Outriders balance changes: Legendary items quest drops, Tactical Assault Rifle, Twisted Rounds, more

The Outriders development team has announced a huge array of changes coming to the game later next week. In addition to general patch notes that include bug fixes, there’s also a balancing patch arriving today, the 8th of April, through a backend update. 

According to the developers, this “re-balancing” is to make sure exploits aren’t being taken advantage of and that some abilities and Skills aren’t too powerful. However, the community might not agree with some of the changes that are included in this update. 

Below, you can see the highlights from the balancing patch. You can also read through the full list in People Can Fly’s new Reddit post on the Outriders subreddit. 

Balancing patch for Outriders

Outriders is receiving a slew of changes. (Picture: Square Enix)

Starting off, the development team is fixing an exploit through the “Historian” other smaller quests. Previously, players could farm these quests in order to receive Legendary weapons, which wasn’t the intention. There was a bug associated with these quests that could net players more Legendaries than it was supposed to. Players who performed this bug will not be published, however. 

The official blurb on the change is as follows: 

• Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests no longer grant Legendary items for each subsequent completion

• While rewarding players for completing all the Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests is still our intention, we did observe unintended results when players repeated this activity in combination with a specific multiplayer bug.

Next up is a change to some popular farming spots in Outriders. Moving forward, the Tooka Beast, Splittooth, Sandshrifter and Coldclaw will no longer be too generous when giving out loot. These enemies were too easy to take down in exchange for the high-tier loot they dropped. 

Coldclaw is seeing its loot drops nerfed. (Picture: Square Enix)

Speaking of taking down enemies, the developers also reduced the critical rating damage multiplier for both the Tactical AR and Marksman Rifle class. The Tactical AR now has a 165” multiplier, from 175%, and the Marksman Rifle now has a 250% multiplier, from 300%. 

• Read more: Earn a free Legendary weapon, titanium and emote in Outriders

Finally, there are some huge changes coming to Bullet Abilities in Outriders. This includes Twisted Rounds, Blighted Rounds and Volcanic Rounds. Essentially, the developers have found that these specific abilities are far better than any other ability in the game. 

You can read about each individual change to the abilities in the patch notes but each version of the ability has been nerfed significantly. Even the Class Tree Nodes for the Bullet Abilities have been nerfed, meaning these nodes have far less power. 

• Read more: Outriders First Patch notes: Crash Fixes, HUD disappearing, Gravity Leap stuck, more

Some of the changes are a bit controversial but the Outriders development team is closely monitoring all aspects of the game. Players can expect these balancing changes to be live in the game sometime later today. 

Outriders balance patch full list of changes:

• Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests no longer grant Legendary items for each subsequent completion
  • While rewarding players for completing all the Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests is still our intention, we did observe unintended results when players repeated this activity in combination with a specific multiplayer bug.
  • With this rewards adjustment, we want to eliminate this exploit behaviour while still making that quest line worth the effort.
  • Players who took advantage of this exploit will not be punished.
• Adjusted loot on specific enemies: Tooka Beast, Splittooth, Sandshifter and Coldclaw
  • These particular beasts are being too generous considering the required effort to take them down.
• Chem Plant - Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 650 / 1150 / 1500 seconds (Previously: 957 / 1303 / 1650)
• Boom Town - Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 390 / 589 / 776 seconds (Previously: 422 / 607 / 792)
  • Some Expeditions seem to be too generous in their required completion times when compared to others.
  • We want to avoid such disproportionate discrepancies, as we believe making all expeditions viable leads to a more diverse and thus more interesting endgame.
• Crit Rating Damage Multiplier on Tactical Assault Rifle reduced to 165% (Previously: 175%)
• Critical Rating Damage Multiplier on Marksman Rifle reduced to 250% (Previously: 300%)
  • Marksman Rifles with a 300% crit rate showed up to be dominating multiple crit builds. By making the modifier the same as for a Bolt Action Rifle, we want to offer players more options when choosing what gun to use.
• Duration of the Massacre AP buff has been reduced to 3 seconds
  • This is a temporary measure until we have fixed an issue with the stacking cap.
• Bullet abilities
  (Twisted Rounds, Blighted Rounds and Volcanic Rounds):
  • While we fully intend to provide the overpowered feel for the best builds out there, we are also committed to making sure that there is build diversity in the top-performing builds.
  • Late in the demo lifecycle, we discovered a bug with regards to the bullet augmentation abilities damage calculation formula. While we fixed this bug, some unforeseen imbalances were unfortunately introduced, which has led to bullet based abilities vastly outperforming other skills. The main problem with this is that such bullet based builds require much less investment to make them "top tier", compared to other builds.
  • To achieve this, we have made a couple of adjustments for the Trickster and Technomancer classes, who benefit the most from their bullet abilities power. It's uncertain as to whether these changes will prove too strong or too weak, so please do consider this to be only the first step, as we will continue monitoring and adjusting them in the future. Just like you, we hope to see more inspiring and crazy combinations of Abilities and Mods!
• The base cooldown of the Twisted Rounds skill has increased to 25 seconds (previously: 16 seconds)
  • While infinite uptime on bullets abilities was always our intention, it is intended to be high risk, high reward playstyle. However, given the current power of this skill, there is very little risk involved in this ability given its short cooldown, even when players fail to trigger ammo replenishment. Increasing its cooldown in combination with adjusting its damage should increase that risk and make this playstyle a more thrilling experience.
• The Trickster's Hero Tree nodes: - Disruptive Firepower, Scion of Power, Outrider Executioner - have had their power reduced to 35% (Previously: 50%)
  • The combination of Twisted Rounds' increase of firepower on top of the multipliers provided by the class tree lead to huge increases of damage dealt by this ability. While we do understand the satisfaction this kind of power can bring, it is currently vastly outperforming our wildest expectations and we, therefore, need to bring it down a notch.
• "Vulnerable" status - Power reduced to 15% (Previously: 25%)
• The Technomancer Hero Tree node -"Damage Against Poison" - has had its power reduced to 15% (Previously: 30%)
  • While the Technomancer's Blighted Rounds do not provide any damage increase on their own other than ignoring armour as Anomaly Damage, they do provide an excellent tool for spreading the Vulnerable and Toxic statuses. which in turn can scale out of proportion.
• The Pyromancer Hero Tree Node - "Trial of Ashes" - has been reduced 15% extra damage (Previously: 30%)