It’s all about speed this patch.
One of our most important goals for the launch of the Combat Arena Beta is to have a final release level of quality when it comes to the feeling of network latency or lag. If you and your opponent both have an average quality internet connection and aren’t on totally separate continents, your characters should respond immediately to your inputs, just like any other online game. After a new round of improvements and optimizations, we believe we’ve achieved that with this patch. We’ve also included a laundry list of balance changes and bug fixes to help smooth things out even further. Let us know what you think!
General Changes
Made several optimizations and networking improvements to improve game feel for players with high ping.
Made several improvements to minimize input delay. There used to be about 80 milliseconds of delay between when inputs were pressed, and when an ability's animation first started. This was happening even in single player. We've managed to bring this delay down to 0! Player characters now trigger their attack animation on the same frame that the input happens.
Added variable tick rate servers, allowing players to react more quickly to their opponents actions than before! Previously the server tick rate was limited to 30 ticks/second, but now the tick rate will dynamically increase up to 60 ticks/second based on the host's average fps.
Improved ability firing to better keep both players’ characters in sync.
Gave ability inputs higher network "Prioritization" so that abilities are still fired even during instances where there isn't enough bandwidth to send all the networked data at once.
The game now sends 4 times less data every frame to help alleviate potential issues with bandwidth.
Improved our animation systems to help reduce the feeling of network delay by up to 100 milliseconds.
Flying characters will now only land when touching the ground if you have recently pressed the "Descend" button. This prevents flying characters from unintentionally landing each time they dash downwards at enemies. You can still press the descend key at any time to land normally.
Pressing the sprint button while flying acts as a "Stop Flying" input, and immediately transitions the character into a falling state when airborne.
Reworded the descriptions of most abilities to better standardize certain terms and be less likely to become outdated.
balance changes
Kinfolk
Awburn
Reduced sustain to help offset access to self healing with Angelic Ray, a small hitbox, and the ability to inflict burns.
Base Health: 185 → 170
Physical Defense: 95 → 90
Special Defense: 105 → 100
Embear
Increased Physical Attack to enable Uppercut to be a good alternative to Fire Spin. The upward movement of Uppercut also allows for some fun and interesting combos that we’d like to encourage.
Physical Attack: 51 → 80
Uppercut cooldown reduced from 8s → 6s, and increased Uppercut's hitbox size to more easily hit shorter characters.
Mechid
Reduced sustain to help better offset access to multiple abilities with super armor and high damage. Additionally, Shockwave and the improvements to Rage tracking were big buffs that have allowed Mechid to more effectivley keep up with faster enemies. Mecha Jab has also been tweaked to help make it a more viable alternative to Mecha Strike.
Base Health: 200 → 190
Physical Defense: 137 → 120
Special Defense: 122 → 110
Mecha Jab: 10 → 15 damage per hit. Increased forward momentum gain when using this ability.
Shockwave cooldown: 5s → 8s
Shovlet
Reduced defense stats a bit to help bring Shovlet more in line with the evasive, smaller bodied, Earth type stall niche. With the changes to Crush, Shovlet also has access to slightly more power than before. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how these changes impact the feel of the character.
Physical Defense 144 → 130
Special Defense 144 → 130
Crush base damage 30 → 40. Crush now uses base the Physical Defense stat for damage calculation instead of the base Physical Attack stat. Added a small amount of forward motion when using Crush.
Modified Quicksand's slow and pull to be more consistant against Kinfolk with different max speeds.
Tadalon
Increased damage for certain abilities to better reward higher commitment combos. Tadalon’s Water Jab is often a particularly high commitment combo due to its very short range, inability to stagger, and lack of super armor. Slightly reduced stats to compensate for overall higher damage output.
Physical Attack 111 → 105
Special Attack 122 → 110
Physical Defense 93 → 85
Special Defense 104 → 100
Bane Bubble: 5 → 8 damage per mark when the target is hit by a Water type attack while marked.
Water Jab: 10 → 15 damage for the first 2 strikes. 3 → 6 damage per hit during the final strikes while spinning.
Splash: 30 → 40 damage to better reward landing ripple to be able to activate Splash.
Tadalon now uses a higher attack origin point for Tide Mark to prevent it from colliding with the ground so easily.
Salamurder
Made it easier to keep combos going with Hook and Fear effects.
Salamurder now uses a higher attack origin point for Hook to prevent it from colliding with the ground so easily.
Feared characters now move at 75% of regular move speed.
Howl cooldown increased from 6s → 8s.
Sprinting speed increased from 3 → 3.5.
Fear Feed movement speed bonus reduced from 4x to 3x.
Other ability cooldown changes
Reckless Charge: 3s → 6s
Counter: 4s → 6s
Escape Draft: 15s → 10s
BUG FIXES
Thanks again to Sir Billy Goat, V-Senpai, and all the active players in our Discord server who helped provide bug reports and troubleshooting for these issues!
Fixed a bug that periodically caused you to slightly teleport to a nearby location after swapping Kinfolk in arena matches.
Multiple stability fixes to the storage box UI.
Previously, the player could start aiming an ability, then open the UI and swap that ability to a different slot, and then fire that ability twice.
The ability bar would not fully update when swapping equipped abilities in the UI.
Flying sometimes not working for the host, or taking 3 jump inputs to start flying.
Dashes sometimes leaving some lingering effects on the user after the ability ended.
"Lunging" (a.k.a. pressing an ability key right after a jump input) could be spammed infinitely with abilities that were on cooldown, allowing the user to “fly.”
Enemy health bars in arena matches displaying the name "SmokeyStache" instead of the actual player's name.
Sometimes when a character died in an arena match, the camera would snap to a different rotation when spawning the next character.
Follower Kinfolk could sometimes activate during an arena match.
Fixed a visual bug where taking an item from a character in a loadout would cause all other characters in the same slot of other loadouts to also show no item, despite having one.
Slyphur’s item UI wasn't consistent in the team window of the UI with the team preview on the left of the screen when holding more than 1 item.
All ranged abilities would use an instant cast animation if they were placed in the basic attack slot. Now only abilities that have been specifically flagged will use the instant cant animation.
Fixed a bug that often caused dodging and shielding to happen at the same time for the remote player.
Fixed a bug that caused the remote player not to play shield animations or show shield VFX.
Fixed a bug where once every 64 server ticks, held inputs would be marked as false, despite the input still being pressed down.
Fixed a regression where Pilfer was no longer stealing items.
Fixed tidemark not dashing to the enemy if the enemy player swapped characters. It now dashes to the enemy's newly swapped character.
Fixed a bug that sometimes caused remote and local versions of a player's character to desync when dashing into the air. In some cases only the server character would go into the air while the other would stay grounded.
Fixed a bug that caused dashes to go slightly above the enemy when using a dash while locked on.
Fixed unusually high knock up values for flight and Mecha Strike.
Fixed a bug where characters could sometimes lock up and not be able to fire an ability until they took damage.
Fixed a bug where the remote version of a character would not animation cancel with move inputs, causing characters to desync in position, resulting in teleporting or a characters quickly sliding to correct their position when the animation ended.
Fixed an error in the storage box UI that could occur when trying to open the info page for a Kinfolk.
Fixed an issue where abilities could get into a bad state if a client predicted ability was staggered before the server created an ability entity.
Fixed an issue where Counter didn’t stay in a defensive pose, and fixed Counter to once again use blue coloring while active.
Fixed a bug that allowed players to fly for an infinite duration by holding descend and spacebar at same time.
Fixed bug where the character could sprint while flying, resulting in faster flying with same stamina cost.
Known Issues
In some rare cases a player won’t be reset to the starting position in between rounds.
Sometimes the human character will lose their clothing after summoning or recalling.
Inbox/Friends List are non-functional until a subsequent patch. Friends list shows example text that can't currently be interacted with.
Starting items in the player's inventory can be deleted by feeding them to a Kinfolk (Restart the game without saving if you lose them).
Cone attacks veer slightly to the right of their intended direction if your camera is offset.
Leaving matchmaking or crashing while connecting to an opponent can leave both of your games in a bad state, where restart is required.
