Operation Medic Bag: Blog Update #5 – Update 1.1.2 Preview
Hello Heisters!
In our ongoing efforts to increase patch frequency, we decided to forego this week's blog in favor of giving a preview of patch notes from the next game update. Our goal with that is to get smaller updates out more often so we can work more effectively with your feedback. We’re back in action with Dev Updates as well, so check out the video version of these topics if you prefer video over text!
While more changes are still on their way and being worked on as part of Operation Medic Bag, we want to adapt and react to the current playstyles, and mix things up and expand your arsenal for the upcoming challenges. This patch will be coming by the end of March/beginning of April. Those who kept up with our weekly blog posts and streams won’t be surprised by anything here, but we wanted to summarize the upcoming contents of the next patch here with descriptions and examples.
New Adaptive Armor
Adaptive Armor users will be identified via a purple bar instead of the regular blue. The armor has the unique ability of not taking any trauma damage, meaning that unless its chunk depletes completely, it’ll fully restore in 4.5 seconds.
See a detailed description of the Adaptive Armor in its blog post, here.
- 2 armor chunks
- 4.5 seconds chunk regen time
- Light weight
- 2 downs
- Reduces incoming damage by 5%
- Takes no trauma damage
Medic Bag Improvement (Adrenaline)
All Medic Bags and kits will have the Adrenaline feature following this update. This would commonly be referred to as “overheal”, and functions as an extra but temporary health pool on top of your regular armor and health. Meaning, if you know you’re about to run into a bunch of bullets, you’ll be able to first use a medic bag to absorb some or most of that damage.
New Fortitude Skill Line
We’ve gone into detail on the Fortitude skill line in a previous blog post, check it out here!
To quickly summarize, the Fortitude skill line makes great use of the new Adrenaline feature from the Medic Bags. It both buffs the player and vastly increases survivability. The Fortitude skills scale with your remaining downs, so your choice of armor really matters if you want to make the most of it.
- Base: Increase your base maximum health by 50. Whenever you heal to or above maximum health, you gain or refresh GRIT.
- Aced: Your maximum number of “downs” is increased by 1 and your bleedout time is increased by 50%.
- Stockpile (Mastery): If you have a deployable bag in your loadout, it has 2 additional charges. (Note: these 2 charges are added before Deep Pockets)
- Health Siphon: Whenever a crewmate heals using your Medic Bag, you heal for 40% of the amount they healed. If this heals you above full health, the excess amount is added as Adrenaline.
- Unyielding: Your maximum health is increased by 15 for each “down” you currently have.
- Supraphysiological: Whenever you have Adrenaline, you gain 10% additional Adrenaline for each “down” you currently have.
- Walking Tall: Your Adrenaline degrades 25% slower for each “down” you currently have. If you have any amount of Adrenaline, you can use First Aid Kits to pause its degradation for 15 seconds.
- Pain Asymbolia: As long as you have Adrenaline and EDGE, GRIT, or RUSH, the effects of these buffs are doubled and you take 10% less damage to your Adrenaline.
Skill Point Increase
With the Fortitude skill line we’ve now added 3 great skill lines to the game. To compensate, we’re adding another 7 skill points into the game so that you can have more flexibility in your build choices.
If you’re afraid that’ll make things too easy, don’t fear. Game Director Mio joined Elisabeth in stream on Thursday last week and said that future updates will increase the challenge on harder difficulties, so this will be part of ongoing balancing updates.
Skills
Manipulator skill line – Overbearing
The Overbearing skill has had an extra feature added that lets you have up to 3 tied hostages following you.
The new skill description is: “Your shout range for intimidating civilians is increased by 20% and civilians stay down 50% longer after being shouted down. You can now order up to 3 tied hostages to follow you.”
Tank skill line- Clean Slate
We’re adding a new mastery to the Tank skill line, the new skill makes use of armor repair kits in emergencies, letting you use them to restore at least one chunk of armor. The skill description reads: “If you have no armor, you can interact with an Armor Repair Kit to restore one armor chunk.”
Escapist skill line – Swift
The Escapist ace skill is now Disengage, formerly in the Tank skill line. The old Escapist mastery skill, Swift moved to the 5th upgrade in the Escapist tree instead.
Strategist skill line – Misdirect
The old Misdirect used to consume RUSH in order to protect you from being disabled by either Cloaker or Zapper. The updated skill has a broader range and gives us the first dodge skill of PAYDAY 3. The new skill description reads: “As long as you have RUSH, all shots from marked enemies have a 10% chance to not deal any damage to you".
Scrambler skill line – Kinetic Short-Circuit
The old Kinetic Short-Circuit would stun enemies if there was an active ECM and they were shot. Kinetic Short-Circuit now has an additional effect to help maintain continued ECM usage in combat: “Whenever you destroy a Zapper’s battery, you replenish one ECM Jammer.”
Sharpshooter skill line – Precision shot
This skill got a significant buff in that it no longer consumes EDGE when firing and penetrates one additional target, the new skill description reads: “As long as you have EDGE and are aiming down a scope, your shot will do extra damage based on your scope magnification and your shot will also penetrate through one additional target.”
Sharpshooter skill line – Cutting Shot
Cutting Shot has gotten an update to make it better scale with the armor penetration of all weapons. Weapons that already benefited from it will have similar performance to what they did before, while weapons that didn’t benefit from Cutting Shot should scale better with the updated skill.
Weapons
R900
A single line change that makes a world of difference. The R900 will now let you cycle its bolt without going out of scope. Meaning repeated fire will feel much better.
Ziv Commando
The Ziv has received a major buff at close range and a minor nerf on longer ranges, it should now work better at its intended role of a close quarters cop blender.
- Increased sprint enter and exit speeds + their animations
- Decreased spread cap and increment (across several stances)
- Increased damage (up to 15m):
- 5m from 30 to 42
- 10m from 30 to 35
- 15m from 22 to 25
- Reduced damage (from 25 onwards):
- 25-30m from 22 to 16
- 35-50m from 14.3 to 12
- Increased armor pen (from 0 to 0.5)
Fixes
Turbid Station
Fixed an issue where players were blocked from crouch walking under some of the train cars.
Weapon
Fixed an issue where the primary weapon could sometimes be changed to the weapon in the first slot.
