Multiplayer Livestream Summary - 6 July 2017
I'm filling for /u/The_hezy for a few weeks.
There were no specific questions asked this week because Bioware had so many updates to discuss.
Thanks to Billy, Conal, Sean, and Mae for this week's Twitch stream.
Patch 1.09 is live! MP balanced upates are here and they are extensive.
Platinum difficulty is available! More on this below.
Batarian Scrapper is the new character. He's Rare. Has Concussive Shot, Flak Cannon, and a new power Snap Freeze that is like a freeze-y version of Flamethrower. Also his heavy melee deotonates combos!
Kishock Harpoon Gun is the new weapon. It's Ultra-Rare. Unfortunately it does not pin enemies to the wall like it did in ME3MP, but it does DOT (damage over time) in addition to its direct damage.
Lots of new equipment is listed in the Apex HQ app; see pictures of the entire list. The equipment will rotate: 2 Rare and 2 Uncommon every week (or that's what is intended; appears to be rotating much faster currently).
You can now purchase a random Ultra-Rare Character or Weapon for 960 MF (Mission Funds)!
The Apex Elite Pack is available for 600,000 Credits / 1,000 AP (Andromeda Points). It guarantees 1 UR, 1 Rare, and 5 of the Rank IV XP boosters. You can only purchase one over the next 3 days but you can also get one (for free) from one of the Apex missions.
The Twitch stream itself starts with a promo video for the new Batarian Scrapper.
Conal (Bioware community manager) and Billy (producer) are talking about the massive updates in patch 1.09.
Billy states that there are always things that get tweaked but don't get called out in the patch or balance notes because "most players don't need to know those details". [As the author of this summary as well as a professional I.T. business analyst I vehemently disagree, but it is of course up to Bioware how and what they communicate. - JRandall0308]
Billy did want to call out that stability and performance improvements were made around the Reegar.
Platinum Difficulty
They've been playtesting this difficulty for quite some time. Wanted to get it in good place. Greater challenge / greater rewrads. Awailable thru Apex missions and in player-set lobbies.
There are also 2 new maps that will be available later this month, but those are being held back to give people time to get comfortable with Platinum.
There are new versions of each enemy faction, for Plat. The base faction mixed with elements of other factions. They think one Plat faction will be more difficult out of gate. Will let us figure it out.
Plat rewards: roughly 2x payout of Gold depending upon how you do w/ objectives. Around 120,000 Cr on full extraction.
Conal heard a lot of swearing from the MP test lab during Plat playtesting. Billy: "if you're not working as a team or spec'd correctly you will fail."
New Character / Weapon
Batarian Scrapper - he was a stowaway, hung out with Salarian Ark, made deals to get himself onto it. "Classic Batarian move".
"Advanced soldier, very melee driven". "Incredibly satisfying' - big windup classic heavy melee feel. His melee detonates combos!
Can keep enemies at bay w/ Flak and Concussive Shot.
Brought back Snap Freeze as fan favoite. It is a sustained ability like Flamethrower.
Kishok Harpoon Gun - fan favorite from ME3. Charge up Sniper Rifle. Does DOT. Fire and forget.
Quick-shot functions too but you really want to charge up and hit your shot.
Veteran Bonus
Veteran Bonus. New feature. As you level up characters will add additional passives. No points to spend.
To make you more powerful heading into higher difficulties.
Prestige didn't help that much but Vet Bonus will help.
"Won't this hurt your chances of getting other cards?" Only way to get vet bonuses is to get to ranks 11-20, so you have to rank each character to 10 first. Only affects chars already at rank 10.
Weapon Variants
New weapon variants specifically for team play and harder difficulties.
Got lots of feedback on the S-tier weapons. The intent was to bring starter weapons up to Gold viability.
Now they want to enable players to jump from Gold to Plat.
Took a lot of fan favorites weapons and introduced 3 variants: Bulwark, Siphon, Concussive. (But not all variants are available on all weapons; ex. Scorpion doesn't have all 3.).
Each weapon variant goes up to rank 10. The only way to get is after you have rank 10 of the base weapon, including URs. (Hurricane as example.)
Effectively 30 new cards per affected weapon: Bulwark, Concussive, Syphon ranks 1-10 each. Take rank 10 wpon of each type and adds add'l bonus of passive stat.
Weapon variant takes the rank 10 of the base weapon and adds passive bonuses, meant to increase power.
Bulwark: additional DR (damage reduction) for every teammate around you.
Siphon: kill enemies, recover health. "Energy drain in a gun." One of their favs in the studio.
Concussive: Adds biotic detonation on weakpoint kills. Conal's favorite esp. on SRs. "Makes headshots feel even more rewarding."
Conal says solo-ing Plat will be hard b/c no team-mate's weapon bonuses.
Weapon Mods
Added weapon mods to increase accuracy without zoom, which has been a request for a long time. Billy doens't like to scope so he is a fan.
Barrels: variations. Stat tradeoff. Heavy Barrel trades off damage for reload speed.
To make sure they don't affect item pool, these weapon mods are only in Item Store! Won't appear in packs.
New Packs
Equipment - don't want to only offer 1-2 equipment items at a time b/c it will take foever esp w/ 18 new items today. So, there will be a random reotation. Will roate every Thursday randomly. [Note that currently the rotation appears to be much faster!]
Uncommon, Rare, and UR pack that will rotate. Weapon mods, weapons, and characters.
Gameplay Changes
You can read the entire patch notes for details, but a few highlights.
The Fiend. Issues w/ him. Lots to improve, make him more vocal, reduce teleportation. Tried to address but discovered still subset of players will see issues.
In interst of fairness, synch kills are no longer fatal (usually). Applies to Fiend, Ascendant, Hydra.
Still the potential to get synch'd if they blast thru your helathgate too far. But the intent is that most of the time you get downed but not fatally so.
Objectives were adjusted: timers and progress bars scale by difficulty.
Devices have 45 seconds each instead of one big timer for all 4. Meant to be more like a ticking bomb in a movie and more exciting and fast-paced.
More audio cues, get there quickly, get it done, move to next one. Puts more urgency and chaos into mix. Wave goes faster.
Uploads have been really hard; Hacks too easy. So they did something about it.
Upload - if you all vacate (which you may have to do in Plat) the depletion rate has been reduced. You may need to kite the enemies away, then return.
Hack can now be contested by enemies.
Assassination - also requested - has been replaced with Boss Waves.
Boss wave was initially introduced in 2nd week (Kett Behemoth). Didn't have anything equivalent for Remnant and Outlaws so made some new creatures
Remnant Progenitor who shoots something totally different. Billy can't wait until his Twitter explodes.
Blaze Hydra, incredibly fast moving hydra w/ fast tracking.
During Boss Objectives - some standard enemies have been augmented - purple nameplate - more helath, more DR, and more Cobra resistance. [Did we even know that Cobra resistance existed? - JRandall0308]
4 bosses extended waves too long, so set to 3; will watch and see if this needs more adjustment.
These new enemy types appear in all difficulties but are more prevalent in Plat where you will also see combinations of them. Bioware is still playing with balance and wave strucutres.
There are now 2 Daily Challenges per day so that is another way to earn MF.
New 11 wave missions coming. New match modifiers. Not "zero ammo" but you can only go to each box once or X number of times. So ammo packs are more useful.
Powers
Whenever they do adjustments give free respec b/c they know something has changed and you might not like the new version of the power or want to be spec'd the same way.
Please see the patch notes for detailed list. Some highlights:
Concussive Shot got a bunch of dmg increases. Lots of players liked it - Human Soldier is one of most played characters. [Not surprisingly: it is the first listed and most similar to non-space-magic games. - JRandall0308]
Billy loves the Turian Agent, so Flamethrower got buffed.
Remnant VI - also boosted. More beam damage, but dropped a few things at rank 2 and rank 5 so he scales smoother. "So he doesn't go strait up to OP right out of the gate."
Lance vs. Throw - more aim assist on Lance. It was originally designed as a skill shot, but in practical play it wasn't useful. Lance always lost out ot throw in skill points. So they made Lance more competitive with Throw.
Shockwave: took a lot of flack in early days. Base dmg upped. With dmg boost and Lift it's gone from Billy only putting a few points into it, to putting all points into it. [They did not specifically address the 50% combo detonation penalty that Shockwave is saddled with, alone among multi-detonator powers.]
Throw rank 6B has been fixed to work correctly.
Weapons
"We hear a lot about ARs. Some steps were taken." (Conal)
Bumps to AR accuracy in 1.08, in 1.09 focusing on Avenger S, Falcon, and PAW which all saw big dmg increases. Carries forward into their Bulwark, Siphon, Concussive evolutions.
Reegar - fixed the performance issues. "Improved stability" notes covers this. Dmg bumped a lot, up to 90-108. Almost +50%.
Black Widow: wasn't living up to its legend. Increased dmg from 771-891 to 900-1041. "It's a monster". Still 3 shots. Increased weakpoint bonus from 1.7 to 2.0 so "if you're hitting headshots it will live up to its name".
Shadow slowed down recharge rate. "It was a beast." [We ruined it for ourselves by suggesting that Benoit use it during the 10 Wave Apex mission! Damn!]
Lots of other weapon adjustments - please see patch notes.
Equipment
Juggernaut Shield - was OP when started (+75% melee damage bonus). They made lots of adjustments in 1.08 to melee in general, so increased its bonus back to 20% in 1.09
Shield Enhancer bonus up to 30%.Iit was meant to be 30% but launched at 15%; they've corrected it.
Revive Pack Transmitter got a lot of traction. It served a specific use but not useful to a lot of people. Reworked it. Now it's the Supply Pack Transmitter. Duplicated effects of first aid, revive, ammo, and cobra effectiveness.
For example, if you use first aid pack (ops pack) will see big yellow bubble that bursts out and gives health to other people. "You can play a support class".
You can also revive other people.
Ammo packs also really helpful with Supply Pack Transmitter.
Cobra RPG is more universal across all enemy types. No more weakpoint bonus
Supply Pack Transmitter improves Cobra's radius by 50%.
Quality of Life
Not always called out in patch notes. [Why not?! Player ask about QOL all the time! - JRandall0308]
Daily Challenges has new marker in menus. True of store as well, challenges, the works. Can also use "read all" to mark them all read.
Adjusted visual for nameplates. Balance legibility of text with art behind it. Silver and Gold more colorful. "Much nicer experience."
In collections screens can see how to get stuff, ex. Bulwark weapons. Even if locked you can press A on XB1 or cross on PS4 to see description (effect), lore, and how to unlock.
Skin tone slider - only affects characters without helmets.
Some Streaming At Last
Batarian Scrapper wearing Kett Armor. "He's monstrous". "He punches like a machine" as Kandros says.
Story mission: The Call From Inside, has the Go for the Eyes modifier (+weakpoint damage, -weapon damage) and Hyper Shields (+shields, -health).
Billy shows the new warning for connection problems.
Billy shows the 39%-40% boosts on power, combo detonations, and melee damage at rank 10 veteran bonus.
They will eventually play Platinum on the stream, but Billy won't do so. He probably doesn't want to get synch killed (even non-fatally) like /u/SalsaDips did on May 11. Never forget!
Billy is using the Concussive Ghost that detonates biotic explosions with weakpoint kills, and the Kishock Harpoon Gun.
"Folks who land cocussives will have an absolute blast" -- keeping up the bad puns!
"You will go into Plat with a level 20 character with rank 10 Bulwark weapon and you will be a monster."
Or you can go onto Bronze and wreck face for fun.
Your character (or gun?) may have a glow with certain special weapons.
You can equip two different variants of the same base weapon: ex. Siphon Scorpion and Bulwark Scorpion.
The Batarian Scrapper was purposefully made a Rare so players can get him more quickly (then if he were UR).
Players have raised about amount of UR, which is a big part of adjustments to item stores.
Billy died on Wave 6 Boss Wave! Even on Bronze the Blaze Hydra's cannon attack is no joke.
And that's a wrap, at least for me! Next week I will be back to ask some Hard Hitting Questions (tm) while hopefully /u/TheHezy retakes the transcription reins.
Whew!
per Conal
