Agents,

Today we are releasing PTS4 for Last Stand and Update 1.6, planned to be the final version of this testing cycle. With it, we are mostly tweaking what we established during the previous phases and we will not be doing any drastic changes in this iteration of the PTS.

We still want your feedback on Last Stand and Update 1.6, so please join us on the forums and make your voice heard! Your discussions and feedback continue to be invaluable to us.

Last Stand

Normalization

With PTS4, normalization will roll the max stat for all gear bonuses, gear mods, performance mods and weapons mods – in addition to the previous max rolls for major stats, weapon damage and weapon attributes – which means that your entire character will be scaled to a fully min-maxed 256 build. Your goal when putting together a build for Last Stand should now be completely focused around creating a build that suits your playstyle, instead of only trying to find a build where the stats are rolled fully to your advantage.

Normalization now rolls the max Gear Score 256 stat for
Your Gear major/minor bonuses
Gear Mods
Performance Mods
Weapon Mods
Major stats
Weapon damage
Weapon attributes

Fortifications

We have always wanted fortifications to help a solo player defend a tactical location, especially if the attacking team was not approaching tactically. With the previous tuning players were able to tank and heal against the turrets but the actual Time to Kill for the turret was fairly long. We are making the turrets more lethal if attackers are not playing smart, which should also help solo defenders hold down their home tactical location. The Pulse fortifications have not been changed.
The damage of the turret fortifications has increased by 40%. The health of the turret fortifications has decreased by 25%.

Join on the Fly

The issues we had with joining a Last Stand match already in progress during PTS2 have been resolved, and you are once again able to join on the fly. Also, players who joined as a group should no longer randomly be split up at the end of a match.
You can now join a Last Stand match already in progress again.

Mercy Rule

We continue to tweak the Mercy Rule and we will continue to adjust it as we gather more data. For now, we want to try to keep it more aggressive and see what players think. We would love to hear your feedback on this aspect.
Mercy Rule now activates at 10 minutes instead of eight.

Personal Score

Up until now, the scores used to calculate rewards at the end of the match were placeholders until we had more data on what kind of scores we could expect during a match. With PTS4, the score thresholds for Last Stand rewards have been increased. If your team wins the match, you will always get a win cache, no matter your personal score.
The Last Stand score thresholds are now 3000 for 1 cache, 6000 for 2 caches and 15 000 for three caches.

Game changes

Combat

Time to Kill was too fast during PTS3 and didn’t give enough time to work skills into encounters, so we’re lowering the PvP damage multiplier in PTS4. This change is subtle and should not dramatically affect the current pace of PvP. Additionally, with the updated normalization discussed above, players are going to be more lethal in general, which means we need to pull back the Time to Kill slightly.
The PvP damage multiplier has been lowered from 0.46 to 0.42. This change applies to both Last Stand and the Dark Zone.

Weapons

Historian
The Historian has been given back its base damage, which means that headshots and critical hit chance will once again have an effect on its performance. As noted during PTS3, the idea is to have a weapon that scales very well with Firearms, so we have given its explosive damage a further boost.
The explosive damage will now equal 700% of the user’s Firearms.

SMGs
During the testing of normalization in Last Stand, we had the opportunity to observe legacy SMGs that still had Critical Hit Chance on them in action. While we had initially planned to remove those weapons from the game, we realized that they were in a good place and that people really liked playing with them. Because of this, we decided to give back Critical Hit Chance to all SMGs instead.
SMGs have been given back their Critical Hit Chance, with a maximum roll of around 22%.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug in Last Stand where the player’s Last Stand rank was not displayed correctly.
Fixed a bug in Last Stand where the player would not receive credit for reviving teammates using Support Station.
Fixed bugs in Last Stand where the scoreboard would not display correctly.
Fixed a bug where players would be stuck at a vendor if the group leader canceled matchmaking for Last Stand.
Fixed a bug in Last Stand where kill notifications while the Points for Kills perk was active did not display correctly for the opposing team.
Fixed a bug in Last Stand where the player would spawn in the Dark Zone next time they log in after using Alt-F4 to quit the game.
Players can no longer open caches when in a Last Stand match.
Fixed a bug with Mobile Cover where talents Adept, Competent and Capable would stay active until either the cover was destroyed or the player changed cover.
Fixed a bug where sometimes the player would lose input functionality after closing the stash.
Fixed a bug where backpack skins did not display properly on the NinjaBike messenger bag on female characters.
Fixed a bug where your Turret and Seeker Mines would attack your own Support Station when Rogue.
Fixed an issue with the Distracted talent where it would always be active when shooting at an enemy’s body even if no status effects were active.
Fixed a bug where Banshee’s Shadow 4-piece bonus would stop working after changing phases.
Fixed a vendor bug where the player was unable to use the mouse to select the item they wanted to buy.
Fixed a bug where the LMB pants awarded from Legendary missions looked different on female character models.
Fixed a bug where the Defibrillator’s heal over time would not be renewed on multiple uses of the skill.
Fixed a bug where Seeker Mines with the Airburst mod would stay active even after being hit by an EMP effect.
Fixed a bug where a Favorited item could be accidentally marked as junk.
Fixed a bug where the Premium vendor would lose functionality if all items were bought.
Fixed a bug where the Signature skill cooldown would not update on the party’s UI if used outside of party range.
Fixed a bug where Dark Zone leaderboards would not display.
Fixed a bug with the Chromatic aberration graphical setting.