Greetings, Chosen!
Game modes galore! The key to sustaining a successful game is to have a strong foundation to build upon. In Patch 0.16, major improvements are in across all game modes based on your feedback — Eventide has more contest points, Colosseum: Trials of Dawn gained a boss, and the rotating game modes expanded. With your help, we hope these changes pave the way for more flashy features to come in future updates.
Beyond this excitement, there are also a handful of miscellaneous upgrades to refine the player experience, including auto-aim adjustments and behind the scenes fixes. Let us know how 0.16 feels on our Discord!
— SeanLagged
Eventide
In Patch 0.15.1, we made major changes to Eventide with the intention of creating a shorter mode containing multiple viable pathways to success. While we’re still steadfast on this endeavor, we heard from you — the community — that these iterations did not match up to our goals. Fortunately, the nature of a beta allows for bold gameplay variations prior to a global launch.
We’re back with another set of changes that we hope will simultaneously integrate your suggestions and live up to our vision of a more robust Eventide.
Final Harvest
These changes to Final Harvest are intended to bring major contest points back to outposts. There will still be some additional objectives in the form of the Overseer and Core Behemoth, but the bulk of point generation will be from outposts.
We’re aware that the point countdown in updates 0.15.0 and prior was popular. Counting up performs the same mechanic but embodies the nature of a final opportunity to harvest points.
- Final Harvest once again requires “Majority Outposts” to generate points, but score still counts up instead of down
- Holding a majority grants the team 40 points per second
- Cores & Keepers stop spawning during Final Harvest
Structure
- Time between events increased: 40s ➔ 60s
- Increased points from events: 1000/2000 ➔ 1250/2500 (tie/win)
- Outpost points granted per 10 seconds increased
- Regular outposts: 10 ➔ 15
- Central outpost: 20 ➔ 30
Overseer
Even if a team is unable to fully take down the Overseer, it is now a valuable source of points in the endgame, further increasing the reward for reaching major health checkpoints.
- Points spread out from 5000 on death to 1250/1250/2500 upon hitting 66/33/0% health checkpoints
- Drops 4 large primal pickups on death
Core Behemoth
Moving the Core Behemoth away from a last hit contest to an increased focus on zone control. A team that wants to maximize the points from the Core Behemoth must properly keep enemies away from the shards it drops.
- Points decreased: 3500 ➔ 1000
- Shard drops changed from 5 on death to 4/4/4 at 66/33/0% health checkpoints
Guardians
- Health checkpoints at 66/33% that they cannot regenerate past
Together, these changes amount to a 50% decrease in the number of cores spawned. In 0.15.1, the bulk of a team’s score was heavily weighted toward core collection, and we want to ensure that other aspects of Eventide are equally valuable.
- Keepers only drop 1 core instead of 2
- Core spawn rate reduced by around 50%
- Health regeneration penalty removed
- Meganaut respawn delay increased: 120s ➔ 165-180s
- Removed the bottom island to side island jumps pads so that they are now only one-way
Colosseum: Trials of Dawn
The Overseer has been added to Trials of Dawn as one of three potential end-game bosses! In the Colosseum, the Overseer takes on unique attributes, including bullet curtain attack patterns and a hard-hitting AoE ability. Come prepared to dodge and use cover to find success.
A brand new VO character also debuts in the mode. Thoff is an overachieving local Grinu that is hyper-evolved and remarkably intelligent. He was put in charge of the Colosseum as a result of his ambitious leadership and fitting taste. Think savage meets etiquette meets circus meets Shakespeare.
Player Experience
- We strongly believe that Catalyst Black is at its best when played with and against real players. To support this, Paragon Arenas has been added to the rotation game mode list. By consolidating an additional queue, we hope the number of bots in matches are reduced.
- Rotating game modes now refresh daily instead of every 2 hours.
- As part of an improvement to the new player experience, the game mode unlock order has been rearranged. Instead of Colosseum, Slayer is now unlocked first in order to introduce core game mechanics in the initial match. Next, Eventide becomes available much earlier on, allowing players to join in on the fun of our most popular mode. Colosseum: Trials of Dawn is unlocked afterward, and finally the rotating game modes can be played.
- In all game modes, the base health has been set to 3200, achieving consistency across all modes.
Minor Updates
- Weapons
- Northern Warmth: Auto-aim scatter reduced to make this weapon more newbie friendly.
- Shotguns: No longer fires in extremely random directions when auto-aimed. Now, auto-aim is perfectly centered on the target; however, it follows an alt-firing mode with a wider arc and faster damage falloff.
- Tons of small and large behind the scenes fixes for errors and crashes.
- Squashed bugs! 🦟