Tribes: Ascend - FPS announced by Hi-Rez Studios. - Page 176

Major Highlights

The system for upgrading weapons has been modified. Players will now automatically receive weapon upgrades as they play a particular weapon, without having to spend XP on the upgrade (allowing you to save your XP for other items). A progress bar on the weapon’s menu page will provide information as to when the next automatic upgrade occurs. If you are impatient and have excess XP, an option is still provided to immediately master an item using XP. Note that previously purchased upgrades are still owned.
27 new weapons have been added to the game, 3 for each class (details below).
Two new Capture & Hold maps have been added (Tartarus and Sulfer).


Weapon/Balance Items

27 New Weapon Variants have been added across all classes. Weapon Variants have new skins and slight statistical trade offs for the weapon they are a variant of. One weapon variant has been added for each free Primary, Secondary, and Belt item that comes with a class. Weapon variants are all unlocked between 4800xp - 18000xp.
Exception: The Titan Launcher (a variant of the Saber Launcher) is a good bit more than a statistical change.
NEW SLOT 2 PERK: The perk Lightweight has been added. Lightweight reduces your mass by 30%, creating stronger disk jumps, but more than triples the delay before health regeneration takes effect. This perk is intended for advanced chasers.
Automatics, SMGs, and Pistols:
Reduced reload time reduction upgrade from 30% to 15% on:
Soldier’s Assault Rifle
Pathfinder’s Light Assault Rifle
Technician’s TCN4
Infiltrator’s Rhino
Raider’s NJ4 SMG
Raider’s NJ5 SMG
Sentinel’s Falcon Auto-Pistol
Increased damage fall off by 5% and brought closer the range at which falloff starts on:
Infiltrator’s Rhino SMG
Technician’s TCN4 SMG
Raider’s NJ4 SMG
Raider’s NJ5 SMG
Increased damage fall off on Sentinel’s Falcon Auto-Pistol by 5%.
Reduced clip size by 2 on Sentinel’s Falcon Auto-Pistol. Adjusted starting ammo pool.
Reduced clip size by 3 on Pathfinder’s Light Assault Rifle. Adjusted starting ammo pool.
Reduced clip size by 4 on Soldier’s Assault Rifle. Adjusted starting ammo pool.
Reduced clip size by 6 on Infiltrator’s Rhino SMG. Adjusted starting ammo pool.
Reduced clip size by 8 on Raider’s NJ4 SMG. Adjusted starting ammo.
Reduced clip size by 6 on Raider’s NJ5 SMG. Adjusted starting ammo.
Reduced damage by roughly 6% on Juggernaut’s X1 LMG.
Reduced damage by roughly 7% on Infiltrator’s Rhino SMG.
Reduced damage by roughly 6% on Raider’s NJ4 SMG.
Reduced damage by roughly 7% on Sentinel’s Falcon Auto-Pistol.

Decreased effectiveness of Raider’s Shield Pack. More energy is required to absorb each point of damage taken.
Decreased detonation time by 26% and increased radius by 3% on Brute’s Gladiator.
Increased falloff by 20% on Sentinel’s BXT1 Rifle (a nerf).
If you die as the Sentinel class, you will now incur a 5s longer respawn time, regardless of what you are respawning as. This is a fix we are still actively working on, and is intended to be improved upon over time.
Reduced the number of credits awarded for Generator Defense to 200.
Increased credit reward for killing Shrikes to 700.
Increased reward for emergency flag grabs to 500.
Increased reward for flag defense to 300.
Reduced damage on Raider’s EMP grenade by roughly 45%. Increased energy drain by roughly 113% (more than double).
Mass reduction while enraged on the Rage Perk has been reduced from 35% to 10%. Heath granted at the start of Rage increased from 25% to 50%. Note that Rage, a slot 1 perk, can stack with the new Lightweight perk.
Fixed an issue that was allowing players to flat impact walls at high speed, and instantly move 180 degrees in the opposite direction with no speed loss or damage taken. This allowed for some game breaking front-to-front routes, and created a number of other gameplay related issues.
This fix will have a heavy effect on rock-bouncing, a skill and strategy emerging from competitive games. We built in some tolerances to this fix that allow free bouncing at certain angles, and bleed less speed depending on the angle of impact. We will continue to adjust as needed. Rock bouncing is a feature we love, but the bug needed to be fixed for other extreme cases that were not to the benefit of the game.
Reduced inactive reload time from 5 to 3 seconds. Inactive reload time is how long it takes for a weapon to reload automatically when not in hand.
Slightly increased the default pickup radius for all flags.
Decreased by 20% the pickup radius bonus provided by the Reach Perk.
Reduced the grace area for the spotting command. You now have to aim closer to the intended target to trigger spot.


Additional Items

The starting points in Team Deathmatch has been raised from 100 to 125.
Fixed an issue in which Custom Servers were not sorting correctly in some cases..
/speclist (run from chat window) will list all spectators in a match (can be run by anyone).
Music is auto-disabled when the in-game browser is open, and reenabled at the previous volume when it closes.
Variety of map cleanups and bug fixes.
Fixed an issue where the Rage perk overlay effect would not play if the player began regenerating health.