M.A.S.S. Builder – WIP: 0.9.0 Property Damage Changes – Steam News

During the development of M.A.S.S. Builder, we’ve seen players create an uncountable amount of M.A.S.S. units. One of them being thematically elemental robots has always caused distress to players with how property damages work in our game, conflicting their interest in making these "God of Thu…

Vermillion is always ready to address some very specific gripes from the M.A.S.S. Builder playerbase. This one’s interesting to me personally because I’ve also felt downright compelled to mix in all damage types and not lean too heavily into any specific themes.

I play on Very Hard, leave me alone.

I don’t know anything about “God of Thunder Swordmaster Machines” or “Fire Breathing Dragon M.A.S.S.” but I do know that if I had things my way, my builds would mostly include normal and fire based damage, with lightning where it’s appropriate. The ice element doesn’t fit into most of my design themes and yet I always have it somewhere just to balance out the weapons. It usually goes on chainguns or missiles because that sticks out the least for me.

Here’s where things are currently heading:

• Removed elemental disadvantages from the game, there are now only either neutral or advantage with property damages.
• Every enemy now has almost the same property damage resistance with every property damage. Property advantages will only result in around 5% to 10% more damage when correct element is used now. Players who bring multiple elements can still take advantage of it, but they aren’t forced to or be punished now.
• Architecture and tech nodes now make property damage much more effective than before. Players who don’t invest in property damage will now have around 30% less damage when using weapons with property damage in comparison to raw damage while those investing an architecture node (such as Revenant) will make this number back to 0% less damage. This should allow players to specifically use Architectures and Tech nodes to counter the lowered damage and perform as well as other methods of play through property debuffs.
• Balance special debuffs to match the new powers as best as we can.
• M.A.S.S. type enemies (including in PvP) is not effected by any status effects, but their property damage resistance are now lower than Quarks.

My original thought was to make elemental disadvantage less noticeable generally by shifting the damage gap more to the right (less damage reduction for disadvantage and more for advantage), but that idea wasn’t node based, it was more of a universal game tweak.

The more I think about it while looking over the notes, the more I prefer Vermillion’s approach. Customization through the node system is a better way to go, and makes use of more of the game’s mechanics. This, as opposed to just tweaking values universally which could inadvertently push the node system well past what the devs intended.

Of course, they’re aware that certain elements in PvE can get wildly overtuned very easily:

And they’ve promptly chucked that concern out a window. My feelings on that were mixed until I thought back on games at the far end of the spectrum (New Gundam Breaker). Things could get silly, but that won’t detract from the fun as a whole, and if it starts to, Vermillion will do what they always do and quickly address it.

So kudos.