Developer Update – February 9th

Hello people of Metropolis! 

In the midst of exploring the Elseworlds and dodging Brainiac’s Skull Ship’s tentacle lasers, we wanted to give you all some more context and details around some of the content in our upcoming patch.

After launch, we noticed that some of our more dedicated players started reaching Mastery Levels beyond our wildest expectations. When we looked into this, we noticed that there seemed to be something amiss with the Burn status effect.

This effect was supposed to scale in a certain way across the Mastery Levels, so it can remain as a viable way to deal consistent damage. When we looked deeper into this issue based on the loadouts used, we found that there was a major unintended bug that made Burn not scale correctly. As Mastery levels increased, Burn’s damage also increased, which basically meant that if you used a Burn build, every Mastery Level had the same difficulty. 

This left us with somewhat of a conundrum. Our most dedicated players had now reached a Mastery Level far beyond what the game was balanced for at launch due to this bug, and weren’t getting the challenge or variety we wanted our End Game to provide. We had to ask ourselves, what can we do to fix this, and more importantly, should we fix it at all?

Our End Game philosophy around mastery is pretty straightforward and rests on the three core pillars of our game: Traversal, Combat and Build Construction, and the mastery of these pillars. We want you all to be rewarded when you master your characters’ traversal, master the combat mechanics and master the exploration and construction of different builds in the game – that’s why we call it “Mastery”. We want you to surprise us with the powerful builds you find and construct. We want you to continuously find a new meta and then break it by finding a better one. While there is no doubt that the Burn build is a really powerful and fun build – it should be! – we didn’t intend for it to be the only viable End Game build for launch and beyond.

So what are we doing?

We are fixing the bug with the scaling (or lack of scaling) on the Burn effect. Burn should still remain viable in higher Mastery Levels, and will correctly scale with damage taken effects on enemies as originally intended, but Burn will no longer scale infinitely.

What about the leaderboards? 

Since this change will be pretty fundamental to the leaderboards and your continued progression on them, we are committed to creating a new leaderboard for you all, so you can continue to explore the different builds in the game. 

All the entries on the current leaderboard will exist in perpetuity and will be a permanent record of all your achievements. We want to applaud you all for both your dedication on getting this high in the Mastery Levels (and also breaking the game). Kudos!

This new leaderboard for Finite Crisis will become the active one for all players, and in the leaderboard menu you will be able to swap back to watch your previous entries, glorified for all to see.

What about Mastery Levels and enemy health?

One of the other fixes we are doing is a direct result of feedback we’ve received from you all. We’ve seen some comments suggesting that enemy health at later Mastery Levels was too high, which makes the climb too steep past Mastery Level 50.

We hear your concerns loud and clear, and we agree. Mastery Levels 50 and beyond is increasing enemy health too much, too quickly. For that reason, we’re adjusting our approach to Mastery Level balancing. Enemy health will now increase in a much less aggressive way, with the intent that more builds will crop up as viable options. 

That brings us to the next piece of adjustments: The Heat Wave’s Molten Skin and The Turtle’s Shell.

These two items will now reduce damage taken by 90%, rather than give straight up immunity. At the moment, these items were too easy to trigger and it is simply a bit too easy to keep the buff up, especially at higher Mastery Levels, and we wanted skilled players to need to use their mastery of their characters’ traversal and the mastery of combat mechanics and mastery of build construction to survive.

In short, enemies will have less health on the higher Mastery Levels, and players will have to work harder to avoid incoming damage.

What about all my progress? 

In case some of you are thinking about this, we want to be extra clear: Your unlocked Mastery Levels, your Finite Crisis rank, all the gear you have acquired and your Squad Levels will not be reset.

What’s next? 

Moving forward, we’re committed to giving you all a weekly dev update, be it big or small, to give you a better and deeper insight into what we’re up to, what we got cooking. In the coming weeks we’ll give you a look into what’s coming up with Season 1, and what longer term changes we’re thinking about to improve the game for us all.

Lastly, on behalf of the entire Rocksteady crew, I want to say a huge heartfelt thank you to all our players, for all the feedback, the passion you show. We’re stoked to be on this journey with you all, and we are looking forward to sharing more details with you all soon around what we’re bringing to the game with the launch of our first Season. 

Much love, and let’s give Brainiac a bashing. That guy really deserves it…

See you in the Elseworlds,
Axel & The Rocksteady Team