With the coming of 0.6.0, we thought it's best to change our normal routine of providing changelogs a week in advance to writing up a preview of the coming game balance changes and giving our reasonings for them first. This is due to the changes that can still be made in the last week before patch deployment and changelogs one week prior to it might not be implemented if a problem arises during bug testing. We don't want players to read a changelog once, then proceed to play in the update without realizing that we've changed the changelog (pun not intended) and not having the experience they expected. Just QUICK REMINDER, this does not mean that we're deploying the update next week yet, it's coming when it's ready, but soon.
So, without further ado, here are the game balance previews:
Enemies (Quarks)
Quarks are one of the most important aspects of the game, being the main enemy type presented to players. We've been trying to improve the AI and behaviors of Quarks in every update, trying out different approaches to make them feel more threatening, and this time, we'll be making them attack a lot more as requested by many of our "Very Hard" players. Bosses have also been adjusted and given new attacks, and many of them will have "Very Hard only" attacks to spice up the difficulty differences now.
Credits
There has been a topic of "grind" that we'd like to address. While we would like everyone to have fun playing the game and getting credits as a by-product to develop their M.A.S.S. technology, the amount received was not enough to progress smoothly through to tier 5 and players have mentioned the requirement of grinding to achieve tier 5's. This was not something intentional and while we do want everyone to have some sort of progression from being able to unlock each node, a tedious grind is not something we desired. In 0.6.0, we'll be increasing the multipliers for credits received after missions, especially from bosses, and the new challenge maps will have special credits multipliers with them.
Nodes
0.5.0. was a very experimental patch for the game, introducing a lot of nodes that drastically change the playstyle of a player. We have been observing your discussions, most likely in our Discord as well as the feedback hub, and have been secretly taking notes on how you think about them. With that said, we're replacing a lot of development nodes, breaking the tier 5 game changers into two nodes instead due to how strong they are (and with your mentioning of the fun aspect you had when getting to use nodes like FMJ or Composite Nanorobotics). These new nodes will mostly be available much earlier in the game and new players will get to use them, solidifying their playstyle much faster than before, and we're also working to promote playstyles that don't use these nodes as well. Read more below.
Melee Playstyle
We would like melee to feel better and the last update had shown us that survivability is a thing many people wanted more of. However, putting everything into a node like Composite Nanorobotics had made other methods quite a trivial option to pick over. We're improving 1H + Shields through various shields nodes such as Saintess Bulwark rhythmic playstyle of guard and slash, speed nodes that provide a fraction time of extreme defense, and baseline lower time before shields recovery kicks in. Stacking different levels of OS (for things like shield regen) is also something we'd like you to try.
Shooters (and Bullet Launchers)
A lot of number tweaks have been made to balance them as a whole, but we'd like to say that Detonators, regarded by you as the strongest shooter as of the moment, been nerfed by around 5% in the damage department but their ammo count took around 35% hit if you don't spec into Magazine Load. We don't want to ruin your fun seeing BIG explosion numbers and we hope that the other buffed-up weapons can be a contender to them in this update.
Weight
Weight is a very controversial stat in the game at its current state. We were first dedicated to not having it affect the game but received lots of complaints on the realism of the matter and have decided to put in its effect in every place as a balance of Acceleration and Armor. As the game grew and more nodes and spaces are unlocked, complaints from the other side were received as it is seen as a detrimental status, even with the versatility it provides against raw damage. We wanted players to have utility choices when carrying large amounts of weapons, with differing ranges, properties, usages, and a lot of things with speed as a sacrifice. However, it isn't prominent enough and has shown that the changes proposed during the early stages of development have not brought good towards weapons tuning, thus we decided to remove weight effects from the weapon as a whole while still retaining its effects on armor pieces. On that note, due to the total increment in speed itself after testing, we will also be removing a lot of acceleration status on various nodes to balance this change, while nodes that are focused on speed will be the same.
Property damages
Property damages were always either "everyone we can burn everything down in seconds while freezing the world" or "it's a small flame that can't even heat up my hands and this is just a splash of water." In 0.6.0 we are revamping almost every property damage node in the development tree to help customize them to their playstyles. There will be less generic percentage increment nodes and more specific swing nodes (higher burn damage while lowering duration, shock and weak more effective, etc.) while also making "advantage property" stronger. Alongside weight changes, this should allow players to bring in an arsenal that could deal with any defense if they are willing to use their weapon slots and concentration to weapon swap to compensate for each type of enemy.