Rocket Arena Season 1 Update – Balance and Tuning Changes!

Our goal on Rocket Arena is to be prompt with gameplay balance and feature changes, taking into account feedback from both our community and internal testing.  We’ve gathered plenty of your feedback from the Pre-Season and have made some balance changes we believe address several issues. 

Competitors
Overall, we’re extremely excited to see how well all of the Competitors are competing across the game, with data and observation showing that each Competitor can legitimately hold their own against the rest of the roster. That said, interactions between Competitors will continue to naturally shift as players dive deeper into each Competitor’s mechanics. Thanks to our inventive community, we’re seeing these kinds of awesome shifts happening almost daily right now. Competitors that were thought to be dominant one day, suddenly find themselves countered by other Competitors in previously unheard of ways. As such, we feel we need to give the game’s meta a little more time to settle before we can make confident, responsible decisions on any particular hero’s balance. Rest assured though, we’re as passionate as you are about the balance of Rocket Arena and we’re actively listening.

• Amphora 
  We love how Amphora is playing, but the current tuning on her Hydro Form makes escaping from danger too easy at times. The goal of this change is to leave Amphora feeling great, but give other players a clear opening to counter Amphora when she’s exiting from Hydro Form.
  • Blast Meter regeneration is now blocked for 2.5 sec after exiting Hydro Form

• Boone 
  These small tuning changes to Boone are more proactive than reactive. Internal tests with some of our most competitive players have exposed some fairly strong Boone tactics that shift him from the lovable spot he’s in now to something quite scary. So, let’s preemptively fix that! The changes made to his Sniper ricochet logic are minor and are only intended to reduce accidental ricochet hits that don’t align with Boone’s precision-based gameplay. Finally, the tweak to Zik’s Vortex still allows for amazing cross-map Vortex Rocketball scores, but we wanted to crank up the skill required to do so from more extreme ranges. 
  • Reduced Sniper bounce enemy redirect check radius by 10%
  • Reduced Sniper bounce enemy redirect check distance by 10%
  • Zik’s Vortex now has a maximum distance that it can carry game mode objects (i.e. Rocketball and Treasure Chest)

• Izelle 
  Izell receives a minor bug fix targeted at improving combat readability. Previously, Izell could perform a Dodge during her brief invulnerability window after her Jaaqua Charge finished dashing. This would result in her Jaaqua Charge resolve animation getting unintentionally cancelled, hurting the feedback for herself and opponents on whether or not she successfully dealt damage. Blocking Dodge allows the Jaaqua Charge resolve animation to correctly trigger. Importantly though, this is not a nerf to Izell since she is already immune to damage during this extremely short window of time. 
  • Dodge is blocked during Izell’s brief invulnerable window after Jaaqua Charge end

• Kayi 
  These Kayi changes are focused on fixing several gameplay and quality of life issues concerning her Grapple ability. Payers should now experience more consistent Grapple interactions.  
  • Dodging no longer ends the Grapple ability
  • Fixed a bug where Kayi could Dodge to end her Grapple early and avoid putting the ability on cooldown
  • Fixed a bug that caused Kayi's Grapple to end early after taking damage less than the required damage threshold

• Topnotch
  Both of the changes to Topnotch revolve around his Jetpack. For the rest of the roster, being in Hit Stun means you cannot use your air jumps or air control to cancel out an attack’s impulse. By blocking the Jetpack and preventing fuel regeneration while in Hit Stun, we’re bringing Topnotch more into alignment with the Hit Stun ruleset the rest of the roster follows. This will also benefit Topnotch players who currently burn their Jetpack fuel accidentally during Hit Stun, despite being unable to move. 
  
  Lastly, while Topnotch’s attacks do have incredible range, his ability to efficiently execute those moves depends on him being airborne to see as much of the arena as possible. This makes the Jetpack the key to Topnotch truly accessing the power of his kit. Overall, we’re happy with the current tuning on Topnotch’s Jetpack. However, because the Jetpack could previously regenerate fuel during Hit Stun, getting shot and impulsed upwards by enemies sometimes allowed Topnotch to stay airborne significantly longer than if he never got in a fight. These changes are intended to remove this contradiction in our combat, so that players fighting against a dominating Topnotch player no longer feel punished by successfully landing shots on him in the air.  
  • Jetpack is now deactivated and blocked during Hit Stun (prevents accidental fuel usage while movement is blocked)
  • Jetpack fuel can no longer regenerate during Hit Stun

Game Modes

• Rocketball 
  We believe Rocketball is a very competitive game mode, however we are currently seeing issues with players getting the Rocketball and scoring relatively quickly.  Our goal is to give teams a better opportunity to deal with players who rush the Rocketball by giving them more time to set up offensive and defensive plays and to engage enemies before it spawns..  
  • Increased the incoming time for the first Rocketball of every new round to 10 seconds, up from 5
  • Increased the time limit to 6 minutes, up from 5

• Tutorial
  • Added a Replay Tutorial button to the Play tab

Artifacts

• Digsite Magnifier, Prospero's Sail
  • Will now only grant Speed Boosts, Bombs, Trip Mines, and Magnets in Ranked playlists

• Digsite Magnifier
  • Chance increased to 100% in Ranked playlists, up from 50%

• Powder Keg
  
  • Will now stay active for an additional 0.5 sec after leaving the ground

Items

• Item spawn points in Ranked playlists will now display the Item itself instead of a Random Item Box
• Item spawn points in Ranked playlists will now spawn the same item every time

UI

• Player ranks appear during versus sequence
• Fixed clipping on rank icon nameplate

We value your feedback and if you’d like to leave us some now, or in the future, hit us up on the Rocket Arena Discords, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch Streams, DMs, etc. - we read as much as we can!

Thanks for being part of our community and we’ll see you in Crater! #LETSROCKET

The team at FSG