[PC & Console] Mission Impossible Patch Announcement 1.20.0 (1265)

Sakebee · Friday at 07:54 PM

Hello everyone,

A new patch is going up onto the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Wednesday 8/5/2020. We are posting our notes a little early this week because there are a lot of changes to cover this time around (see overview for more details). The Patch is scheduled to start at 9 AM UTC and will last up to 6 hours. Console will have its normal maintenance starting at 9 AM UTC as well.

OVERVIEW

Our PC patch this week deals primarily with missions. Since Little Orbit took over, there has been a lot of talk about mission balance. We have been carefully listening to everyone's feedback and noting areas of improvement for some time now, but since Missions are the core of APB, these weren't changes we wanted to rush into. Any modifications to these core systems needed a strong understanding of APB gameplay and how everything fits together. As such, that is how we would like to frame this discussion: holistically. We are going to cover each of our goals for missions in a general sense before diving into the specifics in the changelog.

This first mission pass is intended to provide as much improvement as possible to the APB player's experience without fundamentally changing any of the existing missions you know and love. Our efforts here were focused on reducing pain points, like unwieldy timers, odd group sizes for missions, or awkward objectives. We wanted our missions to flow. Additionally, we wanted to introduce as many opportunities for counter-play as we could to emphasize opportunities for skillful and exciting back and forth between players.

Another area we knew we could improve upon is novelty. Many of our hardcore players have done the same set of missions thousands of times. In order to add some variety, we've gone back and found 50 missions that were previously disabled, added them back to the available mission pool, and updated them all to current mission standards. This means that, in addition to improved gameplay flow, there are also now many more missions to experience in any one gameplay session.

Finally, our third area is balance. With so many different missions and objectives, it was important to us that each felt as fair as possible to either side. Many of our timing, point, and grouping changes were in service to this goal.

There are many more changes than we have space to cover here or which can neatly fit into our three main pillars of Mission Flow, Mission Novelty, and Mission Balance. We will include a more detailed list of these changes in the change log below, but we encourage you to try them out for yourselves when the patch goes live. An important part of this process of improving APB is community feedback, so be sure to let us know what you think once you've gotten a chance to play!

PC CHANGES/FIXES

Mission Changes

We've manually adjusted stage timers and point totals to account for various mission factors. Some examples include:
- Number of objectives
- Distance between objectives
- Size of task items (Small, Medium, Large)
- Objective location (Streets, Satellites, Open Areas)
Final stage timers and point totals for stages that have points have been reworked to focus more on point totals and less on timers.
Bonus time missions now end early when unopposed to prevent stage time pooling. Bonus time based missions now begin with a larger timer.
Stage timers have been normalized when swapping between attack and defend stages.
Missions where the first stage involves three objectives have had their stage timers increased to prevent the defenders from having an immediate advantage.
Moved all VIP/Escort missions to a minimum group size of 3.
Re-evaluated the minimum group sizes for every mission in the game.
50 previously disabled missions have been added back into the available mission pool and are updated to current mission standards.

Modification Changes

Turned Mobile Cover into an Orange Character Modification and reduced its HP value slightly, 650 HP -> 600 HP
High Burn Fuel will now reduce Vehicle HP by 15%, in addition to its current effect.

Consumable Changes

Reduced the current HP damage of Epinephrine Injector from 50% damage -> 25% damage.
Med Spray now also doubles your base HP regeneration in addition to its previous effect
Renamed Resupply Box (Large) -> Resupply Box
Resupply Box is now a medium size item
Resupply Box has all the same functionality of the current Resupply Box (Large)
Added Consumables into Wilde's shop in Social at the following prices:
- Epinephrine Injector - 5 charges for 2,000 APB$
- Med Spray - 5 charges for 2,000 APB$
- Resupply Box - 5 charges for 2,000 APB$
- Satchel Charge - 5 charges for 2,000 APB$
- Boom Box - 10 charges for 2,000 APB$
Changed how cooldowns work for deployables. The Cooldown starts right away, and the item will now last for a set amount of time unless destroyed:
- Mobile Cover (orange mod)
  - Cooldown: 120s
  - Duration: 60s
- Resupply Box
  - Cooldown: 180s
  - Duration: 90s
- Boombox
  - Cooldown: 60s
  - Duration: 45s
- Changes to remove the use duration on Spotter, Epinephrine Injector, Blowtorch and Med Spray will be coming in a subsequent patch

Weapon Changes

Reduced Blowtorch healing rate by 46%
- Hard damage dealt: -8.8 -> -5.6
Reduced Blowtorch ammo capacity from 800 -> 350
Reduced AAEPD 'Volcano JC' max hard damage from 1227 -> 800
Reduced ISSR-B hard damage from 72.9 -> 45
Reduced ISSR-A hard damage from 70.1 -> 51
Reduced SWARM hard damage from 50.7 -> 40.95

Car Changes

Modified the HP values for cars in the following way:
- Bishada: 900 -> 1,150 (HBF 977)
- Jericho: 1,100 -> 1,150 (HBF 977)
- Vegas 4x4: 1,350 -> 1,150 (HBF 977)
- Vegas: 1,350 -> 1300 (HBF 1,105)
- Pioneer: 1,600 -> 1,350 (HBF 1,147)
- Espacio: 1,600 -> 1,350 (HBF 1,147)
- Growl: 950 -> 1150 (HBF 977)
- Mikro 900 -> 950 (HBF 807)
- Varzuga variants 900 -> 950 (HBF 807)
Modified the Cargo Space for the following vehicles:
- Mikro: 4 -> 5
- Vaquero: 4 -> 5
- Rally Varzuga: 4 -> 5
- Han Coywolf: 2 -> 5