Welcome Agents!
New agent: Red, the Treacherous Seductress. Red joins the ranks of Deceive Inc. as our first post-release agent. With her killer looks and even deadlier arsenal, Red is a versatile scoundrel capable of charming her rivals and supporting her allies.
Red introduces an all-new status effect: Charmed. Charmed spies are sent back into cover and gain the status effect, making them both slowed and neutralized. If they fire their weapons while charmed, they become heartbroken, removing the slow effect but making them vulnerable instead.
Taking any damage from an outside source will stop the charm effect immediately, freeing them from Red’s hold.
Charm introduces a compelling dilemma to the victim and an interesting dynamic to fights that we hope will make Red a fun agent to play as and fight against. We can’t wait for you to dive into her abilities!
Red is unlockable for 1500 DI Credits or immediately unlocked when buying the premium seasonal catalog. Speaking of catalog….
You will now earn Catalog tokens by playing the game normally. XP gains will give you access to this new currency. Once you have a token, you can go and spend it in the season tab to unlock the associated reward.
There are 10 pages of content in this catalog and you will need to unlock 3 of the 5 rewards on a page to progress to the next one. Do note that while free catalog users can still unlock 3 items per page to progress, they will not have access to the premium rewards they have selected unless they buy the premium catalog. All unlocked premium rewards will be given retro-actively if you decide to buy the catalog later on.
You will be able to buy the premium Catalog any time in the future: Premium Catalogs will never expire. Free catalog users will only be able to progress the CURRENT seasonal catalog so do note that when catalog 2 releases, the only way to continue progressing Catalog 1 will be to acquire the premium version of it.
One last note on catalog tokens: You can stack up to 10 tokens at a time so be sure to go and spend them in the catalog when you are near the limit. The same tokens will be used for progression in the future so you will be able to gain a head start on Catalog 2 if you choose to!
Heat System and collaterals
Deceive Inc. has been under increased scrutiny from its clients recently. In an effort to raise its operational standards, the company has introduced new rules that will make sure agents do not act too recklessly on the field.
Enter the Heat System!
You will notice this new bar under your health at all times. This bar will be filled when eliminating innocent NPCs. Everytime you reach one of the three thresholds, you will get progressively more severe punishment for taking out innocents.
First Heat Level
You will become 30% more vulnerable to damage for 12 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Second Heat Level
You will become 50% more vulnerable to damage for 15 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Third Heat Level
You have gone rogue! You will take 100% more damage for 20 seconds AND gain the exposed status effect, making you unable to recover for the duration. This is a SEVERE penalty that will only happen to the most unhinged of agents. Make sure it’s not you.
Heat will naturally start venting off when players get back into cover and stop taking out innocent npc. If you ever find yourself building a bit too much heat, you simply have to lay low for a short while to get back into the thick of it.
A final note: VIPs are a special case for the Heat system. Downing a VIP will build up a full heat level right away. Make sure you are certain that this Jati is not the real Jati, otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening.
Teams Intel
After taking a look at overall analytics and getting more playtime in teams mode, it’s obvious that team matches often progress faster than solo matches. There are of course multiple reasons for that, but one obvious one is that intel is effectively tripled in teams vs solo because every team member can hack the same intel piece.
With this update, intel use is now once per team instead of per individual. These changes will have many effects on the gameplay we feel are beneficial:
Teams Revive Mechanic
We’ve received a lot of feedback around the team's revival mechanic. Being able to revive just once is great to drive the incentive of not getting taken out, but it leads to frustrating matches where you can sometimes be out very early and have to watch your friends play without you for 12 minutes.
We are introducing a change to revive that, we hope, will keep most of the upside of penalties when getting taken out and give more playtime to you and your friends.
Every player will now be revivable 3 times in a match BUT they will take additive penalties to their max health. These penalties are as follow:
We will watch the effects of this change on team matches and keep tweaking the balancing of this over time.
Vault Terminals Room Rebalancing
We are making some changes to the overall economy of vault terminals, field upgrades and keycards. Here’s what you can expect:
One of the sources of frustration we saw popup since launch has been “air-strafing” players using the abundance of air control to jump and change direction mid-air in close range fights. This update, we are reducing air control when jumping to make jumping in a fight more predictable and easier to track.
To go with this change, we upped the air control multiplier when falling from high up (like when falling after a bounce mat jump or jumping from a rooftop) to keep movement precision for players when landing from up high.
Solo Matches XP modifier
From a purely mathematical standpoint, winning in solo is less likely than in teams. Couple that with shared XP sources in teams and you have a solo mode that is overall a less valuable means of getting unlocks.
To remedy this, we are adding a 30% XP bonus to all XP sources in solo. Winning in solo should now be a much more rewarding experience.
Character hit box tweaks
To make fights feel more reliable, we are tweaking hitboxes and hit regions a bit. Hitboxes for all agents have been adjusted to ensure they are all fair with their overall silhouettes and a bit more permissive on smaller characters.
To go along with this, we are removing limb damage from arms. Limb damage will now entirely be lower body damage. Hitting a player from the waist up will result in a body hit. We feel the addition of arm shots would lead to frustrating inconsistencies, especially on some characters that have a prominent arm presence in their silhouettes from up front (looking at you Cavalière). These changes are subtle, but should help to keep a more consistent feel to fights overall.
Recoil Work
A lot of work went into the recoil feel of most weapons in the cast. In general, the direction was to make recoil feel snappier and more immediate. We hope these changes will upgrade the overall weapon feel and make gunplay feel better.
Vertical Audio and weapon sound range
We have some audio tweaks coming in this patch. First of all, we have added a low-pass filter and tweaked the volume on weapon sounds based on the verticality of where the sound comes from. This should help with identifying that a fight is coming from above or below.
Additionally, we tweaked the overall range of weapon sounds on a per-weapon basis. This means that lower powered weapons won’t be heard from as far as powerful ones. This should help make the soundscape feel more diverse and add interesting wrinkles to pinpointing the location of fights.
NPC Danger Range
The radius in which npc are scared from weapon fire has been tweaked to better account for map verticality. Previously, npc could get scared from fights happening pretty high above them or below. This creates a lot of confusion when you see a scared npc running around because of a fight that is not happening on your floor.
Ink Menu Preview
This one has been asked for a lot since our alpha playtests and we finally had time to go and do it: You can now see your character’s weapon when changing inks in the agent select menu. This also works when inking gadgets so you will always know exactly what your new ink looks like in action right away.
Result Screen Rework
The mission report screen has seen a rework to make it clearer on what you achieved in a match and tell you exactly what you have progressed in the different progression systems. You will also see the exact amount of credits you earned in that round. No more guessing!
EXP source prompt
To go along with the added clarity in the result screen, you will now be able to see the XP value of your actions during a match. We hope this also serves the purpose of driving players towards actions that progress the flow of a match when they can see the exact amount of XP it gives them right away.
HUD rework
With the introduction of the heat gauge, the HUD overall has received some love. This new layout puts your Expertise with your loadout to better read the remaining cooldown and when it’s available in a pinch.
Increased gadget drop range
The range in which you can drop placeable gadgets has been increased. This should help not goo-ing yourself with the goo-pod and enable cheekier placements of gadgets overall.
Carrier Empowered Navmode Tweaks
Visual changes for much better reading. You now see spies instead of npc while scanning. Mimicked players now show up in empowered navmode view as a crouched spy silhouette. This gives the scanned players a chance to reposition in between scans and still surprise the carrier since they don’t know which npc disguise they have.
In addition, empowered vision now costs intel upfront, which means that quick scan repeatedly will cost 1 intel making less of an ironclad strategy.
Melee reliability work
Improved melee’s reliability in a variety of scenarios, especially when trying to hit someone close to a wall.
Vault Terminal Agent Alert
If two agents of opposite teams are in the same purple room with an active vault terminal inside, the vault terminal’s screen will glow red and play a short alarm sound. This goes both ways: Campers waiting by a vault terminal will alert the person entering and someone looting a purple room and getting a visit will know a rival spy just entered. This alarm is disabled as soon as the vault terminal is turned off.
Raised account level cap
With this update, the new level cap is now 300! Levels 200 to 300 will require more XP than before and a new completionist ink awaits you at level 300 to show off your insane spy skills.
Tweaks to cover regeneration timings
We are making basic cover regeneration a little bit faster, especially when standing still. While blowing your cover should have consequences, the current timing was long enough that even perfectly executed plans could result in you getting third party-ed after the fact.
We’ve found that players that can’t manage to get back into cover because it’s taking too long are often stringed along in a prolonged shooting spree that affects the entire lobby. While this is not a major timing change, we hope its effect is very beneficial to the loop of executing a well planned strike and disappearing back into the crowd.
Performance work and optimization
While this kind of work is never over, we have multiple optimizations and performance tweaks in this update to make the experience smoother on both PC and consoles. These changes should also help with bigger fights causing noticeable slowdown on some configurations.
We’ll have more of these tweaks in future patches as optimization work continues with high priority.
Increased Agent Ping Range
Players will now be able to alert (ping) their fellow teams Agents out to 160 meters.
Team Revive Polish
Added a function to ask teammates for revive as well as a progress bar to let you know how close you are to being revived.
Also added a prompt when trying to leave a team game where you can still be revived to make players more aware that the match is not over for them.
Shop Refresh
All-new looks are hitting the shop with four new rotations added to the current existing four. These rotations will keep cycling on a 24h basis and will not expire, so don’t fret about missing the skin you want as it shall be back very soon!
Here’s a tease at the new looks:
Norfolk Ace
Tournament Arc Cavalière
Elite Forces Hans
Self-Care Xiu
Drone zones added to all levels, preventing players from leaving bounds.
Training range and Pre-game Lobby
Introduction of the dps screen. You can now shoot the dummies in both the training range and pre-game lobby to get an accurate representation of how much damage you deal at different ranges.
Silver Reef
Added props to provide cover in the submarine glass corridors to provide more interesting fire fights in the extraction phase.
Diamond Spire
Added visual cover in the main hall ground floor to make it less of a danger zone. Added cover to the ground floor courtyard. Added new exits to some meeting rooms that only had one entrance.
Doors that lead to the vault terminal room are no longer transparent, preventing you from knowing what lies ahead without entering.
Fragrant Shore
Fixed doors that could not be opened on the first floor of the hotel. Replaced the purple door on terminal E room balcony by a one-way window openable from the inside. Replaced free windows into purple and blue rooms with one-sided openable windows like in Hard Sell.
We’ll keep watching how these changes affect the game and adjust balancing to keep the playing field more diverse and interesting.
We are also introducing a new background system with this patch that allows to update the balancing of the game live, without a client update. This is a huge step forward for us and will enable us to take action with more agility than ever before. With that all said: let's dive in!
Squire is doing great in the current meta. With his recent tweak to max ammo on his base weapon, we are now focusing on tweaking his other weapon options a bit to calm him slightly in combat scenarios. These are by no means huge changes, but we feel they will help level the balancing playing field and give space for other agents to be more viable this update.
Our changes around Ace in this update are focused on two core aspects: Making her weapons feel more different and viable and improving her passives. Cover flush in particular is getting a major buff as we try to make it a more appealing choice to be a real torn in rival agent’s sides.
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback about chavez. In this update, we are targeting a specific set of aspects that have been identified as overperforming in the current meta. We’ll keep an eye on the effects of these changes, but we hope they make more builds viable for Chavez and reduce his oppressiveness in combat a bit. We still have our eyes on endurance training for more tweaks beyond this update.
Larcin is getting pretty sizable tweaks with this update. We are tweaking his weapons a bit to make them more distinct and create more diverse playstyles and we are changing the pickpocket ability quite fundamentally with the addition of the heat system.
We hope to see Larcin not only perform better overall, but be simply more interesting to play in varied configurations.
While the changes we made accomplished that goal, it left pickpocket without a clear use case and identity. Its downside largely outweighs its advantages.
With the introduction of the heat system, we are changing pickpockets once again. We feel this tweak will give back the main appeal of pickpocket while negating the aspect of having a 100% free spy check at melee range.
Madame Xiu
Madame Xiu has been doing well since launch and as such we don’t want to move her too much from where she currently stands. We are tweaking some minor elements on her weapons and we’ll keep watch on where she lands in the new reality of this update with all the changes around her.
Falloff range tweaks did Hans a lot of good with the hotfix. We are continuing some targeted tweaks to make him a bit more viable at range with his base weapon and give back a clear double barrelled shotgun identity on the Uppercut.
We are pretty happy with the changes to the ammo pools on Cavalière from the hotfix, but we still find her base weapons to be slightly over-performing. We are doing some very light tweaks to them that should bring them more in line with the rest of the cast.
The other main factor in Cavalière feeling oppressive is really her tracking ability. To that end, we are tweaking some factors around it to make it less of a homing missile from anywhere on the map.
Yu-mi is a bit of a special case: While her pick-rate is relatively low, her win probability is quite good.A main aspect that has come out as frustrating when playing against Yu-Mi is the very high melt potential she has when landing headshots in rapid succession. To keep this in check a bit more, we are changing the time it takes to fully charge her slingshots a bit. We want to incentivize more quick shots in close quarter fights and keep fully charged shots as powerful fight starters or well-timed finishing moves.
Another aspect we are watching is Yu-Mi’s medi-field. It’s quite clear to us watching analytics that Yu-Mi win’s probability in teams is a big outlier in no small part thanks to it. We are adding a new wrinkle to this ability to make it less of a face tanking win button and add more strategic layers to its placement.
We are making some changes to field upgrade values. Our effort with this one is making less valuable field upgrades a bit more desirable and making purple and gold upgrades more desirable as part of your gameplan.
We are not touching four field upgrades that we think are already either strong enough or have a clear enough role in a field upgrade deck in the current meta. These are: Bulletproof fabric, External harddrive, Exfiltration scanner and overclock chip.
We might revisit them in the future, but let’s focus on the changes in this patch:
Cover Accelerator
While the cover accelerator had a great place in some builds, we wanted to push its transformative nature in your playstyle a bit further. It’s now more useful at low ranks and will make you a true vanishing ghost at higher levels. Since we have a built-in delay before cover starts recharging, we wanted to give this upgrade a very powerful regen factor when you chose it as your top upgrade.
In % Reduction
Extended ammo is a nice pick for some specific agents and weapons, but in the spirit of making it something that changes how you can play the game a bit more profoundly, we are raising values on it significantly. Not only does it open the opportunity to carry a lot of ammo, it gives a secondary utility of being able to remove more ammo from the map by looting much more.
In % bonus
This one is lagging behind quite a bit in terms of usefulness. We are making every level more significant in an effort to make this a great pick to recover while on the run and be fight ready faster than your opponents. We are leaning on a more aggressive scaling at the highest level to make it a more attractive pick at the top slots of your loadout.
In HP per snack
Social Battery is already a great pick, but it’s pretty much useless at lower levels and does not have much room to change at the current balancing. We are making it scale on a larger scale to make it more viable even in lower upgrade slots and a great boost at the gold slot.
In HP per second
Field agent is a pretty solid pick especially for agents that lean heavily on their expertise in a pinch. We are making it a stronger pick as your top field upgrade to really drive that play style defining role we want from gold field upgrades.
In % reduction
Cooldown Changes:
General
Maps
All
Diamond Spire
Fragrant Shores
Agents
Chavez
Ace
Madame Xiu
Yu-Mi
Cavaliere
Major Changes
New agent: Red, the Treacherous Seductress. Red joins the ranks of Deceive Inc. as our first post-release agent. With her killer looks and even deadlier arsenal, Red is a versatile scoundrel capable of charming her rivals and supporting her allies.
Red introduces an all-new status effect: Charmed. Charmed spies are sent back into cover and gain the status effect, making them both slowed and neutralized. If they fire their weapons while charmed, they become heartbroken, removing the slow effect but making them vulnerable instead.
Taking any damage from an outside source will stop the charm effect immediately, freeing them from Red’s hold.
Charm introduces a compelling dilemma to the victim and an interesting dynamic to fights that we hope will make Red a fun agent to play as and fight against. We can’t wait for you to dive into her abilities!
Red is unlockable for 1500 DI Credits or immediately unlocked when buying the premium seasonal catalog. Speaking of catalog….
Seasonal Catalog: Misery Empire
This update introduces our first catalog: Misery Empire! A noir-themed issue with plenty of cosmetics to unlock.You will now earn Catalog tokens by playing the game normally. XP gains will give you access to this new currency. Once you have a token, you can go and spend it in the season tab to unlock the associated reward.
There are 10 pages of content in this catalog and you will need to unlock 3 of the 5 rewards on a page to progress to the next one. Do note that while free catalog users can still unlock 3 items per page to progress, they will not have access to the premium rewards they have selected unless they buy the premium catalog. All unlocked premium rewards will be given retro-actively if you decide to buy the catalog later on.
You will be able to buy the premium Catalog any time in the future: Premium Catalogs will never expire. Free catalog users will only be able to progress the CURRENT seasonal catalog so do note that when catalog 2 releases, the only way to continue progressing Catalog 1 will be to acquire the premium version of it.
One last note on catalog tokens: You can stack up to 10 tokens at a time so be sure to go and spend them in the catalog when you are near the limit. The same tokens will be used for progression in the future so you will be able to gain a head start on Catalog 2 if you choose to!
Heat System and collaterals
Deceive Inc. has been under increased scrutiny from its clients recently. In an effort to raise its operational standards, the company has introduced new rules that will make sure agents do not act too recklessly on the field.
Enter the Heat System!
You will notice this new bar under your health at all times. This bar will be filled when eliminating innocent NPCs. Everytime you reach one of the three thresholds, you will get progressively more severe punishment for taking out innocents.
First Heat Level
You will become 30% more vulnerable to damage for 12 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Second Heat Level
You will become 50% more vulnerable to damage for 15 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Third Heat Level
You have gone rogue! You will take 100% more damage for 20 seconds AND gain the exposed status effect, making you unable to recover for the duration. This is a SEVERE penalty that will only happen to the most unhinged of agents. Make sure it’s not you.
Heat will naturally start venting off when players get back into cover and stop taking out innocent npc. If you ever find yourself building a bit too much heat, you simply have to lay low for a short while to get back into the thick of it.
A final note: VIPs are a special case for the Heat system. Downing a VIP will build up a full heat level right away. Make sure you are certain that this Jati is not the real Jati, otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening.
Teams Intel
After taking a look at overall analytics and getting more playtime in teams mode, it’s obvious that team matches often progress faster than solo matches. There are of course multiple reasons for that, but one obvious one is that intel is effectively tripled in teams vs solo because every team member can hack the same intel piece.
With this update, intel use is now once per team instead of per individual. These changes will have many effects on the gameplay we feel are beneficial:
- It slows down the extremely breakneck speed of unlocking vault terminals in the first phase.
- It adds strategy to team matches in who should take which intel to have the most efficient run.
- It adds incentive to split the team, taking more risks while speeding up the team’s progression.
- It gives a lot of value to finding keycards in teams.
Teams Revive Mechanic
We’ve received a lot of feedback around the team's revival mechanic. Being able to revive just once is great to drive the incentive of not getting taken out, but it leads to frustrating matches where you can sometimes be out very early and have to watch your friends play without you for 12 minutes.
We are introducing a change to revive that, we hope, will keep most of the upside of penalties when getting taken out and give more playtime to you and your friends.
Every player will now be revivable 3 times in a match BUT they will take additive penalties to their max health. These penalties are as follow:
- 75 Max Health on first revive
- 50 Max Health on second revive
- 30 Max Health on final revive
We will watch the effects of this change on team matches and keep tweaking the balancing of this over time.
Vault Terminals Room Rebalancing
We are making some changes to the overall economy of vault terminals, field upgrades and keycards. Here’s what you can expect:
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will NEVER have a purple or orange keycard
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will no longer have a purple field upgrade chest.
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a guaranteed keycard (either purple or orange)
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a purple chest.
- Purple rooms in the vault will now have two purple chests per room.
- Green rooms have a buffed spawned pool to make them more useful in the overall flow.
General Changes
Jump TweaksOne of the sources of frustration we saw popup since launch has been “air-strafing” players using the abundance of air control to jump and change direction mid-air in close range fights. This update, we are reducing air control when jumping to make jumping in a fight more predictable and easier to track.
To go with this change, we upped the air control multiplier when falling from high up (like when falling after a bounce mat jump or jumping from a rooftop) to keep movement precision for players when landing from up high.
Solo Matches XP modifier
From a purely mathematical standpoint, winning in solo is less likely than in teams. Couple that with shared XP sources in teams and you have a solo mode that is overall a less valuable means of getting unlocks.
To remedy this, we are adding a 30% XP bonus to all XP sources in solo. Winning in solo should now be a much more rewarding experience.
Character hit box tweaks
To make fights feel more reliable, we are tweaking hitboxes and hit regions a bit. Hitboxes for all agents have been adjusted to ensure they are all fair with their overall silhouettes and a bit more permissive on smaller characters.
To go along with this, we are removing limb damage from arms. Limb damage will now entirely be lower body damage. Hitting a player from the waist up will result in a body hit. We feel the addition of arm shots would lead to frustrating inconsistencies, especially on some characters that have a prominent arm presence in their silhouettes from up front (looking at you Cavalière). These changes are subtle, but should help to keep a more consistent feel to fights overall.
Recoil Work
A lot of work went into the recoil feel of most weapons in the cast. In general, the direction was to make recoil feel snappier and more immediate. We hope these changes will upgrade the overall weapon feel and make gunplay feel better.
Vertical Audio and weapon sound range
We have some audio tweaks coming in this patch. First of all, we have added a low-pass filter and tweaked the volume on weapon sounds based on the verticality of where the sound comes from. This should help with identifying that a fight is coming from above or below.
Additionally, we tweaked the overall range of weapon sounds on a per-weapon basis. This means that lower powered weapons won’t be heard from as far as powerful ones. This should help make the soundscape feel more diverse and add interesting wrinkles to pinpointing the location of fights.
NPC Danger Range
The radius in which npc are scared from weapon fire has been tweaked to better account for map verticality. Previously, npc could get scared from fights happening pretty high above them or below. This creates a lot of confusion when you see a scared npc running around because of a fight that is not happening on your floor.
Ink Menu Preview
This one has been asked for a lot since our alpha playtests and we finally had time to go and do it: You can now see your character’s weapon when changing inks in the agent select menu. This also works when inking gadgets so you will always know exactly what your new ink looks like in action right away.
Result Screen Rework
The mission report screen has seen a rework to make it clearer on what you achieved in a match and tell you exactly what you have progressed in the different progression systems. You will also see the exact amount of credits you earned in that round. No more guessing!
EXP source prompt
To go along with the added clarity in the result screen, you will now be able to see the XP value of your actions during a match. We hope this also serves the purpose of driving players towards actions that progress the flow of a match when they can see the exact amount of XP it gives them right away.
HUD rework
With the introduction of the heat gauge, the HUD overall has received some love. This new layout puts your Expertise with your loadout to better read the remaining cooldown and when it’s available in a pinch.
Increased gadget drop range
The range in which you can drop placeable gadgets has been increased. This should help not goo-ing yourself with the goo-pod and enable cheekier placements of gadgets overall.
Carrier Empowered Navmode Tweaks
Visual changes for much better reading. You now see spies instead of npc while scanning. Mimicked players now show up in empowered navmode view as a crouched spy silhouette. This gives the scanned players a chance to reposition in between scans and still surprise the carrier since they don’t know which npc disguise they have.
In addition, empowered vision now costs intel upfront, which means that quick scan repeatedly will cost 1 intel making less of an ironclad strategy.
Melee reliability work
Improved melee’s reliability in a variety of scenarios, especially when trying to hit someone close to a wall.
Vault Terminal Agent Alert
If two agents of opposite teams are in the same purple room with an active vault terminal inside, the vault terminal’s screen will glow red and play a short alarm sound. This goes both ways: Campers waiting by a vault terminal will alert the person entering and someone looting a purple room and getting a visit will know a rival spy just entered. This alarm is disabled as soon as the vault terminal is turned off.
Raised account level cap
With this update, the new level cap is now 300! Levels 200 to 300 will require more XP than before and a new completionist ink awaits you at level 300 to show off your insane spy skills.
Tweaks to cover regeneration timings
We are making basic cover regeneration a little bit faster, especially when standing still. While blowing your cover should have consequences, the current timing was long enough that even perfectly executed plans could result in you getting third party-ed after the fact.
We’ve found that players that can’t manage to get back into cover because it’s taking too long are often stringed along in a prolonged shooting spree that affects the entire lobby. While this is not a major timing change, we hope its effect is very beneficial to the loop of executing a well planned strike and disappearing back into the crowd.
Performance work and optimization
While this kind of work is never over, we have multiple optimizations and performance tweaks in this update to make the experience smoother on both PC and consoles. These changes should also help with bigger fights causing noticeable slowdown on some configurations.
We’ll have more of these tweaks in future patches as optimization work continues with high priority.
Increased Agent Ping Range
Players will now be able to alert (ping) their fellow teams Agents out to 160 meters.
Team Revive Polish
Added a function to ask teammates for revive as well as a progress bar to let you know how close you are to being revived.
Also added a prompt when trying to leave a team game where you can still be revived to make players more aware that the match is not over for them.
Shop Refresh
All-new looks are hitting the shop with four new rotations added to the current existing four. These rotations will keep cycling on a 24h basis and will not expire, so don’t fret about missing the skin you want as it shall be back very soon!
Here’s a tease at the new looks:
Norfolk Ace
Tournament Arc Cavalière
Elite Forces Hans
Self-Care Xiu
Level Updates
AllDrone zones added to all levels, preventing players from leaving bounds.
Training range and Pre-game Lobby
Introduction of the dps screen. You can now shoot the dummies in both the training range and pre-game lobby to get an accurate representation of how much damage you deal at different ranges.
Silver Reef
Added props to provide cover in the submarine glass corridors to provide more interesting fire fights in the extraction phase.
Diamond Spire
Added visual cover in the main hall ground floor to make it less of a danger zone. Added cover to the ground floor courtyard. Added new exits to some meeting rooms that only had one entrance.
Fragrant Shore
Fixed doors that could not be opened on the first floor of the hotel. Replaced the purple door on terminal E room balcony by a one-way window openable from the inside. Replaced free windows into purple and blue rooms with one-sided openable windows like in Hard Sell.
Balancing Tweaks
We’ve got a pretty massive list of balancing tweaks we are bringing into this update. Our overall goal with these changes is quite simple: Make more agents and more builds viable. To do so, we are slightly toning down top performers and raising up low performing agents. This means that some middle of the pack characters are not getting as much changes in this update since the top and bottom will move around them.We’ll keep watching how these changes affect the game and adjust balancing to keep the playing field more diverse and interesting.
We are also introducing a new background system with this patch that allows to update the balancing of the game live, without a client update. This is a huge step forward for us and will enable us to take action with more agility than ever before. With that all said: let's dive in!
Agents
SquireSquire is doing great in the current meta. With his recent tweak to max ammo on his base weapon, we are now focusing on tweaking his other weapon options a bit to calm him slightly in combat scenarios. These are by no means huge changes, but we feel they will help level the balancing playing field and give space for other agents to be more viable this update.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Trident
- Reducing headshot crit damage modifier from 1.5 to 1.3 to reduce the very high dps output of burst headshots at close range.
- Weapon Mod 2: Javelin
- Reducing damage per shot from 22 to 20
- Reload time changed from 1.65 to 1.7 seconds
- Weapon Mod 1: Trident
Our changes around Ace in this update are focused on two core aspects: Making her weapons feel more different and viable and improving her passives. Cover flush in particular is getting a major buff as we try to make it a more appealing choice to be a real torn in rival agent’s sides.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Jack of Diamonds
- Damage upped from 20 to 23 per shot.
- Fire rate upped from 1.35 bullets per second to 1.4.
- Reload time upped from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds
- Weapon Mod 2: King of Diamonds
- Damage upped from 40 to 45 per shot.
- Reload time upped from 1.6 seconds to 1.75
- Reduced the zoom on the scope a bit.
- Weapon Mod 1: Jack of Diamonds
- Expertise
- Expertise Mod 1: Stacked Odds
- Vulnerable reduced to 15 seconds from 25.
- Expertise Mod 1: Stacked Odds
- Passive
- Passive Mod Base Version: Diamond’s Bet
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Passive Mod 1: Crippling Shot
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Slow effect upped from 35% to 40%
- Passive Mod 2: Cover Flush
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to .9 second.
- Exposed duration increased from 7 seconds to 14 seconds.
- Passive Mod Base Version: Diamond’s Bet
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback about chavez. In this update, we are targeting a specific set of aspects that have been identified as overperforming in the current meta. We’ll keep an eye on the effects of these changes, but we hope they make more builds viable for Chavez and reduce his oppressiveness in combat a bit. We still have our eyes on endurance training for more tweaks beyond this update.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Vigilante
- Limb damage modifier lowered from .9 to .75.
- Weapon Mod 1: Vigilante
- Expertise
- Expertise Mod 1: Unshakeable Fortress
- Reduced the zone’s size significantly to reduce Chavez and his team’s mobility when using it. This will also make the zone far less efficient in closed off rooms where it used to occupy almost the entirety of the space.
- Expertise Mod 1: Unshakeable Fortress
- Passive
- Passive Mod 2: Endurance Training
- Reduced incoming damage turned into gray health to 50% max down from 60%
- Chavez now heals for 25% of the damage he deals down from 40%
- Passive Mod 2: Endurance Training
Larcin is getting pretty sizable tweaks with this update. We are tweaking his weapons a bit to make them more distinct and create more diverse playstyles and we are changing the pickpocket ability quite fundamentally with the addition of the heat system.
We hope to see Larcin not only perform better overall, but be simply more interesting to play in varied configurations.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Silence
- Fire Rate raised from 5.5 to 6 bullets per second.
- Thrown weapon now deals 10 damage up from 8.
- Weapon Mod 1: Cadence
- Changed damage from 9 per shot to 10.
- Shot delay between bursts raised from .27 seconds to .4.
- Weapon Mod 2: Violence
- Changed damage per shot from 10 to 15.
- Changed fire rate from 4.5 bullets seconds to 3.5.
- Changed headshot modifier from 1.5 to 1.3. (Do not let this fool you: headshots with this weapon hit harder now.)
- Thrown projectile body damage raised from 20 to 30.
- Headshot damage modifier on thrown weapons lowered from 2.5 to 2.0 (Still 60 damage).
- Reduced projectile speed a bit to make it easier to aim and predict a bit.
- Base Weapon: Silence
- Expertise
- Reduced the delay for Larcin’s expertise to trigger on all variants by half. Using the expertise to get away should now feel much more reactive.
- Passive
- Passive Mod 2: Pickpocket
- Now, meleeing a NPC when in cover won’t blow your cover anymore, but will build up heat everytime. This means you can safely try to pickpocket suspicious NPC without revealing yourself, but you will have to be careful not to build too much heat in the process.
- Passive Mod 2: Pickpocket
While the changes we made accomplished that goal, it left pickpocket without a clear use case and identity. Its downside largely outweighs its advantages.
With the introduction of the heat system, we are changing pickpockets once again. We feel this tweak will give back the main appeal of pickpocket while negating the aspect of having a 100% free spy check at melee range.
Madame Xiu
Madame Xiu has been doing well since launch and as such we don’t want to move her too much from where she currently stands. We are tweaking some minor elements on her weapons and we’ll keep watch on where she lands in the new reality of this update with all the changes around her.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Zhulong
- Fire rate raised from 5.5 bolts per second to 5.75.
- Weapon Mod 1: Longshen
- Reload time lowered from 1.75 seconds to 1.5.
- Base Weapon: Zhulong
Falloff range tweaks did Hans a lot of good with the hotfix. We are continuing some targeted tweaks to make him a bit more viable at range with his base weapon and give back a clear double barrelled shotgun identity on the Uppercut.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: The Hook
- ADS headshot modifier raised from 1.75 to 2.
- Weapon Mod 2: The Uppercut
- Reload time reduced from 2.2 seconds to 1.35 seconds.
- Fire rate raised from .8 shot second to 1.8 shot second.
- Damage lowered from 50 to 45 per shot (all pellets hit)
- Base Weapon: The Hook
- Expertise
- The slow amount applied by all Hans' expertise is now 40% up from 30%, helping him close the gap with his victims.
We are pretty happy with the changes to the ammo pools on Cavalière from the hotfix, but we still find her base weapons to be slightly over-performing. We are doing some very light tweaks to them that should bring them more in line with the rest of the cast.
The other main factor in Cavalière feeling oppressive is really her tracking ability. To that end, we are tweaking some factors around it to make it less of a homing missile from anywhere on the map.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Dragoons
- Reduced damage per shot from 11 to 10.
- Reduced fire rate from 5.25 bullet seconds to 5.
- Base Weapon: Dragoons
- Expertise:
- Base version: Investigation
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Chase levels changed from 5/10/15 to 5/8/12 seconds
- Expertise Mod1 :It’s a setup
- Reduced chase time from 20 seconds to 12.
- Expertise Mod 2: Redemption
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Reduced chase time from 20 seconds to 12.
- Base version: Investigation
- Passive:
- Melee reliability work should help a lot with landing Cavalière’s charge melee in this update.
Yu-mi is a bit of a special case: While her pick-rate is relatively low, her win probability is quite good.A main aspect that has come out as frustrating when playing against Yu-Mi is the very high melt potential she has when landing headshots in rapid succession. To keep this in check a bit more, we are changing the time it takes to fully charge her slingshots a bit. We want to incentivize more quick shots in close quarter fights and keep fully charged shots as powerful fight starters or well-timed finishing moves.
Another aspect we are watching is Yu-Mi’s medi-field. It’s quite clear to us watching analytics that Yu-Mi win’s probability in teams is a big outlier in no small part thanks to it. We are adding a new wrinkle to this ability to make it less of a face tanking win button and add more strategic layers to its placement.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Tactical Slingshot
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Weapon Mod 1: Experimental Split Shot
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Weapon Mod 2: Heavy Longshot
- Changed full charge time from .1.2 second to 1.5 second
- Base Weapon: Tactical Slingshot
- Expertise:
- The slow value of Yu-Mi’s EMP bubbles has been raised to 40% from 30% to help land these precious fully charged shots.
- Expertise Mod 1: Medi-Field
- The healing bubble now has a very short delay before starting to heal after taking damages. We want to mitigate popping the bubble to simply facetank any encounter and teams while still keeping its great support utility.
Field Upgrade Balancing Tweaks
We are making some changes to field upgrade values. Our effort with this one is making less valuable field upgrades a bit more desirable and making purple and gold upgrades more desirable as part of your gameplan.
We are not touching four field upgrades that we think are already either strong enough or have a clear enough role in a field upgrade deck in the current meta. These are: Bulletproof fabric, External harddrive, Exfiltration scanner and overclock chip.
We might revisit them in the future, but let’s focus on the changes in this patch:
Cover Accelerator
While the cover accelerator had a great place in some builds, we wanted to push its transformative nature in your playstyle a bit further. It’s now more useful at low ranks and will make you a true vanishing ghost at higher levels. Since we have a built-in delay before cover starts recharging, we wanted to give this upgrade a very powerful regen factor when you chose it as your top upgrade.
In % Reduction
- Old Values: 20-30-40-50-60
- New Values: 30-35-50-60-75
Extended ammo is a nice pick for some specific agents and weapons, but in the spirit of making it something that changes how you can play the game a bit more profoundly, we are raising values on it significantly. Not only does it open the opportunity to carry a lot of ammo, it gives a secondary utility of being able to remove more ammo from the map by looting much more.
In % bonus
- Old Values:10-20-30-40-50
- New Values:30-40-60-80-100
This one is lagging behind quite a bit in terms of usefulness. We are making every level more significant in an effort to make this a great pick to recover while on the run and be fight ready faster than your opponents. We are leaning on a more aggressive scaling at the highest level to make it a more attractive pick at the top slots of your loadout.
In HP per snack
- Old Values:10-12-14-16-18
- New Values:12-14-16-20-28
Social Battery is already a great pick, but it’s pretty much useless at lower levels and does not have much room to change at the current balancing. We are making it scale on a larger scale to make it more viable even in lower upgrade slots and a great boost at the gold slot.
In HP per second
- Old Values:0.5-1-2-3.5-5
- New values:1-2-3-5-7
Field agent is a pretty solid pick especially for agents that lean heavily on their expertise in a pinch. We are making it a stronger pick as your top field upgrade to really drive that play style defining role we want from gold field upgrades.
In % reduction
- Old Values:20-25-30-35-40
- New values:20-25-30-40-50
Gadgets Balancing Tweaks
We’ve made some tweaks to gadgets in an effort to make more varied picks viable. This starts with some cooldown changes to make gadget use and picking back up more interesting considerations. We’ve split placeable gadgets in two cooldown categories:Cooldown Changes:
- Bounce Mat, Umbrella Shield: 45 Seconds
- Drone, Scrambler, Tripwire, Goopod, Turret: 30 Seconds
- Goopod:
- Slow Value has been raised to 40% from 30.
- Auto-Turret:
- Shooting the turret is no longer considered a limb shot, which will lead to faster destruction time for a lot of characters shooting at it.
- HackTrap:
- Hack Trapping intel is now twice as fast to be able to do it regularly without losing time.
- Scrambler:
- No longer affect you or your teammates making it a powerful tool to get the advantage in gadget heavy fights.
Bug Fixes
Top Community Issues- Fixed an issue where the player might become invisible after transforming into a mimic.
- Fixed fire rate cancel exploits with calling cards and other tools leading to faster than intended shots.
- Fixed the vulnerable status effect being way too loud (sorry for your ears)
General
- Fixed mimic not being able to scan anymore if you jumped while in it.
- Fixed mimics having incorrect textures once scanned.
- Fixed an issue where jumping out of a mimic makes the player unable to scan another mimic.
- Fixed an issue with loot boxes overlapping at level 100.
- Fixed an issue with the tutorial videos appearing as a black screen.
- Fixed loot briefcases giving a single reward past level 100. Briefcases will now reward 3 items beyond level 100.
- Fixed crouch camera allowing you to shoot over obstacles you should not see over.
- Fixed a bunch of un-sittable furniture. You can now sit more often in absolute comfort.
- [Xbox Series X/S] Fixed an issue where scrolling the Agent screen might freeze the game.
- [Xbox Series X/S] Fixed several cases where crossparty invites would behave inconsistently
- [PlayStation 5] Fixed an issue where some players were unable to form a party with PC players.
Maps
All
- Fixes for bad spawn locations that would result in trapped agents across all maps
- Fixes for spawn locations that would result in agents starting too close to each other
Diamond Spire
- Fixed an issue on Diamond Spire where players could go on the Vault Roof with the bounce mat.
- Fixed an issue where the sides of purple doors were missing collision allowing players to simply walk through them.
- Fixed an issue with navmode trace not appearing on objectives above the first and second floor.
- Fixed invalid spawn locations that were causing players to get stuck in the map.
- Fixed an issue where the extraction vehicle and zone were not appearing.
- Fixed an issue where the terrace path on the roof was missing.
- Fixed issues with pick-ups and loot not being able to be picked up if dropped in water.
- Fixed an issue with blue doors not having the right interaction time.
Fragrant Shores
- Fixed an issue where the vault could be accessed early by using the bounce mat to get to the top of the Capitol.
- Fixed an issue where players could get stuck between arcade machines.
- Fixed an issue where falling between a building and a gate could cause the player to get stuck.
- Fixed issues with pick-ups and loot not being able to be picked up if dropped in water.
Agents
Chavez
- Fixed an issue where being revived can cause the self-healing to get confused due to new max health.
Ace
- Fixed an issue where ADS sometimes didn’t align with the reticle.
- Fixed an issue where Ace was loading in game with the wrong pose.
Madame Xiu
- Fixed an issue where her shift was causing camera issues when used on crouching or sitting civilians/staff.
- Fixed an issue where teleporting into crouched/seated NPCs will break the player’s perspective.
- Fixed an issue where Serpent’s Bluff had no visual indicator of how much time she has to teleport.
- Fixed an issue where Krait’s instinct passive persists on dead agents.
- Fixed an issue where clipping and texture issues were affecting the Suan Ming/Third Eye costumes.
Yu-Mi
- Fixed an issue where Split Pellet uncharged shot would visually show as a headshot.
- Fixed an issue where after setting up a shot, then switching to a gadget would cause her to be stuck in a reloading loop.
Cavaliere
- Fixed an issue where double drawers were not being visible in active + highlight.
- Fixed an issue where only the primary interact was functioning.
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