(UPDATED) Operation Medic Bag: Update #24 – Ammo Funnel Changes
Update (Added August 5 2024)
Hey Heisters,
We’ve heard your feedback, and will be reverting the proposed changes to the Ammo Funnel skill.
We’ll keep the two new skills, Headhunter and Locked and Loaded, providing you with some extra build variety.
In regards to skill lines philosophy, we will focus our efforts to bolster and nurture fun, player choice, and meaningful gameplay additions.
Original Post
Hello, heisters! This is Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević, game director on PAYDAY 3, and today I’d like to talk to you about an upcoming balance change to the Ammo Funnel and Replenish skill combo.
For those unfamiliar, both Ammo Funnel and Replenish are skills from the Mower line. Ammo Funnel says “As long as you have EDGE, ammo you pick up is directly added to your equipped weapon's magazine. If your magazine is full, it's added to your reserves instead.” and Replenish says “As long as you have EDGE, you automatically pick up ammo dropped by enemies you have killed.” This means that if you have both skills, every kill gives back ammo to your weapon’s magazine.
The reason we are making a separate blog post about this change, rather than just relegating it to patch notes,is because we are aware of this combo being popular and prevalent, so we want to set aside a proper space to talk about it. While this combo was popular both during development and post-launch, we ended up cannibalizing a lot of design space with it, specifically when it comes to weapon ammo capacity and reloading as a mechanic. It’s also a really strong combination because of this. Like, we’re not talking “this is kind of strong” but it’s basically 3 points from almost every loud build dedicated to it, unless you intentionally want to go against the grain.
Before we go into the details, I’ll just highlight a brief summary:
- Replenish is not being changed
Ammo Funnel is being redesigned- We are adding two new skills, a new Sharpshooter upgrade and a new Gunslinger upgrade, to address some of the gaps left by Ammo Funnel’s change
Ammo Funnel
Let’s start off with the Ammo Funnel change:
“Your reload speed increases by 1% for each shot that hits an enemy, up to a maximum of 60%. This bonus expires once you've reloaded or swapped your weapon.”
The goal of Ammo Funnel was to help with bypassing reloads and just let you hold the fire button and mow down enemies. Sadly, it was too good at bypassing reloads, so with this change we’re pivoting to making reloads much faster instead. It leans more into automatic weapons; assault rifles get a large benefit, SMGs get a bit less of a benefit but make up for it with already quick reload speeds, and the LMG can make up for one of its biggest drawbacks. The 60% bonus cap will in practice only affect the Blyspruta MX63 at the moment, but you can push it even further with other skills that affect reload speed, like Quick Reload from the Enforcer line.
Headhunter
Next, we are adding a new Sharpshooter Upgrade called Headhunter:
“As long as you have EDGE and are aiming down sights, headshot kills with primary or secondary weapons will restore 1 ammo to your weapon’s magazine. This ability has a 1.5 second cooldown.”
This is there to help out players who relied on Ammo Funnel for chaining long combos with sniper rifles. While there is a partial benefit for shotguns, the 1.5 second cooldown won’t bypass reloads entirely for them unless you’re spacing your shots. However, it is short enough to chain R900 kills, for example.
Locked and Loaded
Finally, we are also adding a new Gunslinger Upgrade called Locked and Loaded:
“As long as you have EDGE, ammo pickups for your unequipped weapons are added directly to those weapons' magazines.”
This is Ammo Funnel for your inactive weapon. Again, it helps bypass reloading, but you have to be a bit more conscious about it and know when to swap. We know that the current selection of secondary weapons aren’t all as strong to facilitate actively swapping between the two during combat (a lot of our current pistols are more “fallbacks”) but you can expect more secondary slot options in the coming updates, as well as some larger balance changes down the line to make this slot feel better.
These changes are all coming in our next content update.
While we understand that nerfs are usually frowned upon, we also want to keep the long-term health of the game in mind and encourage players to explore more options and playstyles in loud. We hope that it comes across that we are taking this change seriously, both by dedicating space to talk about it, but also developing two new skills to offer more alternatives to it.
Compensation Items
Last week it was music, this week the compensation items, we’ll try not to keep making little additions to the blogs too often, but also don’t wanna stop doing stuff, so here we are!
For any who haven't heard about this before, we go through some details in this blog. To make a long blog short, we’re adding a bunch of content to the various editions of the game, and that addition happened this week. Just not quite as we planned it to go.
There have been multiple reports about players not receiving their items and we are investigating the cause for this. As it stands right now:
- Steam & Epic owners don’t have to do any extra steps, as it will roll out to your game automatically when available.
- Xbox owners have been seeing it under “Manage Game And Add-Ons” for the game, but unable to see the items in-game. We’re investigating the issue.
- PS5 owners have yet to see the items. We’re working with Sony to resolve the issue.
There have also been reports of partial or duplicate items, which are also being investigated and hopefully resolved soon, ensuring that you get the compensation for your tier.
A list of who gets what, and why - is in the aforementioned blog post.
