[2020] Save the World Design Chat | Meta Shift

Hey everyone, 

We’re here with some further discussions on some of the balance changes that were made in the v11.30 update, along with our thoughts behind them. We’ve been closely monitoring the feedback since the release and we’re happy to inform you that our next update will address some of your concerns. 

One of our primary goals was to shift the meta so trap tunnels remain important and do the bulk of the work, but require active player participation to keep them intact and functional. Ultimately, we want to make active gameplay more engaging and fulfilling than passive gameplay; which is why we are introducing these early iterations of a meta shift. Ability damage and health/shield buffs are also a step towards that, but we’ve still got some work to do.

Gas Traps and Floor Launchers

We saw Gas Trap use that allowed affliction to stack and reach damage levels far beyond other traps. We changed the Gas Trap to no longer deal guaranteed full value through affliction, but deal massive damage to any enemy that is trapped in its radius. Gas Traps also received an overall 15% damage increase per tick and now mitigate bee clouds. There are still a few updates we need to make to the Gas Trap, such as the effect duration perk not working properly. 

We’re also unhappy with the overall state of Floor Launchers and how they were used to deal percent based damage to Husks. That resulted in Floor Launcher spam in game modes with high power level scaling like  Frostnite and Endurance, where Floor Launchers over-performed compared to other traps. 

Propane Tanks

Previously, damage to trap tunnels would be caused by stray shots and other player errors that detonated the pile of propane tanks on the floor. Sploders no longer drop propanes and now actively attacks the tunnel so you’ll need to react to counter them. Sploders will also self destruct when below ⅓ HP if damaged by a trap, so they are still a threat to trap tunnels. Overall, we wanted Husks to have additional tools that are effective against tunnels - like the Sploder and Smasher changes and the newly added Healer Husks.

Smashers, more smashing!

True to their name, Smashers were always intended to wreck structures. Before the change Smashers had an easily exploitable, long standing bug with their AI that prevented them from recognizing certain edited structures as valid targets. The correction of that bug, along with the changes to Floor Launchers, revealed an underlying issue with Husk scaling in Frostnite and Endurance. This left players without viable counterplay to Smashers at high levels. 

We’ve released a hotfix to reduce the scaling of Husks in Endurance, Frostnite and the upper part of Twine Peaks. This will make Smashers and Sploders more manageable. Aside from the scaling adjustments; we’re going to be taking a look at some underperforming weapons and traps to see where we can make adjustments.

Thank you so much for all the  constructive feedback since v11.30 went live. Your patience and participation has helped us a ton, we’re looking forward to seeing how everyone feels about all these upcoming changes. Be on the lookout for more updates on meta in the future.

Happy Holidays!