“Great news, Brimstone. Terran Command has given the greenlight for our trial weapon modification program. The objective is to turn each soldier into a true Archie-killing machine on the battlefield! There has been some troubling but unconfirmed intelligence of the Bugs evolving thicker armor to deal with our weapons and we want to stay ahead of the curve”
Weapon Mastery is our new secondary progression system for weapons. All weapons will be able to gain XP and rank up. As they rank up, they can unlock weapon attachments and will be able to shift the way weapons perform out on the field. You can also unlock weapon skins, allowing you to customize your weapons, and lastly, you can achieve weapon mastery upon reaching rank 10 with any weapon. Achieving weapon mastery on a weapon that is locked to a specific class will allow you to use that weapon with any class.
Gaining XP
Weapons will gain XP when you kill an Arachnid with that weapon. To keep things simple, weapons gain the same XP as the player receives for the kill.
Ranking Up
After reaching a certain amount of XP, your weapons will rank up. When a weapon ranks up, any unlocks tied to that rank will become available for you to equip.
Weapon Modifications
Weapon modifications come in 4 types: Ammo, Magazine, Internals and Sights.
- Each of these types can have ONE modification at a time.
- These modifications can have a variety of positive and negative effects on the weapons.
Example: Extended Mags, which are now part of weapon mastery, offer 50% increased Mag capacity for the weapon. So the advantage would be a minor overall increase in ammo and less time spent reloading, but you may have to rearm at base more often, as the downside to this mastery is you have fewer mags available.
With the release of the next update, troopers should keep in mind that weapons will not come out of the gate with their full-fledged mastery tracks and we will be looking to fill the progression track more as we develop Starship Troopers: Extermination. That said, every weapon will have a mastery track enabled, and any modifications added in the future will be retroactively unlocked as long as you’ve reached the appropriate rank with your weapon.
Weapon Mastery
- Once you master a weapon by reaching rank 10 with it, you will unlock the Mastery for that weapon. Mastery will allow you to now use that weapon on ANY class as long as you are at the right level within the class.
Example: If the Hawkeye unlocks at Level 4 on the Sniper, and you master it, you have to be at least Level 4 in the class you would like to use it on as well.
Weapon mastery will carry over between classes meaning that once you master it, it’s mastered on all classes, and you will not have to redo the progression track to acquire modifications again.
This feature has quite a few areas we hope to impact when it is released with 0.7.0, and we want to share our reasoning behind the changes and what we expect to come from the Mastery System.
Add New Unlocks for Players to Chase.
Leveling up is fun and so is having goals to work towards. A system like weapon mastery provides more goals while giving interesting rewards
Learn the Basics, Then Break the Rules.
Mastery is inherently a bit of a rule breaker when talking about classes. It takes previously exclusive things and suddenly says “But what if…?”. That in itself is a pretty cool idea and one of the things we’d love to see is what the community is going to do with the different possibilities. Maybe we see Rangers with the FU17 Flamethrower running around, or Medics and Engineers will take up the mantle of Hawkeye once more. The most experienced troopers of the Deep Space Vanguard have earned the Federation’s confidence that they will choose whatever loadout gets the job done.
Try out New Things.
Troopers, we hear you loud and clear that a lot of people tend to gravitate towards a favorite class, but variety is the spice of life. We think weapon mastery is a great incentive to move to another class but keep some familiarity and progress. Mastered everything on your Sniper and want to try out the Demolisher? Well, once you progress through the initial few basic levels, your weapons will be there ready and waiting for you to kill some Bugs.
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We hope you’ve been enjoying these developer blogs on what is to come with the next update. We still have plenty we want to share before the update arrives so stay alert troopers!
If you want to share your thoughts on these dev blogs to us the devs or just chat with fellow troopers, come join ST:E Community Discord!