Starhawk 1.02 Balance Patch Now Live

Today, Lightbox Interactive released the first balancing patch for its third person build and battle title, Starhawk. The patch is aimed to fix many issues such as weapon respawns and damage.
The following items have been tweaked:
  • Hawk Homing Missile now harder to dodge
  • LR3 Sniper Rifle no-longer damages the OX Tank
  • Bruiser Skill damage to buildings reduced
  • Home-Base spawn regions have been increase on ALL maps
  • Re-Enabled kick player feature for game hosts
  • Reduced Flak Cannon rate of fire
  • Significantly Reduced Flak Cannon damage vs Hawks
  • Increased Flak Cannon pick-up respawn delay
  • Increased Grenade pick-up respawn delay
  • Reduced Grenade pick-up ammo from 3 grenades to 1 grenade
  • FIXED team roster imbalance for Rifter team in ZONES
  • Rift Barrels now only respawn once per round in Co-Op

Notes as listed on the official Starhawk Blog:

Hawk Homing Missile:

In the last game balance update we made a significant improvement to the combat effectiveness of the homing missile which was something that our player community was really wanting — but we feel we didn’t go far enough! So this update makes the Homing Missile approximately 50% harder to dodge.

What this really means to our hard-core Hawk pilots is that you’re now filling up your evasion bar at a slower rate when you’re dodging. You still need a full evasion bar to dodge a Homing Missile but it will be harder to achieve a full evasion bar. This also resulted in us scaling the evasion required for the Swarm Laser accordingly so that it still requires the same amount of evasion “effort” to dodge as it did prior to this update.

Home-Base Spawn Region:

We have been aggressively tracking “base-ravaging” as an issue that we’ll always continue to try and reduce. To help achieve this goal, we have increased the amount of “spawn-able” area for your home-base in both Capture the Flag and Team Deathmatch.

The reason for doing this is to help provide players that are respawning into their home base with more options and distance between any attacking enemy players. This now makes it more difficult for an attacking force to keep a team pinned in their home-base due to the increased surface area the attackers need to cover to induce”base-ravaging”.

 

http://www.lightboxinteractive.com/picture/real_new_copy.jpg?pictureId=15116241

 

Bruiser Skill:

When players had the Bruiser Skill activated, they were simply tearing down the structures way too quickly. To help fix this we have reduced the amount of damage the melee attack does versus structures when the Bruiser Skill is equipped. For example, previous it required only 3 strikes to destroy a structure and now it requires 5. Please note that the small auto-turrets still only take a single strike to destroy. A further adjustment was made so that with Large Turrets (Beam & Flak) now require 3 strikes when the Bruiser Skill is equipped.

Hawk Flak Cannon:

This weapon was very over-powered and our fans agreed. This update includes a significant set of changes to the weapon’s attributes. It rate-of-fire was reduced by 250ms and the damage it deals against Hawks has been cut more than in half. The respawn delay for the Flak Cannon pick-up was also increased from 30 seconds to 60 seconds.

These are some pretty massive changes but based on player feedback, our own internal review and play-testing *AND* our combat analytics, a massive change was warranted.

Troop Grenade:

There were some really degenerate situations occurring where players could essentially be come “grenade-turret” by staying in a bunker and continually throwing grenades — never running out of them because the pick-up respawned so quickly. This drove us to change the number of grenades you get per ammo pick-up from 3 down to 1 as well as increase the respawn delay of the pick-up from 1 second to 5 seconds.

The Light Box Interactive team is also looking into a potential issue with the “Swarm Lasers” where the scrub factors are not working, unexpectadly caused by the update to the Homing Missile. In other words, the LBI team is working dilligently and fast to address. We will keep you posted on a hot fix. We are fully aware!

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