Agents,

We are back with a fantastical catalog and a massive update that aims to shake up the meta in a myriad of ways. From ability reworks, to new gadgets and expanded capabilities for existing gadgets, there is something for every build in this patch! Here’s what you can expect to see:

• A new Fantasy Adventure catalog with 50 levels of unlocks
  
• Reworked abilities for Ace, Chavez, and Yu-Mi
  
• Two new gadgets
  
• The introduction of map Variants
  
• A yacht-full of balance changes that aim to shift the meta in interesting new directions.
  
• An increased level cap to 700 with a unique ink to acquire to go along with it!

Let’s dive into it!

Major Additions
New Catalog
Scoundrels & Sentinels

Assemble your party and roll for initiative in our all-new catalog: SCOUNDRELS & SENTINELS. We are thrilled to reveal our new fantasy-themed catalog bringing you into a world of brave knights and devious rogues.
With 50 levels of unlock and our most ambitious skins and our first animated calling cards, we hope you enjoy the journey into the tales from bardkeep!
Level Cap Raise
Level cap has been raised to 700. Reaching the new cap will reward you with the all-new Opal Ink to showcase your dedication.
New Gadgets
The Bait Box - Deception Gadget

Cooldown : 45 seconds
Gadget HP: 5 HP
Our first new gadget is here and ready to make some noise. The bait box is a new deception gadget based around creating fake sounds to bait your opponents into traps, away from fights or simply drive them mad in pursuit of an illusory keycard.

The Bait Box is a deployable gadget that can play the selected soundtrack (you can change tracks with right click) to bamboozle foes. There are four tracks to play:

Gunshots: Play an assortment of gunshots in quick succession to simulate an ongoing fight. Ideal to bait aggressive players into a fake fight or drive them away from where you are going.

Character Alerted: Play an alerted voice line from a npc to sell the illusion that an out of cover spy is nearby.

Keycard Jingle: Play the iconic sound telling players that a keycard is nearby, driving them to madness and sadness like no other gadget can.

Keycard Printer: Plant chaos into the infiltration phase by faking that a gold keycard is currently being printed!

The Bait Box has been added to regular account progression and is unlocked at account level 22.

The D-Eye - Recon Gadget
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Gadget HP: 1 HP
We’ve wanted to add more elements that reinforce the spy fantasy for a long time and our second new gadget, the D-eye, is a step in that direction. You will be able to shoot cameras from a handheld pen launcher to create your very own surveillance network. The cameras can stick on surfaces, but also on people, allowing you to spectate a bugged npc (or player!) from afar.

Of course, breaking or changing cover will immediately break the camera on a bugged spy. While the D-eye is a potent visual tool, its feed provides no audio, leaving you without crucial information if you stay watching for too long. With the possibility of setting two remote cameras, the D-eye can be used in a wide variety of creative ways and we can’t wait to see you all use it on the field.

The D-Eye has been added to regular account progression and is unlocked at account level 25.

Character Kit Reworks
It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally taken the jump and decided to give ourselves the time necessary to change existing abilities entirely. We have a list of abilities we want to revisit and they could not all fit within this update to reach the level of polish and usability we wanted. We have chosen a selection of abilities that we feel are both boring and very strong to start things off.

New Chavez Expertise 2: ALL-STAR
Immovable object becomes an unstoppable force.
Cooldown: 40s
It has become a bit of a meme how passive Chavez is as a character. The entirety of his toolkit is built with a very defensive approach which leaves very little lee-way to create a different build for him. His expertise 2 is the biggest offender in that regard. The resistant status effect has always been a contentious subject and having a playstyle that rewards you for simply standing in a circle while shooting was not very interesting.

Enter ALL-STAR, a new expertise replacing unshakable fortresses starting now.

ALL-STAR puts Chavez into a stance where he gains amped up, but cannot shoot for 5 seconds. During that stance, he can shove any npc he enters in contact with. When colliding with a spy, Chavez deals 15 damage and breaks both his and their cover while shoving them away with FORCE.

Additionally, Chavez can open doors immediately by ramming them in this stance if he either has the intel/keycard to open it or if it’s already unlocked. The intel will still be consumed when opening a door in this way, but it won’t stop your charge, allowing for very decisive actions.

New Ace Expertise 2: Heat Vision
Hunt troublemakers like never before.
Cooldown: 35s

Adding more damage on top of Ace’s base output has been a problem for a while. Having an expertise that hinges entirely on adding DPS is a very difficult act to balance. Nerf it too much and it becomes irrelevant, make it too strong and it becomes a must have to make the character viable.

With this new iteration of Ace’s expertise 2, we are moving away from damage entirely and digging deeper into Ace’s tracker identity.

Heat Vision is a new expertise that puts Ace into a state where she can detect players that have accumulated heat. This will create a heat zone, a large area that highlights everyone in it, npc and spies alike. The more heat the player has, the tighter the zone, making finding who is the perpetrator easier for Ace.

• Heat Vision will start tracking players with half a heat level
  
• Heat Vision lasts 25 seconds and has a range of 90 meters.
  
• The precision of heat zones is influenced by how much heat the rival has, the more heat, the tighter and less noisy it is.

We want this new expertise to fill a different niche between her base tracking and big blind, giving a dynamic way to track players that have gotten in over their heads.

Yu-Mi Bubbles Rework
Yu-Mi expertises are getting a rework of this update, changing how they function to both make them better zoning tools, but also add counter play to how rivals deal with them.

Core Changes
Yu-Mi now shoots a central pellet that is visible and present at the point of impact that created the bubble. This pellet can be shot by rivals, shutting down the bubble instantly and kicking off Yu-Mi’s cooldown immediately. This adds a whole new angle on how to place bubbles for a Yu-Mi player and gives us much more room to expand their functionality from a design perspective. Let’s dig into the buffs that go along with this.

Expertise 1: EMP Blast Range and duration has been extended for the base bubble, allowing denials of large corridors and overall a much more potent zoning tool than before. In addition to this, the base bubble now deals a small damage over time (1 damage per second) component, making rivals respect Yu-Mi’s space more than before.

EMP blast Radius: 4.5m => 5.25m
Duration: 12s => 20s

Expertise 2: Healing Bubble Bubble size has been increased to allow play around the placed destructible core and duration has been expanded like the base bubble.

• Healing ticks happen more often. Every .75s instead of 1 second.
  
• To compensate for the range being bigger and ticks being faster, we reduce health per tick from 10 to 5. The overall healing from a single bubble is now 25% higher than before, but in a 20 second period instead of 10 seconds making it less efficient at quick fill up but better in prolonged engagement (provided no one destroys your bubble core!)

Healing Bubble Radius: 3.75m => 5.05m
Duration: 10s => 20s

Expertise 3: Nano Fields Range has been increased across the board. Duration is now longer when NOT stuck to a character to give a use zoning use case when used on the environment. As you can see we also changed the name of the ability to clarify its functional difference vs the EMP bubble.

Nano Field Radius: 2.5m => 3.3m
Duration when not stuck: 7.5s =>20s
Duration when stuck is the same as before (7.5s)

Passive 3: Booby Traps Booby traps bubble got the same overall treatment as others: Bigger size, longer duration, but a destroyable core that allows the player to get rid of them immediately at the cost of shooting. They also feature the small damage over time from the base version, giving a bigger deterrent for rivals to enter their range.

Booby Trap Radius: 2.4m => 2.8m
Duration: 8s =>12s

A note on further character changes: We are well aware that many more elements in the game could benefit from the treatment we are giving to abilities in this update.Yu-Mi’s passive options have always been problematic, Larcin’s Expertise 2 is something we’ve long wanted to change and Hans’s kit is something we are looking to change in a more engaging direction, just to name a few candidates.

We will be sharing more changes incoming for more characters in the future, but we need to keep the list relatively tight to be able to deliver these changes in a polished fashion. We want to be very clear that we don't consider these picks to be the only abilities that need changing.

General Changes
Map Variants
To increase match variety, we are introducing the concept of map variants with two maps to start things off. Variants will allow us to change time of day and even some gameplay elements in the future. To start with, these two maps are: Fragrant Shore by Night and Hard Sell Morning.

Both maps will feature an additional VIP (Luana visiting Hard Sell and Garcia visiting Fragrant Shore) to give them a bit of a unique flavor.

Hard Sell Morning
Fragrant Shore NightMap Update
The Yacht has arrived in Fragrant Shore, ready to replace the security truck as the host of vault terminal C. We have transformed the truck into a staff room, giving a better spread of staff areas for the map. While the rework of Fragrant C is the big attraction in the update, we have tweaked a lot of areas including giving more cover in Hard Sell’s vault and adding a bit of visual occlusion on Silver Reef’s balconies with the addition of doors.
Keycard Printer Changes
Expanded possible spawn position and added a new system that ensures that no two printers are too close together, making a better spread inside the vault with more variance.

Extraction phase tweaks
We’ve made two changes to how the extraction phase plays out based on player feedback.

First of all, the phase will now get extended by 30 seconds each time the package changes hands. This is a new initiative to limit games where a long chase ends up in a draw because nobody has time to turn in the briefcase in the end.

In addition to this, we are making turning in the briefcase at the extraction much faster if you are the last spy/ team standing. This will allow you to end things more quickly and get ready to queue up again in a faster fashion.

First Package Capture XP Event
We have added a new source of XP rewarding the player (or team) that captured the package first. This is an additional 500 XP which means that grabbing the package first is worth it even if you don’t manage to extract in the end.

Guards behavior Tweaks
We have modified how guards react to danger events a bit more this update. We have made the bullet impacts location less likely to attract guards by making them occluded by the environment in a more aggressive way. In practice, this means you will get much less situations where a stray bullet from a fight attracts a guard from far away, leaving the danger events around you to be the most important part of aggro.

Elite Guards Social Interacts Update
Elite guards can now also use normal guards' social interaction spots, greatly expanding their blending abilities.

Beginner Queue Update
We have made important changes to the beginner queue:

Added Feedback and opt out feature
We have added a clear feedback that you are currently in the beginner queue and will thus encounter bots in your matches. This can now be opted out of at any time in general settings. You can return to the beginner queue as long as you are within the allowed levels at any time if leaving it proves to be too much!

ADS Setting
A new “toggle ADS” setting has been added in the option menu.

Balance
Full ability reworks are listed at the top with major features, we will not describe them here and will focus on smaller balancing changes.

Suspicion
We have added a lot of features to suspicion in the last update that made it less of a factor in a lot of situations. While these changes have overall been quite positive, we want to turn back some knobs to keep suspicion relevant in situations where it should be while deepening its overall interactions.

• Upped NPC vision distance, increasing from where suspicion is gained 20m => 25m
  
• Blowing cover no longer flush all suspicion, it regens at the normal rate while out of cover instead. This will limit the value of cover regen vs suspicion (while still keeping intact the value of recovering itself).
  
• We added “scolding” as part of the feedback displayed on your portrait. This now also ties into suspicion, allowing you to run after wrongly covered players to scold them without building suspicion.

Retinal Scanner
The retinal scanner was introduced during an event where VIPs were abundant, making the likelihood of seeing it being used higher than outside of events. We feel we’ve put too many guard rails to prevent its use, limiting how it can change matches in a meaningful way. As such, we are lowering one of these guard rails by reducing the minimum before which players can start interacting with the scanner.

• Time before scanner can be used 7 minutes => 5:30 minutes
  
• Reducing starting intel amount from 40 to 30.
  
• Intel Reduction per terminal reduced from 10 to 5 (40-30-20=> 30-25-20)

We don’t think this will change the use of retinal scanners in a major way, we will be looking at future developments to make them a more viable option, but we felt reducing requirements in the meantime would be the right move.

Agents
Ace
The Jack of Diamond has been in a rough spot against other alternatives in Ace’s arsenal. We are trying to give it a more distinct advantage in the fire rate department.

Weapons
Weapon 2: Jack of Diamond

• Passive Charge time .3s => .27s
  
• Charge delay after shot .65s => .55s
  
• Fire rate 1.35 => 1.65 shot per second
  
• Visual indicator added to clearly show when the mark is ready.

Cavalière
For Cavalière, we are looking at expanding the utility of her expertise 2 in a more significant way in the future, but we wanted to increase its range a bit for now to make it more reliable. We are also looking into a more in depth rework of expertise 3 to give it a clearer use case vs her base option.

Expertise
Expertise 2: It’s a Setup

• Significantly expanded investigation zone size to make it easier to use in big rooms.

Madame Xiu
Xiu’s expertise 2 is the clear winner for her kit giving her unparalleled mobility and a lot of options to get out of a fight. We want to put it more in line with her other expertises and make it more of a decision to decide when to use it rather than always having it as an emergency.

Expertise
Expertise 2 Serpent’s Bluff

• Reduced time to recall from 20s to 12s.
  
• Decreased cooldown refund when expiring to prevent players from always applying it preventively. 80% refund => 50% refund.

A note about passive 3: We are aware that xiu’s passive 3 is currently performing too well and we are testing solutions internally for this. We hope to deploy a change to this passive soon to even the odds with other choices in xiu’s arsenal.

Octo
Our focus around Octo is to make his base expertise feel smoother and more useful to use. We are also adjusting his expertise 3 cooldown a bit to better fit how strong it can be in fights.

Expertise
Expertise 1 Cashing Out

• Expanded max distance 20m => 25m
  
• Expanded max angle 110 => 120

Expertise 3 Make’Em Fold

• Cooldown 40s => 50s

Red
Weapon
Weapon 2 : Jack of hearts

• Reduced Red Dot size in ADS to help with precise shots at long range.

Vigil
Vigil is getting a variety of small touch ups with the goal of making her more comfortable to play overall. Her base weapon has become quite dependent on landing ALL your shots with our past nerfs, so we want to bring back some leeway in using it without going back to its dominant original version.

Weapon
Weapon 1 : Caliburn

• Shots before overheating raised 17 => 20
  
• Base ammo and ammo per box raised 35 => 38

Expertise
Expertise 1: Smoke Launcher

• Smoke projectile travel speed is now twice as fast to allow long distance shots more easily.

Passive
Passive 3 EMF Jammer

• The jammer now prevents NPCs from opening doors, not just spies.
  
• The jammer no longer prevents you and your allies from getting intel.

Yu-Mi
Yu-Mi has gotten a lot of changes on the expertise front, but her passive is another beast entirely. We want to look into the passive in a deeper way to make them more interesting and more fair, but the workload needed to do so was not realistic for this update. In the meantime, we are adjusting the quick fix reduction to a lower value that is less disruptive to the overall game.

With gadgets having longer cooldown overall than at launch, a cooldown reduction has gotten more valuable over time.

Passive
Passive 1 Quick Fix

• Gadget cooldown reduction 65% => 50%

Gadgets
With the addition of new gadgets to the roster, we also wanted to overhaul some under-powered picks in the roster by giving them added utility. We are also making some much needed adjustment to the deployed shield to make it less of a standout vs the rest of the gadget options.


Mimic

• Reduced “exit sound” range significantly to make the mimic more subtle unless someone is very close to you. 25m => 10m.

Remote Turret

• The remote turret will now attack rivals' gadget as their lowest priority target, allowing it to be used to destroy rival setup without risking your own cover.

Scrambler

• No longer jams intel for you and your team when active. Only rivals!
  
• The scrambler now pauses vault printers that are currently printing.
  
• Handheld scrambling range is now the same as the dropped version. 6m => 15m
  
• Restored the possibility of having the keep its “on” status when stashed.

Tripwire

• Tripwires can now stick to walls and ceilings, opening up a whole new world of devious plays!
  

Umbrella Shield

• Dismantle time for rival players reduced 1.5s => .8s
  
• Deployed shield HP reduced 100 HP => 75HP
  
• Deployed shield lifetime 20s => 12s

Bug Fixes
General

• Reduction of npc “jittering” when controlled by a player.
  
• Fixed issues with IRIS using the wrong voice line during extract.
  
• Scared NPC will no longer accidentally crouch on a down NPC, reviving them instantly in the middle of a fight.
  
• Fixed an issue where downing a player exactly 100 to 109 levels above you would yield no XP.
  
• Fixed an issue with simulated impulses to prevent a desync between a player position and their npc disguise.
  
• Fixed an issue with NPC door avoidance, leading to npcs getting stuck in doorways.
  
• Fixed an issue that led to players gaining their expertise immediately during early match cooldown if they looted an expertise cooldown powerup.
  
• Fixed some security scanners not sounding the alarm on staff disguises.
  
• Fixed an issue that led to items dropped by a spy when downed to not be lootable for a period of time.
  
• Fixed an issue where IRIS and dialogue subtitles would overlap.
  
• Echelon ranks for friends in party now display correctly in the main menu.

Agents
Ace

• Fixed an issue where Ace would apply her base expertise on the wrong character after shooting someone because of the camera movement from recoil.

Cavalière

• Fixed an issue where Cavalière’s passive status effect would sometimes not apply.
  
• Fixed an issue where melee animations would not play correctly in 3P.
  
• Fixed an issue where printers that were currently printing were blocked because the interaction is locked.

Hans

• Fixed an issue where expertises for hans would not play their animations in third person.

Larcin

• Fixed an issue where the “souffre-douleur” passive would not make a spy drop an item from a tripwire cover blow unless Larcin hit them earlier in the match.

Madame Xiu

• Fixed an issue where NPCs previously used by Xiu would keep their allied outline in teams.
  
• Fixed clipping for the starfish collection skin in the endgame screen.

Octo

• Fixed an issue where Octo would be considered “Full Ammo” at max intel instead of full ammo.

Sasori

• Fixed an issue where players could bypass delays on charging kunais by swapping to an umbrella shield.

Squire

• Fixed an issue where having two sources of amped up (from passive and expertise) would lead to situations where they cancel each other out.

Vigil

• Vigil will now go back to ads once the overheat on her base weapon is done if the input is still held.

Yu-Mi

• Fixed an issue: Yu-Mi status effects could stay stuck if two bubbles from two different Yu-Mi overlapped together.

Map
All Maps

• Upgraded light bake quality in all maps leading to higher quality static shadows and detail.

Diamond Spire

• Tweaks to audio occlusion between floors, preventing sounds from the rooftop from being heard on the lowest floors in certain spots.

Fragrant Shore

• Fixed an issue where players could spawn under stairs in rare conditions.
  
• Fixed an issue where two keycards could spawn inside the same guard room inside the clock tower.

Hard Sell

• Fixed some lab door frames that allowed Octo’s Nautilo to cause damage through them.

Silver Reef

• Fixed an issue that led to the retinal scanner costing less intel than intended in Silver Reef when vault terminals were disabled.
  
• Fixed multiple instances of duplicate food in the map, allowing players to eat twice.
  
• Fixed multiple overlapping interacts that could lead to npc stacking together in areas.

Sound Eclipse

• Fixed a spot where players could clip into a wall in a blue room and still be able to shoot.

Gadgets
Drone

• The drone boost speed was lowered in an unintended side effect. It’s now back to its original boost speed.

Turret

• Fixed issues melee-ing the turret because of a mismatch between the state on client vs server.