In the coming week (July 3+), just in time for the real life fireworks, you will notice a major shift in our own 'fireworks'. The Experiential Crew, a group of old and new players, masters to casuals alike, has been hard at work crafting, testing, reworking, and retesting (repeat for weeks) a long awaited change to ammo balance in a co-effort with the Muse team. The goal of the changes has been to further define each ammo in its role, rather than the current meta based on the some of the secondary features of each ammo. It is designed to change the mentality of just one ammo 'always' being the right ammo for a certain gun. This has led to a stagnation of the meta, and calls for something new.
This will be the second major update that has large aspects almost completely created by players. The previous effort brought the Nemesis Heavy Carronade to our arsenal. The concept, stats, and function of the weapon were designed by players, while the devs worked hard to create the assets to match our vision. It was an amazing 5 week journey of ups, downs, celebration, and heated debates. We are quite happy with the result.
Following on this succees, Muse has entrusted us with a community generated balance patch at our request. The ammo rebalance will come in two stages. Stage 1 will involve changes to Burst and Greased, the most ubiquitous offenders in the game, Heatsink, the ammo that is rarely used for its supposed main use, and Charged, often collecting dust and forgotten. The following gives a basic outline of the changes.
Burst and Heastsink will lose their extra ammo capacity, and instead focus on their main function. For Burst, this means more damage on AOE per shot, without the extra shots. Heatsink will now remove all fire stacks on reload, and have some of its negative stats removed.
Greased and Charged will shift their focus, literally. Greased has long occupied too much of its bigger sibling's DPS space. Both are DPS increasing ammos, so compete directly with each other while lacking a real distinction in function. This most often leads to simply taking the ammo with more DPS, Greased. The new focus, however, will present a conscious and meaning choice between the two. The new focus of Greased will be short range, high DPS with the addition of high jitter. Charged, on the other hand, will have its focus on slightly longer range targets with the addition of velocity and reduction of jitter. Lesmok and Heavy Clip will not be encroached on, since the changes are minor. Just a little further, a little faster.
We will also have new content ported from PvE to PvP, including a ship, gun, and two new map modifications.
Stage 2 of the ammo balance will come later, after the dust has settled on this one. We are planning on presenting two new ammos. One to fill the +ammo role vacated by Burst and Heatsink, while the other will effectively be the opposite of Lesmok. Incendary and Lochnagar will also be getting very close scrutiny of the next month.
We know there will be people unhappy with the changes, with a lot of "Why....?" questions. The Experimental Crew will do our best to answer those questions.
