Say what you will about Rocksteady, staring down the barrel of a live game with 200 peak players nightly on Steam, but they’re still doing things. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has come out with a substantive new blog post that details big changes coming in Episode 2 of its poorly-received Joker season in a few weeks. Here’s a summary of the list, but you can read the whole thing here if you want.
- You can now get all tiers of Infamy sets from Mastery 1, even if higher ones will be more rare than lower ones.
- The difference between the difficulty and power of different Tier sets will be flattened more, and Tier 3’s will be easiest to leverage with any playstyle.
- There will be four new Master “grades,” different levels of power for these weapons that will increase with higher Mastery levels. You can also now craft Master versions of weapons.
- Corrupted Items are sort of Diablo-style “Ancient” items that are super rare Notorious drops with incredibly high stats. An example given: “The standard version of this red-hot Grenade sets all enemies hit on fire, and increases the radius of your next Grenade by 50% for each enemy you Burn, up to a maximum of 200%!” And then the Corrupted one: “Instead of increasing the blast radius, instead the damage of your next Grenade is buffed by 200% for each enemy you Burn, up to a maximum of 1000%!!”
- You will now be able to break down items you don’t want from the mission complete screen rather than them going to automatically gunk up your inventory.
- Mutators are now no longer build-restricting annoyances, but they are changing them to be gameplay bonuses to help players instead and encourage more diverse playstyles rather than hugely limiting builds that are viable.
- There will be more Incursion mechanics during missions. Examples given are Incursions that have Burning enemies take double damage (good for a character like Joker) or crits deal 150% more damage (good for many builds, Deadshot mainly). I don’t quite get how that’s a “mechanic,” as it sounds like a mutator, but we’ll see.
- You will be able to craft legendary items from previous episodes of the game.
- Promethium costs will be lowered for all Incursion missions.
- There will be three more Invasion difficulty levels for Metropolis’ open world itself, given that it’s too easy if you have a crazy strong endgame build. These will have unique rewards and resources and XP gains.
(Nothing in here about removing the grind to unlock the Joker this season. Probably because they were already were/still are selling the mission skip).
It’s a long list. Essentially all of these are really good changes. I still do not believe this game has a future at all, given the state of things, as I think it’s past the point of possible recovery, but I respect the work that’s being done and the changes Rocksteady is making after listening to feedback.
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