Balancing and Scaling Update V2

Most of this update came out of one complaint, and it's one we agreed with. About halfway into a run, new guns stop mattering.

You find something, you look at the card, you run the numbers in your head, and you put it back. Not because the gun is bad. It's because the one in your hands has eaten four wheel spins and six fusions, and the new one hasn't. We went and measured it, and it was worse than it felt. Against a legendary you'd invested in, three of the 153 guns in the pool were an upgrade. Two percent. The rest of the loot table may as well not have existed.

So this update is mostly about fixing that, and then retuning everything that fixing it broke.

Your tuning belongs to you, not to the gun

This is the big one. Every upgrade that used to live on a weapon now lives on your operative.

Forge wheel tempers, the damage and stats you pull out of fusions, elemental coatings. All of it is yours now. Pick up a gun you've never seen and it arrives already carrying every point of tuning you've paid for this run. Drop it for a different one and you lose nothing.

Guns in the pool that beat what you're already holding.

If you're carrying a rare, roughly four drops in ten are now worth a look, up from under one in ten. What a gun brings to the table is what it actually is: its damage, its archetype, its features, its rarity. That's the only axis a weapon choice turns on any more, which is how it should have been reading the whole time.

Sacrifice shrines are now merge terminals

The old shrine ate the gun you were holding and gave you a random one a tier up. Two problems with that. It took the gun you liked, and even winning could hand you something you didn't want.

They're merge terminals now. You pick a gun to improve, and a gun to melt into it. Half the donor's DPS and half its stat advantages carry across. The only rule is direction. The receiver has to outrank the donor, so value always flows upward and you can't feed a legendary to another legendary.

The point is to give the bottom of the loot table a job. Commons and uncommons are most of what drops, and by the deep biomes you were walking past all of them. Now a common you don't want is fuel for the gun you love. A middling legendary fed six commons climbs from 122 to 240 DPS. Repeat merges into the same weapon taper off, so it's a curve rather than a ladder to the moon.

No scrip cost. The gun is the price.

The loot table retires its bottom rung

There was already a rule that commons stop dropping once you're past your first Core Master clear. It was a single step, though. It fired once and never moved again, so layer 1 and layer 5 had the same bottom of the table.

It's a ladder now. Each ascension lap retires the lowest rarity still dropping, capped at rare:

• Layer 0: everything drops.
• Layer 1: no more commons.
• Layer 2 and beyond: no more uncommons either.

And the tier on its way out fades before it goes. Through the back half of a lap the bottom rarity thins out, so you feel it coming rather than noticing three biomes later that grey stopped existing. When it finally moves, the game says so out loud.

Legendaries stayed exactly where they were. They're a jackpot, not a reward for lap count.

And the top of the table now opens for everything

There's a matching rule at the other end, and it runs on your first lap. Which rarities exist at all is tied to biome bosses, not to time or depth or luck. It's there so the opening hours have somewhere to climb to.

Supply caches always respected that. Several other things didn't, and we only caught it because a player asked us a very reasonable question about an epic that turned up earlier than it should have.

The problem was that a few premium sources carried a rarity floor of their own. Cursed caches promised legendary, premium shop stock promised epic, boon altars promised rare. Those floors were written to outrank the ramp rather than answer to it, so a cursed cache two bosses into a fresh save could hand over a legendary that nothing else in the game would offer for another three bosses.

The ramp is the outer bound now, for every source of every item in the game. Chests, shrines, shops, vaults, boss rewards, path bonuses, all of it. Nothing can deal a rarity the ramp hasn't opened yet.

Those premium sources kept their promise, it just got a ceiling. A cursed cache still gives you the best thing available to you at that moment, it simply can't reach past what you've earned. You'll notice this most in the first three biomes of a new save, which is where it was doing the most harm.

Wishlists need a spread now

The Vein, our wishlist road, had the same hole in a different place. Its rewards were built from your list and handed straight over, which meant it skipped the ramp entirely. Stack the list with legendaries, take the Vein after the first boss, and you'd walk away with guns the loot table wouldn't produce for another four bosses.

That's closed. The Vein can only pay out rarities the ramp has already opened, and the card now tells you how many guns it's going to hand over instead of always promising three.

Which is why wishlists now ask for a spread: two entries per rarity tier. Legendary and cursed share a pair, so that's five groups of two, which is exactly the ten slots you already started with. The Armory will tell you which tiers you're short on. It's there so there's always something legal to give you, whatever point of the ramp you're standing on.

And then the enemies had to answer

Everything above made you stronger. We simulated 400 runs' worth of gun progression under the old and new rules to find out how much.

Flat at the opening, then roughly double by the end of a long run. None of our existing balance checks caught it. They all measure a scripted loadout with one fixed gun and fixed items, and not one of the changes above shows up in that.

So every enemy except bosses now gains +2.5% max HP per biome past the Fab Floor. It's additive rather than compounding, because the gain it's answering is roughly linear. Enemy damage is untouched. Your survivability didn't change, so raising it would have made the game harder than it was rather than equal to it.

We didn't take all of it back, on purpose. You land somewhere between even and about a quarter ahead of where you were, depending on depth. Four systems' worth of work that you can't feel would be four systems' worth of wasted work.

Known gap: bosses are exempt from every HP multiplier in the game. Their scaling lives in a ladder we write by hand rather than a formula, so boss fights are genuinely shorter at depth right now. We'd rather rewrite that ladder deliberately than multiply it, so it's on the list rather than in this patch.

Also in this one

• The death sequence no longer cuts to FLATLINE early. It wasn't random. If you tapped anything in the first couple of seconds you skipped it, and because the slow motion stretches those seconds out, one stray press covered the whole animation. Presses are held until the beat finishes now, so mashing still skips ahead through the reward screen without eating the cinematic.
• Reflector Pylon. Pylons expire after three seconds, with magazine and fire rate adjusted to match.
• Malkail's Drakeshot base damage down to 2.
• The aural HUD ring is cut from real art now, and it flashes for shield break, critical integrity, and your dash coming back.

The numbers in this post come from our own measurement harnesses rather than from vibes, so if your experience doesn't match them, we want to hear about it. That's the useful kind of bug report.