[R#189] T#201/202/203 - Patch Notes

Hello Runners,

Update - T203: An issue with drone damage has been fixed. We simply forgot to rebalance them after their movement speed got fixed. In addition mobs have the AoE damage penalty on their weapons removed.

As we communicated last week work has been underway to prepare a supporting patch for the recent deployment of R#186 and it's hot fixes. Originally we planned to launch this patch by August 31st but needed a couple of additional days to complete some aspects. We're now ready to launch this patch to Vedeena for some community testing.

As with all of our public testing phases we're keen for you to test as many of the changes as possible. Please provide feedback and test results of as much of the below as you can, with this feedback we can make sure the patch is ready for deployment to Titan. Assuming there are no reports of major release blockers, we aim to patch Titan on wednesday 10.09.2014. Should any major issues crop up we will postpone those specific changes to a future patch, releasing the rest where appropriate. As this is an important patch we hope we don't need to leave any of it behind.

The changes implemented today are:

• A reproducible server crash has been fixed.
• Blueprints are now limited to 10 or fewer items.
• Fixed movement of drones by reverting to pre-R#186 movement values. The automagic balancing tool adjusted additional fields by mistake.
• Restored the original resurrection animation from pre-R#186. Should you like to see it behaving differently, please tell us in the feedback thread!
• Damage over Time (DoT) has been limited to a maximum of 10% of the total damage output of any given weapon.
• A bug causing PvE DoT corrections to be applied twice has been fixed.
• A boundary limiting the minimum DoT output for a given weapon has been removed.
• A new option has been added to the Hardware Configuration window, players can now select whether Neocron should run in multi-core mode or be assigned to a single processor core.
  
  • Depending on your machine's specification, changing this option may result in a performance improvement.
• Dynamic lighting options in the Hardware Configuration window have been fixed. Changing them now actually has an effect!

Further information on changes to how DoT now functions can be found below:

Removal of the lower boundary for DoT: DoT was previously restricted by a lower boundary, preventing DoT ticks from causing less than 1.0 damage per tick. This boundary existed as damage of less than 1.0 is not correctly shown to the player during combat. However, this had an unintended side-effect where some weapons - such as WoC Rifles modded for DoT - were stronger than they should have been. We have removed this lower boundary to prevent this from happening. We will revisit the damage composition of the affected weapons in Phase 1.5.

As a side effect of this change you may notice weapons which are modified for DoT, do not show tick damage above an enemy's head while the DoT stack is in effect. Correcting issues in DoT's performance is a priority issue for us so we are delivering this change as is. The minor aesthetic glitch introduced with this change will remain present for the time being and will be tackled in one of the next patches which will introduce Balancing Phase 1.5. To confirm your weapons are working correctly, if you look closely (at the damage logs) you will see the damage is actually being applied to your target.

Limiting the maximum percentage of DoT to 10%: We redistributed the damage dealt with weapons that cause instant damage and DoT together. The total amount of damage remains unchanged as well as the time a DoT stack lasts on the runner, the only thing changed is the damage proportion. This will ease some of the recent confusion about DoT and the Devourer problem: a significant portion of the damage is applied later than the initial hit making subsequent shots with the same weapon feel stronger than they are.

Another point to this is that many people think it is unfair to be able to die by DoT after one killed his/her opponent. However the truth is (keep in mind we tuned everything to have equal DPM on equal TL): if he would have used an instant damage weapon with the same damage-output instead, he still would have killed you! He would have killed you the moment he applied his last hit to you, instead of giving you a chance to kill him while his lethal stack ticked down on you.

The corresponding patch discussion thread can be found here

Sincereley,
Your Neocron Support Team