Healing/Support Update News

Greetings! You’ve probably heard that the Healing/Support Update is going live on February 7. I’m writing this post to tell you what to expect in the lead-up to the Update and to summarize the contents of the Update itself.

Before February 7

In the next few days, the team will finalize the exact contents of the Update. We will let you know on Discord as soon as this is done. At that point, the LiveTest server will contain the exact stats of items, skills, and AI that will go live with the update. For extra information, we’ll fire up the Test 3 server as a simulation of the update with a new universe generated. We will also use a script to update the Wiki with all stats of common items so theorycrafters will be able to pull all that data directly into their spreadsheets and programs.

Even before Update Version 1.0 goes live, we are already planning Version 1.1 for release a few weeks later. There are two reasons for releasing the project in stages. First and foremost, we recognize that no amount of pre-release testing can compare to the volume of testing player-hours that occurs after a big update. We are fully prepared for some issues and errors to be uncovered soon after release and are committed to addressing these in a timely manner. Secondly, there are some last minute adjustments that weren’t ready in time for Version 1.0, mostly involving tweaks to bosses and less commonly used ships. Once the contents of Version 1.0 are finalized, I’ll be able to give more details on Version 1.1. I will announce those details before February 7.

On February 7

The update will go live on February 7. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that a lot of gear has changed in size, as well as the capacity of most ships. Certain items have changed in power, too: for example, pulse guns are a lot more powerful than before, while some particularly strong ships and items have been toned down in strength. The upshot is that you may find yourself wanting to change around some augmenter setups! Aside from the usual means of doing this (destroying equipped augmenters, using a reset mission, and using a paid reset module) we are providing three new ways to help you optimize your setup in the update:

1. Fifteen ships had their augmenter slots reduced. Popular examples are: Thatch, Battle Sphere, and Paxian Battle Frigate. Any ships you own that lost augmenter slots will automatically have all their augmenters unequipped as soon as you activate the ship or transfer any items in or out.

2. With the exception of ships whose augmenters were unequipped per #1, all ships that existed before the update are entitled to one free augmenter reset. The reset is activated by using the chat command /freeAugreset while the ship is active. You can save this reset as long as you like; it will never expire.

3. Lastly, every character will have access to three additional augmenter reset missions at the base in Shadow. These missions will work exactly like the normal ones except that you must use them by the universe reset in October 2021, as any remaining ones will be removed at that time.

Version 1.0 Summary

At the core of the Healing/Support Update is mitigation: how much punishment your ship can take. As we analyzed mitigation in the game, we uncovered a longstanding arms race between damage on weapons on the one hand, and resistance on ships on the other. This is pretty standard in themepark MMOs where each update totally supersedes the last, but in Star Sonata we want the power curve to be flatter so that older content remains relevant and new players are reasonably able to compete with experienced ones.

Our work on the power curve has led to a number of high profile changes, such as the standardization of augmenter slots by hull type, the elimination of modification effects from inactive weapons, and the standardization of repair costs to bring down excessive costs on expensive gear. We also instituted stricter standards on the quality tier of items and introduced two tiers above Exotic to give players more room to progress. Many existing items have had their stats adjusted due to adjustments in quality tier to bring them into compliance with the new standards. Quite a few items were listed as Exotic in spite of being rather simple to acquire in terms of time and cost; we couldn’t leave these items at that quality tier without eroding the reward of progression to items that are genuinely difficult to acquire.

Another impactful change from our analysis of the power curve has been a new the development tool for ship design. Here, the biggest change is that higher-tech ships don’t accumulate bonus resistance to damage. This source of “power creep” was one of the worst offenders in the mitigation arms race. Standardizing ship resistances runs the risk of making ships less distinct from each other; while we have done our best to give them bonuses appropriate for their tech and quality tier, we hope to continue polishing ships over the coming months by upgrading their inbuilt super items with more interesting and distinctive effects. The Kalthi ships have been selected for the first pass of super item improvement.

Clearly, taking on the mitigation arms race committed us to a pretty drastic rework of many item stats. This is why we are instituting a universal augmenter reset as explained in the previous section. These resets may be particularly important for the two classes most involved in squad mitigation: Shield Monkey and Engineer.

Shield Monkey Update

As soon as we started thinking about mitigation, our attention turned to Shield Monkey. After all, this is the class most clearly focused on keeping squads alive. The two aspects of squad mitigation that felt most off to us were:

1. Squad mitigation is driven principally by healers manufacturing shields through far-above-100% healing efficiency.

2. In many encounters, squads can wipe if healing is disrupted or redirected for even a very short period of time.

To address these issues, we have made healing occur at 1:1 efficiency in all cases, and we have dramatically increased the shield bank and shield regeneration available to players. We have also toned down the damage in certain boss zones to compensate for the lower healing output from the efficiency reduction. Lastly, we have enabled Shield Monkey to use their shield transference weapons to steal shields from enemies, replenishing their own. The upshot is that Shield Monkey has more gameplay modalities available to it, ranging over the traditional healer, the vampire healer, the drain-tanker, and the squad-sheltering capital ship.

Here’s a quick list of highlights and tips on the new Shield Monkey class.

• Shield Monkey can equip an extra Shield item on Support Freighters and Capital Ships.

• Zen of Shield gives a huge amount of shield bank for this class.

• Transference Mastery (40% range, 20% tracking) is rolled into Shield Monkey class, so you get comparable range with transference weapons and more range with all other weapon types. This change also benefits the range of your combat bots.

• The Transference Efficiency augmenter stat now multiplies your shield stealing.

• Stealing-oriented Shield Monkeys will want to obtain a lot of DPS multipliers to be effective, while non-stealing Shield Monkeys will want to obtain a lot of shield regeneration.

• None of the healing and mitigation changes affect stations and permanent drones, so the Wild Space meta is largely unaffected by this project.

Engineer Update

While Shield Monkey is the official healer class in Star Sonata, Engineer has incredibly powerful healing from drones in the endgame. In fact, Engineer is a highly versatile class that can achieve impressive results in healing, DPS, and tanking. Players who select this class certainly appreciate the versatility, but a Jack of all trades isn’t supposed to be a master of all of them. As we worked on Shield Monkey, we became convinced that Engineer would become the undisputed king of healing if we didn’t make some changes there too. So, our mission with Engineer was to retain its signature versatility while dialing down its ability to perform multiple simultaneous squad roles at such a high level. In exchange, we’ve dramatically increased Engineer’s ability to customize their drone stats, as detailed below.

Here’s a quick list of highlights and tips on the new Engineer class.

• Engineer can equip an extra Energy item on Support Freighters and Capital Ships.

• Zen of Energy gives a lot of extra energy bank.

• Energy transference beams now share a portion of the target’s energy consumption with the Engineer instead of passing a flat amount of energy to the target.

• Mechanical Engineer adv subskill allows you (and your squadmates, with a Repair Drone from Lyceum) to pay the docked repair cost while in flight.

• Instead of giving resistance to damage directly, we’ve made a portion of the Engineer’s energy bank serve as an overshield to incoming damage. Only the top 50% of the energy bank can be used in this way, to prevent the Engineer from becoming crippled in combat.

• A fraction of your augmenter stats are now passed to your drones. The exact fraction is computed as 2% per level of Drone Deployment, plus 60% from Engineer class. This means that your ship augmenters benefit your drones at just over 100% effectiveness. Any augmenter that used to have Drone Ops has been reworked, so you’ll want to take a close look at the new stat distributions to see if they’re still to your liking. Don’t forget to equip a DPS augmenter if you want your drones to do damage!

Miscellaneous Changes

As part of the power curve analysis, we have made a number of other standalone changes that are chronicled here.

• Shield Chargers and Solar Panels have enhanced values but function exclusively out of combat. To benefit from these items, position yourself near a star and disengage from all combat interactions for 10 seconds. This means no receiving or dealing non-parasite damage, using or receiving tractor beams, launching missiles and fighters, and so on. You can also gain the out-of-combat effect by docking. Unlike an older draft of this effect, you do NOT need all hostile targets to be eliminated for out-of-combat status to kick in. Also note that we’ve updated the universe generation code to place at least one star in every random galaxy and dungeon.

• Damage-over-time weapons have been carefully analyzed and tuned. The main results are that parasites now do full critical damage (!), and we no longer have weapons doing more than 75% of their damage from parasites. Fire Extinguishers and Pest Exterminators are now out-of-combat items (except station-locked versions) and their power has been increased accordingly.

• Weapon damage types now have a theme and focus, leading to more pronounced use cases.

  • Laser damage => deprecated and converted to Energy or Radiation

  • Radiation => ethereal (even projectiles)

  • Ethereal but not radiation or laser => no longer ethereal (e.g. KMW)

  • Heat => Powerful damage-over-time effects

  • Mining => better against heavy fighters and capital ships

  • Physical => better against light fighters

  • Surgical => increased augmenter drop chance (up to +100% if used for the whole kill)

• A number of skills were revised a few new ones were created.

  • Bot PhD: +8 extra slots, passes 30% of your skill bonuses to bots

  • Bot Tweaking: passes 30% of your skill bonuses to bots, still gives agility and speed

  • Droney: +1 temp drone slot, passes 50% of your skill bonuses to drones

  • Zen skills (condensed from 100 levels to 50)

    • Shield: +2% bank up to 50

    • Energy: +2% bank up to 50

    • Spin and Acceleration: 2% up to 50

  • Lagrange: 10% damage / resistance when maxed at level 25, per damage type

    • Transference Mastery has been deprecated and is now Transference Control (Lagrange)