Season 5 Large Meta Changes

Season 5 still saw some weapon and loot meta changes to try and help keep the gameplay fresh. I aimed for changes that had a good return on relatively little resource investment, as content departments were devoted towards major character changes and the Quests feature for the season.

The season 4 swap of the LSTAR coming out of the airdrop and the Devotion going into the airdrop proved to be very successful, and was a good return on the investment. Following this, I made another similar swap, pulling the Mastiff shotgun out of the airdrop and putting the Peacekeeper into the airdrop. Since the Mastiff had been an airdrop weapon since launch, it helped the season feel like there was still a psuedo new weapon to play with, as players rarely got to use the mastiff before. The Mastiff shotgun has a thin and wide spread pattern. I tuned it such that the weapon had 3 important ranges: ultra close, where all 8 pellets hit and led to a 2 shot kill; further out, 6 pellets and a 3 shot kill; and close-mid range, where only the center 4 pellet cluster would hit and lead to a 4 shot kill.

Another benefit to this change was that the Peacekeeper had long been quite difficult to effectively balance. The Peacekeeper’s identity was a low rate of fire, very high impact shotgun. This archetype made it extremely strong around corners and in very close quarters since it could take a huge amount of health away from enemies in one shot. Then the Peacekeeper user could take cover or swap weapons to negate the weakness long shot cooldown — a common degenerate play pattern was to shoot it around a corner then back up to another corner, and the victim couldn’t push without giving enough time for the peacekeeper shot to be ready again. It was difficult to try and reduce this power without losing the identity of the weapon and making it too weak, but the play pattern was very strong and frustrating for victims. Moving it into the airdrop led to the weapon being more rare and made it only available in later game scenarios where players have better armor, greatly reducing player frustrations and complaints.

Another major change for season 5 was the addition of a new perk for the gold armor. Since season 3, it gave wearers the ability to heal twice as fast, but this proved to just be too powerful of an effect for a single piece of loot. Reducing the effect’s power to only 25% healing or similar wasn’t a great option. The amount of heal speed increase needed to feel impactful and meaningful to players was too great for the amount of power that even small heal speed increases provided — there just wasn’t a balanced value that would work. The new perk I added, “improved minor heal”, makes minor health and shield replenishing consumable items heal for double the amount. The time to heal fully is not faster, but this benefits players in medium to long range poke battles, where kills are difficult and it’s more about draining the enemy’s supply of healing items to gain an actionable pushing advantage. Again, this perk is a good choice for the gold armor specifically, as conveying the perk to enemies firing at the wearer is crucial.