NOVA DRIFT: FISSION
v0.24.5
November 18, 2019

Nova Drift FISSION brings additional polish, balance, and quality-of-life changes to Nova Drift, along with introducing some new Body Gear and build archetypes. Older, underutilized upgrades have been given new artwork and overhauls. FISSION also introduces some wave and scaling changes which set the stage for the upcoming enemy and boss rework.

Highlights:

Harnessing mysterious cosmic powers, the Stealth body gear has been divided into two separate bodies: The Spectre and the Firefly.

The Spectre body gear represents the stealth aspect of the original Stealth body. It is able to cloak faster and enjoys up to a +200% weapon damage buff when fully cloaked. It is able to move at low speeds without breaking cloak and can apply a partial damage buff while partially cloaked. Additionally, enemies have been given more intelligent reactions to a stealthed target...

The Firefly body gear represents the speed, thruster burn, and self-damage resistant aspects of the original Stealth body. Its thrusters are now larger, deal more damage, are more wide-spread, and have unique artwork.

The Split Shot weapon has been reworked. It has been given new visual effects and animations and its damage and spread has been increased. Additionally, the weapon now innately deals 50% splash damage on hit to targets behind its point of impact.

Added a new recursive common Wild Mod: Masochism. Masochism grants +8% self-damage resistance, but increases damage taken from enemies by 4%. It also provides a stackable "Adrenal Module-like effect", providing up to +15% increased global damage while at death's door.

Reflexive Shields, Defiance, Hypermetabolism, Regenerative Shields, and Celestial Lance have been reworked or upgraded. Myriad other balance adjustments and minor features have been added!

Introduced the Combat Log to the game!

Added support for directional steering!

Waves and enemy scaling have been reworked. Progression is smoother now, with very high waves being far less chaotic (but still difficult!) Enemies are more powerful, but less numerous, allowing more strategic builds to compete in the late-game alongside the usual contenders.

Full details on the update:

Major Changes

• Harnessing mysterious cosmic powers, the Stealth body gear has been divided into two separate body gears: The Spectre and the Firefly
• The Spectre body gear represents the stealth aspect of the original Stealth body. It is able to cloak faster and enjoys up to a +200% weapon damage buff when fully cloaked. It is able to move at low speeds without breaking cloak and can apply a partial damage buff while partially cloaked
• When you cloak, enemies behave a bit more naturally. They will first target the location they last saw you, and then start guessing where you might be. Some enemies even fire in every direction, if able
• The Firefly body gear represents the speed, thruster burn, and self-damage resistant aspects of the original Stealth body. Its thrusters are now larger, deal more damage, are more wide-spread, and are more unique looking
• The Firefly body and the Spectre body are both available without unlocks
• The Split Shot weapon has been reworked. It has been given several new visual effects and animations, and its damage and spread has been increased while its degeneration now accelerates. Additionally, the weapon now innately deals 50% splash damage on hit to targets behind its point of impact
• Added a new recursive common Wild Mod: Masochism. Masochism grants +8% self-damage resistance, but increases damage taken from enemies by 4%. It also provides a stackable "Adrenal Module-like effect", at up to +15% increased global damage
• The effect that reduces hull damage by a flat amount has been named "plating". Descriptions have been updated to refer to this effect as such
• Reworked how waves are spawned under the hood, removing several problems. Very late waves are less chaotic and spammy, but enemies are more powerful
• Enemies now scale up their hull and damage values increasingly higher, starting at wave 120. This scaling won't be present in modes where "Endless" is not enabled, once disabling it becomes possible

New Tools

• Created a combat log, which you can enable any time during the game by pressing the Backtick key, which is the key just below Escape. This feature will log all of the hits you take, and show you exactly what your defenses are doing. Currently this feature does not report self-damage or burn damage, but may in the future as I continue to iterate on it
• Created a new debug tool, the wave log. This will help us diagnose any problems with the enemy wave system, as well as show you exactly what's going on with them. If you've enabled debug mode by pressing Delete, you can toggle the combat log (detailed above) by pressing Shift + Backtick

Quality of Life Changes

• If you have stored more than one upgrade, you can choose them all before the menu closes. You can disable this feature in the settings menu
• You can now select "Directional Steering" as a gamepad control mode from the Settings menu. This makes the player attempt to face the direction you are holding on the right stick. The controls for stabilize and displace still work with the left stick. In a future patch, this too will be made directional. This has been a popular request, but I recommend instead becoming accustomed to the default steering controls
• Added support for analog thrust. Thrust strength is proportional to trigger value and Stabilize strength is proportional to stick value
• Reserved hull and shield values are now depicted with a different color on the hull and shield bars
• Burst Fire delay between firing has been capped at 1/5 of second
• Player bullets dispose in a wider range outside of the game boundaries, giving them a bit more time to reach their targets if they swing wide

Upgrade Changes

• Reflexive Shields has been reworked and given a visual upgrade. Additionally, it does considerably more damage
• Sources of burn such as Discharge, other lightning mods, and Helix Orbs which did not previously stack damage from overlapping instances now do so
• In addition to its attack now stacking, Galvanic Outburst provides an additional +2% shield effect power. However, it can no longer be self-triggered in order to differentiate it from Discharge
• Regenerative Shields now applies its effect 75% to shields and 50% to hull, up from 70% and 30%
• Death Blossom and Emergency systems now require your shield to protect you, not your constructs. Shielded Constructs now blocks Emergency Systems from appearing in the upgrade pool
• Shielded Constructs flat hull and hull increases +5 -> +10 and +5% -> +10% respectively
• Hypermetabolism has been reworked. It now reserves hull and shields instead of reducing them. Its increased regeneration values have been reduced, but since the maximum value from which they are derived is no longer reduced, the resulting values are similar
• The Defiance mod has been reworked, as it was allowing certain builds to achieve immortality. It turns out that "plating" is an extremely strong modifier when stacked high
• Defiance self damage reduction +7% -> +4%
• Defiance plating 1 -> .5
• Defiance now additionally resists recoil and thrust-reducing effects by 4% each
• Celestial Lance damage and self-damage have been reduced by 10%. The damage and self-damage now ramp up over time the longer the aura is maintained through fast movement
• Loaded Mines and Death Blossom were scaling more than intended from added projectile modifiers. These mods now use a new formula
• 4% -> 5% global damage per unspent mod for Ataraxia
• 85 -> 90 base hull for the Research and Engineer bodies
• -15% -> -10% shields for the Research and Engineer bodies
• 80 -> 100 base shields for Siphon Shield
• 65 -> 70 base shields for Temporal Shield
• Blade splinters no longer collide with enemy projectiles
• Blade splinters now degenerate and decelerate faster
• Blade splinters now reduce hull by an additional 25%
• Warp Strike damage malus for screen-wrapping 5 + 15% of your defenses -> 5 + 10%
• Velocity and Snipe each provide 5% less of an increase to projectile speed. To compensate, the base velocity of most weapons has been increased by 10%. Railgun, instead, had its base damage increased. These mods felt like too much of a shoe-in for certain weapons to hit a usable threshold
• Antimatter Rounds self-damage decreased about 5%
• Rupture now does what it says it does (3% of enemy maximum hull as blast damage. Was actually 2.25%, and erroneously reported 3%)

Minor Changes

• Reflexive Shields has been reworked and given a visual upgrade. Additionally, it does considerably more damage
• Sources of burn such as Discharge, other lightning mods, and Helix Orbs which did not previously stack damage from overlapping instances now do so
• In addition to its attack now stacking, Galvanic Outburst provides an additional +2% shield effect power. However, it can no longer be self-triggered in order to differentiate it from Discharge
• Regenerative Shields now applies its effect 75% to shields and 50% to hull, up from 70% and 30%
• Death Blossom and Emergency systems now require your shield to protect you, not your constructs. Shielded Constructs now blocks Emergency Systems from appearing in the upgrade pool
• Shielded Constructs flat hull and hull increases +5 -> +10 and +5% -> +10% respectively
• Hypermetabolism has been reworked. It now reserves hull and shields instead of reducing them. Its increased regeneration values have been reduced, but since the maximum value from which they are derived is no longer reduced, the resulting values are similar
• The Defiance mod has been reworked, as it was allowing certain builds to achieve immortality. It turns out that "plating" is an extremely strong modifier when stacked high
• Defiance self damage reduction +7% -> +4%
• Defiance plating 1 -> .5
• Defiance now additionally resists recoil and thrust-reducing effects by 4% each
• Celestial Lance damage and self-damage have been reduced by 10%. The damage and self-damage now ramp up over time the longer the aura is maintained through fast movement
• Loaded Mines and Death Blossom were scaling more than intended from added projectile modifiers. These mods now use a new formula
• 4% -> 5% global damage per unspent mod for Ataraxia
• 85 -> 90 base hull for the Research and Engineer bodies
• -15% -> -10% shields for the Research and Engineer bodies
• 80 -> 100 base shields for Siphon Shield
• 65 -> 70 base shields for Temporal Shield
• Blade splinters no longer collide with enemy projectiles
• Blade splinters now degenerate and decelerate faster
• Blade splinters now reduce hull by an additional 25%
• Warp Strike damage malus for screen-wrapping 5 + 15% of your defenses -> 5 + 10%
• Velocity and Snipe each provide 5% less of an increase to projectile speed. To compensate, the base velocity of most weapons has been increased by 10%. Railgun, instead, had its base damage increased. These mods felt like too much of a shoe-in for certain weapons to hit a usable threshold
• Antimatter Rounds self-damage decreased about 5%
• Rupture now does what it says it does (3% of enemy maximum hull as blast damage. Was actually 2.25%, and erroneously reported 3%)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where the wave would elect to advance despite there being an enemy spawner present (but no enemies)
• Fixed Hives getting trapped off-screen (fourth time is the charm?)
• Purification wasn't healing the player in most cases, it is now functioning again
• Dart now triggers Eclipse Shield retaliations
• Pausing doesn't interrupt Death Blossom anymore
• Prevented Skirmish from proccing in edge cases where you can't fire, but somehow do anyway
• Fixed several strange interactions of Bastion Shield and Reflexive Shields
• Fixed a crash related to Ally targeting
• Fixed a "leak" with Celestial Shots getting stuck off-screen causing slowdown
• Fixed odd Minelayer shield behavior
• Fixed a typo preventing strafing or displacing left from working on game pad