The first major mid-season update of the year brings changes to several aspects of the game, from Pearl, to agents and the guns they fire.

Chamber gets a slight uptick, while Viper's fuel has been further nerfed. Pearl's B Site has been heavily adjusted to ease the life of defenders. Several weapons have been adjusted, nominally the Shorty as well as the main rifles' ammo reserve and running recoil multipliers.

Images of the Pearl changes can be found here. The full patch notes are reproduced below:

AGENT UPDATES

BREACH

  • Rolling Thunder (X)
    • Warning visuals have been updated to provide a clearer edge to the ultimate's area of effect. This should make it easier to understand when you will and will not be hit by the ultimate.

CHAMBER

Chamber has taken a backseat in overall pick-rate after the last round of changes in Patch 5.12. At the time, we reduced Chamber's sphere of influence significantly. We're looking to put more power into his ability to lurk, and give him more flexibility within his setups.

  • Rendezvous (E)
    • Reduced weapon equip time after post-teleport lockout 0.7s >>> 0s
  • Trademark (C)
    • Disable range increased 4000 >>> 5000
    • Trap arm speed reduced 4s >>> 2s
  • Tour De Force (X)
    • Firing rate increased by 15%

VIPER

The Viper change below is meant to both create more explicit downtimes when playing around her utility, and address the multiplicative effects of Viper and Harbor's vision block.

We want to ensure Viper and Harbor can be competitive independently, while also allowing room for teams to explore strategies that can counter them. This change retains Viper's power moments while her utility is active, but asks you to be more precise on when to use it—giving attackers more agency and value in baiting out her fuel, and defenders a larger window to play around it during retakes. It also creates some moments of downtime when Harbor and Viper cycle their walls.

As always, we'll be watching how these changes play out in the coming months and evaluating if any further updates are needed.

  • Fuel Regeneration
    • Reduced regeneration per second 5% >>> 3.3%
    • Regenerate to max fuel once empty 20s >>> 30s

MISC.

  • When hit by Concussing abilities, Yoru's Fakeout (C) can now be visually affected.
  • The timing of Omen's From the Shadows (X) voiceover line will come in quicker to increase your discernibility.
  • Sova's cape dynamics were redone and smoothed out, while still maintaining a silhouette close to his body to not give away enemy position.
  • We've cleaned up some of the code related to the trajectory of grenade-like projectiles (such as Sova's Shock Bolt [Q] and Recon Bolt [E], and Brimstone's Incendiary [Q]).
  • Changes like these help us avoid bugs as we continue to make exciting new features for y'all. There should be no net difference, but if we ended up missing anything, let us know!

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS UPDATES

  • Combat Report now shows “Allies Dazed” in addition to “Enemies Dazed” for all Concuss abilities.
  • Performance optimizations in Observer Mode when frequently switching between Agents who are using abilities.
  • Tidying up font systems. Please report any issues if there are any characters or text that are different size or style compared to previous patches before 6.10.

MAP UPDATES

PEARL

We've felt that Pearl's B Site has been problematic due to how difficult the site is to hold as a defender in conjunction with the amount of strong post-plant options available to attackers. With that in mind, we wanted to get a smaller scale update out before Champions to address those concerns.

  • Adjusted the B Ramp Screen and removed the attacker cubby

    • The Screen on B Ramp was providing a lot of mixup pressure and had proven hard to deal with on retakes. We've made the Screen shorter and replaced the ramp with a jump up. This should make the position more committal and more predictable to deal with.
    • We've also removed the attacker Ramp cubby as well. This reduces the number of positions to hold the long plant from and makes this space more vulnerable to flanks.

  • Adjusted B Site Screen

    • We're adjusting B Site Screen to give more options to defenders. We've extended the screen to create a larger pocket to play from, added a non-pennable section, added a stack of crates to give defenders a new mixup option and moved everything closer to B Ramp to allow more utility to fit there (Smokes, Sage Wall, etc).

  • Added a new cubby in B Hall

    • The new cubby gives defenders another position to play from. This provides extra space for defenders to reposition against incoming utility, and it creates new angles to contest B Link or the common Long plant spot.

  • Widened the pillar on B Site

    • Adjusted the size of the B Site Pillar to give you a little bit more room to work with. This should also reduce the likelihood of getting spammed.

WEAPONS UPDATES

WEAPON ACCURACY ON ASCENDERS/ZIPLINES (ROPES)

We've adjusted the weapon spread on ropes across most weapons to make combat efficacy while on ropes a touch more difficult. This should allow combat on ropes to be viable in close range scenarios—which we feel is important to make them a viable map traversal tool—but much less often will it be a good choice in medium to long range engagements.

  • Ascender min spread on ropes increased to 65% of the walking spread
    • Rifles from .8 >>> 1.3
    • Classic from .35 >>> .55
    • Frenzy from .35 >>> .52
    • Ghost from .35 >>> .6
    • Sheriff from .35 >>> .78
    • SMGs from .3 >>> .65
    • Snipers & Shotguns unchanged
  • Walking and running spread on ropes increased to match the walking and running spread on ground.

SHORTY

We like that the Shorty has found a viable role in the game though it has proven to be too reliable and accessible. We're increasing the price to make purchasing the Shorty a more thoughtful decision throughout the course of the game while the damage adjustments require more accuracy to get one shot kills against fully armored opponents.

  • Reserve ammo adjusted from 10 >>> 6
  • Price adjusted from 150 >>> 300
  • Damage at no fall-off adjusted from 12 >>> 11
  • Damage at first step fall-off (7 meters) adjusted from 8 >>> 6

FRENZY

The Frenzy has been more potent at long ranges than we'd like. The spread (error) and recoil changes will make long range fights tougher while retaining much of the Frenzy's short range power.

  • Min spread increased from .45 >>> .65
  • Spread curve adjusted
    • Maximum spread reached in 5 bullets instead of 6
  • Recoil pitch curve adjusted
    • Maximum recoil will be reached in 5 bullets instead of 6. Total recoil is lowered to compensate.

ERROR POWER

Error Power (also known as Center Biasing for us) is a tool we utilize to reward accuracy by biasing shots toward the center of the crosshair.

While this system is functioning as intended for stationary firing, it's been unintentionally aiding firing while on the move. We've significantly reduced center biasing in these movement states: shots fired while moving are now almost uniformly random within their spread cone, meaning that fewer of these shots will precisely land on target.

Even so, Run-and-gun (and jump shooting) kills will still happen—and we think these kills are healthy in close range contexts with the right weapons—but this error power adjustment should help to reduce their frequency a moderate amount, particularly at longer ranges.

RECOIL ADJUSTMENTS

For a handful of weapons, we've increased vertical recoil while firing on the run. This makes the weapons feel less controllable in this state, and should reduce the number of incidental run-and-gun kills.

  • Vertical Recoil Multiplier While Running:
    • Phantom: 1.5 >>> 1.8
    • Spectre: 1.5 >>> 1.8
    • Vandal: 1.5 >>> 1.8
    • Frenzy: 1.25 >>> 1.5

PHANTOM/VANDAL AMMO RESERVE

We wanted to inject more decision making when wall penning common spots or blind firing through smokes with the Phantom and Vandal. We'll keep a close eye on the adjusted ammo reserves for these guns to make sure these weapons are still able to deal with shootables like Sage's Barrier Orb (C) and Harbor's Cove (Q).

  • Phantom Reserve ammo adjusted from 90 >>> 60
  • Vandal Reserve ammo adjusted from 75 >>> 50

BUG FIXES

AGENTS

  • Fixed bug with Killjoy's utility not fading back into stealth when recovering from a disabled state
  • Fixed Omen's Shrouded Step (C) to not be interrupted if you're Suppressed before teleporting.
  • Fixed an issue where when Sage rotated her Barrier Orb (C) 90 degrees, she was blocked from placing the wall for .8 seconds. Now, Sage can place her wall immediately after rotating it 90 degrees.

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS

  • Fixed Ability HUD overlapping in the Shooting Range when switching Agents.
  • Fixed Kill Feed being out of order when one shot kills multiple players.

SOCIAL

  • Fixed a bug where party groups in your friends list would sometimes be put in the wrong section. They'll now always appear in the online section.
  • Fixed a bug where push-to-talk wasn't working when the Buy screen was open. Now you can talk while you shop.