash attack.
- Curveball's Ambidextrous Pitch and Forkball skill trees mess up the grenade targeting and force them to all land in one spot.
- PhenX can in some cases shove you out of the arena in the Elite Ops bossfight when you get squeezed between him and the walls.
- Automatic input recognition is still causing some nuisance with the mouse cursor sometimes interfering with controller input and vice-versa.
- A few stats remain not showing up correctly in some menus or popups, or may be labeled ambiguously.
- When configuring your clone with mouse controls, you have to click a Trait in the list once to activate the stats popup.
- Gear items sometimes show the same "utility" icon twice. They also don't show any damage type icon that may be affected negatively, e.g. Napalm buffing fire but nerfing other damage types.
As always, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums if you encounter any issues or want to leave some feedback!
Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!