The Thunder augment collection is finally completed after a year. Much needed improvement to healing. Support Nanobots gets a nice buff (might end up being a repeat of the February 2019 Isida score farming) and offensive Isidas can be less hesitant to heal injured allies before going towards the enemy.

I've actually seen a noticeable increase in the number of Crusaders I see in battles recently, in all modes. So much so that getting a screen freeze (mobile bug with the icicle) has been become noticeably more common.

Ares with anything inflates your kill count in battle. Strict Ammunition Load has only be available in that bundle as well as only one iteration of UCs around a year ago, so not many people have it, and most of those who do have no reason to use it (they'd also have Vacuum Shell and Adaptive Reload). Furthermore, its niche has diminished a bit with the recent Thunder critical chance changes. Armadillo helps against it very well. With the amount of stray Armadillos in battles lately, it's nothing spectacular.

In my honest opinion it should stay that way. There's enough camping in the game right now and with Shaft specifically, it should set a precedent as petty as it may seem. It's one thing to get kicked for being in sniping mode for two minutes. It's another to be getting kills with the sniping mode and not moving your tank at all after that. ?

Why did you assume with certainty that he was talking about a Tanki Fund? Nothing in the video suggested anything about a Tanki Fund. The birthday celebrations aren't even here yet. You're really jumping the gun here.

Nothing about a Tanki Fund was said in that video anywhere. That picture is not a Tanki Fund. If anything, that looks like the new interface for the Challenges section which was shown in one of the recent Test Servers (weeks ago).

What Vlog number did he say this?

Crisis has always been an exotic reward in Ultra Containers since the day it came out in 2020.

People aren't looking forward to even more Pulsar spam. Just like with the Vacuum Shell/Helios Tanki Fund, I'm not looking forward to how battles will be after that, unless there is some across-the-board balance changes that would make them less obnoxious when fought often in battle before they arrive.

Gold boxes themselves are disabled, just like in the previous Solo Juggernaut Magistral mode.

Not everyone. There are players that go into the mode with combos specifically tailored to killing enemy Juggernauts or protecting thier own. I am the latter, and while I have an advantage of having a bit of horizontal auto-aim on the Terminator's Railguns, I have the disadvantage of uncomfortable mobility and a major weakness to 4 relatively common turrets in the mode - Smoky, Railgun, Hammer and the enemy Terminator. I try to avoid becoming the Jug because I am much more suited being its caretaker.

That's the "reinforcement" part of the MM system. It was there for quite some time but seemed to have kicked into overdrive earlier this year and became easily noticeable. When I'm doing special missions on my alt accounts for UCs, they usually had a pretty smooth time since their equipment is very strong for their ranks. It's only since earlier this year that I've started having problems finishing them quickly because very strong reinforcements can come in long before the battle finishes if enemy players leave early. So now I try to balance between not dominating too hard to make players leave early, but also have enough of a lead so that when strong reinforcements do come in, my team can hold out and still win in the end. This is all around the mid-ranks. I can't speak for beginner ranks like where your screenshot was taken.

It appears Incendiary Band's temperature limit was silently increased from 0.25 to 1.0 sometime during Friday or after this server restart here. I played with it shortly after the update came out and it was 0.25. Now it is 1.0. Here is a video comparing Stock and Incendiary Band. It still has the 0.25 heating rate so it would reach 1.0 in around 7 seconds as opposed to ~2.5 seconds before the Vulcan rework.

During Mad Tanks (the one with doubled HP), turrets with shorter range (Firebird, Freeze, Isida, Ricochet and Twins) were OP because the maps were smaller and they had more energy per clip with the same reload as before.

It's new as it hasn't been put in UCs yet. The same happened with Vacuum Shell and Missile Launcher Swarm in the past, and is expected to happen for augments first obtained from events.

Earn 15 stars in MM battles? If missions aren't contributing to that (which they likely won't), then that'll be at least 5 battles without Premium. Ugh.

Another weekend event, another great map for Shaft.

I give up. Mobile is too simple for something epic like you're describing to happen.

That was in February.

They have plenty of time to make adjustments to it. By the time someone gets one, the paramaters for that Stock turret may have long changed. In the previous interface, whenever they were testing a new augment or Stock settings, it showed as having no augment equipped. There's no reason for them not to set it as the Pheonix icon if they want to. If anything it adds to the mystery they're trying to conjure up in the playerbase.

The crit rate is much closer to Stock than it was before. Previously, the chance step penalty was too harsh for what extra critical damage you got. You needed more than twice the number of fodder shots to get to a decent critical chance than the other Smokies. Any miss when on this decent chance could have meant you missed it and had to start over. Crits often came at the most inopportune time where they were already on low HP or one shot remaining. With this new Smoky, all of them start at the same place and the only place it slightly differs is after it achieves the critical hit. The previous worst case scenario was being a downgraded Assault Rounds. The current worst case scenario is being a slightly worse Stock Smoky.

While it feels more powerful to use with most augments on mobile, I do already miss being able to control when I deal critical damage. Supercumulative Rounds is finally a worthwhile pick after so long and along with Pulsar is the only ones I feel comfortable using so far. I still see no value from Explosive Rounds. It wouldn't hurt to let the critical hits deal splash damage as well.

That does not necessarily mean it's a trophy augment. The icon could just be used for any unreleased augment they're testing and the playerbase would be none the wiser.

The "Damage taken from Freezing" part gives it away that it shouldn't be trusted. Unless they plan far down the line for the Cold status to deal damage over time.