[2021] Balancing Update - 24 February

Pilots,

The following are the server-side balancing changes we've made this week:

General

• Matchmaking improvements to reduce time to find a match while retaining balance
  • No matchmaking changes were made last week as we were monitoring changes from the week prior
• Skill Rating penalty added when leaving from the Fleet Battles lobby
  • This will go live on 25 February after a brief downtime

Starfighters & Components

After last week’s tuning, the TIE defender is performing more in line with our expectations but is still overperforming at the top levels of competition. After listening to feedback and comparing it to our data, we’re reducing the shield regen rate and tweaking the boost for the TIE defender.

The TIE defender will still perform very similarly at most levels of gameplay to how it does now but the “boost skipping” technique used in high-end play will be slightly less effective. It’ll still be able to bounce around, but less sharply than before and while needing to focus more on shield integrity. This should also give more viability to a wider range of components.

• TIE defender shield regeneration rate decreased by 35%
• TIE defender boost acceleration decreased by 6.5%
• TIE defender boost activation cost increased by 28%