Cocofang

Some of you may be aware that the DP20 values that you find on ranged entities are not always reliable. While it is fine that they are rounded, some cards have values that are impossible for these cards to achieve. It's been a topic for some time and I started compiling all values the other day in order to finally tackle this problem with the goal of updating tooltips, DP20 values and formulas used to calculate those. Let's begin by establishing what works. Current formulas Generic The typical ranged attack in Skylords has an amount of damage it inflicts on the main target as well as an upper limit of damage it simultaneously inflicts in an AoE. And of course a time between attacks. There are different ways to write this and still come to the same result but it's essentially this. You take the damage the attack deals to a single target and add the total damage the attack can deal in an AoE. You then average that value out by dividing it by 2. Finally you take the time between attacks and divide it by 20 to get the amount of times the entity can attack within 20 seconds. Divide the previous result through this and you have your DP20. Alternatively divide 20 by the time between attacks and multiply the previous result by this. This formula works for the vast majority of ranged entities in the game. Unfortunately It just sometimes uses inaccurate values. Ranged attacks without AoE and Flamethrowers Used for any ranged attack that either does not have an AoE component or is purely AoE, in that the fixed damage value is distributed among all affected targets. In that case "time between attacks" should technically be "Interval between damage application" but same difference. Squads Used for ranged Squads. There are no ranged squads with AoE but if there were they would use the generic formula multiplied by the number of entities in the squad. You calculate the damage value as usual and then multiply it by the number of entities in the Squad. This is also the reason why damage output from a squad drops if individual squad members were killed. Inconsistent values Usually the AoE value of a ranged attack is 150% of the single target damage. So for example, an attack that deals 100 damage to the main target would consequently have an upper damage cap of 150 for its AoE. Pretty straight forward but unfortunately far from consistent. Many entities in the game are off by a few digits, so they range from 148% - 152% on their AoE. Some of them because the single target damage value doesn't have a clean 150% value, which is fine. The recently released Bedrock for example has 633 single target damage on U3, the AoE being rounded from 949.5 to 950. But in many other instances the numbers are simply off. For example, Armored Tower has 110-170 damage but really it should be 110-165. Another inconsistency is the attack time. After extensive testing there seem to be three internal values that define this. Cast Steps (the wind-up part of the attack animation after which the projectile fires), Resolve Steps (the wind-down part of the attack animation) and Recast Steps (independent balancing lever and cooldown between attacks), all expressed in milliseconds. The actual attack time appears to be: But take Cannon Tower as an example. It has 200 Cast Steps, 1000 Resolve Steps and 2300 Recast Steps. The highest value being Cast Steps + Recast Steps, which is 2500ms. But the description and DP20 calculation assumes an attack speed of 2000ms, or 2s. Which is of course completely wrong. Additionally, there is a small random delay added to every attack. This is an important aesthetic choice as it makes ranged battles feel much more frantic and organic. But it obviously affects DP20 and should be included in the calculation. Interestingly, this RNG delay doesn't affect entities that have higher Resolve than Recast Steps. Most airborne entities are in that category. Abilities As a general rule of thumb the DP20 calculation ignores abilities like Multishot or effects applied by the attack, like poison or debuffs that increase damage taken. Windweavers are notoriously powerful because their on-paper DP20 is doubled when they get to attack two targets. Same goes for Lost Horror or Rioter's Retreat. Other units like Gemeye P or Spirit Hunters have a powerful DoT attached to their abilities that drastically elevates their damage output. This makes some entities look worse on paper than they are. Going back to Spirit Hunters, their measly 192 DP20 is actually 792 or 692 depending on the affinity. And that doesn't even consider the ability to attack multiple targets one after another in order to apply the poison to several enemies simultaneously. For Gemeye P the actual DP20 is somewhere around 5250 instead of 3250. But that assumes targets stay within the AoE. Considering the huge variance it would introduce to DP20 calculations in addition to some affinity-variants getting different base stats they are simply not factored in. Sucks for cards that would get more attractive numbers but it's the most straight forward approach. Outliers This is where the real fun is. Ignoring abilities is simple enough but what if crazy variance is built into the attack itself? For these entities there is no established norm as to how to even approach the calculation. The formula has to somewhat reflect the expected damage output when using the card. But how? Let's look at all the relevant Outliers that are currently in the game and consider their damage output in various scenarios. Single Target: Only one target available Small AoE: Multiple targets available, all in one direction. Meaning while AoE is applied the same amount of turrets are active as if there was only one target. Split Single Target: Multiple targets available, surrounded. Meaning all turrets are active (where applicable) but no AoE is applied. Average AoE: Multiple targets available, surrounded. Average AoE overlap (Single Target DMG + AoE DMG) / 2) Max: Full damage application Battleship 4 directional turrets, each dealing 100-150 damage every 2 seconds. 2 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 2000 Small AoE: 2500 Split Single Target: 4000 Average AoE: 5000 Max: 6000 Ravenship (Ravenheart summons) 4 directional turrets, each dealing 70-120 damage every 2.5 seconds. 2 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 1120 Small AoE: 1520 Split Single Target: 2240 Average AoE: 3040 Max: 3840 Corsair 6 directional turrets, each dealing 25-38 damage every 2 seconds. 3 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. Except when the Big Fat Cannon cycles through. At which point all 6 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 1125 Small AoE: 1417 The above values are already wonky because they assume 4.5 turrets firing, as the average between the 3 drive-by turrets and all 6 blasting while Big Fat Cannon cycles. Split Single Target: 1500 Average AoE: 1890 Max: 2280 Big Fat Cannon (regular formula) Single Target: 580 Average AoE: 725 Max: 870 Ravenheart 6 directional turrets, each dealing 90-120 damage every 2 seconds. 3 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 2700 Small AoE: 3150 Split Single Target: 5400 Average AoE: 6300 Max: 7200 Spitfire 8 directional turrets, each dealing 75-110 damage every 2 seconds. 2 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Only affects air targets. Regular ranged attack with an AoE component, dealing 466-700 damage every 5 seconds. Only affects ground targets. Single Target: 1500 Small AoE: 1850 Split Single Target: 6000 Average AoE: 7400 Max: 8800 Ground Bomb (regular formula) Single Target: 1864 Average AoE: 2332 Max: 2800 Lost Spirit Ship 8 directional turrets, each dealing 80-100 damage every 2 seconds. 2 turrets can attack a single target simultaneously. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 1600 Small AoE: 1800 Split Single Target: 6400 Average AoE: 7200 Max: 8000 Howling Shrine 4 directional turrets, each dealing 750-1125 damage every 11 seconds. 1 turret, rarely 2, can attack a single target simultaneously, depending on positioning. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 1705 Small AoE: 2131 The above values assume 1.25 turrets firing. Split Single Target: 5455 Average AoE: 6818 Max: 8182 Primeval Watcher Chain attack dealing 660 - 330 - 220 - 165 - 132 damage as it affects up to 5 targets. Can only hit each target once per attack. Single Target: 4400 Second Target: 2200 Third Target: 1467 Fourth Target: 1100 Fifth Target: 880 Max: 10047 Rocket Tower 4 omni-directional shots, each dealing 75 damage every 4 seconds. Cannot attack a single target simultaneously. Can shoot all if 4 or more enemies are in range. Functionally similar to Multishot. Single Target: 375 Max: 1500 Stronghold 8 directional turrets, each dealing 164-246 damage every 2 seconds. 3 turret, rarely 4, can attack a single target simultaneously, depending on positioning. All turrets can attack if surrounded. Single Target: 3553 Small AoE: 4442 The above values assume 3.25 turrets firing. Split Single Target: 8747 Average AoE: 10933 Max: 13120 Thunder Wagon 1 turret, dealing 350-525 damage every 4 seconds. 1 flamethrower dealing 150 damage every second. Thunder Bomb (regular formula) Single Target: 1750 Average AoE: 2188 Max: 2625 Flamethrower (regular formula) AoE: 3000 What now? A big problem with some of these outliers it the drastically different damage output depending on how many turrets can shoot at any given time, as they are directional. How do you account for that sort of variance in a static formula? Thunder Wagon is the most straight forward with its current design: Just add up the two AoE values. Rocket Tower could get a nasty low number like 375 DP20 or the rounded average between single target and max, which is 940. There can be different formulas depending on the setup but ideally several outliers should be covered by one formula. The questions to solve are: Once the RNG delay is considered in the DP20 calculation, many ranged entities will end up with a lower DP20 value. This wouldn't affect their functionality at all though. Would that still be something to be concerned about? Should the relation between single target and AoE be updated across the board to get as close to 150% as possible? Which formulas could express the DP20 value of the outlier cards most accurately? They are clearly more tailored towards AoE clearing but a needlessly inflated DP20 value would give a false impression about their actual strength. Do the outliers need expanded tooltips to clear up their mechanics or is the DP20 value enough? How should the DP20 value be rounded? Single digit? Even 10? Even 100? Different rounding depending on the tier of the card? Important to keep in mind that this is all just about the visual representation of numbers. The actual mechanical values are untouched (aside from potentially minor changes to achieve the 150% AoE value). But depending on which formulas you use you get a higher or lower number printed on the card. Which is certainly important for the "feel" and first impression. If you have any ideas or opinions regarding this topic, feel free to share. Especially potential formulas for the outlier cards that can be used going forward would be valuable.

In this roughly 10-15 minute read you'll learn how to get BFP and gold in Skylords Reborn. You'll also see that even cards that seem out of reach like an expensive Harvester, Avatar of Frost or Forest Elder are not that far off at all! There is no way to spend money in the game, as such BFP and gold have to be earned through gameplay. They are separate currencies that are used for different things. BFP can be traded, gold cannot. BFP is used to: purchase boosters from the shop purchase cards from the auction house apply card-artworks as avatars Gold is used to: purchase upgrades apply upgrades purchase cosmetics pay the fee to send mail, list auctions and reforge cards Daily Quests Each day you get two quests that are worth 75 BFP each upon completion. You can hold a total of six quests simultaneously. Keep completing those and that's 150 BFP in the bank each day. Here is the entire pool of available quests. Daily Rewards For time spent in-match you get a steady flow of BFP. Each day a Daily Boost of 250 BFP is added, colored in blue. If you don't manage to drain your Daily Boost then some of it carries over to the next day. But no matter how much Daily Boost you saved up, it will always drain over the course of 45 minutes of in-match time. Below is the Reserve, colored green, which steadily refills at a slow pace. So you can continue earning BFP even when playing past the 45 minutes. But the lower the Reserve gets, the slower it distributes BFP. So if you manage 45 minutes of playtime each day, you consistently get 250 BFP here. For more information see here. Daily Discount In the Marketplace you can unlock a daily booster discount after spending 45 minutes in-match. Two options here: Sell the booster for profit. General Boosters sell the best. Buy the discounted booster for 350 BFP and trade them for more to another player. Usual rate is 420 BFP, so 70 BFP plus for you. Great if you want raw BFP for specific cards. Open the booster. You only get to experience organically growing your collection by opening boosters once. Same goes for getting and trying new cards and building decks with whatever you have. Not to mention that in a collectible Trading Card Game it's kind of an essential component to roll the dice on boosters. Also, most valuable Promo cards only drop from boosters (some are exclusive to events or achievements, though all can be traded). 1 in 200 boosters on average. Either way, you should always take advantage of this discount. Map of the Day Each day one of the maps on the world-map is on fire, which indicates that it's the MotD. You get to pick an additional reward for winning, be it another upgrade or extra Gold/XP. Additionally you gain 50 BFP. Winning the MotD on ten different days on Adv or Exp will grant you one Rebirth Booster. This is a valuable booster that only contains cards from the Rebirth Edition. As such they are very sought after, especially when new cards are released. Since the content of a booster is determined on opening even stockpiled boosters have a chance of dropping new cards. Test your luck by opening them when new cards are released or sell them to somebody that wants to. Depending on the demand (should be much higher on new card releases) you can sell a Rebirth Booster for 1000 - 2000 BFP or even more. In total: 450 BFP each day Whatever you drain from the Reserve 100 BFP discount on a booster. If you don't want to open your booster and pass it on, that's 520 BFP each day. Rebirth Booster every 10 days, valued 1000 - 2000 BFP. Even the most expensive Ultra Rare (UR) cards (excluding Promos and newly released ones) are 1000 - 2000 BFP. So that's like, what, 2 - 4 days of playing? Very approachable for the most desirable content in the game! Achievements There are a ton! And many of them are very beginner friendly. Focusing on those will give you a quick boost after starting out. The easy ones to keep in mind are: Up and Coming - 1 Mini Booster Complete the Introduction. Going in Cold / Lighting the Spark / Nurturing the Soil / Beginning the Ritual - 1 Mini Booster each Win a match where you start your game with one of the four main faction colors Frost / Fire / Nature / Shadow. Always Adapting - 1 Mini Booster Win with a deck level of 30. The deck level increases with each upgrade (making a card stronger) and charge (loading an extra copy of a card into one to increase the amount of times you can use it before it goes on cooldown) a card has. You'll quickly get there. Ever Evolving - 1 General Booster Same but with a deck level of 60. Will take a bit longer but if you focus in a few cards you really like to use it's still achievable in a timely manner. Especially with Common cards, as those are cheap to upgrade with gold. Thirsty for More - 1 General Booster In-match time of 5 hours. Afterwards even scales to 15 and 30 hours, granting an additional 2 and 3 General Boosters. A Reputation To Uphold - 1 Mini Booster each level For each PvE Rank/Level you rise you get one Mini Booster up to Rank 6. So a total of 5. Afterwards you get General Boosters. Friendly Neighbourhood's Skylord - 1 General Booster Do 20 Daily Quests. This is repeatable, so you can get one General Booster every 10 days. Heart of the Cards - 1 General Booster Open 20 Boosters. Also repeatable. Just a Story - 1 Twilight Booster Winning Encounters with Twilight, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, The Soultree, Crusade, Sunbridge, King of the Giants, Titans, Ascension on any difficulty. The Most Dangerous Game - 1 Bandits Booster Winning Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, Blight, Raven's End, Empire on any difficulty. Saviour of Nyn - 3 General Boosters Win all campaign (cPvE) maps on any difficulty. Godslayer - 250 BFP Win Sunbridge and Insane God on any difficulty. Apprentice - 1 General Booster Win any 20 randomly generated PvE (rPvE) maps of any difficulty. Draconic Desolation - 250 BFP Spawn 7 different dragonkin in a single match. The cheapest are: Giant Wyrm, Fire Dragon, Lost Dragon G+P, Northland Drake R+B, Swamp Drake, Skyfire Drake, Wasteland Terror R+G, Windhunter G+P. You can just switch orbs during the match to spawn them one after another. To see which ones you currently have, just type in "class:dragon" into the search bar of your own collection. This also works in the marketplace so you can look up the cheapest. A Wrinkle in Time - 250 BFP Win the map Empire under these conditions: Your deck only contains Frost, Shadow and Lost Souls cards. You play at least 5 different Lost Souls cards during the match. There are a couple more rather easy Achievements but they require specific cards. If you really want to complete some of these, you can check if they are currently cheap on the marketplace, buy them for the Achievement and sell them again afterwards. But the above alone nets you a total of 750 BFP, 11 Mini Boosters, 8 General Boosters (3360 BFP total value), 1 Twilight and 1 Bandit Booster (~ 880 BFP total value). And those are just the easy Achievements that can easily be done within the first couple of days. Dozens of other Achievements to do after that! Trading If you want to dedicate some time to speed up your BFP gains you can get into the economy. In short: Buy low, sell high. Paying attention and taking notes on the usual prices for certain cards will give you an idea of their marketplace value range. Then, whenever you notice a card dipping on the low end of their usual value, you can buy those up. When the price for your newfound inventory rises again you can ditch them for profit. The Skylords Market Journal is an amazing resource for this approach. Some cards have a much higher variance in their prices than others. Changes to the game can affect prices as well. After you have a good feeling for card prices it takes maybe 30 minutes a day to buy and sell inventory, if you keep track of a lot of cards. But in return you could make an extra 1000 BFP in that amount of time. Since the introduction of reforging every rarity has a price floor it doesn't really dip below. Cards that would have a very low marketplace value are instead given inherent value as reforging material. Therefore reducing overall supply and increasing demand as long as they are very cheap. Meanwhile, very expensive cards are dead-ends as far as reforging is concerned. They are not being used as material and either kept or sold. That means reforging has a soft rubber-band effect, dragging the lowest prices up and the highest prices down. Because low value cards become more desirable as material while being funneled into high value cards, increasing their supply. That also helped making opening boosters less volatile since you are guaranteed a minimum return simply because of card rarity. The usual price floors for rarities are ~10 BFP for Cs (Commons), ~25 BFP for UCs (Uncommons), ~100 BFP for Rs (Rares) and ~200 BFP for URs. You will notice hardly any cards ever notably dipping below that. However, there are sought after cards that will be much more expensive than their rarity suggests. For example Lost Dragon or Nomad can be around 20 BFP despite being Cs. Shaman or Frost Mage, both UCs, regularly go for well above 60 BFP. Popular Rs like Mine or Mana Wing sell for over 300 BFP and iconic URs like Enlightenment or Harvester change hands for more than 1000 BFP. These high value cards also often have big fluctuations in price. Newly released cards are also always very expensive shortly after release and then slowly settle down. So carefully think about whether you want to use them immediately on release or rather wait and buy them later. If you get your hands on a copy early on, either through a booster or reforging, do you want to keep it or sell it for a very high price and buy another copy a few weeks later for a fraction of the price? Reforging If you like to gamble with some dead inventory then Reforging can be very profitable, especially when new cards are released. Check out the rarity of the new cards and their orb colors. Then use your excess cards to get that orb color and rarity output in reforging. Let's say I am aiming to get a specific Frost UC card. So I am narrowing down the pool to 100% blue color output, which means Frost, Stonekin or Lost Souls cards are possible. I put in three identical Cs and boost the rarity output with an UC that shares a lot of similarities with the Cs. Another approach. The Lost Launchers have different affinities but close enough. In order to get 100% blue again, I put in a Stonekin card so all four cards share that color. Because I am mixing building and a unit (less similarities) my rarity output suffers a bit and I might get unlucky with a C as the result. But it's good enough and I am even saving some gold by mixing like that. Similar story if you aim for an R. Match three identical UCs with one R that has as many similarities with the UCs as possible. Or use more expensive material in two identical UCs with two identical Rs to remove the chance for an UC output. URs are the easiest to target as it simply requires four identical Rs to achieve a guaranteed UR output. With enough volume of material you can easily brute force several newly released cards on patch day. Sell them while they are hot and buy copies for your own collection later once prices dropped. For example, a newly released UCs, which will probably trade for 100 BFP a month later, can easily be sold for over 3000 BFP on day one. So if you have large volumes of excess cards that are too numerous to sell, just burn them all up on new releases. You can also keep an eye on which color pool has the most expensive URs and then shred some Rs to roll the dice. But also keep some gold stocked up, as reforging requires it as a fee. Gold is earned over time in-match. The rate at which you earn gold depends on the difficulty. Higher difficulties reward more gold. That is true for both cPvE and rPvE. There is no need to rush maps or artificially drag them out as the rate at which gold is generated is a bit slower very early and very late into a match. So if you just play normally you should always fall somewhere within the sweet spot of gold-over-time. At the end of each win you have the choice to either pick an upgrade (which would otherwise cost more gold to unlock, so upgrades are basically gold in a different form) or a plain gold/XP reward if you don't want or need any of the presented upgrades. Keep in mind that the price for purchasing upgrades with gold depends on the rarity of the card. The U3s for Cs cost 1200, UCs 2400, Rs already 4800 and URs 9600. Conversely, disenchanting upgrades (i.e. not picking one after a cPvE game) grants you 200/400/800 gold per disenchanted reward-slot, depending on the difficulty. So while taking upgrades as map rewards is never a bad idea, R and UR upgrades are especially gold efficient. As previously mentioned, when you win the MotD you get to pick an additional reward!

Depends on whether or not you would like to apply that to all entities in the game or just player cards. Manually doing it only for player cards is manageable busywork. Also doing it for NPC entities would be much more annoying as there are so many.

What about just piling up buckets of enemies past the gate? To give players actually something to kill.

Were there already tests as to how the map can be changed? The gate-exploit still has an atrocious effect on how people approach this map. So many simply cannot play Expert without it because - unsurprisingly - they use it as the easiest way out and never bother to learn beyond that as the map is considered "solved" at that point. Still stands as a stellar example on how an overpowering mechanic can render whole slabs of content moot.

Inactivity isn't something anyone gets banned for. Do you have Discord? You can use the contact-staff channel to open a ticked and somebody will look into it.

Do you have an Anti Virus program? If so you have to make an exception for the installation folder so it leaves it alone. AV often randomly triggers on Skylords, which can happen again with updates. The Skylords launcher functions in a way that triggers some AV. But it's harmless for the user yet necessary for the game to work. By default, the game is meant to send your login credentials to the EA server, just like every other always-online game communicates with the official server. However, EA shut down the official server, there is nothing to communicate with. And without the EA server the game cannot function at all, it's dead. In order for this project to work it needs to use a technique that "steals" the login credentials that you enter when logging in and reroutes them to the Skylords Reborn server instead of the non-existent EA server. So to be clear, what is being taken are the login credentials that this project already has from you signing up. And those are being sent to the SR server instead of the EA server. Otherwise the game would just try and fail to connect to the dead EA server and not work.

Do you have an Anti Virus program? You have to make an exception for the folder so it leaves it alone. AV often randomly triggers on Skylords, which can happen again with updates. The Skylords launcher functions in a way that triggers some AV. But it's harmless for the user yet necessary for the game to work. By default, the game is meant to send your login credentials to the EA server, just like every other always-online game communicates with the official server. However, EA shut down the official server, there is nothing to communicate with. And without the EA server the game cannot function at all, it's dead. In order for this project to work it needs to use a technique that "steals" the login credentials that you enter when logging in and reroutes them to the Skylords Reborn server instead of the non-existent EA server. So to be clear, what is being taken are the login credentials that this project already has from you signing up. And those are being sent to the SR server instead of the EA server. Otherwise the game would just try and fail to connect to the dead EA server and not work.

AV often randomly triggers on Skylords, which can happen again with updates. The Skylords launcher functions in a way that triggers some AV. But it's harmless for the user yet necessary for the game to work. By default, the game is meant to send your login credentials to the EA server, just like every other always-online game communicates with the official server. However, EA shut down the official server, there is nothing to communicate with. And without the EA server the game cannot function at all, it's dead. In order for this project to work it needs to use a technique that "steals" the login credentials that you enter when logging in and reroutes them to the Skylords Reborn server instead of the non-existent EA server. So to be clear, what is being taken are the login credentials that this project already has from you signing up. And those are being sent to the SR server instead of the EA server. Otherwise the game would just try and fail to connect to the dead EA server and not work.

From looking at existing functionalities that spawn buildings (outside of summoning them straight from cards) we know that EA did not intend for any units to ever have the ability to do that. Not during the time the original game was running at least. There are only abilities in the game that spawned buildings. Portal Nexus and Altar of Chaos, both buildings themselves. But instead of them having a generic mechanic that is simply able to create buildings, which is how the unit-spawn mechanic works, both of them have hyper specific, hardcoded and tailor-made mechanics that are only meant to do exactly the one thing they are doing. As such, these mechanics show a lot of quirks when used for something other than their intended purpose. One of these is that there is no ability preview next to the portraits when selecting multiple units. Because originally this is a buildings-only ability and unlike units buildings cannot be grouped.

AV often randomly triggers on Skylords, which can happen again with updates. The Skylords launcher functions in a way that triggers some AV. But it's harmless for the user yet necessary for the game to work. By default, the game is meant to send your login credentials to the EA server, just like every other always-online game communicates with the official server. However, EA shut down the official server, there is nothing to communicate with. And without the EA server the game cannot function at all, it's dead. In order for this project to work it needs to use a technique that "steals" the login credentials that you enter when logging in and reroutes them to the Skylords Reborn server instead of the non-existent EA server. So to be clear, what is being taken are the login credentials that this project already has from you signing up. And those are being sent to the SR server instead of the EA server. Otherwise the game would just try and fail to connect to the dead EA server and not work.

The male/female tags are being removed. Reason being that on many cards it is unclear what the unit even is and there is no pretty way to communicate it. Also, the concept was never really fleshed out, it only had two cards that interacted with it. Twilight Hag already got reworked and Girl Power is next. So it hardly ever really amounted to an actual playstyle.

Previous patch notes: The new proposal is a good direction. But it leaves several issues unaddressed: Asymmetry of the northern orbs. One can be taken without destroying the shrine, the other one cannot. Power requirement to defend the nodes. It is a long map and binding power into fortifications would slow you down further. No incentive or benefit to holding the nodes other than the game telling you to do so. I do not like the respawn timer change, it's unnecessary. The pressure is high and that's fine. That such a change apparently takes a lot of effort just makes it seem even less attractive. The focus should be on somehow salvaging the design of the map so the game at the very least not totally lies to the player and sets them up for a harder time. Meaning, there should be a benefit to actually holding and defending the nodes. The intended design of the map is made clear by what the callouts tell you to do. But it's so horrendously designed that it turns out just ignoring the directions is much better. The game wants you to destroy the shrines. But it's better to leave them standing when possible so you won't get attacked. The game wants you to defend the nodes. But it's better to ignore them completely and only tap them at the very end. It's a total design failure and essentially amounts to nothing more than a bunch of traps. Still think simply giving the nodes the effect of granting energy would reward players for holding them. Or let them create a strong construction-hut aura so you could build actual fortifications there without massively slowing you down elsewhere. Right now it's just plain bad to do what the game tells you to do. Defensible walls at the nodes won't change that.

Lost Evocation R is insanely strong for your pure LS T4. It doubles unit damage output for up to 45 seconds and can be used as Blood Healing fodder. Lost Dragon P gets boosted to 7430 DP20 and cuts enemy damage output in half at the same time. Blood Healing also pairs well with Winter Witch. Not only do the shields reduce the damage your units take in the first place. But Blood Healing also first eats through the shield to heal everything around for health. Lost Warlord B is of course great for that exact reason. Not only is it a disposable Revenant but it even has a shield. So it's great to use as healing. An alternative is Overlord. Its healing ability is quite strong as well.

Cultist Master is also a great way to feed Altar of Chaos as it can continuously spawn Nightcrawlers as a sacrifice. Upgrading Cultist Master makes it spawn more Nightcrawlers at once. And as you discovered, it also generates a lot of corpses, so something like Furnace of Flesh built next to it will result in very fast void return rates.

It's possible that you simply saw the visualized area around Construction Hut and when you noticed that units were healing right next to the hut you made the connection that it has to have something to do with the aura. But Construction Hut has nothing that differentiates it from other buildings as far as passive unit-healing is concerned. Also, the healing only occurs out of combat on idle units.

Main issue is the style. BattleForge has a very particular artstyle with rough strokes, rough textures, cloudy/foggy backgrounds that serve as high contrast canvas for the actual subject of the picture. Even the subject itself is often partially fading into this background fog, empathizing anything in the foreground even further. And even then there are unfortunately a few artworks that stick out with a different style or a hacky paint-over of the low poly 3D model. If an AI was trained on the core artstyle it could be worth looking into. But otherwise the AI results might require too much touch-up work.

Holy shit, what? Enlightenment made cards FREEEEEEEEEE? 175p for unbound units and buildings by T3? I don't even remember that and I played the original on launch. How quickly was that changed? Did that even go live at any point?

I don't know about how hard that would be, however the actual question here is: Should we? People that desperately yearn for a challenge have Ex+ where all factions are quite hard. Going up against a random faction is a core functionality of the mode. It's unfortunate that some are "duds" but it's still an essential mechanic. The more power you give to reduce randomness the more you erode the mode as rPvE.

From what I have been told the problem with PvE presets is that single-player is linked with multi-player. Which means if you were to change anything about what Bandits do in rPvE 4P, you would inadvertently change them in rPvE 1P as well. However, the various factions are much better balanced difficulty-wise in 1P. So making Bandits, say, 50% harder in 4P to make them somewhat similar in difficulty to the other factions would simultaneously make them almost impossibly hard in 1P. We cannot fix 4P preset-balance without utterly breaking 1P preset-balance. Those are very unfortunate circumstances that we have inherited here and untangling that is a large undertaking. Which is why it seems like nothing is happening with that issue. There is awareness and willingness but the game stands in the way as of now.

You have to use Tectonic Shift on a place that will remain open. Allied and enemy units block the location and prevent the teleport because they cannot be "phased" to the side like own units are. This is not an issue exclusive to Tectonic Shift. Phase Tower behaves like that as well. So it's been like that since the release of the original game. And until we figure out a way to have both allied and enemy units be handled like own units for the purposes of blocking buildings it'll unfortunately stay that way.

I could see an Abyssal Warder-style Phoenix mechanic. Every revive makes the next Phoenix progressively smaller and weaker until it can't revive anymore.

The dream!

Balancing both around a cooldown of the respawn-ability and an automated death-timer for the critters would be a workaround. Similar to how Sunken Temple caps out at a certain number of swarms. It'd just be annoying to micro because the new critters obviously wouldn't be part of a dedicated unit-group. So while technically an improvement, it would certainly be a hit to the gameplay experience. The other option would be to make the respawn-ability manual but that would shift the annoyance from having to pay attention to the new critters to instead having to click the button every now and then. But that could be more easily balanced, I think. If you were to give the critters a much bigger impact when they are alive, they could function as a temporary buff for engagements.

Technical limitations in the editor made an exact replication of that type of movement unfeasible. When a building with multishot teleports it crashes the game. No way to fix that right now so it has to be Stonekin exclusive.