News - Big Killstreak Buffs & The Reaper Is Back. Warzone 2 Season 4 Patch Details
With this, we saw a good handful of really solid changes. There are many changes I've been asking for quite some time, and it's great to see them come to the game. Not only do we see weapon balancing, but we also see footstep adjustments, as well as what we're going to be focusing on in this first article.
This is a bunch of kill streak adjustments as well as the addition of a few new kill streaks. If you guys are interested in the other changes, like the footstep changes as well as weapon balancing changes. I actually plan on having a second separate article today covering the footstep challenges since I think it does deserve its own article, and then tomorrow is when I plan to get to the weapon balancing just because that one takes a little more time to put together, but without further ado, let's dive right into the topic today, and this is our kill streak changes.
General streak adjustment
And first off, we have a general kill streak change that's going to apply to all of the kill streaks, and this is something I've been asking for like a couple months now, so I'm really happy to see this. This is the spawn protection against kill streaks, which will now be disabled when a player inflicts damage or locks on to a kill streak with a launcher, and this is excellent news: if you don't shoot at that kill streak, you'll still have that 4 seconds of spawn protection.
That's how much spawn protection we get. Keep in mind that spawn protection only works against streaks, not enemy players with guns. However, if you try to shoot back at that streak within those four seconds, it will immediately turn off your spawn protection.
Specific killstreak changes
But then, on top of this, they did increase the explosive damage radius from 7.6 M up to 8.9 M, so it's going to be a bit more lethal. As well, for the cruise missile, they buffed this as well, increasing our explosive damage radius from 15.2 M up to 22.9 M; that's a 50% improvement, which should make it quite a bit more deadly as well.
Then, with the SAE, just like with the precision air strike, they decreased the delay before the explosive damage occurred by 2 seconds. So again, there's going to be less time to react to that when you hear that it's called in. They also increased the explosive damage radius by 7%—not a massive difference, but there is a bit of an improvement there, and one thing I really like that they did with this is that they removed the stun effect on victims before death.
That's the most frustrating thing about the SAE. I don't mind dying to an SAE outright, but I hate the fact that you get sort of locked in place, there's nothing you can do, and then you end up dying. I'd much rather just die immediately than have that stunned feeling before death, so that should make the SAE more powerful while simultaneously being less frustrating to die to, at least based on how it sounds on paper.
After that, the remote turret saw some key Nerfs. The first thing is that they increase the cost from seven kills up to eight kills, or the equivalent score value, so it's going to take a little bit more to earn one. They also decrease the number of hits required for the turret. Destruction for specific damage types So with melee, instead of taking 12 hits with a melee to kill a turret, now it's just three hits, and with launchers, it went from three hits down to two hits to take one out, and then on top of that, they improved detection of EMP hits from the Storm Ender launcher against the remote turret, and this is just something I found in my testing to be quite inconsistent.
Sometimes you'd shoot the remote turret directly, and the storm ender just wouldn't do anything to it when it should, and these seem like good changes to the remote turret. It's still going to be just as lethal as it was before the update; it's mainly going to be a bit easier to counter now, and it takes a bit more effort to earn one.
As for the wheelson, they nerfed this by increasing the cost required, so it was eight kills. Now, after this update, it's nine kills, or again, the equivalent score values. I'm not going to read out the score values every single time. After that, the OverWatch Hilo saw a nerf as well as a buff.
The nerf is that they increased the cost to earn one from 8 kills up to 9 kills, whereas the buff is that they decreased incoming damage dealt by bullets by 50%. I think there should be some incentive to run launchers to take out streaks and before this update it didn't really make sense to use launchers since you could just look up to the sky with whatever gun you happened to have in your hands and if one or two people were doing this you could take that streak out really quickly before it had any time to get kills, so overall this was definitely a net buff to the OverWatch Hilo, next with the emergency air drop they decreased the cost to earn this from 10 kills down to 9 kills so a bit of a buff there then with the carpet bomb they decrease the cost from 10 kills down to eight kills so quite a nice buff there and on top of that they increase the explosive damage radius from 10.2 M up to 12.7.
M so a 25%, boost there and they increase the bommer flight speed by 40%, so there'll be less time to react to a carpet bomb coming in and this should make this streak quite a bit more powerful that's a combination of three Buffs and I'm looking forward to checking this one out especially after the update I think it's going to be quite good now.
After that, with the T, they increase the cost from 10 kills to 11 kills, so a bit of a Nerf there, but then we got the same buff as the OverWatch Hilo, where they decrease incoming damage dealt by bullets by 50%, so that's a pretty big buff that's going to make the valls harder to shoot down with regular guns, but then on top of that, they did decrease the machine gun explosive damage from 27, down to 20, so it'll be slightly less lethal in that sense, and I would say with all of these combined, it seems like they all just sort of balance out and it's just going to perform different rather than just straight up better or straight up worse.
As for the gunship, they increase the cost on this from 12 kills up to 13 kills with the chopper Gunner they did the same thing they increased the cost from 12 kills up to 13 kills, and they did the same thing as the Vall and the OverWatch Hilo with the incoming bullet damage they also decrease the turret explosive damage from 45 to 35 so slightly less lethal there and they decrease the explosive damage radius from 1.7 m to 1.3 M so you have to be a bit more on target with it But another thing to point out here is the general spawn protection adjustment that I mentioned earlier.
