April 18 Livestream Answers

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DLC 5 Overview

We did just launch our 5th DLC, the final DLC of the season 1 pack. That DLC is Arktech Revolution, it brings a lot of changes to the game. We have introduced scaling, now your ego rating matters more than it did before.

One of the big changes that we've had. One of the Mutants I just shot had 1 armor pip instead of 2. A lot of new players were having difficulties when they fought in the Mount Tam area, we've adjusted all of the enemies in the area so they are brought down to the equivalent level of the player. They were 50 EGO Rating higher at the start. We also degraded all of their armor by 1 pip.

The armor pips works for damage reduction, that works for you and enemies. We also removed the armor pips from the tutorial mobs.

The threat level indicator isn't showing because we aren't near an event.

We are about to deploy a patch that fixes the sticky threat level indicator, if you go through dynamic content and have your threat level stuck to you and not be adjustable and that was causing a lot of the difficulty spikes people were encountering. For example being stuck at threat level 2 and fighting threat level 10 enemies.

We came up with a list of things that we addressed in the alpha testing. E.g. health regeneration scaling on percentage of a max players health, tutorial mobs no longer having armor, damage over time scaling, infector bugs scaling.

In the 12 hours since the launch of DLC 5, we had prepped a few changes but others were based on feedback. One of our fixes to scaling caused sieges to not scale again, we got the tuning of the mutants in the opening areas. We tuned the threat level of several encounters to require more players to escalate.

We fixed the siege scaling bug, one of the bugs we have right now is that high level volge troopers are a pain in the *** right now, so their super move they use to wipe out lots of people in front of them doesn't trigger on people who are low on health. It's designed to be an upfront move and tuned the damage on that as it way too high. We did the same thing to tankers who were proving to be much much harder than we intended. 

Consumable Charges

The consumable charges granting salvage, they were granting the wrong type of currency that was invisible. No currency was lost and it was restored as it was the only thing that awards the invisible currency so the players could be updated.

The charges was something we talked about a month ago, we've been working on them a while. We wanted to get them in with Gunslinger but we didn't have them ready for that so we postponed them to Arktech revolution. Anytime you kill an enemy and he drops grenades instead of dropping a random grenade, it drops a generic universal grenade and if you pick it up it will refil one grenade inside your current equipped grenade. If you are full up of that type you instead get 25 salvage.

Biomen background

All Biomen are named after presidents, Piercer is named after Franklin Pierce, two minibosses in the Waterfront Arena are named Tyler and something. The idea is that all Biomen were made by their local governments for the Earth Military Coalition but the local scientists got to make them. So the naming convention was to always name them after world leaders from the nation of origin since the Biomen are all manufactured so instead of having normal names. If I remember correctly they are named after the year they are made, the batch they came in and the vat they came from.

People are concerned in the current build about the Volge being very difficult.

Mostly that falls onto the Troopers although the Viscera can be really nasty. Viscera are kinda working as designed, you can avoid most of their attacks as they have long telegraphs and they were always meant to be hard. When they were first introduced they were tough, as a result of us adding more rarity buffs, the blue rarity bonus addition, we ended up making them not as powerful as the players had a power creep and the enemy hasn't. So now we added armor to them and added default shield resistance, you now do 25% less damage if you are shooting into someone elses shields.

Boss Difficulty

Co-op maps and co-op bosses, are one of the issues with 1.502. EGO boosting will scale more reliably to match higher level threat events. Events will now have a degrading threat, so it will scale more dynamically when people join and leave an event.

They do grant more reward for the difficulty, but that will become more pronounced in the new patch.

Hulkers at incursions despawn after a couple of seconds?

The Hulkers are dying after a couple of seconds yes.

Forced to use a specific nano.

we wanted to make sure that each nano had more of a purpose when fighting different types of mobs. There is now more of a benefit to have a variety of weapons. Everything has some defence that it is good against, fire is great against health thus making fire since everyone has health, necessary in most loadouts. Normal damage is okay against everything. Bio destroys armor, radiation people are figuring out how much it bypasses, it really changes life being able to shoot through armor. In a patch in a couple of weeks the calculations for that are being adjusted.

Difficulty Level Adjustments

We're not done by any stretch continuing to evaluate the difficulty level. We are paying attention to the feedback. 101 keys is way harder than the other instances, so one of the tasks we are doing are changing some of the AI of the blitzers who are very good at flanking you. So we want you to have more strategic choices against them especially with the numbers that you see in the fights.

Since nanos are now so pivotal do we have any plans to add more nano converting mods to the stores?

There are a couple of features we need to put in before that will be super effective. There aren't nano rolls on almost any weapon with a projectile because they don't upgrade right. It's just not the way the data is set up. So before we add converters to lots of things we are going to take a closer look at how it attachers to guns.

Will there be more landmass to Defiance?

Yes, we are working on a new landmass. No date. There is a lot of season 2 info we are holding onto while this DLC hits. We have a few missions coming up with crossovers for the television series. Just finished recording with Stahma and Nolan.

Will we ever be able to play as a Sensoth?

I'm not going to comment on never. Indogene is my favorite. Sensoth and Biomen provide their own challenge, balancing because they are bigger and handling them in PvP would be problematic.

Why didn't you increase the number of perk slots in loadouts?

With DLC 5 we also added 15 more perks, the reason we decided to not increase the number of perks in peoples loadout. We wanted people to make intelligent choices about what builds they have. Even 9 perk slots is a lot to manage, but the purpose of it is to force you to make strategic decisions. We wanted to allow people who wanted to hit people with corrosion to reduce peoples armors or specific enemies or circumstances. If we extended the number of perk slots you wouldn't necessarily be forced to make difficult decisions.

Can we have a bar and drink in game?

There is a place in the game with a drinking emote but you don't have a cup in your hand. An emergency primarily in Madera that is called Party Crashers. It came out with the Armistice event and you can go up to that dance with someone, have a drink with some people.