Pigeons at Devlog 6/19/26: Balancing

Balance Changes

We’ve got some big balance changes coming with the enemy update. We’re focusing on the Shocklance, Plate Launcher, and Swarm Launcher, and yes, Micro Detonators is getting a small nerf.

Before we get into the details, some background on our balancing philosophy: While it’s tempting to lean into the “don’t nerf, only buff” mindset we don’t want to feed the powercreep too hard. Over time the game gets easier, so enemies need to get harder, and it turns into a cycle of boringness. Which is boring. While we’re happy to let overpowered upgrades stay overpowered for a while (they fun), eventually we do want to bring them in line with their peers. That said, we have a couple rules we like to follow when balancing:

1. When an upgrade is nerfed, buff one or more other upgrades to create interesting alternatives.

2. Even if an upgrade is cool, we don’t want any of them to feel mandatory.

3. Nerfed upgrades should still be good. We try to never balance something into the ground.

With that out of the way, lets move onto a few changes coming with the next update!

Shocklance

Micro Detonators

• Reduced the chance for Micro Detonator explosions to trigger more explosions

• Elemental explosions have no impact damage and now only deal damage from their over-time elemental effects

• Increased impact damage on non-elemental explosions:

  • Min: 12 → 40

  • Max: 18 → 44

• Micro Detonators has been insanely powerful for a long time, and we want to bring it back a bit without torching the upgrade - to keep it feeling cool we’re trying to balance it without lowering its explosion chance. We’re giving extra impact damage to non-elemental Micro Detonator explosions to make them a little more useful.

Gearshift

• Increased post-auger charge speed by 30%

• Increased duration by 25%

• Gearshift is currently the least-used Shocklance epic so we’re increasing its stats a bit. We want the charge speed boost to feel more impactful when combined with upgrades that increase your charge time.

Splintered Lance

• Reduces damage by ~50%

• Splintered Lance was essentially providing a 3x damage boost, especially when combined with Notched Breakpoint for reduced spread. We tried just making it so that multiple coils can’t damage the same target in a single shot, but it ended up feeling better to give a flat damage reduction instead so that it still gives a bit of a damage boost.

Ready and Waiting

• Increased passive charge rate when the Shocklance is unequipped by 560%

• Added a UI indicator that shows the Shocklance’s current charge when its unequipped

• Our goal with this change is for Ready and Waiting to allow you to fire off a shot, switch weapons, and then switch back without needing to charge it yourself. This upgrade previously had an unnecessarily slow charge speed when the Shocklance was unequipped.

Half Cocked

• Reduced max coil size:

  • Min: +110% → +57%

  • Max: +160% → +66%

• Much of the Shocklance’s superiority comes from its ability to get massive AOE sizes. Half Cocked already does a lot, so we’re lowering the coil size increase it gives from a fully charged shot.

Fisticuffs

• Damage boost stat is now labeled as ‘damage’ (previously was incorrectly labeled as ‘speed’)

• Increased damage boost:

  • Min: 9 → 19

  • Max: 11 → 28

Plate Launcher

Plasma Blades

• Plasma blades now deal reduced damage compared to direct hits with a plate

• Plasma Blades my beloved. The blades look too cool to reduce their size, so we’re instead making them deal less damage than direct plate hits. They’re still really good, but not quite so insane.

Slap Job

• Reduced spread

  • Min: 10 → 9

  • Max: 20 → 10.5

• Slap Job was like laughably unusable so we’re reducing its spread by about half.

Damage Arc

• Damage Arc can’t be triggered by shooting your plate with another plate

• The core idea of Damage Arc is to encourage you to swap to your other weapon to shoot your plate, but the best way to use this upgrade was to throw on a bunch of plates and shoot them into each other - we hope to bring it back to that core identity by disallowing plate-on-plate damage. We’re also working on a new Plate Launcher upgrade that encourages single-plate builds :)

Nice Catch

• Reduced the damage you take when catching a plate by 50%

• The damage you take is further reduced for each extra bullet in your magazine capacity

• Increased move speed when holding your Plate Launcher by 100%

• An upgrade that damages you is always gonna be tough to fit into a build, but we’re hoping that decreasing self-damage for larger mag sizes will make it a bit more useful.

Bouncy Plates

• Reduced upgrade size from 5 to 3 cells

Swarm Launcher

Munition Siphon

• Reduced upgrade size from 8 to 5 cells

• Increased grenade charge rate by ~40%

• Munition Siphon didn’t feel as potent as it should have so we’ve made it recharge your grenade faster and made it easier to fit into your Swarm Launcher builds.

Remote Control

• Reduced upgrade size from 4 to 3 cells

Over Extend

• Doesn’t reduce magazine size as much

  • Min → -40% → -10%

  • Max → -30% → -4%

High Caliber Pellets

• Pellets no longer automatically dive

• Since the Swarm Launcher already has another upgrade that makes pellets auto-dive (AND the upcoming Swarm exotic also stops pellets from hovering) it was kind of redundant for High Caliber to do the same thing.

Cones

I’ve been working on a new weapon slated to come with 1.0. It’s an energy weapon that doesn’t fire individual projectiles, and I want it to deal damage in a cone. The problem is, Unity’s physics engine doesn’t have any sort of query to find objects overlapping a cone. I considered convening the cone council but figured it wasn’t worth their time.

So, how do we get a cone query without cones? We fake it approximate!

I ended up splitting the cone into multiple capsule queries that get progressively fatter as they get further along the cone. I add more capsules if the cone angle is wider. Here’s a visualization:

If an enemy is found inside a capsule, we fire a ray from the gun to the closest point on the enemy’s collider to make sure there isn’t a wall in the way. If the ray hits a solid surface then we ignore that enemy.

Of course, one enemy may be inside more than one capsule, and we certainly wouldn’t want to damage the poor guy twice. Enemies that the [REDACTED]gun damages are stored in a temporary hash set (a collection that can’t contain duplicates) so that we can cheaply go:

if (AlreadyDamaged(target)) { dont; }

Enemies

Meet the Lacerator! He’s a new abomination variant that spawns with no ranged weapons, but he doesn’t slow when meleeing.

And, of course, the Fridge.

The explosive barrel brute also got a visual revamp. Plus, we fixed an issue where he would sometimes keep running at full speed after beginning to explode.