Greetings, Lord Captains!
Rogue Trader has already been out for some time, and our team has not been sitting idle.
While working on fixes and improvements for the game (a massive 2,500+ changes are coming very soon in patch 1.2), we’ve also accumulated a lot of important data concerning character progression and player’s reception of the game’s various systems thanks to both your feedback and extensive internal analysis.
Having already dealt with most of the critical bugs, we felt that the upcoming patch would be a great time to revisit game balance. With these balance changes, we are aiming to provide a better challenge, offer more interesting gameplay, and expand the variety of viable builds, especially on higher difficulties.
To do this, we identified the list of key problems that we felt had the biggest negative impact on player experience. These were split into four major categories:
- Excess of additional turns
- Overscaling in the late game
- Sanctioned psykers and pyromancy
- Arch-militant overtuning
Let’s talk about each of them in detail.
Excess of Additional Turns
While the original design felt engaging, it appears that, in the end, we went too far with the abundance of out-of-sequence turns and attacks. Stacking additional turns gives such a dominating advantage that players who utilize it can entirely trivialize combat, sometimes to the point where the enemy doesn’t even get to take a single turn!
Tuning things like this has to be done carefully and in batches in order to prevent overnerfing, so we began with tweaks to the Officer in patch 1.1. In 1.2, we’re going a step further and implementing major changes to a whole set of abilities that provide additional turns and AP. We want them to stay true to their spirit but do something entirely different than before.
For example, Seize the Initiative no longer provides an additional turn to the Officer, instead allowing the Officer and allies under the effect of the Officer's Voice of Command to deal additional damage to enemies that have not yet acted in combat.
In the Hero’s Footsteps now provides a stacking +5 Fellowship bonus when an ally uses a Heroic act and a +5 Toughness bonus when using Desperate measures instead of providing an additional turn.
Overscaling in the Late Game
Our players are very quick at finding the most effective combinations, but let’s be honest, those single shots for 1.5 million damage that we’ve seen on some player videos were somewhat… beyond our expectations.
Some of these crazy numbers were indeed caused by bugs, but putting those aside, there were still a handful of items and abilities in the game with multiplicative scaling that did silly things when stacked. While seeing 8-digit damage values is fun to an extent, the sheer amount and availability of such options removed the element of challenge, which we believe is not healthy for the overall game experience.
To address this, we’ve updated a lot of abilities, items, and talents across the game that provided multiplicative bonuses (such as 3 x Intelligence bonus) to give flat bonuses instead (for example, 10 + Intelligence bonus), tweaked some percentage based bonuses to be stronger in the early game but less devastating in late game (such as the Operative’s Offensive Pattern Prediction, the Navigator’s Reveal the Light or the Exemplar’s Deadeye Shot), and fixed a handful of bugs with incorrect scaling such as Confident Approach.
Killing Edge was also tuned down, being one of the main offenders that caused skyrocketing numbers.
Sanctioned Psykers and Pyromancy
Looking at sanctioned psykers prior to this update, we felt that they were always at a significant disadvantage compared to Idira and her higher psy rating.
We have now made it so that sanctioned psykers can take psy rating-increasing talents earlier (at levels 4/14/24/34 instead of 10/20/30/40). This will not only reduce the eventual difference in psy rating when compared to unsanctioned psykers, but it will also allow sanctioned psykers to take advanced psychic powers earlier.
Unsanctioned psykers can now also take those talents a bit earlier (at levels 9/19/29/39), mostly so that different archetypes have similar access to advanced psychic powers.
With these changes, we hope to achieve a certain parity, where the sanctioned psykers will still have a somewhat lower psy rating but will be able to take higher-level psychic powers earlier in order to compensate.
This wasn't our only change to psykers. For a while, we were concerned that the pyromancer, who was always supposed to be a dedicated damage dealer among psykers, had a weaker damage potential than a telepath (and we received a lot of player feedback about it, as well). In this patch we’re significantly boosting damage numbers for most of the pyromancy psychic powers, starting with Ignite — it now deals vastly increased damage, and pyromancers no longer need to rely on conventional weapons for the first half of the game.
Arch-Militant Overtuning
According to our observations and community surveys, the Arch-Militant remains the most effective archetype, with a damage potential so high that skilled players could stack bonuses from versatility extremely quickly, gaining a significant advantage. We’ve slightly reduced versatility generation and scaling from it to put the Arch-Militant more in line with the rest of the archetypes. In particular, we’ve made changes to Confident Approach, Reckless Rush, and Wildfire. Note that we don’t intend to nerf the Arch-Militant into the ground — it will still be very effective, but the numbers will be a bit more reasonable.
Plans for the Future
Our work on combat balance is far from over. However, after this batch of changes and considering the massive wave of bug fixes that are coming with 1.2, we would like to spend some time assessing the performance of the updated archetypes and analysing the feedback from our players. Although we understand that some of you may end up frustrated with losing your archetype power fantasy, many of these changes are necessary for the game to deliver the experience we envision. Let us know what you think — we need to be sure that we’re going in the right direction!
Later, we intend to go over all encounters that are either known to be difficulty spikes or feel too easy for their level and tune them accordingly.
Lastly, although a bit unrelated, you may have seen in our roadmap and known issues thread on Steam that we recognized the limited availability of conviction points. We’ve received a lot of feedback that their distribution is uneven and scarce, forcing players to make certain decisions in fear of being locked out of conviction levels. We’re working to address this, but unfortunately, we are not yet ready to ship it with 1.2. We expect it to come a bit later, in one of the following updates.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. See you very soon in 1.2, where you will be able to see all the changes yourself, and looking forward to hearing your feedback!