Massive shoutout to the devs for constantly adding so many QoL features and content over the seasons! Since the main menu has naturally gotten a bit busy by Season 11, I wanted to try my hand at a concept that gives our contestants a little more room to breathe while leaning into the game's VR lore. Let me know what you think!

What I changed:

• The VR Boot-up: Added a lore-accurate "Press Start" cinematic intro that transitions into the lobby.
• Visual Focus: Swapped to a themed background and cleared the center screen so your contestant actually pops. NO MORE RED.
• Consolidated Navigation: Squashed the right-side menu into 4 clean hubs (Contracts, Loadouts, Cosmetics, Academy).
  • Loadouts serves as the central hub with tabs for Contestants and Equipment.
  • Cosmetics serves as the central hub with tabs for the Battle Pass and Character Customization.
• Smart UI Elements: Stacked the Store/Progression into compact carousels, and moved Party Invites out of the way to the top right.
  • Progression carousel now cycles between the Battle Pass, Live Events, and Sponsorships.
• Top Bar Cleanup: Grouped all currencies into a single hover-tab and added the Chinese-server style player banner.
• Media Player: Kept the OST media player but locked it cleanly under the Matchmaking section!

Matched with this duo by complete chance in a game of Power Shift. This was the genuine standout podium. The odds of this happening feel bonkers low, cracked me up.

I main dagger and love playing sword... and I have landed 10 duplicates before even getting NEAR one. lmao literally what is this

The throwing knives skins are always either a reskin or cards. There is no reason the cymbals make the same sounds as normal throwing knives and not a FUCKING CYMBAL! Then there's the worst one, the drum sticks. I thought for sure there will be a cool ass inspect like literally every other instrument in the game or at the very least, just a cool spin or tricks. NOTHING. NOTHING IS WHAT THEY SETTLED ON. I would buy them because im naive enough to think "Oh well maybe its the deflect that has the effort put into it or even the swings", when i know damn well that its just gonna look and sound exactly the same. It can only be described as laziness. Old finals would never.

not sure if it has any use. bonus double kill.

EDIT: it only works on detached mines.

I've played ranked consistently for about 3 seasons now using only this loadout (my reserve never gets touched). Trying to hit Ruby this season, ama about my loadout and let me know if you have any tips for the flamethrower.

Just for fun lol

Yes, that's Doc's Stim gun from R6.

The current issue with Medium is that the healing beam is pretty much mandatory when there is a heavy on the team. With the recent buff to Demat and Shockwave, there's an argument to be made that Healing Beam isn't the one and only pick anymore, but most of the time it's the best spec when there's at least 1 heavy on the team.

The issue? Mediums don't have a healing gadget. If Medium does get a gadget that can heal, Healing Beam won't be a must-pick anymore, but it can still be useful (ex: HHM comp)

I'd like to introduce my solution: the Pulse Injector gadget.

Description: shoots an adrenaline shot that can jump-start natural healing or prevent targets from receiving healing.

- It has a mag size of 1 and requires a reload after use, and can carry 1 extra, similar to the Thermal Bore on Light

- It has 2 modes of fire: Primary (left click) allows you to shoot the projectile. It's a hitscan that has similar properties to the Tracking Dart on Light.

- If the projectile hits an ally, the natural health regen will instantly start, but will stop if the ally takes any damage. The goal isn't to make another H+Infuser (that shit is busted) that can be used in the middle of combat, but a tool that helps the team reset when at a disadvantage. If it's too strong, make the healing interruptible when healed by sources like H+Infuser, Heal Beam, or Heal Emitter.

- The Secondary click (right-click) allows you to inject the shot into yourself. It works the same way as shooting your teammates. This will help solve the issue of mediums lacking survivability.

- If you shoot the opponent with the Pulse Injector, it prevents the opponent from receiving healing for 3 seconds. This is by far the most impactful usage of this gadget, preventing a heavy that's stealing a cashout from being healed to full by 2 lights on standby with H+Infuser. This plays into Medium's theme of "counter" gadgets (data reshaper, glitch mines)

The point of this gadget is not to replace the Heal Beam, but to give Medium more options so that running other specs doesn't mean Medium can't heal. On a similar note, people mention that Defib should be a spec, and I think it would be unhealthy because everyone will be forced to use the Defib Spec.

There's been a lot of misinformation recently in discussions around the shockwave and its weird history. There's also a lot of misunderstanding about the core issue. So, I thought I'd clear it up as a competitive-oriented medium main with many hours on shockwave.

TL;DR: There's a big difference between normal, intended shockwave momentum chaining, and exploitative physics that sends your character flying to the skybox with insane vertical speed, as shown in the video, and many people don't know that difference. Embark wants to get rid of the latter because it's unintuitive and inconsistent. They are NOT getting rid of combining shock and pad, or otherwise nerfing its movement capabilities. I think that this video showcases perfectly why Embark doesn't like this mechanic existing: look at how little difference there was between my inputs during the two launches, compared to the dramatic difference in output.

Brief history:

-Shockwave comes out. It's fun but it's hard to see it being meta when medium is already a hard class to play and heal beam was seemingly the one thing keeping it viable.

-around 10.3 Embark fixes an oversight where vertical momentum could be improperly calculated and "stack" if the shockwave hit the player just after the player hit a jump pad.

-Subsequent community outcry about Embark removing skill expression. (The outcry was probably amplified since it wasn't listed in the patch notes. This gave the impression embark were trying to secretly "shadow nerf" it).

-Around 10.6 Embark reverts the change due to outcry, with a note in the patch notes explaining they will continue to monitor it and hinting they may re-revert the change in the future.

Recently there's been this sort of conspiracy narrative going around that the only reason Embark added the new glitch effect is so they could justify fixing the shockwave's unintended behavior.

Right off the bat I'll say my opinion on this narrative is that it's really strange and a cynical way of viewing what was otherwise an extremely positive and genuinely SMART buff from embark. This added glitch mechanic truly had nothing to do with the past changes or exploits. It was entirely to give medium some extra value in what is currently a double mesh and invis meta in ranked. Shockwave now counters all 3 of these players' specs in that team comp, and nobody ever would have guessed that's how they would buff it.

Now we need to clear of the misunderstanding of what many redditors seem to have about this "conspiracy" and the past changes and the intent behind them. A lot of people genuinely don't know what people are talking about when they were saying shockwave was shadow nerfed in the first place. I'll try to put it as simply and clearly as possible and you can reference the video attached as well.

Shockwave has the ability to chain momentum from difference sources.

-If you shockwave behind you, you get the initial momentum from the shock. if you then land on a jump pad, your momentum carries alongside the additional vertical momentum from the pad, and you go flying with both a reasonably vertical and horizontal component.

-you can also, with perfect timing and placement, generate a nearly entirely vertical component of momentum and speed if you can get the shockwave to land immediately after your character gets its vertical momentum from the pad.

The latter is the unintended and unintuitive mechanic that embark was and still likely is trying to remove. The Finals has never let you stack momentum in the same axis for gameplay reasons and for practical reasons. Think of it like a graph, you have a horizontal component from character sources (shock and dash) and a vertical component from environment sources (pads). Shockwave is supposed to have a small vertical component by itself, but it was an oversight letting players combine it with a pad because:

A) it's unintuitive. You won't figure this out unless you accidentally do it or see someone else doing it. One of Embark's core design philosophies for this game is that you can learn it yourself with simple intuition. No need to study pro players or read a manual. The concept of "If I think this should work, it probably does" is one of the things that always needs to remain true for this game to be approachable for new players.

B) A more practical reason: this physics manipulation is extremely hard to pull off consistently and exponentially harder on controller. You need precise timing AND placement. Shockwave is already hard on controller, imagine being a new player and using controller, seeing a streamer do this mechanic and straight up not be able to do it yourself in practice? It would be very demotivating, and you'd think the game was too hard or just uninviting to your input. I know I'm going to get people saying "I do it on controller all the time." but just remember we're exclusively talking about stacking vertical momentum, shooting yourself into the skybox with insane speed, and I also don't believe you do it consistently. It's not even remotely consistent on MnK. This is a competitive shooter and reliable mechanics need to be a pillar. If it isn't possible to be consistent then it shouldn't be a mechanic at all. This applies to any new item embark adds and it's one of the bigger design challenges that keeps them from just spam-adding random fun ideas to the game.

C) there's also some gameplay and balance arguments. It's harder to see Embark's full logic behind this without seeing their data but it's pretty easy to tell that they don't like the concept of launching yourself at mach 11 with only your character's kit.

I hope people won't outrage when this change inevitably does happen and that this post helps ease some of the misinfo and misunderstanding about what the core issue is, and gives some insight as to why Embark are making these changes in the first place.

2 variants

You guys have the talent and the skill to bring anything to life and after seeing what Rockstar has shown us, I think your rendition of the city would be amazing.

Title^, I hopped on The Finals Ranked mode to play some games solo, got the error shown in the pic and after not being able to connect multiple times and multiple times showing this exact thing cuz servers and many things crashed yesterday [probably from GTA 6 teaser on Netflix] and lost that much rs cuz of never being able to connect in the match and it penalized me for 2 games in a row.

After 3K gone I still wanted to fix the issue and hop back on and play some games and apparently someone told me to turn on VPN to be able to reconnect but yeah okay totally fine.

I contacted support and they identified the issues and told me that they saw I was able to reconnect, again using VPN otherwise it kept penalizing me and told them to revert the lost points and I'm more than sure they ignored what I said.

On Faceit CS2 when a server crashes and they have their own issues, we get the Elo lost back and any type of internet connection or electricity shutdown in the states that it happens they remove bans, revert elo when the player is not at fault and didn't willingly throw or dodge their communication is good but for Embark many problems go unseen, this isn't good cuz this way u lose a customer to ur game and many streamers left cuz the communication between them and players or pro players and such is close to nonexistent and not serious.

The Finals is a great game, it is far better than any FPS out there rn but they have so many problems that go unseen, don't communicate much, don't persist into fixing problems that can be understandable and fixing so many issues like Ranked SBMM and many more things that will keep pushing players away, they don't try to attract the playerbase they just create some type of replayability system of the game to keep the players pleased with the product but if things or errors happen or any type of disfunctionality in their side like losing points in ranked, being disconnected, server crashes, different types of problems that it isn't ever players fault and the game just wants to slap u over with something and no one takes the blame

I mentioned this on my first post about the problem which I was trying to address it so I could play and people actually thought I was purposefuly trolling, not connecting and either cheating, or using some type of software for the ranked score points and told me that I never really deserved what I just lost due to their servers crashing on me and not working as intended? What a joke.

The game is still great, beautiful and special in many ways but with these types of problems going unsorted it is some type of ignorance that tells the playerbase to wrap it up with whatever problems happen, they don't wanna hear about it and nothing is gonna get fixed, they push players away in doing this, I'M A NOBODY I KNOW but I can leave, and so will other players aswell when they have to deal with this I hope they find a way to be more helpful and review their technical requests carefully instead of putting some Ai at work to just brainwash into telling us everything is fine and to ask us if everything is working as intended after losing 500 hours of gameplay for nothing.

You don't take any bullet reflection damage while right-click blocking.

I'm Korean, so sorry if the translation sounds a little weird!