Coming Later This Week

This patch is purely content focused, with a brand new Base and a powerful new Raid Tool added to the game, along with new offerings in the Store.

We are also working on next week’s patch, which we aim to bring a new game mode focused on the Raid experience, as well as some balance adjustments to weapons, among other things.

A fortified airship hangar that the Iron Vigil uses for repair and resupply into Highguard.

This base has a large airship docked high above the ground, with the Anchor Stone in the cargo hold of the ship itself. The deck surrounding the airship overlooks the entire area, giving defenders an elevated position to snipe from, but allows quick repositioning to both generator rooms, where combat quickly turns close quarters.

Small ventilation shafts located above the generator buildings allow defenders to throw grenades in to flush out attackers if a bomb is planted. 

The layout is strongly forward facing, with only 3 plant points - one on the front, right and left sides. If attackers feel rushed to plant at the front, they then have to fight across the entire base to get to the generators, which are located in the back buildings.

Small but mighty. The best way to raid an enemy base is to let yourself in, and lock them out.

This powerful new Raid Tool quickly fires darts that open doors and windows, temporarily disabling them for the enemy and giving control to your team.

Swap to the Lockpick in your loadout menu at the start of a match, or find them randomly in red Weapon Chests. Darts are a new ammo type that can be found in chests and supply barrels, or purchased from Trader Flynn.

The Lockpick has 1 Purple variant.

• Warden’s Lockpick (Purple Version)

  • A powerful version of the Lockpick that casts an energy field in the lockpicked door or window. For teammates, passing through it gives a short speed boost. For enemies, it delivers a small zap that damages, slows and highlights them for a very short time.

Trader Flynn now offers 7 items every week instead of 5. 

Some items will be repeats of previous weeks, allowing players to earn rewards they might have missed.

A gentle giant.

This new mount is available for purchase in the store, and comes in 4 different versions in the same bundle!

A collection of Iron Vigil themed cosmetics for an adventurous airship crew.

• Desktop users may now enable “High Performance Mouse Input Polling” in the Settings menu

Dev note: While the engine has never performed mouse input smoothing, users may have perceived latency or frame rate dips on certain machines when using a high poll-rate mouse. This setting causes the engine to poll mouse inputs on a separate worker thread at a much faster rate and may improve performance for some systems. As this is a newer feature, we are leaving it disabled by default, as it may interfere with third-party overlays, and alt-tab/window-focusing behavior.

• Resolved visual bugs with emotes and other animations when playing with a Low or Medium View Distance Quality settings.

• Desktop users may now select FSR as the active anti-aliasing method.

Dev note: Previously, only NVIDIA users had the option to switch AA methods between TSR and DLSS. Now, all desktop users can also opt into FSR. AMD GPU users with supported cards will automatically leverage FSR4 when this option is selected. When selected, the FSR Quality Mode setting supersedes the internal resolution setting, and a new FSR Sharpness option can be tuned to add additional sharpening as desired.

• During matches, the frame rate is no longer throttled to 30 FPS when the game is in the background.

Dev note: On Windows, it’s not uncommon for applications or the OS itself to steal focus from the game (popups, notifications, etc.). This could happen in a subtle way that would cause the throttle to “stick” because the game never regained focus. We’ve opted to just remove this throttle altogether since it’s rare to actually want to throttle the game while mid-match. The Max FPS setting can still be changed at any point.

• Match load times were significantly optimized on all platforms.

• Additional crash fixes and optimizations.

Gear Up Phase

Dev note: All of these changes are aiming to bring players to loot and fight at the Shieldbreaker site, with a quicker time to shoot.

• Gear Up Phase shortened to 90 seconds from 120 seconds

• The PoI waypoints at the start of the phase now only show on the location the Shieldbreaker will be forming. It never fades away until the forming phase starts.

• Masterwork Weapons and Ultimate Chargers now only appear at the PoI where the Shieldbreaker is forming

• Reduced respawn times to 15 seconds from 20 seconds during the Gear Up and Shieldbreaker Forming phases

Raids

• Raid will now end after one generator explodes, teleporting attackers back home and resetting the match to the next Gear Up phase.

Dev note: This change aims to give losing players another chance at success and create tighter games. Games can still be won in 1 Raid by destroying the Anchor Stone.

Quality of Life

• Added Assist and Damage to the end of match podium stats

• We've increased rejoin times so players that disconnect from a match will have an easier time getting back in

• The Stats screen “Success Rates” has been reformatted to not be a decimal

Ranked Updates

• Increased kills/assists points for Bronze and Silver

Ekon

• Dread (Passive) now triggers at <50% enemy health instead of <100% enemy health

Dev Note: We've heard everyone's feedback about being scanned too frequently. This feels like a particularly important numerical threshold because it prevents a revived ally from being instantly scanned.

Kai

• Increased the health of his Ice Wall from 300 to 400 and health of individual chunks from 40 to 50

Mara

• Increasing Sacrifice (Passive) range from 8 meters to 10 meters

Atticus

• Shockspear (Tactical) cooldown reduced from 60 to 45 sec

• Shockspear charges reduced from 3 to 2

Condor

• Increase passive detection range from 40 meters to 60 meters

Soaring Guardian (Ultimate) updates

• Transitions quicker to bird form

• Increased lateral move speed

• Smoke projectiles travel faster

• Enemies in Condor smoke sphere get a “position revealed” HUD indicator

• Condor will now say “baddies” less.

Redmane

Pounce (Tactical) updates

• Cooldown reduced from 60 to 45 seconds

• Pounce reduced from 3 to 2 charges

• Increased weapon raise time after a leap

• Increased travel speed while using ranged leap

Una

• Forest Wisps (Tactical) will now target enemies twice as fast and more reliably

• Increasing projectile speed on both Forest Wisps and Tree Walker (Ultimate)

• Reducing the duration of the Tree Walker's cast animation.

• Limiting Una to 2 Tree Walkers at a time

Firing Range Updates

• More Character abilities work against Firing Range dummies

• Condor Ultimate highlights dummies in smoke spheres

• Redmane abilities now hit target dummies

Bug Fixes:

• Improved the UI with Reporting and Blocking players

• Fix for bug where multiple players on a single invisible zipline would cause them to become visible

• Fix for Barghast emote VFX on low settings

• Fixed basebreaker trails having distorted effects

• Addressed some hitches that could be caused by rapid mouse movement

• Fixed issue that would sometimes cause weapons skins to not appear correctly on a weapon

• Fix for Redmane sometimes getting stuck in geo when performing a leap

• Fixed animation bugs at low view distance quality settings

• Fix for messaging overlaps in some UI menus