Build 129

[rob]

Greetings Brave Testers! It's time for build 129! This week the changes include:

* Buff loot drops from quests
* Nerf loot drops from random forts
* Add signal beacon quests
* Buff Avenger

The biggest change this week has to do with loot. We are de-emphasizing the loot you get from killing random forts. Instead, we want you to get the majority of your loot from on-map quest objectives, such as building up towns, clearing out convoy routes, getting the supply caches, etc. Convoys, subcommanders, wormholes and region bosses will continue to be an important source of loot.

It's important that quest loot scale with region difficulty, and we've attempted to make that happen in this week's update. But we probably didn't get it all right, so we plan to make adjustments next week. Let us know which quests you think need more loot. For example, "leveling a town in an orange region doesn't give enough reward, so I don't bother to do it". (On the other hand, maybe the loot is fine but you just need a bigger group? That's what makes this tricky.)

Five of the new signal beacon quests are created in a region once the first few forts in the region are dispatched. Connect them to origin to get a loot prize.

Avenger seemed underpowered to me, so I buffed its main turret turn rate and the recharge rate of its first 2 triggers. I also edited its graphics a bit. Let me know what you think the crappiest tank in the game is; maybe it'll get some love next week.

As always, we greatly appreciate you, our testers. Your help is really, really...helpful.

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

[Will]

Yay I called the Avenger being UP sweeeet. Crappiest tank is easily the Silver, with the Minotaur not far behind - or ahead

[rob]

Sorry, Silver doesn't count. It's supposed to be lame. And Minotaur...I use that one on Drills and especially maze region walls all the time!

Based on module prices, Corsair's looking pretty unloved...

[rolnd]

I can't log in at the moment, is this a glitch or is it just the servers?

[rob]

Server's back up. Sorry about that.

[Dems]

I think you are a bit overdone with the loot from random forts (augments, prism, etc.) For example, the destruction of ~ 20-25  +   gives only 2-3 augments. As their farm if all the cities in the desired region 12 lvl and quests left \ hard to do?

[rob]

Dems,

The killing of random forts for loot is being de-emphasized; for loot, do map-based quests such as towns, convoy routes, supply caches, etc. If there are no quests in a region, let me know: that's a problem I'd like to address. If quests don't give enough loot to be worth doing, also let me know: I want to fix that. If quests are too hard, you should try an easier region threat level.

[Will]

I feel like the Minotaur has no place though, yes it has bombs and all that for minion clear on drills but when you are moving through a region it doesn't have any minion clear whatsoever and has hardly any sustainability in terms of taking damage. I just don't understand why I would use it over the likes of the Dragon. That's my issue I guess. Also, I don't see people playing it that much anymore and there's a reason for that. The Minotaur has bad shields for crowded areas and has low invulnerability time and less damage when you compare it to the Dragon. The Corsair could of course use a buff but if you buff it I would suggest a buff of the bomb trigger before anything else. Maybe a cooldown reduction of some sort would be in order as opposed to a damage buff. But yeah, just saying my reasoning behind what I'm saying. I just feel like the Minotaur has no place in this game at all.

[pabu]

Buffing the turn rate of Avenger's main turret makes the tank lot more versatile. Earlier even few minions buzzing around were problematic as the turret would just switch targets all the time and never actually shoot. Now I've been using Avenger to kill forts in green/yellow regions with relative ease. Small forts die fast enough for me to mostly ignore the minions and continue to next fort. Only the purple-cross-forts provided problems because they are both beefy and have ton of minions. I feel that Avenger can now be useful for places other than convoys.

Signal beacon quests seemed bit underwhelming to me but I guess that is fine for easy regions. In general you find some minerals/towns along the way. Haven't had chance to try these in harder regions.

Clearing convoy routes felt lot better than before when rewards were rare. This seemed to be easiest way for me to find pulches now.

I never really cared for the loot from small forts themselves. Loot from Deltas felt disappointing compared to earlier but I might get used to it. Hopefully people will find enough incentive to clear harder regions too, haven't seen too much of that happening during last week.