Implant Adjustment Preview

2023-02-17

Dear Capsuleer,

With implants available for usage, many Capsuleers have devoted themselves to studying how to use them in different situations and created an abundance of practical tactics. Combat environments and fittings vary, and so do implant capabilities and their branches, which makes various combinations. This amplifies our core design purpose – to bring variety and playability to combat.

At the same time, this places great demands on maintaining a delicate balance of the Implants. Since the launch, we have received a lot of suggestions regarding the Implant Balance. We have made slight adjustments and fixed some bugs, but there is no absolute balance since there's a huge difference between implant capabilities. Issues regarding Support Projection and Focused Crystal urgently require improvement:

 

About "Support Projection"

Implants that sacrifice firepower for support and control capabilities. To make it less easy for the ship to be destroyed when encountering a professional support projection team with low firepower, we have incorporated an immune system that functions similarly to Automatic Defense Implants.

How we will adjust "Support Projection":

When attacked by Electronic Jamming Warheads, the ship's electronic system will enter an emergency adjustment state and be immune to more Electronic Jamming within 10 seconds.

 

About "Focused Crystal"

Implants suitable for persistent battles against large ships and structures. Taking the Large Pulse Laser as an example, the initial fire interval of 7.85 seconds can obtain 2 Focus effect levels and achieve its peak in about 3 minutes. It was initially designed that the Focus effect would be removed upon switching targets. However, after testing under multiple combat scenes in New Eden, we discovered that the application for Focused Crystals is very limited, so we did not implement this setting.

This causes new problems: Focused Crystals give out balance performance in battles within 3 minutes. However, its damage bonus becomes too high when the battle exceeds 3 mins, and the longer the battle, the higher it gets, way higher than any other implants. Common PVE battles usually take more than 3 minutes, which makes Focused Crystals the most popular implant, eclipsing other weapon systems. After taking everything into consideration, we decided to extend the time for its firepower to peak and reduce its maximum damage bonus.

How we will adjust "Focused Crystal":

1. Each attack (passive effect) gains 1 more Focus effect level.

2. Reutilization (Lv. 15), reduces Remote Shield Booster activation time by 0.2% per level of Focused Crystal (the old effect was to increase the automatic recovery speed of shields).

3. Crystal Reinforcing (Lv. 30), increases the maximum Focus level increase from 50 to 90.

4. Rapid Charge (Lv. 30), increases the Focus effect levels gained on every hits by 2. 

 

After adjustments, the Focused Crystal is still the most suitable implant for persistent battles under various battle scenes in New Eden since it deals greater and more persistent damage than any other implant, which doesn't falter its initial design purpose. When fighting with enemies with high agility, there might be better choices than the Focused Crystal since its focus effect can be easily interrupted.

The above issues regarding Support Projection and Focused Crystals have too much impact on New Eden. We will adjust the balance of the two as soon as possible to ensure they won't be overpowered while maintaining their distinctions. We will continue to observe the performance after the update.

In addition, we also noticed that some other implants still have room for improvement. For example, the Sniping Technology and Barrage Repression deal high critical damage but lack endurance. The Automatic Defense is low in damage bonus and incapable of providing sufficient support capability. The durability of High Power Coil is low. We will gradually optimize the settings of old implants in the upcoming balance adjustments and daily updates to perfect the entire implant system and enrich the battle in New Eden.