Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League dev Rocksteady has announced plans to create an entirely new leaderboard due to a Burn bug.
In a post on the game’s Discord, Rocksteady discussed the looter shooter’s upcoming patch, and in doing so said that it had noticed “some of our more dedicated players started reaching Mastery Levels beyond our wildest expectations.”
The root cause of this is a bug with the Burn status effect. This was supposed to scale across the Mastery Levels so it remains viable for damage dealing, but a “major” unintended bug made it scale incorrectly. “As Mastery levels increased, Burn's damage also increased, which basically meant that if you used a Burn build, every Mastery Level had the same difficulty,” Rocksteady explained.
The developer said the bug “left us with somewhat of a conundrum.” “Our most dedicated players had now reached a Mastery Level far beyond what the game was balanced for at launch due to this bug, and weren't getting the challenge or variety we wanted our End Game to provide. We had to ask ourselves, what can we do to fix this, and more importantly, should we fix it at all?”
In the end, Rocksteady decided the Burn bug had to go. Explaining its decision, the studio said: “While there is no doubt that the Burn build is a really powerful and fun build - it should be! - we didn't intend for it to be the only viable End Game build for launch and beyond.”
So, the bug will be fixed so that it scales correctly with damage taken effects on enemies, as originally intended. But Burn’s ability to scale infinitely is not long for this world.
Unfortunately, the knock-on effect of this bug is that Rocksteady has been forced to reset the game’s leaderboards. “Since this change will be pretty fundamental to the leaderboards and your continued progression on them, we are committed to creating a new leaderboard for you all, so you can continue to explore the different builds in the game.
“All the entries on the current leaderboard will exist in perpetuity and will be a permanent record of all your achievements. We want to applaud you all for both your dedication on getting this high in the Mastery Levels (and also breaking the game). Kudos!”
Elsewhere, Rocksteady plans to stop combat Mastery levels 50 and beyond increasing enemy health too much, too quickly. “We've seen some comments suggesting that enemy health at later Mastery Levels was too high, which makes the climb too steep past Mastery Level 50,” Rocksteady explained. “For that reason, we're adjusting our approach to Mastery Level balancing. Enemy health will now increase in a much less aggressive way, with the intent that more builds will crop up as viable options.”
The Heat Wave's Molten Skin and The Turtle's Shell will also be adjusted, so that they reduce damage taken by 90% rather than give immunity. Rocksteady, again: “At the moment, these items were too easy to trigger and it is simply a bit too easy to keep the buff up, especially at higher Mastery Levels, and we wanted skilled players to need to use their mastery of their characters' traversal and the mastery of combat mechanics and mastery of build construction to survive.”
Looking further ahead, Rocksteady said it will provide players with a look into Season 1 in the coming weeks, and longer-term changes it’s thinking about.
There’s much we don’t know about Rocksteady’s long-term plan for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, although we do know Joker is set to appear as a playable character. Last week, we reported on how a Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League player had unearthed a hidden message that looked like a strong hint at the return of Batman. Datamining has shown strong hints that Flash and Green Lantern are set to return in some form. Other playable characters suspected to be on their way include Mrs Freeze (Nora Fries), Lawless, and Deathstroke.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
