Hi everyone, here’s an update on the base rebalance. As hoped, it is on track to go in for next universe (which should be announced soon). The purpose of this post is to elaborate on some of the details of the rebalance, especially those that I left vague in my first post.
- Station Mastery skill will only provide 2% combat bonuses per level, but this change will be completely balanced out by increasing the corresponding base gear stats.
- Base gear will also be improved by a factor of 2 in addition to the Station Mastery change. This will change the balance in PvB but BvB will be unaffected by it. The changes will only affect things like DPS and Shield Recharge, not Range.
- Class skills will no longer affect bases. There will be new base-only super items that the bases can use during combat to give themselves extra range or other bonuses. The super items will have a 10 minute charging time to prevent you from rapidly swapping between bonuses.
I mentioned disposable base gear in my previous post. Here’s how it’s going to work. When you deploy a base kit, it will come with three new blueprints pre-installed. If it’s a tech 20 kit, the blueprints will be Annihilator Upgrade X, Y, and Z. Lower tech kits will come with the corresponding lower tech blueprints. Each upgrade project builds a whole set of gear that can’t be removed, tossed, or sold from the base. That includes a shield, energy, shield charger, laser, and omni-dampener (all seven damage types). These projects cost little or no credits, but require a substantial supply of raw materials (Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste) over an extended period of time. For example, the Upgrade Z version will take 6 weeks to complete.
The objective here is to give players the chance to build a strong galaxy defense even if they don’t have any base gear stored up. Of course, having some Adamantiumized or Armada gear in storage will still be quite handy to make sure your bases are strong from Day 1. Not only that, that kind of gear will be necessary for competitive BvB since the XYZ Upgrades take far too long for that.
Since we are repurposing XYZ gear as disposable, we need to do something about currently-existing XYZ gear. When universe reset is taking place, we will go through and replace existing XYZ gear by the plain versions. But before you cry “nerf!” let me share with you some new stats.
- Achilles Protector Z (old): 550,000 bank, 530/sec regen
- Achilles Protector (new): 1,822,875 bank, 2,462/sec regen
As you can see, the new plain versions of base gear will be miles better than the current Z versions. The only XYZ gear that won’t be replaced by the plain versions are Andaman and Achilles Laser Z. We are aware that these are popular endgame base weapons and so those two items will be left as they are (except of course they will receive the same stat buffs as the rest of the gear, as well).
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your impressions on this.
