DICE Launches Battlefield 5 Tides of War: Lightning Strikes Update 4

DICE has now launched what they are dubbing “Update #4” for Battlefield 5’s Tides of War Chapter 2: Lightning Strikes. While previous recent updates have added major new features, this latest Battlefield 5 update focuses more on quality-of-life. Although it doesn’t bring any single standout pieces of new content, it does fix a number of priority bugs. Plus, it also brings some new balance changes, including shotgun improvements.

Battlefield 5 Update 4 for Tides of War: Lightning Strikes

“This is a smaller quality-of-life update,” says DICE; “as we wanted to quickly address some issues that we’re hearing about from our community. With that, we’ve resolved the flickering issue on squad deployment, made improvements to shotguns, fixed the end of round Company Coin counter, and also made some stability improvements.”

Battlefield 5 Update Tweaks Shotguns

The full patch notes for the latest Battlefield 5 update are available online in PDF form, as per usual. As DICE states, this update is smaller than some of the game’s other recent updates. One of the only changes to weapons and vehicles is a change to the game’s shotgun balance. According to DICE, they felt that shotguns were under-performing in comparison with SMGs at close range. As such, damage drop-off distance for buckshot and slug ammo has been increased. Meanwhile, the 12g Automatic and M1897 both got an increase of around 20% to buckshot maximum pellet damage. The M30 Drilling also got an increase, but closer to 10-15%.

Among the other bugs fixed in this update is the flickering issue which had been reported on the squad redeploy screen. The End of Round Company Coin counter should now also show the correct amount of coin for every player. On the subject of shotguns, DICE also fixed a bug unique to consoles which was causing shotgun damage to be less than normal. Fixes were also made for bugs in Practice Range, Combined Arms, and War Stories.