This week’s update has a lot of interesting information mainly related to the forthcoming Class Rebalance. Keep reading to find out more.
First, I made a lot of skill changes that will go live with the rebalance. Both Berserker and Gunner will now get a 100% bonus to multifire at level 1 of their respective skills. This should have profound impact on newer players when they are first choosing a skill and should help with the fledgling Gunner or Berserker’s damage output. Both Berserker and Gunner class skills will no longer grant an incremental multifire bonus either. This means a fully leveled Berserker will now have 3x MF instead of 5x. To compensate for this, Berserker will also get a rate-of-fire bonus on their core class skill. I also made some changes to the Speed Demon skill, Speedy Firing. The bonus will no longer be scaled with speed. Again, this should help with Speed Demon damage output in PvE situations quite a bit.
Second, and perhaps the biggest thing I tackled this week, was expanding the current ‘buff’ system used by Field Generators and Neurotweaks. Currently, the buff system is locked to a maximum of 32 buffs, all of which had been already used. This hard cap was due to a bitmap that needs to be sent to the client to tell it to display buff icons. Going forward I’ve doubled that number and we’ll be able to have a maximum cap of 64 different buffs. This gives us a lot more stats we can play with when creating Field Generators and Neurotweaks.
Of course, I didn’t just raise the buff cap on a lark, I’ve also gone ahead and added a few new buffs; Tractor Power, Electric Tempering, Inertial Dampening and Anti-Transference. The first three of these are extremely familiar so I don’t think they need explaining, but the last, Anti-Transference is a brand new buff. Anti-Transference is similar to Lifesteal in other games. It converts a percentage of your damage to your target into healing for your ship’s shields. Expect to see this buff used for some special new Berserker items.
The third big thing I worked on this week is also Class Rebalance related. It is a brand new item for Fleet Commanders called a Fighter Recall. When used, this item will do three different things. Firstly, it will destroy any fighters that can’t return to your ship. Secondly, it will teleport any fighters that can return back into your ship. This will be extremely useful for saving valuable fighters and also for destroying fighters to free up slots for new fighters. Thirdly, if you have any fighters queued, it will remove them from your launch tube and return them to your ship. This should allow Fleet Commander a lot of additional freedom in using fighters as they can save valuable injured fighters or escape from a bad situation quickly without sacrificing fighters. Below is a short video demonstrating the new item.
