Agents,
With "High Alert" update expected later this month, we wanted to read you in on what changes are headed your way. Please keep in mind that this is a Work In Progress changelog and things are subject to change (items may be removed or added) before the final release.
HIGH ALERT UPDATE
Sound the alarm, the High Alert update is (almost) here!
Welcome or welcome back agents for our first “intra-season” content update. As you might have guessed by the title, this update is all about raising the consequences for reckless action and making the playfield far more advantageous for stealth plays. This has been a very clear thread of feedback where the overwhelming majority of the community agrees: You want more reason to hesitate before shooting and greater advantages when getting the drop on someone that did not. This is what this update is about.
Of course, it also comes with a bevy of bug fixes and targeted balances fixes around some of our most high profile issues.
Before we go in, we should specify that this is not a full season update and that Catalog 2 and its content shall be discussed a bit further down the line. This update is a step in giving you more regular content without waiting for a full seasonal update to do so. For now, let’s talk about High Alert and what it means for you on the field. What better place to start than the very often requested “Heat 2.0”?
General Changes
Heat 2.0
When we introduced the heat system with Misery Empire, the feedback we received was loud and clear: MORE. Players want more consequences to being loud and we aim to deliver with this rework.
First and foremost Heat 2.0 is a more robust framework for the future. It allows us to tweak many more values around heat in a much faster fashion than we used to be able to with the previous iteration of the system. On top of that, we reworked the entirety of the system to be not only much more present, but also clearer and more readable at a glance in the middle of action. Let’s dive in!
Damage Based Heat:
How you obtain heat is no longer tied to downing an NPC, but directly to damage dealt. You gain heat relative to the damage you dealt to an NPC vs their max health. This means that single tapping NPC to do a spy check will now yield heat and downing an NPC will still offer the full penalty.
Tweaked Values:
You now gain more heat than before by fully downing a NPC. It will take two NPCs taken out to gain a single heat level. The VIP is an exception to this rule, giving much more heat if attacked.
Heat from scolding:
If you get scolded by non-guard NPCs while out of cover in a restricted room, you will slowly build up Heat over time.
Penalty level changes
In the original implementation of heat, you would gain a short penalty right when you downed a NPC with a high enough heat level. This penalty had its own timer, independent of the heat level decrementing.
In Heat 2.0, the heat penalties will stay as long as you are currently within the heat level bracket. That means you need to let Heat vent down to get rid of the penalties. To compensate for this and increased heat from multiple sources, Heat now vents a little bit faster than before while in cover.
The 3 levels now have clearer status effects with the names ``Heat LVL 1-2-3” and a different visual look to the vulnerable effect.
The Guard situation:
Guards will now give heat, like any NPC would. The intent is for players to start seeing Heat as a resource. Spending it to get rid of some guard is going to bring risks to a player that they will need to weigh correctly.
The Spy hit Buffer:
We added a mechanic to limit accidental heat gains in fights with all the changes to the system: There is a buffer after hitting a spy recently where you won’t gain any heat if you hit a NPC by mistake. This buffer is short and is only intended to prevent random heat gains during real combat
Elite Guards
After repeated catastrophic failures of their security, the VIPs are putting together a new training program to deploy Elite Guards to the field. These new guards have heightened access, capable of entering technician rooms, higher caliber weapons that deal more damage and improved endurance making them capable of taking more damage before going down.
Elite guards will be very few and far between before the vault, but you can no longer depend on the fact that nobody but a spy and the VIP can enter vault terminal locations. You also better watch out inside the vault. Picking a fight in the technician rooms there just got more dangerous.
As always, we’ll be monitoring how Elite Guards affect the game and we hope it will add a new layer of tension to every operation.
Spy Cache Cover Restore
To help against the encroaching presence of heat and the danger presented by elite guards, Spy caches have been outfitted with a new cover booster as well as a slick new look.
You will now instantly recover when looting one of these caches, allowing you to disappear and go back into stealth play after a tense fight. This will also help players that just had very close fights and would have difficulty losing guards, potentially resulting in their death by giving them a clear out when looting the cache.
Dossier Menu
Added a new menu with top secret information on all NPC characters, including their often requested names to facilitate team communications and call outs. This menu also features a full list of status effects with their effects so you can brush up on your game knowledge at any time!
XP Booster Change
We’ve received a lot of feedback after the introduction of the XP booster in the Misery Empire Catalog which we are now acting on with this update. From now on your XP booster will only deplete during matches, not in the main menu and not if you are offline. Your XP booster is also active for the entire match if you start a match with only 1 minute left, so do not worry about not having enough time left for one last match.
We hope you’ll appreciate these tweaks and we look forward to more feedback on the subject!
Cover Change interact time tweak
Interacting with a NPC to change cover is now faster than before, not requiring you to hold for as long to take their appearance. This limits situations where you would try to take cover from a walking NPC and have them leave the range before completing.
Crouch Fatigue
We are introducing an equivalent to jump fatigue that will affect players repeatedly crouching very fast multiple times in a row. Players will gain a progressively worse speed debuff when crouching more than 3 times within a very short period of time that will gradually go away as they stop crouching.
This is mostly to remove the advantages of mashing crouches in combat to make yourself harder to hit leading to un-interesting combat.
New animated Inks
10 all-new inks that can be earned through loot briefcases or in-game credits have been added to the game. These are our first animated inks, available in a variety of styles. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do!
Better support for different aspect ratios
We’ve made a change to the way we handle the camera’s field of view to better support a wide range of aspect ratio on a variety of monitors. This should hopefully make the game much more playable on ultra-wide monitors.
Global Agent Changes
We are slightly reducing the time headshot negation lasts after blowing someone’s cover. The current duration was a disadvantage for a few different weapons that would lose more shots than intended before landing a headshot.
Making it a bit shorter will even the playing field a bit more with slow rate of fire/high damage weapons that were not affected by this anyway considering the time it took for them to get a followup shot.
Cover Shield headshot negation time
- Duration: 1s ⇒0.7s
Agents Balance
One of the running themes of the changes you will see below will be adjustments to reload times. We are revisiting most of the cast to make sure the downtime given by reloading fits their overall playstyle and gives an edge to the rival party that can be capitalized on.
We are also making changes to a multitude of stats including headshot modifiers on weapons that perform too strongly currently in the meta.
Ace
Weapons
Changes to Ace’s weapons are mostly around the theme of the reload time rework. We are also placing both the jack and the king in a lower unified class of headshot modifiers.
Base: Queen of Diamond
- Reload Time: 2.3 => 2.75s
Mod 1: Jack of Diamond
- Reload Time: 1.75 => 2
- Damage: 22 => 20
- Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Mod 2: King of Diamond
- Reload Time: 1.7s => 2.1
- Damage: 45 => 46
- Crit Multiplier: 1.8 => 1.75
Passive
Ace’s passives are currently very difficult to place in a fight and are most of the time only viable as an opening move. While we don’t want them to be TOO easy to pull off in a live fight, we think reducing the charge time slightly will be beneficial to her gameplan.
Base: Diamond’S Bet
- Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Mod 1: Crippling Shot
- Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Cavalière
Weapons
Cavalière is getting a bit more changes around her weapons. Her Dragoons have been underperforming for a little while and we want to make them more competitive overall. We are also adjusting the Hydras to calm down their very powerful headshots a bit and making the wyverns faster to reload at the cost of a bit of headshot power.
Base: Dragoons
- Reload Time: 2 => 1.7
- Damage: 11 => 12
Mod 1: Hydras
- Reload Time: 2 => 2.3
- Fire Rate: 2.5 => 2.2
- Damage: 20 => 18
Mod 2: Wyverns
- Reload Time: 2 => 1.8
- Crit Multiplier: 1.5 => 1.3
Chavez
Weapons
The Vigilante has been outshining the Sentinel in most situations previously. As such, we are lowering its damage a bit to really focus into the fast firing alternative niche with some downsides built into that. The duke is getting a reload time revision in-line with the rest of the cast to really focus on its high risk nature if you miss your shots.
Base: Sentinel
- Fire Rate: 1.25 => 1.3
Mod 1: Vigilante
- Damage: 22 => 20
- Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
- Limb multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Mod 2: Duke
- Reload Time: 2.8 => 3
Hans
While Hans is not getting extensive changes on this patch, we wanted to let the community know we are currently looking at his passive abilities for a future rework. We’ll keep you posted on the progress on this front as we get closer to season 2.
Weapons
Overall reload time adjustments to fit the rest of changes to the cast.
Base: Hook
- Reload Time: 1.9 => 2.2
Mod 1: Jab
- Reload Time 1.75 => 1.85
Mod 2: Uppercut
- Reload Time: 1.35 => 1.6
Larcin
Larcin is doing very well currently. For the time being, we are only adjusting his pickpocket passive to be in-line with Heat 2.0.
Passive:
Mod 2: Pickpocket
- Heat values from hitting a NPC have been tweaked to be in-line with the new value from shooting down NPCs.
Madame Xiu
Weapons
Reload time adjustments to further differentiate weapon archetypes and fit the rest of the cast.
Base: Zhulong
- Reload Time: 1.75 => 1.7
Mod 1: Longshen
- Reload Time: 1.5 => 1.9
Red
Weapons
Red’s Jack of heart is still a very high performing weapon and we are tweaking it a bit further to make it less oppressive. Lovebite is not getting any changes for now, but we are looking at spread tweaks to make it better performing in the future.
Base: Heartbreaker
- Reload Time: 1.55 => 1.7
Mod 1: Jack of Heart
- Reload Time 1.55 => 2
- Damage: 20 => 18
- Limb Multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Expertise:
Red’s Sweet Embrace has been performing extremely well ever since her debut. The power of giving cover back to your team and a small bit of immediate healing is already quite potent. As such, we are removing the cleansing aspects that this passive had.
Cleansing status effects would lead to frustrating encounters that are hard to understand for rival players and could lead to a variety of non desirable exploits (like cleansing heat related status effects).
On the flipside, Lovebomb has been an underwhelming part of Red’s kit and we hope that making its radius non-visible to rival agents will give it a bit more of a use for trap loving players.
Mod 1: Sweet Embrace
- Sweet embrace no longer cleanses negative status effects.
Mod 2: Lovebomb
- Lovebomb’s radius is no longer visible to rival spies. The bomb itself is still visible.
Squire
Weapons
Squire’s getting some pretty big change to his arsenal in this patch. He’s been performing very strongly for a long time and we are mostly targeting the javelin and his base weapon for adjustments. We hope this will make Squire less frustrating to fight and even the playing field for more diverse agent selection.
Base: Lance
- MagSize 10 => 11
- Reload Time: 1.3s => 1.75s
- Fire Rate: 3.1 => 3
- Damage: 17 => 15
Mod 1: Trident
- Reload Time: 1.45s => 2s
Mod 2: Javelin
- MagSize: 8 => 7
- Reload Time: 1.7 => 2.2
- Fire Rate: 2.4 => 2
- Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Passive:
We’ve been toning down damage reduction across the board recently and Aegis cover escaped most of it since it was not tied to the resistant status effect. We are directly tweaking this passive with this update to once again make squire less of a terror on the field.
Mod 2: Aegis Cover
- Duration: 1.7 => 1.4
- Damage Blocked: 50% => 25%
Yu-Mi
Passive:
We are continuing our work to make Yu-Mi a more viable agent. We nerfed her base passive pretty hard at launch to counter gadget spamming strategies and while we will not go back anywhere near the amount of passive gadget regen she had back then, we are upping the amount to 65% to allow her to lean on gadgets a bit more.
We are also giving more expertise cooldown refund for energy catalyst to make it a more enticing and gameplay defining choice.
Base: Quick Fix
- Cooldown Reduction: 50% => 65%
Mod 1: Booby Trap
- Expanded size and duration for bubbles created from booby traps. (This change was listed in the May hotfix but was not part of the update. We apologize for the confusion!)
Mod 2: Energy Catalyst
- Expertise Cooldown Returned: 33% => 50%
Bug Fixes
- Various bug fixes