Time for some changes!
Reading the graphs: Each cross is one game, the distance from 0 on the vertical axis indicates how close a game was to the mean duration for all games on the graph (the weighting for how much this affects the lines is half as much as we used in phase 1). The numbers in the bottom right are the min/median/max/standard deviation for stage up times and game duration.
Both servers combined
Euro server
US server
Compared to phase 3: worse ratio, better lines. I want the game to be able scale up well enough to higher playercounts, so I'm actually fairly pleased with this. It's probably safe to say friendly fire being on helped somewhat, but overall I feel the difference between the settings is minimal enough not to warrant specific changes for either. In other words: balancing with one is equivalent enough to balancing with the other.
Marauder (again)While I don't agree with a lot of folks that the zap is an issue, I do think it's obvious that the air acceleration increase has had an effect on the balance. I was prepared for this however, and had planned on increasing the marauder's bounding box in response (since we want to keep the speed for the sake of fun). It'll still be smaller than the bounding boxes in 1.1.
Flamer (again)The usefulness of the flamer seemed to take a dive with marauders being overpowered, but I'm still satisfied with its damage and everything else that's changed about it recently. The marauder change should help make it a little more attractive again, but I think its niche as a defensive weapon can still be improved by increasing its knockback. I don't know if x2 will be enough to really matter for anything, but I don't think it will hurt.
Other StuffAmid the pages of forum discussion about phase 3 were a handful of minor requests that I found myself amenable to.
- Shotgun being weak against dretches - I think the shotgun's role is as an inexpensive, short-range weapon against alien players, and not being so great against dretches is kind of bad for that. I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, but I believe adjusting its pellet count and damage-per-pellet can make it better against dretches while not affecting much else.
- Teslas - The usefulness of teslas was actually something I wanted to address anyway, as it's become clear they're just not worth using instead of turrets in the majority of cases. I'm going to try spliting the difference between their current range and their 1.1 range.
- Basilisk gas repeat - The repeat rate on this makes it so the gas can't really be used in combination with the slash unless you're only fighting one target. There should still be a choice to make about how you attack, but I think a slight reduction in its repeat could make that decision more interesting.
Dretch?Gotten some feedback about the dretch being underpowered. I'm not going to change anything with it at this time, but I'll be paying close attention in this phase to see what, if anything, should be done about it.
The Changes- Marauder bounding box increased 44x44x34 -> 46x46x36
- Advanced marauder bouding box increased 48x48x38 -> 50x50x40
- Basilisk gas repeat decreased 2500 -> 2000
- Shotgun damage/pellet count changed 4/14 -> 5/11
- Flamer knockback increased 1.0 -> 2.0
- Tesla range increased 150 -> 200
