The Finals’ latest patch has made throwing C4-loaded canisters at players way less effective

14.02.2024 - 18:17 / techradar.com

Embark Studios has made yet more tweaks to The Finals in the hopes of nerfing the popular C4 ‘nuke’ strategy, as well as some other changes. 

In case you were unfamiliar, The Finals’ Heavy class gets access to the explosive C4 gadget, which can be attached to surfaces or players to destroy the environment or deal damage to enemies. One strategy that’s been repeatedly nerfed has been dubbed the “nuke meta,” and it involves attaching the C4 to throwable objects, such as canisters, and sending them at foes to deal enormous damage.

Back in December, Embark nerfed the blast radius and damage of the C4 in a first attempt to quash the strat, although this didn’t stop vocal players from asserting that more needed to be done. And, lo and behold, it was — last month, the maximum damage that could be taken from the explosive was reduced again. Now though, Embark is taking a slightly different approach, by instead aiming its changes at the canisters that many were attaching their C4 to. 

“As promised, this update introduces some changes for ‘nukes and snukes.’ Red canisters will now have the physics to make overloaded cans drop faster and take less predictable pathways,” Embark explained in the latest patch notes. 

This means that, in theory, canisters loaded with C4 explosives won’t be able to travel as far when thrown, so combined with the “less predictable pathways” to make them harder to aim, they’ll be a way less effective projectile. 

On top of that, another of this patch’s changes has “fixed an issue where multiple C4s would cause more damage than intended when exploding together, for example when attached to an object.” So, even though this heavy damage output clearly wasn’t intentional, regular C4 users can expect some significant changes to the way they play. 

As for the other changes, players should now be able to tell the difference between cloaking sounds of enemies and their teammates, and input latency has been improved on Xbox Series X|S, just to name a couple of things. The full list of alterations can be found on the official patch notes.

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