Catalog 4 Patch Notes - World’s Finest Update

World’s Finest Update
Agents, it’s finally time, a new season is coming your way. This update brings not only a continuation of the overhaul initiative with new tweaks, gameplay changes and quality of life improvements. Here’s what you can expect at a glance:

• A new agent: Vigil
• A new Superhero themed catalog with 50 levels of unlocks
• Major changes to npc behavior and the extraction meta
• A boatload of fixes, tweaks and updates to all aspects of the game.

Without further ceremony, let’s get into the details.

Season 4 Content
New Spy: Vigil, the precise professional

Introducing Vigil
After a long stay in the shadows, Squire's mentor emerges in Deceive Inc's hour of need. Once known as Knight, she now adopts the mantle of Vigil: A watchful eye over the world of spies.

Once known as the mythical Agent Knight, Maryam Saad re-emerges from her long absence under a new name: Vigil. Beckoned to action once more by the threat of the Jatimania, she’s ready to head back onto the field and teach everyone a trick or two.

Prepared for any situation
Vigil joins the cast as the newest agent, bringing a large toolkit of tactical options and weaponry to the field. Vigil’s expertise are alternate weapons, each bringing unique utility from smoke bombs to stun guns and even aerial mobility.

In addition, Vigil’s passive abilities allow her to deploy small tactical devices that dramatically expand your options, allowing you to scout, trap and block your rivals in all-new ways.

Vigil represents the ideal of a master spy, having access to a wealth of high tech weaponry and tools that makes her a force to be reckoned with. You’ll never catch her unprepared.

New Catalog: World’s Finest
Catalog 4 welcomes you in a world of super heroes and dastardly villains with 50 levels of unlocks for new heroic skins, inks, poses, calling cards and avatars.

Purchasing the premium catalog will give you instant access to our newest agent, Vigil, and exclusive rewards. As a reminder, players can still buy Vigil with Credits earned by simply playing.

General
Account Level Raised to 600
It’s finally time to raise the level cap and chase a new progression Ink: The Hematite ink!

Changes to free catalog track
Since launch, we have allowed players who purchased previous catalog to keep them forever and spend tokens in them, but free users have been locked to only progressing the current catalog.

We are now lifting this restriction entirely, allowing users that have not purchased a previous catalog to still spend their token in them to progress. We feel this is the natural extension of our commitment to having as few sources of missable content as possible for all players.

Extraction Phase Changes
No more stalling
Briefcase scan will no longer stall the ping entirely, it only slows it down by 50% making it so the maximum time without a ping is 45 seconds instead of minutes when combined with exfil scanner, max intel and abilities from certain spies. We think this will make the playing field much more fair for everyone while keeping a distinct advantage to holding a scan.

Nearest Extraction Logic Changes
The logic used to determine which extraction should be called when nobody is left in the match or the auto-call timer runs out used to be determined purely by distance. This was not representative of the most easily accessible extraction in a lot of cases, especially when verticality is involved.

From now on, the nearest extraction is based on a path from the navmesh, taking into account the length of the actual path to get there rather than raw distance.

NPC behavior Changes
We have multiple upgrades to how NPC behave in a variety of different situations, so let’s get into it!

Vault Priority
Once the vault opens, guards will now actively seek to enter, giving a much stealthier entrance for players and an easier to follow flow for the match.

Better Combat Awareness
We have changed how we handle the “scared” status for NPCs in some pretty major ways this update. Previously, NPC would become scared when within the radius of a dangerous event. They could stop being scared after a certain period and look un-phased by a fight that is still on-going. This would lead to what some would call the “combat medic” behavior where some NPCS would rush in the middle of a fight to revive downed npc.

In this update, a room now knows that a fight takes place within it and notifies npc that are inside currently or that come inside during the fight. This has huge implications on gameplay:

• NPC won’t stop being scared in a long fight and as such, won’t start reviving other npcs.
• A NPC that enters a room with a fight ongoing will instantly become scared and try to leave instead of walking in the middle of the fight.
• Players entering a room with a fight inside in cover will have their npc become reliably scared to better blend in with the surroundings.

Guards Privacy respect
One of the most frustrating situations in DI is when you managed to evade aggro-ed guards inside a bathroom stall only to have them open the door a few seconds later to punch you in the face. We’ve all been there.

With this update, guards will not enter a closed bathroom stall if you managed to get in there when they were away enough. This should help make stalls a valuable spot to regain cover and reduce frustration from getting stuck in there with guards.

New Settings and changes
Controller Menu navigation tweaks

• Increased base cursor speed
• Added a “Gamepad Menu Cursor Sensitivity” setting in controller settings.
• Added a “Gamepad Menu Scroll Sensitivity” setting in controller settings.
• Improved Scroll speed vs Input magnitude. Lower input will scroll slower and maximum inputs will scroll faster for more control.
• Right Analog stick can now scroll horizontal items.

Slider Controls Changes

• Right analog stick taps will increase/decrease sliders by a single unit at a time.
• Right analog stick held more than .25 seconds will continually increase/decrease sliders with a speed based on the magnitude of the input.
• For keyboard users, A,D, Left and Right keys can be used to scroll sliders when hovered in a similar way.

Nav Mode Camera Sensitivity
We have added a new sensitivity setting that will allow players to set a different one when using navmode. This comes from feedback that quick scanning on controllers when holding the package is quite difficult to pull off at the same speed as keyboard and mouse users. Now, it will be possible to set a high sensitivity in navmode to help you spin around quicker for a scan.

Network Info
We added three levels of settings for players to get more information on the network situation, helping identify potential issues and diagnosing it better.
- Hidden: No info.
-Default: Network state icons will appear at the top of the screen to tell players about issues.
-Full: Complete details on the current network state. Ideal to send in depth info about issues.

Change to anonymous mode
To make it easier for players to know another player is anonymizing their name, we are changing the naming convention for anonymous players to be “SecretAgent-XYZ” with the last part being a random number between 0 and 999.

This will make it easier to identify if someone is anonymous and will help with reports for repeat offenders that change names to evade possible actions.

XP Boosters for credits
To help our most dedicated players get through the long echelon grind, we are adding the option for players to spend their credits to acquire XP booster right from the main menu at the cost of 1000 credits per booster.

We intend this to be a “high level” player credits sink and less of a way to skip early progression which is how we settled on this price.

VIP guard Escort
Following the thwarting of the Jatimania by pesky spies, VIP are raising their security protocols. From now on, guards will escort VIP around the map, making sure they are safe.

This can be used to a player’s advantage as a VIP disguise will also work to attract guards escorting you around. This can also be used in team modes to follow your VIP disguised friend with a guard disguise. We hope you’ll enjoy this new addition that makes VIPs more interesting to encounter.

Pinging Rival Gadgets
The ping has been updated to allow players to point out enemy gadgets to their teammates. This used to be a very painful situation in teams with no voice comms so we hope this will help our team play quite a bit!

UI Overhaul
Additional work has been put into continuing to upgrade the UI experience both in and out of matches.

• Revamped Allies HUD in team modes including a counter per teammate for the amount of revives.
• Continued work across HUDS and menu legibility.
• Continued work on improving the look and feel of HUDS and menus.

Player Spawn points update
We went back and curated spawn points in all maps by taking into account the new player number reality we introduced during Jatimania. We added a new concept that allows us to keep more possible spawn points in private lobbies with higher player counts while reducing close calls in normal matchmaking.

Friends XP modifier
To incentivize bringing in your friend in team modes, you will now get a cumulative 15% bonus XP per friend invited to your party! We hope this makes team modes a more viable option to level up and give you a good excuse to bring your friends in for some spycraft.

XP Source Tweaks
We’ve made a range of changes to XP sources, adding missing sources and tweaking balancing to make advancing the gameflow more rewarding.

• Lost and found boxes will now give XP when opened to be more in line with other game elements.
• XP cassettes 200 => 250XP
• Entering the vault 100 =>150 XP
• Package Capture 200 => 500XP
• Extracting bonus 100 => 500XP
• Extracting XP modifier 1.3 bonus XP => 1.5 bonus XP

Lost and found boxes changes
We’ve made two major changes to lost and found boxes this update. Every single staff room will now have a guaranteed lost and found box. We feel the randomness of what is inside is already quite enough. Additionally, credits purses are no longer part of the spawn pool. We know these would lead to immense disappointment when spending your hard earned intel, so we hope this makes the boxes far more enticing.

Larcin As A Starter Spy
In this build Larcin is a starting character. We think that this is a great move for newer players as he is a character with abilities that are emblematic of what makes DI unique while offering good options to get out of a tight spot for newer players.

Map Updates
Diamond Spire
Diamond Spire continues its glow up with a rework of the roof and lobby area including the shift of an extraction point to better balance the map. By increasing the density of both floors, we hope to make them more viable spawn locations where players are pushed less often to change floor and collide with rivals early on in a game.

Objective Rooms Visibility Tweaks
In addition with these changes, we have revisited the Hard Sell, Diamond Spire and Silver Reef vault to block line of sights on the objective from elsewhere in the vault. The amount of visibility afforded to the room, especially in Hard Sell and Diamond Spire, would lead to long camping sessions and un-interesting interactions. Hiding the room will give more reason to push the initiative and take advantage of seeing from inside.

Balance
General
Melee Delay After Shot
In season 2 we added the concept of a delay for shooting right after a melee that we could tweak per character. We had a blindspot for balancing on the opposite side: being able to melee the exact frame after a shot. With this update we have now added a small delay to give a bit more reaction time on the receiving end of such combos.

Agents
Special Note: We have heard your feedback that the developer names we used (Weapon Mod 1 to refer to what the community calls weapon 2) were just confusing for the player base at large. Starting with this patch, we will be using your naming convention for agent notes.

Ace
We recently raised all tracking abilities cooldowns to 40 seconds up from 30. We think this was a bit too much and are trying 35 seconds as a new metric for these abilities.

Expertise
Expertise 1: Queen’s Gaze

• Cooldown 40s => 35s

Expertise 2: Stacked Odds

• Cooldown 40s => 35s

Passive
Ever since we fixed a bug that allowed ace to charge her passive during her “in between” shot animations, we’ve received the feedback that it made her feel more clunky to play. As such, we have tweaked the time before the charge starts to feel more snappy and reactive.

To fit with this, charge times have been made a bit longer, all in all they will take the same amount of time as before, but start charging earlier as we think it feels better from a feedback perspective.

• Passive charge will now start much sooner after a shot is fired.
• Charge times have been tweaked so that the total charge time is the same as before.

Cavalière
Cavalière feels very oppressive with her current iteration of her expertise 1 while at the same time feeling a bit restrictive for the user. Readjusting the cooldown timer + refund% should help alleviate the frustration from the Cavalière player perspective, while the changes to her chase durations and clue lifetime should give a bit more leeway to the victims. Getting a level 3 should be what the end goal for Cavalière investigation is, reducing the Chase Durations for lower levels is a step in that direction. In addition to this, we are giving more utility to her redemption expertise in an effort to make it a more appealing alternative.

On the weapon front, the wyverns are getting a slight tune down to be more in-line with other full-auto weapons in the game.

Weapon
Weapon 3: Wyverns

• Headshot damage 14 => 12

Expertise
Expertise 1: Investigation

• Clue lifetime 2:30 => 2 minutes
• Cancel refund rate 50% => 65% of remaining time
• Chase duration at 1 clue 7s => 5s
• Chase duration at 2 clues 10s => 8s
• Cooldown 40s => 35s

Expertise 3: Redemption

• Can now investigate the trace left behind by the case carrier on a ping during the extraction phase.
• Breadcrumbs left behind on cover change have been increased from 10 seconds to 15, indirectly buffing this ability.
• Cooldown 40s => 35s

Passive
Passive 1: Tiger’s Leap

• Using tiger’s leap while carrying the package will give a faster buildup than walking to prevent strategies where tiger leaping non-stop gives a lot of distance before pinging.

Larcin
Our only change on Larcin this update is around addressing ping stalling with his kit to level the playing field with all agents.

Expertise
All

• Larcin will now build up ping with the briefcase even when immaterial. No more stalling!

Hans
Along with some well deserved bug fixes detailed below, the jab is getting an all-new spray pattern that makes it far more reliable than before.

Weapon
Weapon 2: Jab

• Adjustment to spray pattern for a more “vertical” pattern instead of a wide one.

Madame Xiu
We are rolling another buff to Xiu’s weapon 3 to cement its place as a good alternative to her other options. In addition, we are introducing a new mechanic to control Xiu’s potency in the extraction phase and a bit of quality of life around her teleport abilities.

Expertise
All

• Using any of Xiu’s expertise with the briefcase will accelerate the ping to half of the run speed value to make it a consideration without limiting it too much.
• Xiu will now keep her last valid npc to teleport to for a short duration if there are no valid targets in sight. This will prevent a situation where you try to teleport to a npc that becomes invalid at the exact moment, stopping you from teleporting.

Weapon
Weapon 3: Xuanwu

• Maximum fire rate 8.1 => 9

Octo
Octo’s passive 1 was hit hard in the past mostly because of its interaction with ping stalling tactics in the extraction phase. With this being addressed this patch, we are giving back some % in an effort to make it a more desirable pick. It’s gambling time!

Passive
Passive 1: Edging your Bets

• Refund chance when missing 10 intel 25% => 35%
• Refund chance when missing 20 intel 50% => 60%

Red
Red’s Jack of heart was pinpointed by player feedback as being a bit too difficult to aim with considering its precision identity. We have reworked the weapon scope to offer better visibility in this update.

Weapon
Weapon 2: Jack of Heart

• Tweaks to the scope mesh to make aiming in ADS easier.

Sasori
Sasori’s weapon 2 received a wide array of nerfs in the post-Jatimania update. We feel like most of it was positive to the experience, but we do think that it was a bit too far. We are giving back some headshot damage per Kunai to reward precise players more and we’ll keep monitoring the state of this weapon in the meta for possible future adjustments.

On the poison vial front, we have now tied the time before the cooldown starts to the bubble lifetime and reduced it a bit to make it more manageable to victims.

Weapon
Weapon 2: Hyo & Hanei

• Headshot Damage 10 per kunai => 12 per kunai

Expertise
Expertise 2: Poison Vial

• Bubble Duration 30s => 22s
• Cooldown now only starts when the bubble expires, preventing multiple bubbles in play.

Squire
Squire’s trident is still coming out as a bit too strong currently which is why we are making a very slight adjustment in an effort to reign it back just a tad.

Weapon
Weapon 2: Trident

• Damage per bullet 10(30 per burst) => 9 (27 per burst)

Yu-Mi
In addition to some important bug fixes detailed below, we are making a small tweak to her weapon 1 in an effort to make it a bit friendlier to use for new Yu-Mi players and a bit more distinct from her longshot.

Weapon
Weapon 1: Tactical Slingshot

• Full charge time: 1s => .9s

Gadgets
This update comes with extensive changes to a large variety of gadgets. Our main goal is to make more gadgets viable by tweaking gadgets that are overly oppressive and buffing the scrambler to make it more viable.

Drone
Once deployed, the drone now has a battery life of 45 seconds before being destroyed. If a player manually recovers the drone before that time, the lifetime is refilled when the drone is re-deployed.

We hope this encourages players to think more about their gameplan in a drone instead of just playing extremely passively. We also think having players try to recover their drone more often will be a positive change as it adds an element of risk for them to measure vs just waiting for the cooldown.

• Deployed drone now has a lifetime of 45 seconds before breaking.

Hack-Trap
Hack trapped objects will now flicker with a subtle red “glitch” every 6 seconds. The intent is that if you are not slowing down and actively looking for it, getting trapped by surprise will still happen most of the time. If you get trapped once though, you can now slow down and look around to find other trapped objects at the cost of speed and efficiency.

• Hack-Trap now leaves a clue that flickers every 6 seconds for rivals.

Goo-Pod

• Updated VFX to make sure the goo does not hide the pods, preventing counterplay.

Scrambler
The scrambler now disables active hacktraps when enabled, allowing you to open doors without getting tracked. This should complete the vision for the scrambler to be an all-encompassing protection against rival gadgets

• Scrambler now prevents hack-traps from triggering.

Tripwire

• Tripwires will start to become visible at 8 meters instead of 3 and fade in slowly from that point.

Umbrella Shield
The Umbrella shield now entirely blocks characters from traversing it once deployed, making it a tactical consideration for the user on where they drop it to use it in a fight. In addition, rival players and your allies can now interact with the shield even while in cover to dismantle it from up close, preventing situations where you would have to blow your cover just to exit a room that is blocked.

• Deployed shield now entirely blocks everyone and everything, no more shield dance inside the shield.
• Deployed shield now takes .5 seconds to fully materialize, allowing you to walk through it during that time.
• Deployed shield shield can now be dismantled when interacting with it from up close. This works the same way as picking up your own gadget, but will destroy the shield instead.

Bug Fix
General

• The cover of a spy won’t talk or scream anymore when that spy is out of cover.
• Heat system has been entirely re-factored to be more robust, fixing a variety of issues with stuck heat levels and incorrect values.
• Fixed an issue where the neutralized status effect would sometimes still allow an agent to trigger their expertise.
• Fixed instances of major desync between npc position and the undercover spy leading to weird positions after blowing cover.
• Fixed an issue where open doors could interfere with other interactions.
• Fixed an issue with melee attack that made the auto-targeting unreliable in close quarters (which is quite unfortunate for a melee attack).
• Performance passes to reduce the cost of NPC vs audio occlusion raycasts.
• Multiple fixes to the neutralize status effect, resulting in a much more reliable experience all around.
• Fixed an issue that made loading screen tips flicker heavily.
• Fixed crouch speed sometimes being much slower than intended.
• Fixed an issue where sometimes burst weapons would miss a burst when mashing the input.
• Fixed an issue where triggering a stance expertise while holding a charge melee would cancel the expertise instantly.
• Bots will no longer be aggro-ed from players opening field upgrade chests from afar with a spyglass.
• Fixed an issue where spectator mode would not use the player’s camera sensitivity settings.
• Fixed an issue with the vault terminal UI indicator that would leave the icon permanently looking locked.
• All NPC can now sneeze.

Agents
Cavalière

• Ammo will no longer be faster to investigate than other items.
• The recon drone will no longer trigger “it’s a setup”, revealing its user from afar.
• Interactable clues left by an agent that dies and gets revived again will be cleansed to give them a fresh start.

Hans

• Shock Ray will now blow cover correctly.
• Static cage now benefits from the cooldown reduction given by energy syphon.

Larcin

• Fixed Larcin’s iron sights being slightly mis-aligned.
• Grande finale’s description no longer mentions it being cancelable when it is not.
• Fixed animation issues with Larcin’s weapon in a variety of situations after going invisible.

Madame Xiu

• Fixed visibility issue with in-hand items when teleporting.
• Fixed twitching animations when Xiu is firing her weapons in third person.

Octo

• Nautilo’s sound effect will now match the fire rate for other players.
• Fixed an issue where redeploying in the pregame while under the effect of “make em’ fold” would leave the vfx stuck on the victim.
• Nautilo’s reticle will now be more visible against dark backgrounds.
• Fixed weird behavior of the “on the house” ability with level 4 intel..

Sasori

• Fixed an issue that led to the kunai charging sound playing on every interaction
• Fixed sword slash vfx being visible through walls.
• Fixed poison vials sometimes being visible through walls.

Squire

• Squire’s fast reload animation has been tweaked to look better across all weapons.

Yu-Mi

• Fixed an issue that allowed Yu-Mi to run while charging her weapon.
• Fixed an issue where players could be locked out of using their active indefinitely after canceling it.
• Fixed an issue that led to the slingshot charging sound playing on every interaction.
• Fixed issues that would sometimes cause Yu-Mi’s projectile to hit objects below where she is aiming.

Map

• Fixed a wide variety of un-sittable seats in all maps.
• Fixed multiple keycard spawn points clipping into meshes, leading to them being hard to see.

Diamond Spire

• Fixed tree collisions to make them closer to the visual.

Fragrant Shore

• Fixed the globe clipping into the desk when activating the old fort shortcut.
• Fixed staff interacts clipping into furniture.
• Fixed plant clipping inside a sittable bench near the clock tower.
• Fixed multiple npc stuck spots.

Hard Sell

• Fixed a invisible keycard spawn in vault bathroom
• Fixed a collision being too wide in the 3rd floor staff room above the auction hall.

Silver Reef

• Moved some vault printers spawn to prevent them from being too close to each other.
• Fixed NPC stuck spot in some guard rooms.
• Fixed some instances of sea-weeds clipping into windows.

Sound Eclipse

• Fixed a npc stuck spot in the tennis court.
• Fixed drawers that could spawn invisible keycards.

Gadgets

• Fixed an issue where the drone hud could stay stuck when swapping in and out of it quickly.
• Fixed aim-assist issues with deployed Umbrella shield, making it harder to hit than intended.
• Fixed the shield health bar not updating when recovering health in your hand.
• Fixed an issue where the Umbrella shield would sometimes wrongly absorb melee attacks that should hit the spy.
• Fixed an issue where holding the umbrella shield and hacking would create a state where the sound effects could stay stuck.
• Fixed mimicable items icons being visible through walls.
• Fixed an issue where the turret getting destroyed while players are aiming could zoom out their camera.