This patch includes some long-awaited balance changes, as well as a number of small improvements and fixes, some of which lay the groundwork for future patches!

Improvements

• The taskbar icon will now flash if something important happens while the game is in the background
  
  • Eg. when a matchmaking game is found, when it’s your turn to pick a perk, when your character has been spawned
    
  
  
• You can now delete profiles while using keyboard/mouse
  
• Button prompts no longer show gamepad icons while using keyboard/mouse
  
  • We still hope to improve the overall mouse experience further in the future
    
  
  
• Added some fallback latency tests in case the standard tests fail
  
• Added some more specific messages for certain errors
  

Balance changes

Katana:

• Increased slash cooldown from 0.3s to 0.4s per slash
  
• Slightly increased charge time from 0.7s to 0.85s
  
• Charged attacks now cost 2 ammo
  

Perks:

• Reduced Mind Crush confusion duration from 3s to 1.5s
  
• Increased Blood Runner move speed boost from 25% to 30%
  
• Blood Perks now trigger at 40% health instead of 33.3%
  
• Adjusted Survivor stack curve (now 30, 20, 15, 12 instead of 30, 25, 21, 18)
  
• Adjusted Titan stack curve (now 50, 90, 120, 150 instead of 40, 80, 120, 160)
  
• Pyrogenesis now does 30 damage over 3 seconds instead of 20 damage over 2 seconds
  
• Cyber Heart now heals 1.5 HP per second instead of 2 HP per second
  

Developer comments: We’ve seen new and intermediate players consistently struggle against Katana, often feeling helpless and unable to react or escape from an aggressor. In addition to fixing a bug that affected its cooldown, we’ve added slightly more time between slashes to give players a better chance to parry them, and increased the charge time a little to make it more deliberate. We also increased the ammo cost of the charged attack, given it requires a read to parry and is relatively easy to execute.

Mind Crush has been a divisive perk, and while certain players have enjoyed the challenge, others find it frustrating and hard to deal with. For now we’ve cut the confusion duration in half, which should preserve the initial disruption but reduce the feeling of being confused forever, and we’ll continue listening to player feedback.

The blood perks are particularly strong when paired with perks like Survivor and Bulletproof, but weren’t quite as effective without these synergies. These buffs mean you don’t have to be as low to get their benefits, and the increased move speed should make Blood Runner feel more impactful at lower stack counts.

We’ve also buffed a few other perks which we felt weren’t enticing or effective enough, and reduced the healing provided by Cyber Heart given how consistent its benefit is.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug causing Katana’s cooldown to be ignored for consecutive charged attacks
  
• Fixed being unable to heal while in Survivor’s short invulnerability period
  
• Fixed some cases where the sudden death ring wouldn’t appear due to packet loss
  
• Fixed long names touching the screen edge while mini score bars were full
  
• Fixed stat cards with 3 rows of perks overlapping the XP display