This Week at Scorched: 5/1/22

“Twas” a week of scorched.

Welcome back Pyros & Maniacs, today we’ve been cooking up something behind the scenes. I’ll cut to the chase here for you. As I’m sure you’re aware a lovely new batch of cannons has been cooking up, but what could this possibly mean? We’ve have been working tirelessly getting this ready for you; with GerbSnail making the cannons, nblock programming it all so we even have a bot to begin with, and our SCORCHED KING, making sure we do it all correctly, and me, writing this for you now! Lets go on a little bit of a highlight reel as we’ve added some new and exciting functions to your everyday scorching!

17 NEW CANNONS…? and a secret one

Ever wanted to take an exotic into scorched but couldn’t figure out which one? That’s a problem Gerb’s been working on solving. In my personal opinion Season 2’s cannons are leagues better then Season 1’s with so much more variety and flair, but there were some great things learned with their creation as well as an unfortunate realization. With the ever present problem of gun shaped guns persisting here’s a word from him on this next batch.

GerbSnail: Hello everyone, resident cannon builder here.

Last season’s cannons were pretty great, but in my opinion some of them were not my best work. While producing Season 1’s batch of cannons, I struggled to figure out why some of them turned out so well almost immediately while others felt like a struggle to make. Fortunately, I finally figured it out right as Zombie asked me to start work on Season 2. This discovery originated with a funny anecdote that Zombie will never let me forget, the creation of the Wave Cannon. I was hesitant to make it at first because I didn’t know how well it would turn out, but for whatever reason it just ‘clicked’ and to my genuine surprise it turned out to be one of the best. The answer did not in fact lie on some hidden skill I randomly pulled out of nowhere, but instead it was the weapon choice that made all the difference.

The biggest takeaway was that some weapons work really well and others definitely do not. If the weapon’s right, it’s almost like it takes no effort at all to make the cannon. For Season 2, I wanted the creation of every cannon to feel like making the wavesplitter, not like some difficult slog, but instead just letting the pieces fall into place. In order to find the exotics that fit this category, I decided to put out a set of rules for myself to ensure that every model in Season 2 is a banger:

1. Every cannon needs to have a 60:40 ratio. Too much gun and it just ends up looking like a big version of that gun. Too much cannon, and it just looks lazy. For example, I attempted to make a Ruinous Effigy based cannon, but it ended up just looking like a big Ruinous Effigy instead of a cool scorch cannon.

2. The weapon model can’t look too “gun shaped.” Because of the round-ish nature of the scorch cannon, it’s hard to work with weapons that are very flat and gun shaped. Instead, the best weapon models are the ones that are more 3D and weird looking. For example, I attempted to make a Vigilance Wing based cannon, but because of its shape the only real ‘unique’ aspect of the weapon were the wings on the side of the cannon and the paint job. It by proxy also broke the 60:40 rule, so it was cut.

3. The weapon needs to have enough material. Basically the way I make these things is that I get the original weapon model and dissect its parts, scaling and placing them onto the cannon in a way that makes sense. I wanted to make the trio of exotic hand cannons (Last Word/Thorn/Lumina) into scorch cannons because in theory that would look awesome, but in practice there just wasn’t enough there to be able to make something of it.

In Season 2, there are going to be 18 brand new cannons for you to go after, and they are miles better than the Season 1 batch. Unlike last time, we will be locking the cannon inspection command so that in order to take a look at a cannon, you as a community will have to unlock it first. I know you’re dying to take a look at the new creations, but we thought that it would be a more satisfying experience this way. The final cannon is animated and honestly probably my best work, so believe me when I say that it’ll be well worth the wait.

Finally, I would like to bring you all some bad news. Unfortunately until there are more exotics in the game, there are no more cannons that I can make without compromising on my rules in some way. As sad as it makes me say it, I don’t think there will be a Batch 3 any time soon. Fear not, however, because of course we are already cooking up something special for Season 3, coming probably as soon as you all get close to finishing this season’s content path. Anyways, that’s all from me for now, happy scorching!

We’re sure you’re dying to figure out what cannons you’ll find in Season 2 but you’ll just have to wait a little longer. We want to surprise you with the amazing work coming, so you won’t be able to preview these cannons just yet. That being said, the other day I asked if I could make a meme to tease the season, and was told no, so instead, here’s a meme Gerb made immediately after I got told no ;).

Doubling your Bounty

On select weekends (ie. the last scorch week of a season or whenever we feel like it tbh), there’s gonna be a double Scoin Weekend! The Bonus applies from Saturday reset to Weekly reset on Tuesday, and for the duration Scoins gained from any source are doubled! (Except winning gambling. we’re not trying to break our fragile little economy :p) As a celebration of Guardian Games and the release of Season 2, Double Scoin weekend will be active this week! Get that bonus while you can and fast track your path along the season 2 track!

KING: Pending they don’t fuck us and replace it with supremacy.

Choose your Main

Another addition to your main arsenal is Cannon Masterworking! Pick a cannon and level it through 5 different levels, matching our role structure. For each level of the masterwork you gain an additional 2 scoins per win! Pick your main cannon and level it up all the way to Inferno to get all 10 Scoins, or spread yourself out across many cannons and get a bunch of +2 bonuses for every Masterworked cannon! You can find the specific ranks of each masterwork and required kills in the patch notes section below.

We wanted to allow you to have your own “signature” cannons, so this comes in tandem with Cannon kill trackers. Rack up those kills and make these cannons your own! You can find your kill tracker and current masterwork level in your Scorched Inventory. Personally I’m shooting for the “Scorch Cannon?” as my signature.

Scorching Statistics

Now for what might be a slightly more common of feature of these Twas, statistics! nblock has kindly provided me some of the internal screenshots of the Scorch Bot and some final statistics for Season 1. honestly there isn’t much to say so I’ll let the data speak for itself! Unfortunately we don’t have kill stats for Season 1 as they weren’t set up yet until we got the kill trackers working. We’ll have that for next time. This will be a wrap for the body of this TWAS, but we ain’t done here yet! We’ve got some more little goodies cooked up here for you after the stats!

nblock: I keep track of too many things.

KING: I’ll fix that richest stat soon

Scorching Support: Update 2.0

Yes I actually sat down and wrote patch notes for this. nblock: naaaah really.

[SCOIN UPDATES]

• The hard cap on Scoins has been removed. (Previously was 25000)
• Old Scoin distribution system has been deprecated in favor of a new system.
• Each Cannon Bought now awards an increasing Scoin bonus depending on the season.
• Cannon prices follow the same scheme as bonus Scoins.

[GAMBLING UPDATES]

• Double Scoin weekends will be active on select Scorched Weeks. Starting Saturday at reset and until weekly reset, you gain Double Scoins from all sources!
• When Map Voting is available only the highest multiplier will be taken into account.

| 3.0x - Correct map
| 2.0x - Double Incorrect Map
| 1.5x - Default Incorrect Map

[MASTERWORKING BONUS]

• Cannon Masterworking has been added, following the same rank advancement as Scorch Bot’s roles
• For each Masterwork on a cannon you gain an additional 2 scoins.
• Masterworks cannot be stacked like roles.

| 500 Kills - Ash
| 1000 Kills - Spark
| 2500 Kills - Flame
| 5000 Kills - Blaze
| 10000 Kills - Inferno

[MISC UPDATES]

• A cannon kill tracker has been added to your inventory, kills to your cannon will be added at the end of each match.
• A 24 hour cooldown has been added for swapping seasons.
• Scorched Inspect can now only inspect globally found Cannons.

Regular TWAB TWAS Activities

We totally didn’t get this idea from anywhere else.

[CLIP OF THE WEEK]

KING: Sir mac and cheese showed even without ammo you aren’t completely hopeless with the dive to clutch out one final ghost, that sure was a new one!

Link

[HATEMAIL OF THE WEEK]

KING: Oblivion king was around a lot last week and was hating up a storm, for being so good at crucible he said he could smoke us he spent more time typing than he did getting higher than the bottom of the leaderboard.

Link

[WHOLESOMEMAIL OF THE WEEK]

KING: Always nice to see people be kind in this mode, maybe one day we can have enough scorchers to make this more common.

Link

Annnnnd Scene

And that’s a wrap. To be honest with you I’m not sure how often we’ll have actual things to report in here, but I’m totally alright with sharing stats and having a good laugh at those we burn to the ground in our inferno of a gamemode. So if you see me or some of your fellow pyromaniacs in VC hop in and say hi! We’ll be grinding Season 2 right alongside you. Who will claim the 17th cannon first? We’ll see! For now I’ll see you around.

Your local TWAS writer and lurker - Jon

cough cough scorched lore soon cough cough