Shotbow

Hello, Shotbow! Happy May! This month's edition of Dentril's New Moon is full of exciting updates, so let's jump right into it!

Network Updates
Team Updates
Last month, we announced the creation of the new Helper rank. Thus far, the rank has been a great help in recognizing the work of people on the team who don't fall into our previous staff categories.

We have decided to rename Helper to Specialist, because we feel the term "Specialist" better encompasses what the rank is meant to be: a rank for those who specialize in a certain aspect of a game: whether it be balance, game design, configuration, etc. There are still two tracks, which are now called Jr. Specialist and Specialist. This month, we are excited to have brought on our first Jr. Specialists to the team, which will be shown in the staff updates section below.

Team Applications
Ever wanted to join the Shotbow Staff Team? The following teams are accepting applications:

• Development Team
• SMASH Administrative Team
• Localization Team

Social Media
We are starting to make more use of social media platforms! Follow Shotbow on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for exclusive sneak peeks, XP codes, and more!

Gamemode Updates
Annihilation Updates
Over the last few months, the Annihilation team has been working hard on an update which was released this month: Obvious Osmium! The update contains a TON of new stuff, including a new class, balance updates, a new end battle, and much more! You can read the full update thread here.

You can also check out the update's teaser trailer here:



MineZ Updates
MineZ has had a whopping 7 patches released this month, with tons of gameplay, build, and balance changes. Check out the patchnotes log here.

Statistics
Network in General
Staff updates:

• Roquel was promoted to BAC Lead
• Rinjani was promoted to MineZ Admin Co-Lead
• _BrightDarkness_ was promoted to Administrator
• trevorix became a Slaughter Jr. Specialist
• Viral333 joined the team as a MTA Jr. Specialist

Other statistics:

• 2,484 in-game reports were handled in the last month
• There were 1,126 players banned in the last month
• 57 ban appeals were resolved in the last month
• There were 77 support tickets resolved in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 289 on April 9
• 69,057,744 XP was earned by players this month

That's all for this month. I'm your host, Mistri — thanks for flying Shotbow!

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Annihilation Update - Obvious Osmium (2.16.0)

Hello and welcome!

Today, we are thrilled to announce our latest update Obvious Osmium!

As always, most of these changes are based on community feedback.

We would appreciate constructive, well-founded criticism (positive and negative!) here on the forums once you have experienced this update in-game for some time. Nothing is ever set in stone.





Changelog


NEW

Tank
Not content with killing? Like taking things slow and steady? Then Tank is for you!

The NEW Tank class is the ultimate survivalists kit. Use your sword and shield to enter your defensive stance and soak up nearly all damage* inflicted upon you, but be wary of your stamina! If your stamina becomes fully depleted, you will be vulnerable once more.

When in your defensive stance, you will cast a protective projectile phalanx around yourself. This will protect close teammates from incoming arrows, allowing them to advance on enemies with you in vulnerable situations. Be warned, your stamina will still take a hit from projectiles!

*Legs may still crumple during landing.


Class Changes:

Archer

• Archer now has an additional, brand new ability which is called Rain Of Arrows:
  • Left-click while holding any bow to toggle it on/off.
  • The ring of particles indicates your targeted area.
  • Shoot your bow to bring down a rain of arrows onto your enemies. Every enemy in the area will be hit.
  • Only 1 arrow is consumed.
  • The ability has a cooldown of 30 seconds.

Builder &Delaying Blocks

• The two Delaying Blocks have been removed from Builder's spawn kit.
  • You can still get them from Builder's Resource Drop.
• Delaying blocks can now be purchased from the Weapon Shop for 20 gold ingots each.
  • Still has a 5 block effective radius.
  • Teammates right click them to see their radius.
• Delaying blocks now have the same restrictions as Team Doors.
  • If broken by a teammate, it will be returned to you.
  • If broken by an enemy, it will drop on the ground.
  • Cannot be placed within 8 blocks of another friendly delaying block.
  • Cannot be placed within 3 blocks of an enemy delaying block.

Defender

• Defender's Class Icon has been changed from a shield to a prismarine shard, so that both Defender and Tank can be recognized by a respective Class Item. (Yes, it might take a while to get used to this, sorry! )

Engineer

• To prevent unnecessary explosions, Engineer no longer blows up upon running the chat command /kill.

Scorpio

• Based on the outcome of our Annihilation - Community Poll #1, Scorpio's hook will no longer pull enemies if the Scorpio is outside of the world border. This means that on most maps, vanilla void scorping is not possible.
  • Some maps; Skylands and Aftermath for example, have access to the void inside the map border. Void scorping will still be possible there. Depending on your playstyle and the map rotation, you know what maps (not) to vote for!

Swapper & Succubus & Thor

• As we have already announced in our Annihilation - Community Poll #2, Swapper can no longer swap invisible enemies who aren't wearing any armour at all. The same applies to Succubus and Thor. This change brings them in line with Immobilizer and Mercenary which have the same limitation.

Transporter

• Transporter can now use its Portal Maker on cobblestone.

Vampire

• Vampire doesn't take 25 % more damage during the day any more.
• While the chance of stealing 1 HP from enemies at night remains the same (30 %), Vampire now also has a 15 % chance of doing so during the day.
• Vampire's Blood Sense has been buffed:
  • Its cooldown has been reduced from 60 to 8 seconds.
  • You no longer get Blindness for 2 seconds.
  • It now works like a sonar which takes 5 seconds to scan its whole radius for enemies.
  • If you want the whole scan cycle to finish, you have to keep holding its Class Item (now a red disk, formerly a beetroot soup) for the whole 5 seconds.

Warrior

• Warrior's Frenzy has been buffed:
  • You no longer take +1 HP of damage from enemies.
  • It now gives you Speed I for 12 seconds.
  • Every 4 seconds it heals 2 HP, so 6 HP in total.
  • You still deal an additional +1 HP of damage to enemies, so +2 in total (unchanged).

Other Changes:

• Double Nexus Damage
  According to our Annihilation - Community Poll #1, the majority of players prefers the original double Nexus damage over the nexus bleed in Phase 5. Back to the roots, here we go!

• Ender Pearls
  On the one hand, the replacement of the Nexus bleed means that defending feels more rewarding again, because you can't automatically lose 1 nexus HP every 45 seconds any more despite building a defence and hugging your Nexus. On the other hand, the return of the aforementioned double Nexus damage, the removal of void scorping from most maps and the fact that it's harder to reveal invisible enemies mean that rushing is a lot easier. Therefore, we decided to make defensive walls great again by no longer teleporting rushers who throw an ender pearl into an enemy protection area. You can still pearl out of enemy protection areas and into your own one.

• Annihilation Stats
  2 brand new stats are tracked from now on:
  • All players who love repairing their nexus as a Handyman will be happy about Nexus heal stats (Nice HAN! ).
  • Everybody who enjoys slaying Bosses will be pleased about the addition of Boss kills which are given to all teammates that damage a Boss prior to claiming its Boss Buff.

• Leaderboards
  There are 2 new leaderboards:
  • Most Nexus Heals - Who is the best Handyman out there!?
  • Most Boss Kills - Who can slay the most Bosses!?

• Ending Phase
  30 seconds after the game has been won, all sneaking players are teleported to a grand, final Boss fight! If a regular Boss is alive at that time, it's replaced by the untouched final one.

• Nexus Miners
  Players who damage an enemy Nexus now receive double the Shotbow XP and Annihilation rank points for each hit.

• Launch Pads
  Ever tried to use a launch pad at the same time as someone else and subsequently fallen to your death? Yeah, that sucks. So we have changed launch pads to allow multiple players to use the same launch pad simultaneously. This change imposes a 5s cooldown from using another launch pad.

• Shields
  As shields are barely used and as we don't want to make new players think that they were super powerful, they have been removed from the spawn kit and as a preference toggle. However, you are still able to craft them.

• Starting Phase
  Different sounds are now played in a voting when:
  • the game starts in 2 minutes
  • the game starts in 10 - 2 seconds
  • the map is being loaded

• Chat Command
  /dado (alias for /damagedone) doesn't only display your own nexus damage/heals, but it can now also be used to check the nexus damage/heals of:
  • another player: /dado <IGN>
  • a whole team: /dado #<Team>

• Chat Notifications
  Whenever a nexus is destroyed, the chat notification now includes a colourful IGN of the player who did the final hit.

• Map Rotations
  Map rotations are now displayed in the Anni Lobby.

Bug Fixes:

1. Invisible enemies not being completely invisible.
2. Logs disappearing permanently; thanks to shiroe_hammuni for reporting it!
3. Lumberjack's Brute Force not damaging enemy armour correctly.
4. Getting rubberbanded while using launch pads.
5. Items from the Brewing Shop and the Weapon Shop not stacking with the same items from Alchemist's Tome, farms, etc.
6. IceMan's class-related ice turning into regular, breakable, ice.
7. Swapper being able to put its Swapper disk into a jukebox.
8. Pickaxes losing durability while attempting to mine your own Nexus.
9. TAB looking like that of other game modes.
10. Twilight having unbreakable blocks; thanks to Sens for reporting it!

Closing Words:

While we have fixed a few bugs in this update again, some you may have experienced and others you probably didn't know were there, we are aware that we still have bugs to fix and we appreciate all the help you can give us with getting those fixed. If you find a bug in Annihilation and want to have a chance of getting a shoutout in the next update thread, you can report it on our official Discord by using this command: !support bug <IGN>.

Credits:

First and foremost, thank you very much to our Devs Mosh and Galap for making this update possible and to the whole Anni Team for working hard every single day!

Of course, many thanks to you, our passionate community, for casting your votes, offering suggestions, reporting bugs and supporting us!

We have decided to reopen the recruitment of the SMASH team because we need more ideas and support to develop our game-making and event things more than before.

Our activity is to deal with players who are breaking the rules.
We are looking for open-minded people who are careful and fair-minded enough to see all players without getting personal.
We also plan events for our players to enjoy, come up with new items and much more!

If you love SMASH and want to contribute to the team but you are not sure how, don't be afraid to apply, you will be accompanied by friendly team members!

If you are interested, please apply here.
We will start to go through the applications after around a week.
We look forward to receiving many applications.

Thanks for reading to the end!
SMASH Team.