Deep Dive: Guards and Heat

Agents, our topic this week is centered around guards, their behavior and their connection to the heat system. We’ve put a lot of effort into this update to reduce frustration from guard behavior during pvp fights and make their response more in-tune with player behavior to give you more tools to avoid a strong response from guards. Let’s have a look at how we are tackling all this in practice.

Updated Guards Behavior
Guards will now scale their response depending on the heat level of the spy. Here’s how heat penalties work now and how it affects guard behavior.

No heat: Guards will aggro from less far away and will only try to take you down with melee attacks. This level is meant to interfere very little with PVP fights and allow well behaving players to not get much PVE hostility. Guards can still shoot at you if you purposefully put yourself in a situation where they can’t melee you (jumping on a desk to wait around for example).

Heat Level 1: 25% additional damage taken and guards will start shooting at you. This is close to what guards currently do on live from a behavior standpoint.

Heat Level 2: 50% increased damage taken. Guards will aggro from farther away and you will be able to aggro up to 3 guards at once instead of 2.

Heat Level 3: 75% (down from 100% previously) increased damage taken. Guard response is identical to heat level 2 with the added downside of taking even more damage from their shots because of the additional vulnerable status.

To complement this, guards have received tweaks to their melee behavior to make them far less likely to punch you from behind as well as a slight buff to their weapon damage to make heat level 1 more dangerous from a PVE perspective.

Additionally, after a short grace period, aggro-ed guard will start building up your heat level over time, incentivizing players to cut line of sight and get back into cover. This means that standing in front of heat level 0 guards while juking them for a long time will eventually lead to heat level 1 popping up.

Heat Gained Buffer
Finally, the buffer to gain no heat after hitting a spy has been made longer and we also added a buffer on passive heat gained from aggro to not trigger if you gained heat actively from hitting a npc recently. This prevents the player from gaining double the heat from a single attack on a guard. The idea is that heat should not act as an accuracy check during a fight, we should be more lenient if a lost shot hits a npc while fighting other players.

The intent behind all of this is to reduce chaos in the average fight by making guards respond to something that scales with player action. If a spy plays in a very clean manner, they can expect guards to be less of a threat than before, players that gather a lot of heat will find the response much more daunting than before.

One more thing we want to make clear, is that these changes that are coming with Phase 1 of Operation Overhaul are just the start! The team is continuing to work on new systems and changes to the existing ones to help enhance Agents ability to successfully play more stealthily and enjoy more opportunities for tricks and mischief.

Some of these systems are already in test internally, but need more time to iterate on, while others are still more conceptual as a result of feedback from players and internal testing. We’ll be sharing more on these as development progress continues, so stay tuned!