Pat came back to work this week, after three weeks of campaigning in the glorious hinterland of Infantlandia, and, well, particle effects just had to happen. New class powers sprang into existence! Colors changed? People went slightly mad.
It was a good time. 🙂
Anyway, duplicate class powers are a bummer, so we replaced two duplicates with fresh new stuff. The Walker’s old DPS buff cloud has been replaced with a new DPS buff *blast* that works more like the medic’s heal. An especially useful thing when a boss has a very short window of vulnerability and you all need to HIT IT NOW. Bring on the Pat-ness:
And while we were messing with it, we also reduced the Walker’s speed to bring it inline with other planes.
The Raptor’s re-use of the Acid Cloud was also bumming us out, so now it has a unique class special as well. Say hello to the delayed-blast mine, which detonates 4 seconds after being dropped, and does quite a lot of damage when it does so (more than the acid cloud, actually!) And if you want, you can drop a cluster of mines near each other, because why not?
Oh, and as you no doubt recall, last week we fixed the fact that dungeon drop rates were much too variable (depending on the size of the group that killed any given potential droppers of said dungeons.) Rates are absolute now, so we fixed the variability, but many players reported that the new absolute rates were too low. So we increased a bunch of them (up anywhere from +30% to +100% what they were last week.) If the RNG gods are smiling, things should be better now.
Lastly, it seemed like buffing the range of the Columbo wasn’t enough to make it enjoyable to use, so we upped the damage it does (on every plane that can use it EXCEPT the Old Faithful, for… reasons? If it seems like it is good now, we’ll probably make this change for every class that can wield it.)
And many other changes:
- Hog’s Propeller Blast was recolored
- Ice dungeon has yet more final enemy art
- Doomsday Mechanism now has truly final art, plus a cool intro animation. We made it a bit more dangerous, too.
- Updates to Jester’s chest loot
- Hog uses Columbo instead of shotgun
- Fixed a few bugs in the client that were causing perf issues on the client
- Duster no longer can use shotgun
- Engineer no longer can use shotgun
PS. I mentioned a “lava spike” in the subject line. But I didn’t in the blog post. That seems like a strange omission, doesn’t it? Inexplicable. Someone will remind me what that was all about at some point, I’m sure.