Joe: Hello again, my friends! Hamrick here to answer some hot community questions we have seen and give you a quick glimpse into what Sandbox is working on for the rest of the year and on into 2019.
While we have those hot questions coming right up, I just wanted to take a second to call out something you may have noticed. Instead of building up to one or two massive patches a year, we have transitioned to shipping smaller batches of changes much more frequently. We hope that this new approach will allow us to remain more agile than we have been in the past and allow us to shake up the meta a bit on more frequent intervals. We hope that a year from now we can all look back on this new way of working and agree that it was very successful. Alright, enough of my rambling, onward, to the questions!
Can you buff snipers? We would really like flinch to be reduced and to have more lower zoom scopes.
Snipers are definitely one of the archetypes we are actively looking at and making changes to. For example, later in January, Rapid-fire snipers will be moving to a two-shot body kill. Additionally, we are considering allowing more snipers to be able to one-shot supers on headshots in a future patch.
Lower zoom scopes do exist in the game, but have not been particularly prevalent with post-Forsaken weapons and have been largely limited to a few weapons (ie., The Supremacy), but we’ll be increasing the number of them in the game as we move forward.
We don’t currently have plans to alter sniper flinch any more at this time, but we will continue to keep an eye on your feedback.
Nova Warp??????????????????????????????
Yup, the Nova Warp super is too dominant right now and we are planning to tweak it. It’s currently slated to land with a patch coming in late January.
Spectral Blades hit detection feels much more consistent. Can sentinel and other melees get the same treatment?
We definitely want all melee supers to feel as good and reliable as possible. This is something we are still looking into.
A lot of the pre-forsaken subclasses feel underpowered now. Can they get buffed?
Yes! We have some planned buffs coming to older subclass paths in the patch currently slated for late January, but we are already looking ahead to what we’d like to do in patches further down the line. We will be regularly looking into tuning subclass content to ensure that there’s a healthy balance of viable choices in all activities. We use a combination of data and community feedback to track the right things to fix, so please continue to surface which choices feel the least viable to help guide us.
Any changes to the top exotics being used in the Crucible like One Eyed Mask, Shards of Galanor, etc.?
These exotics get talked about quite a bit and while I don’t have any immediate incoming changes to share, I expect that they will be getting looked at in the future.
Telesto is currently besto. Can you tone it down or move it to the Power slot?
Late in January you will find that Telesto’s bolts-to-kill will now match its charge rate, where it was previously doing more damage than other fusion rifles of its type. That said, due to it being affected less by damage falloff due to its explosive nature, it will still be more consistent than fusion rifles of the same charge rate. Worth noting, PvE damage will be increased to keep parity there. Once we see how these changes land, we can decide if and what to do next. The goal still being to buff where we can, but when we have to nerf, you’re going to find us trying to inch down instead of going nuclear… at least as much as we can.
Scouts Rifles still feel weak in both PVP and PVE. Can they come up?
This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches.
Could SMGs get a non-precision damage buff?
We just recently buffed the range on SMG’s to make them more competitive. We’ll be monitoring the data and feedback for a bit to help us decided where to take them next. If we find that they still aren’t good enough, we will be happy to buff them further.
Can Fusion Rifles get buffed? Maybe longer range or higher damage to combat shotguns?
This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches. We did bring up the damage of Rapid Fire Fusion Rifles in 2.1.0 last week.
Any plans to adjust Wavesplitter?
It’s not at the top of our list but we do intend to take a look at it. First we want to look at the global ammo economy for trace rifles in PvP, and then we can take a look at Wavesplitter’s effectiveness.
Titan skating is rampant on PC. Do you plan to remove it?
We’d like to fix this, however, we’re being careful about how we do so because it’s so closely tied to the core feel of the Lift ability. In other words, we don’t want a Titan skating fix to change the way the Lift ability feels for all players. We’d love to have a simple fix to this issue we could roll out immediately, but this one is going to take us a while to land on something solid.
To recap, we want to roll out smaller batches of patches more frequently. We want to bring things up whenever possible, but when we do need to bring something down, we are going to try and inch it down and into the correct location. And finally, there is a patch coming, currently slated for late January, where we expect you to see some changes coming to things like Rapid-fire snipers, Telesto, Nova Warp and pre-Forsaken subclasses… And we have much more planned for the months ahead.
