Greetings, Brokers!
We have a exciting patch to walk through today. Lots of improvements, bug fixes, balance changes, and exciting new features to add to your Agent’s life.
TEAMS!
Have you ever wanted to team up with another broker in battle? Well we’re incredibly excited to announce the first version of Team Play feature, so those dreams are now a reality!
Starting today, we’ll be periodically running teamplay matches and Trials where you can join up with your fellow Brokers to battle against other teams for victory. This is a very early version of Team play - we have lots of improvements to come. In this mode, you’ll join the match as normal, and when your Agent beams down they’ll be sorted into a team. Teammates won’t attack one another but, coordination will be needed to ensure your team doesn’t overextend itself.
The drop phase will now show you where your teammates are landing, and you can change locations to ping your team with new ideas on where to land.
Once the match starts, you’ll see a new version of the leaderboard where your team is aggregated together. Winning Brawlmaster isn’t an individual task anymore, it’s a shared team responsibility. Every Shard or KO helps your team. Surviving is now also focused on the team. Even if a single member of your team is the last survivor the team as a whole wins!
This is a big new feature for us, so we would love your feedback as you jump in. Please let us know your feedback on our Discord.
We have lots of additional ideas on how to improve this feature with things like premade teams and more!
Trial Ticketing Changes
We’re making a large change to how tickets work. In the past, Brokers won tickets to Trials - that’s no longer the case.
From now on, when an Agent wins a ticket or medal in a Trial, that ticket and medal will be assigned to the Agent. Agent contract value will also increase based on the set of tickets the Agent holds. We’re excited to see how this As part of this release, we’ve traced match history back throughout and credited all Agents with the appropriate set of medals and tickets. As part of this process, all Brokers will receive a BC payout for the value of their remaining tickets. Brokers will still be able to win medals.
Additional New Features
If you’ve ever been partway through a Trial and been unsure how the rest of the field is doing, now you don’t have to wonder! Trial pods (and the overall Trial leaderboards) now update every round of every match, keeping you up to date on how the other pods are doing.
Skill maps now wrap - the left side and the right side of your Agent’s skills are now considered to be orthogonally connected - you can now use these rows in the same way as other rows to unlock skills to either side.
Login via Steam - You can now use your Steam account to log in.
Original Shard amount now dynamically updates on #players in the match
Match Changes / Fixes
As we work towards the finalization of our infrastructure improvements, we’ve made enough performance gains to enable 12-player matches as default. Quickmatches, Trials, and Practice (Hard) will have 12 players going forward.
Additionally, we’ve implemented a large set of behavioral and pathing changes:
- You can now view skill maps in the lobby, allowing you to scout out your opponents
- Xandrians should be significantly less dogged in their pursuit of battle
- Agents no longer momentarily freeze in place after firing attacks or losing a race to collect a Shard - they’ll instead immediately continue their strategy
- Agents now weight enemy strategies when making flee decisions and will prioritize escaping from enemies on attack
- Agents should now more naturally slide along walls instead of being pinned or stuck at map edges
- Agents on Survive with no enemies in vision will attempt to collect Shards instead of standing still - if they see an enemy, they will resume fleeing
- A rare bug that caused dodged KOs to not be dodged and occasionally result in Lazarus-like symptoms has been fixed
- Fixed a bug that caused Agents dropping on the very first row or column of the map to instead have a randomized drop location
- Fixed a bug that occasionally caused Agents to have a ‘phantom heal’ where they would silently regain health lost from an attack, causing the next attack to appear as if it did reduced damage
Additional bugfixes:
- Agent Trade missions should now function properly
- Sorting Agent Leaderboards by contract value and average position should now function properly
- Dusana, Titus, Wolfram, and Valon have been asked (politely yet firmly) to stop showing up in matches
- When viewing Agents from the Broker info screen, the Agents will now properly come to the front of the modal and be viewable
Balance Changes
Critical Strike Multiplier
With heavy-crit builds seeming extremely powerful, the main change we’re making here is reducing the base critical damage multiplier from 2x to 1.5x - this should significantly reduce the impact of massive critical damage in the later portions of the match. Additionally, we’ve tweaked the power of the on-KO package. We’ll be monitoring this closely alongside the shift to 12-player matches. We also reduced the effectiveness of some on-round start skills that provided exceptional value relative to their point cost.
On-KO Skills Buffed:
- Blood Sport (Assassin) - Ranged Damage increased from +4 to +6
- Exposed Weaknesses (Sniper) - Ranged Damage increased from +4 to +6
- Thrill of Battle (Berserker) - Damage increased from +4 to +6
- Cleansing Fire (Paladin) - Melee Damage increased from +4 to +6
- Momentum (Sentinel) - Melee Damage increased from +4 to +6
- Fortify (Engineer, Sentinel) - Armor increased from +4 to +6
- Vanishing Act (Trapmaster, Assassin) - Evasion increased from +4 to +6
- Repositioning (Sniper, Explorer) - Speed increased from +3 to +5
- The Guilty Flee (Paladin) - Melee Range increased from +20% to +30%
- Valor’s Reward (Paladin) - Max Health increased from +35 to +45
- Respect the Fallen (Paladin) - draw increased from +3 to +5 Elements
- Forbidden Knowledge (Engineer) - Impulse per turn increased from +1 → +2
Round-Start Skills Nerfed:
- Lethal Focus (Assassin) - Critical Chance decreased from +2 to +1
- Lethal Focus (Berserker) [Renamed from Drums of War] - Critical Chance decreased from +2 to +1
- Concealment (Sniper) - Evasion decreased from +2 to +1
- Concealment (Trapmaster) [Renamed from Fog Trap] - Evasion decreased from +2 to +1
Other Adjustments:
- Scent of Weakness (Engineer) - Reworked from “On KO: +20% Vision” to “On Shard Collect: +2% Vision”
- Deep Insights (Engineer) - Increased from “Draw 4 Elements” to “Draw 6 Elements”
- Sharder Mark II (Explorer) - Shard Collection range from +15% to +20%
- Immovable (Engineer, Sentinel) - Reduced from Boost: +3 Armor to Boost: +2 Armor
- Base Critical Damage multiplier reduced from 2.0x to 1.5x