WIP: 0.10.0 Tentative Upcoming Balance Changes

Disclaimer: We're not going into the specifics but an overall look on what's to expect when the update finally arrives much later. This is also not the patch notes nor everything we're adding into the game, just pure balancing. We'd like to use this opportunity to read through your thoughts on them, maybe discuss some changes, and adjust accordingly. This IS NOT EVERYTHING and there will be more balance changes coming. Anything announced before like the melee attack speed changes are still coming but won't be mentioned in the future.

Hello and welcome to another WIP update, this week featuring upcoming balance changes in the 0.10.0. Don't be alarmed by the words balance, we're not hitting anything with nerf bats that'll make things nigh unplayable as this is a game where we encourage everyone to play whatever and however, they'd like to. With that out of the way, here is the FIRST tentative balance changes coming into the game.

DIFFICULTY BALANCING

Difficulties in M.A.S.S. Builder has been a controversial topic for a while now as the game has evolved throughout all these years and it heated up after 0.9.0 release where we made impactful changes to various weapons and enemies. We first designed all difficulties to be playable by anything and everything truly but we've received requests and heard concerns about that design, and honestly it became toxic enough towards each other that we felt the need to address it. Just to list some and not all.

- Very hard isn't hard at all and there's no reason to play anything lower than that
- Why can't you play VH when the devs had made it playable by all, skill issue, or maybe you're not using meta or play as how the game is designed to be played.
- x is better than y, z is better than x, that's because you cannot use x comfortably in VH as you needed the utility of z, so why aren't you using z.

After a great amount of thought and discussion internally, we changed that completely in 0.9.0 and made Easy the stage for "anyone, anything, anyhow you want to play the game," and Normal as "You can play anything here, but you'll need to try a bit," Hard and Very Hard were adjusted to have players play more optimally than ever, alongside nerfs that we never wanted to do in the first place but was forced to. The gap between Normal and Very Hard is large.

We never wanted anything related to meta to be forced onto anyone in our game. Our philosophy and vision of the game is to have anyone play anything they wanted anyhow they wanted, and we wanted to stand by that, but as the game grew to this point, there were rampant talks of how certain things are unviable when in reality it's just slower than some other methods of play.

There are reasons we don't nerf immortal builds that just stand still and have AoE effects burst onto surrounding enemies to kill them, it's fun and we liked that. There are reasons we don't nerf burst melee, there are reasons we don't nerf what players called Buzzsaw strats over certain points (the dash attack cooldown was laughably ignorable that some players mentioned we failed in killing it when in reality we just wanted to stop players just using macro to spam it too fast). There are reasons we allow players to just map controls onto the same button (hello there melee + launcher spam on left click). We never wanted to take any fun out of the game and if someone found a way to perform something better without ruining the fun of others, hey, bless their discovery.

Which led us to the following decision, we're making easy and normal difficulty easier through numbers crunching. As requested by players who are well into cosplay builds, we do agree that the current balancing is too harsh on M.A.S.S. units that are just pure power fantasy and we'd like to change that, make it easier for everyone to just have mindless fun even in normal difficulty. Story progress should flow even better, and players should be able to progress through in normal even with suboptimal tuning tiers. This should allow more players to play within our design of anything goes.

This used to be only for easy difficulty but after much discussion, we'd like to also include normal difficulty to the fray. On the other side, we'll still retain Hard and Very Hard difficulty as is. Struggle as it may be, VERY HARD should be VERY HARD and not intended for anything suboptimal. VERY HARD is an aspirational content and we intended it to be that way and not only through numbers expansion. You might have noticed some mechanics that are present in VH and not in lower difficulties, or a mechanic that exists but not to that extent. Did you know that enemies non-stop following providing little downtime to regenerate shields was mostly present in VH and not in easy/normal because they have extreme move speed in higher difficulties? Bosses that just keep attacking? We plan to have more of that (and change some behaviors in normal difficulty).

On the same note, there will be more discussion following multiplayer mode difficulty later when it is time. We hope this clarify a lot more behind the thoughts on which direction and why we're changing the game. For concerns regarding end of mission rewards, please know that quick run throughs in Normal yield much more as they can be run much faster with much less strategy, a mindless fun. There are more plans to better this, but it cannot be mentioned at the moment. If there are any other concerns, feel free to discuss it with our representative in our discord server.

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