2XP - We've got something in store for you just in time for the long weekend! Play anytime from Aug. 31st to Sep.5th to take advantage and earn Double XP! (which may work great with the Echelon system below!)
Upper Echelon Patch Notes
Agents, it’s finally time to go in-depth with our next update! Upper Echelon is focused on targeted gameplay enhancements and additions to change up the meta in team based modes, expand options in what and where to loot and enhance our progression systems for high level players. There is a lot to dive into, all inspired by player feedback, so let’s get to it!
General Changes
Echelon System
We’ve received a lot of demand from the player base to expand progression in the game beyond what we currently have. Enter the Echelon system! The goal of this new system is to open up character based progression well beyond mastery 10. No gameplay unlocks will be tied to Echelons, this is really a “completionist” feature that rewards you for continuous play with your favorite agent over long periods of time.
Here’s what you will unlock by leveling up Echelon ranks:
- An evolving flair next to your name when playing as a Echelon Ranked character showcasing your progress
- You will earn 20 Bonds (our real-money currency) every Echelon Rank.
- 3 titles per character on Echelon rank 10, 50 and 100.
Do note that Echelons DO NOT reset your gameplay unlocks on a character. You can pursue
them without losing any of your hard earned unlocks. Reaching Echelon level 100 should take a sizable amount of time, we are excited to see how far you get into this new system.
Team Revive Rework
A major piece of feedback we’ve been looking at for a while now is the overwhelming presence of “body camping” in team-based modes. To remedy this and give players more options, we are adding a new way to revive your teammates while dodging a camping team.
From now on, extraction terminals will allow you to revive your entire team for the cost of 5 intel. They will respawn at the pad immediately, removing the need to make it to their bodies while being camped. This option becomes unavailable in the extraction phase to help drive the match to a conclusion.
Of course, you will still be able to revive your teammates directly at their body with no intel cost if the situation allows it. We think this change will make team matches much more dynamic and interesting and we’ve had a blast playtesting it internally.
Team Revive health thresholds
To go along with the revived rework, we are tweaking the max health thresholds after getting revived. We hope these changes will give a bit more lee-way for revived players to make a difference, while still making it undesirable to get downed early in a match.
Revive health thresholds before: 75-50-30 Max Health
Revive thresholds now: 80-60-40 Max Health
Package Restore
The player that gets the package from the vault first will now get a full restore for them and their team. This will put everyone back at full health, but also put all your teammates back at the max health threshold if they have been revived before in the match.
This will NOT resurrect teammates that are currently downed or out for good though, so make sure you get your teammates back up before capturing that package if possible.
New Gameplay element: Lost and found boxes
While we are happy with the keycard changes from Season 2, one side effect of their inclusion was to devalue staff rooms in the overall structure of matches. To remedy this while still keeping control over match pace, we are introducing a new element unique to these rooms for players to seek out: Lost and found boxes. For 5 intel, players can hack them open to find a random drop from a list of possibly high value items, including keycards and field upgrades. Be careful though: there is a small chance to loot less valuable items too. Weight the options carefully!
New lootables
Three new item types will now spawn randomly across all maps. These items will reward you with “meta reward” like XP and currency to spend outside matches.
- XP Cassette: Get 200 XP right away
- Credits Purse: Get 25XP and 25 Credits
- Pile of Bonds: Get 25XP and 5 Bonds
You will find these spawning randomly across the map so keep an eye out for them!
Player Movement Update
With this patch we are rolling out a major upgrade to how we handle player movement. What this means in practice is that player movement will be updated much more frequently by the server, leading to more accurate, smoother and easier to track movement overall. This should have a major impact on the overall game feel and smoothness of combat.
We will continue looking at possible upgrades on this subject in the future.
New XP sources
To help you reach these elusive… ahem… upper echelons, we are adding two new sources of XP to the game. Intel spent on doors and Intel spent on chests (field upgrades chests or lost and found boxes). These XP events scale with how much intel you spent. We hope these will make progressing the game more rewarding, but also encourage team play by spending intel for your allies.
Content Creator Contest Calling Cards
We are happy to introduce our first content creator calling cards following our streaming context! Leaflit was the grand winner in both categories (Hours streamed and viewer hours) while Fitzy and Miss Lovely Shadow were the runners ups in both. You’ll be able to go and grab their calling cards for free in-game with this update from the calling card menu.
**Agent Balance
General
Low Ammo Count**
- Updated the threshold that is considered “low ammo” for the UI warning on all the cast to make it fit better with their respective ammo capacity
Ace
We are trying something a bit new with Ace’s passives. The bonus damage effect on her base passive has always been a core part of Ace’s identity as a sniper character. We felt that making this effect the baseline for all of Ace’s passives would give more space for different options to be chosen by players. To make this work, we’ve made multiple changes to all three passives outlined below. We are also making weapon tweaks to give the Queen of diamond a more interesting place in Ace’s arsenal and differentiate it further in game feel from the Jack.
Weapons
Base: Queen of Diamond
- Reload time 2.75s => 2.5s
- Fire Rate .8 => .9 shot per second
- Damage 30 => 32
Mod 1: Jack of Diamond
- Ammo in mag 7 => 8
- Fire Rate 1.4 => 1.35 shot per second
- Headshot Multiplier 1.75 => .1.5
- Reduced Recoil in ADS to help followup shots.
Passive
Base: Diamond’s bet
- Applies the Exposed status effect on hit on top of the original damage buff.
Mod 1: Crippling Shot
- Applies a damage buff on top of the original slow status effect
Mod 2: Neutralizing Shot (Formerly Cover Flush)
- Applies the Neutralized status effect on hit.
- Applies a damage buff on hit
Cavalière
Cavalière has generated a lot of discussions around her investigation skills recently. With this update we are upping significantly the amount of time a clue remains interactable, the range at which you can interact with it and how far you can see it to give Cav her detective feel back in a big way. We are also making some tweaks to her hydras to get into a heavier hitting niche vs the rest of cav’s arsenal.
Weapons
Mod 1: Hydras
- Bullets per mag 16 => 14 (8 shots to 7 shots)
- Fire rate 4.4 => 3.6 bullets per second
- Damage 9 => 10 per bullet
- Headshot Damage Multiplier 1.75x => 2x
Expertise
Base: Investigation
- Clue detection Range 25m => 50m
- Clue Interaction Range 4m => 10m
- Clue Lifetime 60s => 150s
- Chase time at 1 clue 5s=> 6s
- Chase time at 2 clues 8s=> 9s
Mod 2: Redemption
- Clue detection Range 25m => 50m
- Clue Interaction Range 4m => 10m
- Chase time 12s=> 15s
Chavez
With this update, we are making changes on what kind of expertises can get a “cooldown refund” when canceled early. We are making sure that powerful abilities that can change the flow of encounters do not get a refund if players choose to cancel them manually. Chavez fits right into this category with his expertises and is the first on the list for that tweak.
Weapons
Base: Sentinel
- Reload Time 2.5s => 2.35s
Mod 2: The Duke
- Reload Time 3s => 3.1s
Expertise
All Expertise
- Canceling expertise early will not refund charge anymore
Hans
Hans has been doing very well recently, but one of the major pieces of feedback we got from his catalog 2 changes was that his hip fire spread is not accurate enough on the edge of close to medium range. We are adjusting two of his weapons with a different spray pattern and a less aggressive opening of the spray at range to get more reliable hits. This means that we have to lower some of the stats on the weapons to prevent them from becoming absolute killing machines, but overall this should make eliminations far more reliable in a large variety of scenarios.
Weapons
Base: The Hook
- Fire rate =1.4 => 1.3 shot per second
- Damage 45 => 40 (all pellets hit)
- Spray pattern change to be more consistent and land more pellets at range
- Spray stays tighter for a longer duration before spreading for more consistent hits
Mod 1: The Jab
- Bullets per mag 8 => 10
- Damage per shot 30 => 23
- Spray pattern change to be tighter and more consistent to land
Larcin
Larcin is getting the same treatment as Chavez: No more cooldown refund for canceling his abilities early. In his case though, we are bringing the overall cooldown back down a bit to compensate since we have better control without the refund. We are also giving back a bit of power to Cadence to make it an appealing choice again.
Weapons
Mod 1: Cadence
- Damage 10 => 12
- Fire Rate 9 => 10 bullets per second during burst
- Delay between bursts 0.4s => .0375s
Expertise
All Expertise
- Canceling expertise early will not refund charge anymore
- Reduced cooldown from 75 seconds to 60 seconds
Madame Xiu
While we are currently looking at some tweaks to Xiu’s expertise in the future, this update brings a simple change to her burst weapon. With this change, Longshen should feel more reactive and become a better choice by allowing faster followup shots.
Weapons
Mod 1: Longshen
- Delay between bursts 0.45s => .0375s
Red
While Red is mostly getting bug fixes this update, we have updated her lovebomb to be more consistent with her other abilities in a team scenario.
Expertise
Mod 2: Love bomb
- Allies in the radius of the bomb will regain cover if an enemy triggers it.
Squire
Squire used to be the king, but recent nerfs have hit him a bit too hard with the evolving balancing around him. We are mostly focusing on making his base weapon a solid option and tweaking the trident slightly to make it a bit faster on its burst.
Weapons
Base: Lance
- Bullets per mag 11 => 12
- Fire Rate 3 => 3.2 bullets per second
- Damage 15 => 17
Mod 1: Trident
- Fire rate 9 => 10 Bullets per second during burst
Sasori
For Sasori, we are entirely focused on making the interplay between his sword and throwing weapons smoother and more viable. We are reducing the cooldown after a sword strike on all his weapons and making it especially low on Yuki and Hikari to really allow you to set up the slow on a fight’s start with less of a severe downside. We have also changed how to charge his mod 1 to remove the need to hold two buttons at the same time.
Weapons
Base: Ame and Kage
- Sword cooldown after a strike 1.25s => 1.15s
Mod 1: Hyõ and Hanei
- Functionality Change Sword now charges simply by holding the ADS button, no longer needing to hold both buttons at the same time.
- Sword cooldown after a uncharged strike 1.25s => 1.15s
Mod 2: Yuki and Hikari
- Sword cooldown after a strike 1.15s => 0.9s
Yu-Mi
Yu-Mi has received extensive changes for season 2 and has been doing much much better since. We are leaving her untouched for this update and will watch how the meta evolves around her.
Gadget Balance
With this balancing pass we are mostly focusing on diminishing the oppressiveness of the trace status effect. The hacktrap becoming much more reliable than before has made the effect quite a bit more present and while we are looking at more involved tweaks to how it works in the future, we are reducing trace duration in the immediate future to make trace less of a dire situation.
Spyglass
Spyglass hack speed has been reduced by 30% to give players a reason to sometimes take a risk and hack manually. We think the spyglass should come with a choice between efficiency and safety that you might want to alternate depending on the situation instead of always being the best choice.
- Reduced hackspeed in spyglass by 30%
Recon Drone
- Reduced tracing time 20 => 14 seconds
Hacktrap
- Reduced tracing time 12 => 7 seconds**[/b]
[b]Tripwire**
- Added a short delay before being able to re-trigger the same tripwire on the same victim, preventing it from blowing cover multiple times per frame
Mimic
- Can now hack and interact while in mimic form
Bug Fixes
General
- Secret passages will no longer close on players. They will re-open instead if you approach them while closing.
- Fixed an issue that would lead to players appearing out of cover to other players even when they regained cover
- Fixed an issue that allowed players to open shortcuts into purple rooms from outside
- Lowered volume on the Tripwire Presents intro movie
- Fixed an issue that would cause spies meleeing while crouched to appear standing up in third person
- Fixed an issue that lead to the ink “random access memory” to have inconsistent patterns in third person
- Fixed an issue that caused status effect to stay active during the victory screen
- Fixed an issue that caused the navmode icon of the package to hide gameplay elements
- Fixed an issue that lead to the “being revived” message staying on screen if the revive is interrupted
- Fixed an issue that lead to incorrect health total in UI after being revived
Agents
Chavez
- Fixed an issue that lead to Chavez health dropping to 130 when grabbing a bullet proof fabric field upgrade while under the effect of passive mod 1
Hans
- Fixed an issue that allowed Hans to shoot two expertise projectiles back to back without cooldown.
Larcin
- Fixed an exploit with Larcin’s zone expertise allowing some characters to shoot without losing invisibility.
- Fixed an issue that lead to revive icons being visible on dead agents when Larcin is invisible
Madame Xiu
- Fixed an issue that would break social interactions if Xiu used her expertise on a NPC already in one.
Sasori
- Fixed an issue that allowed Sasori to shoot and melee at the very same time.
- Fixed an issue that lead to Sasori not being able to loot ammo with Hyõ and Hanei
- Fixed an issue that could lock Sasori from doing any action after using his vial
- Fixed an issue that would lead to kunai failing to fire right after a charge sword strike
- Fixed an issue that lead to sword charge VFX being visible even when in cover
- Fixed an issue that caused Sasori’s sword to stay stuck on his hand when switching tools
- Fixed an issue that lead to kunai staying visible even when out of ammo
- Fixed an issue that lead to darts becoming invisible after using expertise mod 2
- Spies traced by Sasori now get a “traced” notification
Red
- Fixed an issue with Canceling expertise early will not refund charge anymore
- Fixed an issue on love bomb that could lead to players appearing out of cover when triggering it.
- Fixed an issue that led to text that should only be visible to Red’s allies on the love bomb being visible to enemies.
- Fixed an issue that allowed Red to use her succubus kiss expertise twice without cooldown
Yu-Mi
- Fixed an issue that allowed players to shoot two expertise back to back without cooldown.
Levels
Silver Reef
- Bathroom doors can no longer keep you stuck inside the stalls. (Even if you have to go really badly!)
Fragrant Shore
- Fixed the collision of some balconies that would prevent players from jumping above them.
Changed depots in env_dev branch