Shotgun Reload, Zagger and Preparedness Changes

Reloading contributes significantly to the rhythm of a gunfight and contributes the rest and fermatas that keep things interesting. However, there have been some long-standing inconsistencies in how reload works, and we’re going to even those out.

Minimum Reload

In Defiance, there has always been a functional minimum reload time. This one-second reload acts as an unbreakable barrier, like the speed of light, preventing players from getting lightning fast reloads.

But what about the Zagger?

“But wait!”, you say, “what about the zero-reload Zagger!” And you would be right to ask! There’s a long-standing bug that allowed guns to be reloaded instantly if you modded it to be exactly a 0 second reload time.

Anything else would properly respect the 1 second minimum reload time, though the UI could incorrectly display less than 1 second.

Changes being made

This led to extremely overpowered weapons that others could never compete with. With the Aftermath update, we’re fixing both of those issues:

• Weapons that had exactly 0 reload time will properly respect the 1 second minimum reload time like everything else.
• The UI will also respect the minimum reload time and you will no longer see fictional improvements to reload when you’ve reached the lower bound of reload times.

Edit: They later discovered the minimum reload was at 0.5 seconds and not 1 second. Check out the Patch Notes for Aftermath also.

Changes to the Zagger

This means that the beloved Zagger is going to be updated. With the reload limit visible and strictly enforced, it’s clear that the Zagger no longer benefits from its uncommon or legendary rolls.

Changes being made

As such, we’ve altered those bonuses to turn the Zagger into a weapon that captures it original flavor and keeps it as a best-in-category sawed-off shotgun.

• The uncommon reload bonus have been transformed into a flat damage bonus
• the legendary bonus has been updated into an additional two slugs in the clip.

This means that all legendary Zaggers may fire two shots before requiring their one-second reload. The legendary Zagger continues to be the best weapon of its kind.

Single-slug-reload Weapons

Additionally, we’ve been really bothered by how single-slug-reload weapons responded to reload increases. Or how they displayed reload time in general. Or how clip size improvements made them worse.

Extended magazines took longer to reload and therefore meant they could trigger reload bonuses less often.

Changes being made

• We’ve updated our system for single-shot reload weapons so that they display their total reload time rather than the reload time for individual shells.
• Any time you see reload displayed on a weapon, that will describe the full time it takes to reload that weapon and extended magazines no longer affect that reload time.
• This means that some individual shot reload weapons would result in ark hunters visually loading those weapons comically fast. Like extra silly fast. For any time that an ark hunter would be loading a shot into a gun faster than one shot per second, we now have them load multiple shot in a single action.

This is AWESOME and has the added benefit of preventing your die-hard ark hunter from looking like a lunatic on fast-forward.

Preparedness Perk

These updates put our reload system in line save for one big outlier: Preparedness.

Preparedness in its current form reloads a percentage of your stowed weapon every second. It maxes out at 10% per second, reloading a minimum of 1 round per second.

This sounds benign, but it causes two unbalanced strategies.

Unbalanced Strategy #1: Using large clip weapons and swapping between them

One is predicated on using two weapons which take a long time to unload and swapping between them rather than reloading.

They take so long to empty that the stowed weapon is reloaded by the time the active weapon is dry.

This removes the disadvantage of these weapons entirely as there is never a time when they are manually reloaded.

Unbalanced Strategy #2: Using small clip weapons and switching between them

A second strategy is to pair weapons with very low ammo capacity, like sawed-off shotguns or rocket launchers, and take advantage of the minimum one-shot-per-second reload of the stowed weapon.

Doing this, an ark hunter may fire, swap, and repeat infinitely to keep firing with no downtime.

This was never intended and bypasses a large part of the tactics in Defiance’s combat wherein downtime due to shield recharge and weapon reload play a significant part.

The changes to Preparedness

To address these problems while keeping Preparedness useful, we’ve changed its functionality to tie it to your equipped weapon’s reload.

• Preparedness now reloads a percentage of your stowed weapon’s clip each time you fully reload the weapon in your hands.
• This can be quite difficult to track, a problem shared by many triggered abilities,so we’ve updated the display of triggered effects so they display each time they are triggered.

Effect Floating Text

In the image here, our intrepid APS deliveryman has just finished reloading his Zagger, and therefore partially reloaded the weapon he has stowed.

These improvements are part of our ongoing mission to keep Defiance as the tightest and most robust massive co-op shooter on the market. Come explore the Aftermath on PTS, give us your feedback, and see for yourself how the New Frontier has changed!

Good hunting,

Creative Lead Trick Dempsey