Ahead of a balance patch currently planned for Tuesday, January 13, Arc Raiders design lead Virgil Watkins of developer Embark offered a preview of changes being applied to two balance outliers: the Kettle rifle and Trigger Nades.
Speaking with GamesRadar+ as part of a forthcoming wide-ranging interview, Watkins discusses the balance of power and value among Arc Raiders' gear tiers. The Kettle, a common semi-auto rifle capable of melting players when wielded with fast fingers (or a good old-fashioned macro), and Trigger Nades, which are by far the most lethal standard-use grenades around, upset that balance of power as-is and are eating deserved nerfs.
"I can probably say this now," Watkins begins. "In the update on Tuesday, we're mitigating the Kettle issue, we're dealing with Trigger Nades, and then, of course, we're looking at kind of shuffling, as we keep going with some of the balancing."
I asked how the Kettle is being changed. As expected, Embark is lowering its fire rate cap. The gun technically has a cap right now, but it's so high that, if you even approach the limit, you'll be insta-killing players in a way that feels like an error.
"We even saw videos of people doing it manually, they're just that fast," Watkins says. "But yeah, it is really just that we lowered its max possible fire rate."
Trigger Nades, I feared, might be taken to a farm upstate for their crimes. Watkins reassures me that Embark wants to preserve the precise, timed, and powerful explosions that define these little monsters while still reining in their one-size-fits-all potency, which has at times turned PvP into a very lethal game of dodgeball, because who needs guns?
"The intent right now is, the damage falloff curve is changing," he explains. "You have to be a lot more exact to get the full damage. The intent with them is, you land them on the target and that's where you're doing your max damage. And then a triggering time adjustment, so you can't have it leave your hand and just blow it up immediately. You require a bit more lead time."
A Kettle that still performs but can't be abused, and Trigger Nades that hurt (and, critically, hurt Arc) up close but demand far more accuracy and care? I haven't played with the new balance patch myself, obviously, but these sound like elegant changes – an encouraging response to some early pain points for the game's meta.
"Then we're taking a look more widely at the band of, where does it sit on the rarity spectrum?" Watkins adds. "What does it cost to make or maintain using these things versus the effective output of them, and shuffling those things a little bit. That won't be in this next coming update, but that's what we're looking at in a wider scheme."
