Hi everyone,
As with last week, we spent much of this week working on the upcoming Meowza 2 encounter and on attempting to improve server / lag issues.
We’re nearly done with the Meowza 2 battle implementation and expect to release it publicly sometime next week. Meowza’s inner sanctum will be (by far) the most lethal thing we’ve ever created. No shield phases; just a highly mobile target and the craziest, most bullet-flooded battlefield you have ever seen.
We’ll share much more detail in our next blog post, but for now, a sneak-peak at what Meowza looks like when you strip away the giant mech:
We’re also very pleased to report that we finally think we made some headway on the recent lag issues that have been plaguing players in the overworld and in dungeons. You should notice some significant improvements in general, and hopefully won’t experience any really long-lived issues in specific (one problem we discovered and fixed was causing the servers to have trouble recovering from lag spikes… yikes!)
Other notable changes:
- Most major bosses now display the “Your damage” UI flyup after they are killed (the one we added to Meowza a while ago.)
- There’s a new “help” menu that is intended to help players remember all the stuff they can do in the game. There’s a callout to the help menu built into the HUD. You can hide this callout in the options menu if it bugs you.
- Raptor pilot skill 3A was nerfed from +52-60% damage to just +24-40% damage. (Probably doesn’t take away its status as DPS leader, but makes it a bit more reasonable by shaving 20% off the max possible.)
- Other skills, like Dagger Knight 1A, haven’t been buffed or nerfed, but changed so their positive value starts at a lower number and escalates more with each skill point. I.e. instead of +32-40% it becomes +24-40% (for the same number of skill points.) We’ll do this to every skill eventually.
- Scythe of Zed has been converted to pure physical damage, as previously discussed.
- The “Golden Rei” buffs that were accidentally applied to Overworld Rei have been partially walked back.
- The daily group bounties now only require 2+ nearby players, instead of 3+
- Well, it’s no wonder people said common Lions were too generous with T8s. Turns out they had the wrong loot table. Common lions have had their T8 droprate slashed.
- Guard Lions (Sunday bounty target) have had their turn-rate reduced 15%, and their fireball has a very brief warning now. Additionally, they have a very small chance to drop Stiffs and an even smaller chance to drop a T9. Moderate chance to drop a T8. And guard lions now also have properly epic art!
- Tiffany has had her health buffed 3x and her invulnerability times cut in half.