AirMech v27424 - Return of the Beta Bundle! Now with Beta Striker! Free upgrade for existing owners!

Beta Bundle is back! After much discussion and negotiation, we have settled on the contents and price to re-release the Beta Bundle for players as we near the end of Beta. All existing owners get free upgrades to the new content, including the amazingly awesome Beta Striker, the second generation of the Alpha Striker. The price is high, at $75, but was arrived at by looking at the price of the Beta Bomber on the Player Market for completed sales. It's average price would be over $45 USD, so adding a second exclusive variant, actually makes this a great deal. And it can only go up in value from here. Balance! We've been saving up a lot of balance changes for after the tournament, along with a number of changes to attempt to make the game more accessible for new players. Something that might give an initial shock is the reduction of movement speeds in the air. We need to slow these down to give us the headroom to increase lag tolerance. Proportionally, they should all be the same as they were before, and some of the carry speeds should be a bit better. Pay close attention to the global changes to AirMechs below. They have always had a reduction in damage vs units to balance them out a bit, and we're reducing this value which will make them a lot more deadly vs units. There will be a domino effect here, changing the survivability of almost every unit vs AirMechs. The auto-repair changes are also quite drastic, so make sure you try it out.

Updates

• Beta Bundle released! Needs to be purchased ingame.

• Alpha Bundle owners receive special pricing for the Beta Bundle!

• Beta Striker awarded to existing Beta Bundle owners on login

• Wooden Zeppelin is the newest Diamond VIP bonus reward

Balance Changes

All AirMechs

• Lunchboxes on Outposts now are a shield like the Fortress (should work better)

• remove auto-repair when moving/firing

• 100% increase to auto-repair rate (after 3 seconds of not moving/firing)

• note that auto-repair rate is doubled in ground mode (always been this way)

• reduce all air movement speeds by 10%

• tweaked carry values for heavy loads to reflect new movement speed

• increase damage vs units by 30%

• decrease recharge rate over Outposts by 8%

• increase turning responsiveness of various AirMechs

Bomber

• increase Air DPS by 4%

• increase Melee DPS by 20% (Melee does not get the +30% buff)

• increase Armor by 7%

• decrease Fuel use for Bombs by 30%

Neo

• increase Air DPS by 7%

Angel

• Increase transform to air speed by 10%

• Increase pistol Piercing damage by 10%

Units

• Assassin Melee Damage increased by 33%

• Assassin Build Time reduced by 33%

• Assassin Movement Speed increased by 11%

• Joker HP decreased by 4%

• Joker Piercing Damage increased to 20 from 5

• Joker DPS reduced by 25%

• Zipper Piercing Damage doubled

• Tango Piercing Damage doubled

• Jackal Piercing Damage increased by 17%

• Longhorn/Gemini/Goliath/Devastator Movement Speed decreased by 22%

• Longhorn/Gemini turret rotation speed reduced by 22%

• Goliath/Devastator turret rotation speed reduced by 17%

• Grinder rear weak spot added (it is a tank after all)

• Dinger HP increased 33%

• Bucky Accuracy increased 33%

• Seeker missile damage reduced 9%

• Seeker and T99 missile lifetime reduced 6%

• T45 Build Time reduced by 25%

• T45 Build Cost reduced 17%

• T45 HP reduced 17%

• VaultBox HP increased 50%

• Bombs Build Time increased 14%

• Bombs