Space Clouds

Dev Diary – Refined & Reforged Patch – Part 1

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming Refined & Reforged patch. This update focuses on enhancing active play and promoting a more dynamic and engaging game, where players must think critically and make strategic choices to succeed. In addition to several new mechanics that are designed to promote active play, we’ve also made a couple changes that should greatly reduce the lag players have experienced in large-scale PvP battles. Our development team has been working hard to bring you new and exciting gameplay opportunities, and we’re confident that these changes will add a new level of depth and excitement to your time spent in the game.

Gunner’s Deathblossom

The Deathblossom has been one of the most powerful effects that any class has access to in Star Sonata. It has allowed one class to deal high amounts of damage to many targets while only paying a modest electricity cost. The role of Gunner is inextricably linked to the feeling of the Deathblossom, so we knew that we needed to keep that feeling alive no matter what changes we made to the mechanic. The most major change we’ve made is that the Gunner will have to pay some amount of energy for each shot it fires. The exact amount of energy depends on the number of valid Deathblossom targets with efficiency rising greatly when several targets are being fired on. Based on our testing, we feel that this positively rewards using the Deathblossom tactically, as opposed to keeping it enabled at all times. Rest assured, Gunner still very much owns the role of indiscriminate destroyer, laying waste to a battlefield around them.

We’ve added a scaling electricity cost to the extra shots on the Deathblossom. This change makes Deathblossom mode much less energy efficient, particularly when firing against only 2 or 3 targets. Additionally, Deathblossom mode now disables your normal “selective firing” mode, meaning you cannot target a planet or moon to get an additional stream of shots on the target. This will encourage players to toggle the Deathblossom on and off based on what they are fighting. We have fixed a longstanding bug preventing Damage mods on Deathblossoms from working and have added these mods to various  Deathblossom items for an added level of complexity. On-hit weapon effects (splash, area of effect, chain, etc.) no longer occur while the Deathblossom is equipped, greatly reducing visual lag and freeing us up to buff weapons with those effects for use by other classes as well. Finally, targets are no longer shot simultaneously, instead they are fired at a fixed rate, which will lead to a significant gain in server and player client performance, especially in larger engagements.

Deathblossom

Gunner’s Destruction Debuff and Advanced Sub Skill Changes

The Destruction effect has been decreased from 45% to 15%. This change was made as Gunners were adding substantial amounts of multiplicative DPS to a squad in spite of not being construed as a class with that role. However, the Automated Reloader advanced subskill now grants a 10% destruction bonus, bringing Destruction’s effect up to 25%. The Advanced Targeting Computers advanced subskill now grants +50% tracking and -15% range, instead of adding additional targets to the Deathblossom.

Missiles and Missile Launchers

We’ve made some changes to the missiles and missile launchers as well. Missile launchers are no longer usable on bots and they no longer have a missile queue. The time between missile launches has increased but they now do much greater damage with longer-lasting effects. Missiles no longer fire in a volley in most cases and instead fire in a salvo of a single missile. Players are able to target and engage a singular missile much better than a volley of missiles. The Disintegrator missile effect has been changed to negative damage debuff.

Missile

Shield Monkey and Its Tools

Funky Monkey now has new functionality that allows you to put on a stacking healing parasite on whatever you are healing. The best part? This healing parasite doesn’t cost shields from your shield bank, making Shield Monkey considerably more efficient in healing. It does come at the cost of an overall HPS penalty so this should be an interesting choice for players to make.

Next, Monkey Mantle has undergone a few changes. It is no longer usable on capital ships and now requires an increased amount of constant electricity to be equipped. Additionally, we’ve decreased the size of the Monkey Mantles to encourage more tactical and situational use.

We’ve also made changes to Last Defense and Last Stand neurotweaks. Their bonuses have been adjusted to help you heal others and steal more shields, making them more effective in keeping you and your allies alive in the heat of battle.

Weapons Changes

We’ve made some changes to certain weapons. Super long-range weapons have been recategorized into the same category as long-range weapons. This reduces outliers of extreme range weapons that were obtaining such extreme ranges that it wasn’t very fun to fight against them (or even to fight with them as you were so far from visual range of your own target).

All projectile weapons other than Sebastopols now have at least a little bit of tracking. Transferences with low tracking had their tracking and HPE increased.

The ranges of on-hit weapon effects now scale with tech of the weapon. This causes the overall range of the effect on these weapons to be much farther at higher techs, a change that we believe will make these weapons viable for use by a variety of classes (and couldn’t have been done as long as AoE weapon effects were permitted in Deathblossom mode). However, the initial hit damage for on-hit effect weapons has been lowered, and the damage that the effects do has been raised. This means that the single target damage that these weapons do is overall lower but the damage done to additional targets is quite a bit higher. Overall, we view these changes to be a net buff to weapons with on-hit effects and anticipate that a variety of classes will find them situationally useful.

Energy Changes

Energies are being buffed, mostly.  Energies with high regeneration for their tech level will see a significant increase in bank size, while energies that had middling regeneration have had an even bigger increase in bank size. These changes should make Energy Bank bonuses much more useful across the board, and they should increase the amount of time players are able to fire their weapons at full power. Not all energies will retain the exact stats they had previously and could see weight, size, regen and potentially other changes but we attempted to prioritize regeneration numbers above all.

We have also added a fuel indicator to the user interface. When your energy is running low on fuel, the indicator will blink red to alert you to this fact and you can hover over the energy bar to know an estimation of how much fuel is left.

Tractors and Graviton Disruptors

As we were analyzing the overall experience of large-scale PvP, we realized that the enormous range of tractor beams was distorting gameplay and encouraging people to engage their enemies from many screens away. We felt that tractor beams would be more engaging to use if they were restricted to somewhat shorter ranges than currently seen in game. The biggest change to know here is that the Tractor Power stat will no longer grant range along with strength. Also, we’ve shifted most of the power of the tractor subskills onto the baseline stats of tractor beams themselves. Lastly, since it will be a lot easier to avoid tractor beams than before, we’ve increased the cooldown of graviton disruptors so that you can’t use them to achieve near-immunity to tractor beams. As a whole, we hope that these changes lead to a more engaging experience when tractoring or being tractored.

Screenshot 2023-02-20 162631

Previously tractors in player conflict were used as long range harassment and to pull bots out of a squad’s position. While you will not be able to use the tractor from nearly as long ranges, those being tractored will not be able to maintain close to 100% uptime of their gravitation disruptors anymore. This creates a new paradigm where you have to actively work around tractors and use the gravitation disruptor when the time is right instead of repeatedly using it on cooldown to negate tractors entirely. As for the tractor beam range reduction, ships without a lot of tractoring bonuses can expect their tractor beams to continue functioning with similar range and strength.

Along with these changes, tractors stats will now scale up more aggressively with tech level. Be sure to check out the stats on any higher tech tractors in your arsenal to see whether they’ve become more competitive..

Drones

We’ve also made some changes to Drone behavior. Automatic cross healing of stationary healing drones has been disabled and temporary drones will no longer automatically heal other temporary drones with transferences. However, they will still automatically heal drones without transferences. You can still make healing drones heal other drones by using RTS. Additionally, we’ve fixed the Drone RTS to make sure that drones properly follow your RTS commands. With RTS fixed, Engineers have a new tool in their arsenal for actively contributing to their squad while inactive Engineers will no longer benefit from automatic cross-healing of drones.

Miscellaneous Changes

Stasis has been adjusted so that you no longer benefit from your shield regeneration while in stasis. You will only heal from Death Stasis healing, making all classes be in stasis for the same amount of time regardless of their shield regeneration and shield bank.

Finally, the Speed Demon Overdrive Device has had its Energy regeneration amount reduced but now grants an extra Electric Tempering bonus. Berserker Class 3’s Damage bonus now requires piloting a heavy fighter to receive its benefits.

Long Term

From the beginning, our work on this patch was focused on lifting up interesting tactical choices and rewarding active gameplay, particularly as informed by the various snags we’ve observed in squad-based PvP since the Anatolian Expanse update. Along the way, we have attempted to follow any nerfs with new opportunities, such as the removal of on-hit weapon effects in Deathblossom mode paired with the overall buff to weapons with such effects.  We’re particularly glad to report that we’ve addressed several sources of lag that have unfortunately weighed down the game in recent months, particularly in large PvP engagements. Overall, it’s our hope that this update helps to inject some fresh and exciting gameplay into Star Sonata. We appreciate the continued support of our players and look forward to hearing your feedback as you explore the new and improved features. Thank you for playing!