SpiritAlpha

Conjuration only works on spell charges.

After completing the achievement to beat all the campaign maps on expert, you get warped into a different dimention (new achievement) where everything has been taken over by Lost Souls. This gives you the ability to reply every map with different look and enemies, very similair to the spooky encounters map. 
Why make new maps if we can reuse existing maps 😛 

Greetings Skylords!
This Community Update is a few days ahead of schedule because we have two events that we don't want you to miss! From today until 2nd of November there is a special Halloween event, and on Saturday 29th October we have a PvP tournament with a participation prize! Let's get you up to date. 

• Halloween Event

The Lost Souls have altered the timeline for a special Halloween event! Instead of Encountering Twilight, Rogan Kayle finds himself in the face of new horrors. Enjoy a spooky experience on this adjusted map to celebrate Halloween, and the upcoming release of the new card "Evil Eye" with us!    

You can find the full event details here. This is a temporary event which ends on 2nd of November. Check it out now to not miss out!

• Evil Eye release and adjustments

Evil Eye will release next week in a small dedicated patch (which will not break replays).
Players participating in the Halloween event will have the chance to be rewarded with the new Twilight card the moment it comes out! After the event is over Evil Eye will also be eligible to drop from General and Twilight boosters as an uncommon card. So save your boosters till then!
Since its original reveal, we have made some adjustments to the card based on testing feedback.
The original design had a couple of issues, including a lack of splash damage, squishiness, mobility issues and increased susceptibility against crowd control. While the damage output of the card has a very high potential peak, in practice the card turned out to be hard to use and didn't add much to the Twilight faction besides a new transformation effect. 
To make the card feel more rewarding to play, we gave it a new mechanic; a unit being attacked by Evil Eye explodes if it dies (thematically its insides are superheated and explode), dealing damage in a small area. Having on-enemy-death mechanics is already part of Twilight's identity (i.e. Twilight Warfare) and we found this could solve the splash issue in a more creative manner. 
While this addition goes against the single-target attacker role we originally had in mind, it makes the card more fun to play and gives the player the option to either focus on a strong unit (i.e. a boss) by making use of its passive Rage ability, or micro it to benefit from Searing Sight's new on-death ability. 
Lastly, we gave the card a much-needed health increase from 3300 to 3800. We are happy with how the card turned out, and hope you will enjoy playing it! 
 
 
CHANGED: Searing Sight
Casts a superheated beam that deals 200 damage to a target enemy every second. If a unit directly attacked by Evil Eye dies, its corpse explodes, spewing forth boiling liquids that deal 1000 damage in a 15m radius, up to 3000 in total. 
 
Transform
Evil Eye has the faction's ability "Transformation", allowing it to transform into other Twilight units. Because Evil Eye is already a strong tier 4 card, it has a special passive ability to make transforming it worthwhile. 
 
Conjuration
If the unit is transformed, it will restore spell card charges. The card of every Fire, Nature, and Twilight spell will be granted one more charge and will be immediately reusable. The maximum number of possible card charges for a specific card will not be exceeded.
 
ADDED: Rage
Unit does increasingly more damage the longer it attacks, up to a maximum of 300% more damage, but falls back to its original damage output if it doesn't fight for 5 seconds or changes target. 
 

• New Card Reveal: Raven Walker

While Evil Eye releases in the coming days, there are more new cards in development. We are hard at work adding a new legendary card into the game: the infamous Raven Walker.
Raven Walker is a powerful tier 4 Legendary card, meaning only one can be summoned on the battlefield at a time (like i.e. Viridya or Ravenheart).  Besides being a strong ranged unit, Raven Walker has the ability to corrupt the very air around it, causing played out cards to backlash, dealing huge amounts of damage to both allies and enemies, including buildings! If Ravenheart or its summoned Raven Ships are nearby, Raven Walker will lose its slow passive ability and move like a general XL unit.
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy with it, numbers and effects might still change before release. 

 
Slow
Unit has Slow movement.
 
Blackpowder Turret
Every 4 seconds, unit fires an explosive shot that deals 920 damage to enemies in a 10m radius around its target, up to 1380 in total. Knocks back small and medium units. Affects ground targets only.


Corrupting Aura (100p)
Activate to cast a destructive aura of 30m radius at the target location. Every card played out within it will backlash, dealing 10 times their power cost times their orb count as area damage distributed among all hostile and friendly entities, up to 10000 in total. Lasts for 30 seconds. Reusable every 60 seconds.
 
Fleet Support
If Raven Walker is within 25m radius of a Raven Ship or Ravenheart, it will lose Slow.
 
Some of you might be wondering why Raven Walker is a Legendary card, instead of a Bandit card. While exploring our options, we found two issues with a Bandit approach. First, we feel Bandits as a faction is currently quite complete in terms of T4 units, and this unit would not add anything interesting to the faction; it would not be much different from Construct-decks which already use double Shadow for Nether Warp.
Additionally, Raven Walker's Corrupting Aura ability works on buildings. This means it can be used even with healing spells to destroy enemies and important structures, allowing for a wide variety of decks to build around it. But because of how Corrupting Aura works, it can be stacked infinitely, which is problematic from a balance point of view. It does not come up often that we want something to be limited to a single instance, making this the perfect Legendary. It is also a good opportunity to expand the existing Legendary deck and slowly add Blight's entire raven squadron to the game.
Raven Walker is planned to release in an upcoming content patch. We are not ready to announce a release date yet. 
 
• Tournaments / Events

Since Community Updates are posted on a monthly schedule, events might come and go in between Community Updates. Be sure to keep a close eye on the ingame event-tab and the forum calendar to not miss any events! 

• NEW - Official Halloween Event - until 02-11-2022
The Lost Souls have altered the timeline for this special Halloween event! Instead of Encountering Twilight, Rogan Kayle finds himself in the face of new horrors. Enjoy a spooky experience and celebrate Halloween and the release of the new card "Evil Eye" with us! More information.  
 
• NEW - Official PvP Tournament - 29-10-2022
On Saturday 29.10 we are hosting an official PvP tournament with prizes! The tournament starts at 14:00 p.m. CEST (Berlin time) and will also be livestreamed on our Twitch. Every player who participates will get a booster, so be sure to join even if you are inexperienced! More information. 

• FINISHED - Battle of Tactics #2: Perfectly Balanced
Ultralords latest contest has finished, and the winner reveal can be watched on Twitch. Big thanks to Ultralord for hosting this event, please let us know if you liked it! More information.  

• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event yourself? Please reach out to our Event Organizer, Metagross! We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 
 
• Team changes 

We are glad to announce two new members to the team behind Skylords Reborn. WaterMelonLord has joined us as a Global Moderator. Cool. 

Mynoduesp has also joined the team as Quality Assurance (QA), helping with maintenance and player friendliness, for example by improving descriptions. 

We also had a couple of replies to our translator roles, thank you! We could always use more translators, so if you are fluid in French, Russian or German, please consider doing some translations for us.



• Contribute to the Project

We have opened up a new staff role: Social Media Manager. We heard multiple times that people are intimidated to join the team as a marketeer, so we split up the responsibilities and tasks, making the entry barrier a lot lower. As a Social Media Manager, you are responsible for keeping our Social Media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) up to date. Help with our Twitch and Instagram account would also be greatly appreciated.  
As always, we hope you will also consider helping out the project. Please take a look at all our open positions on how you can do so. 

There are also a variety of contributor roles like translator, that don't require you to join the staff, but still allow you to help out now and then. Please take a look. 
 

• In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a Lost Souls-booster: LOST-SOUL-TIME-LINE

The code is valid until December 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments! 

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #28

EDIT: I messed up. Remove Thugs from the picture

 
Hint:
 
Answer:
 

Welcome to the Official Halloween Event!

The Lost Souls have altered the timeline again - instead of encountering Twilight, Rogan Kayle finds himself facing very different horrors. Enjoy a spooky experience, celebrate Halloween and the release of the new card “Evil Eye” with us!    
 
Everything you need to know:
Map                 - Spooky Encounters (Community Map) Difficulty          - Expert Date                 - 28.10.2022 - 02.11.2022 Restrictions      - None Goals                - Win the map on Expert difficulty Prizes               - Either 1 Evil Eye (upcoming new card) or 1 Twilight Booster Replays            - Send through DM on Discord (Kapo#0116) or PM on the forum (@Kapo).
  Send in your replay, renamed to Halloween and your ingame name – for example: “Halloween_MyName.pmv” until the 2nd of November 2022, 23:59 CET. 

At the end of the event, we may make a compilation of interesting and/or funny replays/screenshots – by participating, you automatically agree to be included in that.

How To Play
Go to the Community Map section and select the Event map named Spooky Encounters / Gruselige Begegnungen / Rencontre avec les Perdus / Жуткие Стычки. Complete the map on expert and send me your replay.

How to access the map:
How to get your replay:

Prize pool
For this event, everybody will get a prize – you have a 50:50 chance to either get your hands on the upcoming new card Twilight Evil Eye or a Twilight Booster. There is no restriction on how many prizes we dish out, half of the players will get an Evil Eye, the others will receive the Booster, determined by a roll of the die. Please note that you can only enter once with one winning replay. Prizes will be sent out manually after the event ends. 
          

We are looking forward to your replays! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Last but not least, a big shoutout to those who helped with this Event: @LEBOVIN, @Dallarian, @Majora, @R4bitF00t, @Metagross31, @CrazyCockerell, @SpiritAlpha and our map testers!


Best regards,
Skylords Reborn Team

But isn't that a problem because walls against t4 enemies are little more than cardboards, just there to buy you a couple seconds.
Don't see how stronger archers will fix this. Your best options would be CC, but this pretty much rules out fire/shadow.
I don't even remember anyone using rifle cultist on walls (ok they are rather weak but still).
Not to mention enemy abilities that just throw you off walls and deny them for some time.
Higher tier archers would all need resistance against this or justify it with some incredible power/price ratio or greatly buff the walls they are standing on

As long as they manage to make those units fit into their factions theme, I don't really see a problem here. And I'm fairly confident about it: Every faction has a T1-Archer, many have a T2-Archer and they are still unique.
As for the PvE difficulty: That's not quite true, If you, for example, add a card that is not worth using, nothing changes (as far as I am concerned, that's the point where Twilight Slayers are right now). That's also why I think that comparing it to Razorleaf + Root Network is a fair thing to do - when people are building their deck for a map, that's what they'll do. If Twilight Slayers are just not worth using if you could use Razorleaf, than either Twilight Slayers are too weak or Razorleaf is too strong. Since I think Razorleaf is fine, my conclusion is that TS could use some buff.
In general I think the game is at a pretty solid point with regards to new cards right now: While there are over- and underpowered cards, there is also a fairly large middle ground and if a new card fits into that middle ground, balance does not change much by adding it. Which is a good thing, more middle-of-the-road card enhance deck variability. For example Banzai Lord and Wasteland Terror made new and interesting Badit decks possible, but I havent noticed PvE getting easier due to these decks. That's the spot I'd like TS to be in, too. But right now, they are a bit overshadowed by other defensive cards.

The goal of Twilight Slayers was never to be on mine-tier PvE level goodness. Not all of our new cards need to be of the high power level, we just want to provide a nice mix of new options for players to play with. Ideally, players should not be able to tell if a card is from the new edition, because it blends so well with the other cards. Ofcourse, being new cards, they get a huge spotlight on them and players (rightfully so) give feedback on them, but not everything will be a Banzai Lord 🙂

Thats not to say that Slayers are perfectly fine in their current state (I'll leave that to the balance team), but don't expect them to take care of all PvE troubles, and doing your dishes while  they are at it 😛 

I understand your point. I see it similar. They could have given the card an effect that improves the unit for the defensive purpose on walls. 
What I'm getting at is that Twilight Slayers are a very good addition to a Twilight deck when it comes to T3 defense scenarios. I mean, they offer a viable alternative for Bad Harvest pos 3, which already indicates that they can handle most other defensive scenarios as well. With Stranglehold (g) you also have access to a good tool to keep enemies away from your wall. Twilight Curse is also a good option for eliminating problematic units like Vilebloods. So you have several ways to defend well with Twilights T3, you just have to get creative. But that is the problem that I see. Very good players can build a good deck around Twilight Slayers and can handle almost any situation with skill and experience. Beginners and mediocre players reach their limits here, which is why, as I mentioned at the beginning, I would have given more to the card here to be able to defend walls more effectively. So I agree with you in part, but I absolutely don't think it's a bad unit, even for defensive uses on walls.

One of the issues we face as a balance team is that we are often unable to release changes as completed wholes, instead things are released as they are completed. Twilight Slayers falls into this category as there are other changes to Twilight we plan to make which we aid it in its job as a defensive wall-based unit. It is hard then to determine if the current situation is due to a particular weakness in Twilight Slayer or due to an unfavorable environment around it until we actually fix said environment. Of course we very possibly could have gotten the numbers wrong with Slayers, it is our first ever attempt at a T3 S-archer and walls do not scale over time, so we appreciate the feedback and will continue to monitor its performance going forward.

Awesome deck, and great explanation. I would like to add 1 thing. 

For people who will to try out this, or similar kinds of decks:

If you play Resource Booster as you get Tier 2 (or 3) on all your current wells, and you need to enlighten a Tier 4 unit after (Batariel, forest elder, Dreadnough or any other), please avoid building the 2 wells at the tier 4 camp. The initial payment of 200 power for a pay-off in about 3 min is not worth the delay on your units.
When/if you play a buff Batariel deck, never build the 2 wells as you cycle through your power anyways with SoW/cultist+FoF. The chance is very low you actually be spending the 900 power you got when you enter the last few camps. 

XL units are very popular as they represent the peak of the power fantasy in Skylords. Seeing how the game is set up from the ground up to reuse assets I have been wondering how M units would fare if they were repurposed as XL units. There are many surprisingly good models! Especially with some great texture work there could be all sorts of new XL units. So I went through all M units and scaled them up to see how they hold up.
This is just a little personal project I did out of curiosity and I figured I might as well share. Enjoy the show and maybe some people get inspired to come up with fun concepts for these entities if they were actual L or XL units for specific factions and with different textures.
Amazon-Types
Amazon, Amii Phantom, Gladiatrix, Stormsinger, Nightguard
Overall decent models and variations. Could serve as ranged XL units, skewering things with spears the size of tree trunks. And would allow the exploration of the existence of giantess warriors. Or half giants in L format.
Big Gun-Types
Bandit Sniper, Nox Trooper, Firesworn
Rough to say the least. They start looking janky in L format already. Low poly count and odd proportions make these a hard sell as XL or even L units. They also highlight a problem with animations when scaling up. The giant-model of Dreadnought or the Warlord-type XL units sell the weight of their weapons and armor very well when walking. These guys swing their weapons around like they weight very little, so they aren't spectacular in that department either.
Dancer-Types
Bandit Sorceress, Firedancer, Frost Sorceress, Lost Dancer, Dryad, Winter Witch, Moon, Viridya
Another tough sell. Especially the dancers and dryads have problems when scaled up. If you look closely at them in-game you can see that the fluid motion of their hands is actually them wobbling their fingers up and down as if they were made of rubber. These sort of visual tricks work when they are small but fall apart when scaled up and it just looks weird. They don't have a lot going on either, the models are relatively plain.
Dino-Types
Bandit Stalker, Icefang Raptor, Firestalker, Razorshard, Swiftclaw, Scavenger
Now here is something! How about giant war dinosaurs? Swiftclaw is pretty ugly but the other guys have lots of details to work with on their models and could look even better with a detailed texture.
Flyer-Types
Crystal Fiend, Magma Spore, Mana Wing, Energy Parasite, Deathglider
Of the bunch I think Energy Parasite actually has the most promise. Very unique and detailed model that could serve as the template for lots of things when re-textured.
Insect-Types
Scythe Fiends, Witchclaws, Twilight Crawlers, Drones, Burrower, Nightcrawler, Shadow Insect
My favorite models. They look and move amazing when scaled up! Pretty much all of them are prime stuff to serve as crazy new XL and L units. Especially Witchclaws look rad. Re-textures could open up even more possibilities.
Ogre-Types
Eliminator, Enforcer, Slaver, Executor, Knight of Chaos, Lightblade, Mauler, Twilight Brute, Mountain Rowdy, Shaman, Warlock
A big but very weak group. Most ogres are just blobs. But Lightblade looks slick, like a living tank. And even Mauler isn't half bad. Textures would definitely have to carry here but there is some potential at least.
Popsicle-Types
Earthkeeper, Ice Guardian, Lost Wanderer, Wrecker, Giant Slayer, Rogan Kayle
These start falling apart in L size. Put something like the Earthkeeper next to Avatar of Frost and it's just unconscionable.
Rider-Types
Dreadcharger, Lyrish Knight, Nomad, Silverwind Lancers, Bandit Lancer
On top of pretty low-poly models and plain riders, this is another category that has issues with communicating the weight of that scale. And they would imply the existence of giant horses.
Torso-Types
Frost Mage, Grove Spirit, Shadow Mage, Twilight Hag
Pretty fun, I think. Although a bit fragile looking so definitely nothing you'd see on the frontline. The models are kind of plain but compensate with the fluid and mesmerizing animations.
Wormpeople-Types
Cultist Master, Lost Priest, Timeless One, Timeshifter Spirit
Those are so cool. Enough details to do some great magic with textures and just a very interesting design to look at in general. Also three very distinct looking models.
Which ones do you think could work well?
For which faction?
What abilities and playstyle could they have?
And how could their theme change entirely with clever texture work?
I think there is a lot of potential here, many of these could become some amazing additions to the L and XL roster, leading to even more variety.

As part of our second round of building changes, Ice Shield Tower will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change:
Iteration 1
1. Orb cost: 1 Frost (T1) ➜ 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T2)
2. Power cost: 50p ➜ 90p
3. Life points: 1100 ➜ 1440 
4. Ice Bolt:
   A. Damage: 66 damage, up to 100 in total (581 dp20) ➜ 96 damage, up to 144 in total (840 dp20)
   B. Radius: 5m ➜ 8m 
5. Ice Shield:
   A. Change from active to auto-cast (30m range, add radius on hover).
   B. No longer affects flying units.
   C. *New Description:* "Every 6 seconds, tower applies an Ice Shield to a friendly ground unit that absorbs up to 690 / 730 / 800 / 880 damage for 30 seconds. Has a range of 30m. Affects ground targets only."
Iteration 1 Goals
Ice Shield Tower has long struggled to find a place alongside its T1 counterparts. Defense Tower is much more stat efficient and Northern Keep is a better support tower. In terms of Ice Shields, it competes with the more mobile Frost Sorceress which is favored over Ice Shield Tower in PvP. In light of this situation, we have decided to move the tower to T2 and make its Ice Shield ability auto-cast. This allows us to increase its strength and opens up the possibility of creating Ice Shield synergies in T2 and beyond, such as has already been done with Icefang Raptor, by creating a more readily available source of Ice Shields. One issue we ran into with this change was how strong it would be alongside War Eagles and Skyfire Drakes in PvP, leading us to removing its ability to work alongside air units. 

As we announced in our Towers Deep Dive, our faction design team has been working on performing a balance pass across all attack buildings in the game. Some of these changes are relatively minor, while other changes are more substantial. This thread will function as the main thread for our second round of building changes. The original master thread can be found here. Minor changes are included here, while major changes have their own threads linked to below. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change. 
Substantial Reworks and Balance Changes

The following buildings have significant enough changes to warrant their own threads.
Previously Announced:
Rocket Tower Stronghold Newly Announced or Updated:
Armored Tower Ice Shield Tower Fortress Changes 

One category of towers we spoke of in our Deep Dive were Fortresses. Fortresses are expensive towers from T3+ that have large models. Due to the way space works in BattleForge, larger towers should have higher stats in comparison to other towers as you can build less of them in a given area. We have decided, outside of the unique case of Church of Negation, to make 200p the base cost of Fortresses. This allows us room to pack more stats into a single building. Our goal is to move Fortresses in the direction of self-sufficient defenses that can hold positions even in those locations where you might only be able to build one or two.
 Deepgorge
1. Cold Clutch radius: 25m ➜ 30m.
While Deepgorge has substantially increased in strength since the most recent changes, particularly in connection with North Star(b) with which it naturally synergizes. Unfortunately, due to the tower's large size, its ability radius is still too small when the tower is placed behind a wall making it difficult even for a well-placed Deepgorge to hit all melee attackers on long walls. 
 Howling Shrine
1. Essence Bolts damage: 600, up to 900 in total ➜ 750, up to 1125 in total (3750 dp20)
2. Crowd control duration (both affinities): 10 sec ➜ 15 seconds
Howling Shrine is feeling better after the buffs both to itself and to the root network in general. When the initial changes were proposed, some people suggested larger buffs to the card but we urged caution due to the difficulty in account for how things would change once the full set of root network changes came through. Now that we can evaluate the changes more fully, it appears that Howling Shrine is still a tad on the weak side. To remedy this, we are giving it a +25% damage increase and increasing the duration of both its root and paralyze to help it keep dangerous melee units at a safe distance. 
 Volcano
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 200p
2. Damage: 581, up to 872 (3990 dp20) ➜ 766, up to 1149 (5270 dp20)
3. Life points: 4390 ➜ 5690
4. Infused Eruption's (red affinity) Rage:
   A. Rage scaling: 100%/200% ➜ 75%/150% 
   B. Rage timer: 7 sec ➜ 10 seconds
   C. Attacks per stack: 4 attacks ➜ 3 attacks
5. Lava Sea
   A. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   B. Bugfix the ability so that it works
Making Volcano more "dense" by increasing its power cost and then adjusting its stats accordingly. Total damage when enraged is slightly increased despite the nerf to Rage's percentile damage increase (12,000 --> 13175 dp20). Additionally, the rage should activate substantially sooner. Previously it took 29 seconds in combat to full scale, now it should only take 22 seconds. One thing we learned in the wake of Volcano's previous changes is that its Lava Sea ability is bugged and does not work. Fixing the ability to function as advertised should do much to make Volcano a larger threat. 
 Worldbreaker Gun
1. Life points: 4500 ➜ 5400
2. Descriptive: Add "Has a long range of 50m" to its Ground Attack description.
WBG is the best defense in the entire game, but that is achieved primarily through its Heavy Snowball ability augmented by Skyelf Sage. In terms of functions as a tower, it is still good but has uncharacteristically low life points for its cost and tier. We are giving it a slight bump in total health, which should help it when functioning as a tower while leaving it unchanged as a long range artillery piece. 
Minor Changes

It is the general principle of the faction design team not to change abilities or introduce complex mechanics needlessly. Cards should generally perform a single function and perform that function well. A lot of the buildings in the game are already well-designed but lack sufficient stats or possess too strict of requirements. As such, we have opted wherever possible to introduce simple changes to bring the tower to the appropriate power level. All values below are U3. 
 Artillery
1. Range: 50m ➜ 60m
2. Increase turret turn speed. 
Allow Artillery to damage siege units even when placed behind a wall.
 Fire Bomb
1. Damage: 715 up to 1650 in total ➜ 720, up to 1800 in total
2. Add "Fast Construction" - Construction time is reduced by 50%.
3. Allow to hit air units & enable splash overflow fix.
 Hammerfall
1. Increase turret turn speed.
2. Breeze of Life (g) / Breeze of Strength (b):
   A. Maximum capacity: 1500 ➜ 3000
   B. Recharge rate: 15 per second ➜ 40 per second
   C. Radius: 20m ➜ 25m
3. Breeze of Strength, Ice Shield cost: 495 capacity ➜ 600 capacity
Increased turret turn speed should increase damage output due to faster target tracking. Change to affinity effects: Higher maximum capacity should make both affinity effects better, but especially the healing one which is only drained as required. Higher recharge rate means that a new Ice Shield can be bestowed every 15 seconds instead of every 33 seconds, even with the higher cost. Range increase to make it easier to place units around it. Total charge time is now 90 seconds. Additionally, Hammerfall's shields do not decay while within the aura. This makes them a stable source of extra health for allied units. Hammerfall's recharge and healing is still less than Healing Well's, a T2 60p card, with the same maximum capacity.
 Infected Tower
1. Damage: 114, up to 172 in total (1215 dp20) ➜ 138, up to 207 in total. (1466 dp20)
2. Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 8m
+20% damage increase and small splash radius increase. Changes to Infected Tower's ability have been postponed until we can properly rework it.
 Kobold Laboratory
1. Mason Mastery radius: 25m ➜ 30m
2. Material Research: 
   A. Changed buildings ➜ buildings and walls
   B. Allow repairing while in combat
   C. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   D. New description: "Friendly buildings and walls in a 30m radius have 50 / 50 / 50 / 70% lower repair costs and are repairable in combat."
Allow Kobold Laboratory to have a niche use in defense and to provide something beyond what Glaciation is capable of providing. Change is meant in preparation for DRPvE and will also be useful in maps with prolonged defenses, especially near walls.
 Lost Converter
1. Add Soul Splicer's "Soul Suction" ability to the card, allowing it to gather corpses outside its passive range.
2. Corpse cost to freeze: 200 ➜ 250 stored life points
 Morklay Trap
1. Enable splash overflow fix
2. Explosion Blast total damage: 2640 in total ➜ 4400 in total
Increase total targets from 3 to 5 and enable splash damage properly transferred even when units die.
 Stone Hurler
1. Damage: 100 damage, up to 150 in total (834 dp20) ➜ 120 up to 180 in total (1000 dp20)
Align actual damage with stated damage on the card.
 Twilight Bombard
1. Remove "Siege" from Infused affinity
2. Add "Rage" to Infused affinity. 
   A. Stage 1: +25%; Stage 2: +50% damage
   B. Attacks per stage: 3
   C. Reset timer: 10 seconds
3. Increase turret turn speed. 
Twilight Bombard (r) has Siege as its affinity effect, which is largely useless. By changing it to Rage instead, we make the choice between the two affinities one of increased damage versus crowd control.
 Waystation
1. Add Soul Splicer's "Soul Suction" ability to the card, allowing it to gather corpses outside its passive range.
2. New passive, Fast Construction: Construction time is reduced by 50%.
3. Infused damage buff: 30% ➜ 40%
4. Tainted poison damage: 30 life points every second ➜ 40 life points every second
5. Corpse storage: 2500 total ➜ 4500 total
6. Corpse cost per potion/poison (both affinities): 180 ➜ 400 stored life points will be used up.
7. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
The first step in what will eventually be a full rework of Waystation. For now, the addition of fast construction means it can be set up offensively as its name suggests and the addition of Soul Suction means it should be able to easily gather corpses to fuel itself. Gave a small boost to both affinity effects and increased the radius to require ranged units to enter its effective radius to damage it.

Amazing work 😁

I just Eyed yet another piece of pure perfection, cant wait to lay Eyes on it ingame.
To the Skylords Reborn Team. You guys really have your Eyes on the target, since you hit it all the time.





 

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• September Patch Release + Feedback Thread

Our latest content patch released on September 14th and brought three new cards and many balance changes to the game. You can check out the patch notes here. We hope you are enjoying the many hours that went into creating it.
As always, we would love to hear your feedback on the changes we have made to the game with this patch. 
What do you think of our first PvE nerfs? Do the various decks still feel usable? Have they changed much at all, etc.?
Do you like the changes to card and factions (PvE and PvP)? Why or why not? Where did we hit the mark, and implement something exciting you'd like to see more of? Where did we miss the mark, and what should we avoid in the future? Do you enjoy the new cards, are they balanced, do you like Hybrid Orbs? And what about our map changes? 
While these are some of the topics we are most interested about, feel free to offer any suggestions regarding the patch and the current direction of the game. Please provide your feedback here, or you can also join us at our balance discord to further discuss changes to cards. 
 
• Follow-up Achievement Patch 

In a small follow-up patch, currently planned for this upcoming Monday, we will make changes to some achievements in the game (and add some new ones!). We know players really like achievements, so we plan to continue adding and improving the experience. This patch will also contain some QoL changes. 
Skylords Reborn released with a base set of achievements, including 3 achievements which reward players for draining their BFP reserves. Unfortunately, since release we have seen that contrary to encouraging more play, these reserve achievements are actually driving players away from the game. Players will grind many hours in a row to finish all three achievements and in the process completely burn themselves out. Given this situation, we have decided to remove all 3 reserve achievements and replace them with general in-game playtime achievements that the player can complete at their own pace. These new achievements will be available to everyone, even those who previously completed the reserve achievements.
Sadly, our newest achievements, added in our Force of Nature patch, were also not free from issues. "A Wrinkle in Time" caused a lot of confusion with its description and has been updated accordingly. Our new RPvE 10 achievement "Abandon Hope..." has proved to be quite popular, even with brand-new players who attempt it without being properly prepared. This has led to frustration among our more veteran players, who the achievement was meant to help by increasing the RPvE 10 player pool. As such, we have locked the achievement beyond PvE Rank 10, to prevent unprepared players from joining lobbies in hopes of easy boosters. Our Pure Fire achievement "Never Thought of Him" has had a very low completion rate and after talking to players we decided to reduce the restrictions. Now, only the player pursuing the achievement is required to use a Pure Fire deck, instead of the entire team. We have also made changes to Defending Hope to allow the player to activate Rogan with a building and not just a unit. While the fact Rogan required a unit to be activated was intended to be a fun puzzle-like challenge for the "A City Strongly Compact" achievement, we noticed this caused substantial frustration among players, especially those who were also trying to complete "The Long Journey Home" simultaneously.
You can check out the full list of changes here. The patch is currently planned for release on Monday the 3rd. 

• New Card Reveal: Evil Eye

While we just released our latest patch, we are already hard at work on creating new cards and content. Stay tuned to our Community Updates for more information about their release. 
Our last content patch already contained two new Twilight cards; Twilight Slayers and Twilight Crawlers. We might have kept the best for last, and are excited to reveal another new card coming to the faction in the future; the long requested Evil Eye! 

Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it, numbers and effects might still change before release. 
Evil Eye is a new tier 4 unit for Twilight decks, requiring two Nature and two Fire orbs. The card will be uncommon, and won't have an affinity. This ranged Demon Dominator deals increased damage the longer it can focus its sight on an enemy. 
 
Searing Sight
Deals 200 damage to a target enemy every second. Evil Eye's sight deals increasingly more damage the longer it attacks, up to a maximum of 800 damage every second, but falls back to its original damage output if it doesn't fight for 5 seconds or changes targets. Has a range of 30m. 
 
Transform
Evil Eye has the faction's ability "Transformation", allowing it to transform into other Twilight units. Because Evil Eye is already a strong tier 4 card, it has a special passive ability to make transforming it worthwhile. 
 
Conjuration
If the unit is transformed, it will restore spell card charges. The card of every Fire, Nature, and Twilight spell will be granted one more charge and will be immediately reusable. The maximum number of possible card charges for a specific card will not be exceeded.

Evil Eye has been requested as a playable card many times over the years, and we hope you look forward to playing with it in the future! 
 
• Art Spotlight

The artwork for Evil Eye was created by SpiritAlpha. As always, it went through many iterations; work on the card started as early as June 2022! We collected some sketches to show a behind the scenes look at the work that went into the final design. 

First, SpiritAlpha provided 9 possible art compositions for Evil Eye. Our Art Critiques then voted for their favorite designs. The three top voted designs were picked to expand upon. Here you can see some of their exploration: 

In the end, we went for the first design, which is a take on Nano's Wrathgazer wallpaper. We then spend a ton of time getting the colors and scenery just right for the card, making sure it fit with other twilight designs and the card frame. 
        
2009 / 2022
What do you think of the artwork? And do you enjoy these behind the scenes sections? Please let us know in the comments!
 
• Tournaments / Events

Since Community Updates are posted on a monthly schedule, events might come and go in between Community Updates. Be sure to keep a close eye on the ingame event-tab and the forum calendar to not miss any events! 

• NEW Battle of Tactics #2: Perfectly Balanced - 14-10-2022 until 23-10-2022
A new event soon to be hosted by Ultralord. To beat this challenge, you are required to play with a deck containing a perfect mix of cards. Four of each color, four of each tier, five of each card type, and every card has to be played out at least once (meaning you can't put filler cards into your deck). Keep an eye on the event calendar on the Forum or ingame news for the full rules and map! 

• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event yourself? Please reach out to our Event Organizer, Metagross! We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 
 
• Team changes 

We are happy to welcome R4bitF00t to our team as Map Artist. He will help out the map department with the graphical side of things, which will greatly help our map projects that are currently in development. 

• Contribute to the Project

As always, we hope you will also consider helping out the project. Please take a look at all our open positions on how you can do so. 
There are also a variety of contributor roles like translator, that don't require you to join the staff, but still allow you to help out now and then. Please take a look. 

 

• In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a Twilight-booster: ISPY-WITH-HUGE-EYES

The code is valid until November 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments! 

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #27
 

Twilight slayers looks so cool, the Artwork is really epic. I was one of those who hoped they would get a playable card at some point. Keep up your awesome work. 👍

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Recent (and upcoming) Patch 

On the 16h of July we released a small Quality of Life patch, containing some bugfixes, and updating the Free PvP decks to adjust to the new meta. You can check out the patch-notes here. 
We are also working on a new content patch, which will bring more balance changes and two new cards into the game. We will share more information on this patch in the next community update, but we will reveal one of the new cards today! 
 
• Survey

First things first: a massive thank you to everyone who filled in our Feedback Survey for 2022! You completely shattered our expectations with over 2000 responses! 
Especially since this project is run completely on a voluntary basis with no profits (which 12% of you were not aware of by the way!) we couldn't be more proud of your praise for the state the game is currently in:

We will need some time to go over all the comments, but the data and individual responses are very helpful to us, and your kind words are a motivation to continue trying to make this project the best it can be! 
We will share more insight in community feedback on a later date. Thank you for being part of this great community!
 
• Introducing: Hybrid Orbs

Before we reveal our new card, we have to talk about a new orb requirement coming to Skylords Reborn: Hybrid orbs. 
A Hybrid orb allows you to meet its requirements with one of its two colors. For example, a  card can be played with  or .
Hybrid orbs are a nice in-between of heavy and loose orb restrictions. Restricting a Twilight card to require double Fire or double Nature, would cause it to be unplayable for half of the Twilight decks. Opening up the card by having the 3rd orb be a neutral orb, would however cause unintended synergies with other factions. For example; access to Nature's heal for a Bandit card, or Shadow's Motivate for a Twilight card. By going for a Hybrid orb, we reward playing a faction deck in tier 3, without locking the other color combination of that faction out. 
 

 
We will use this new flexibility to make adjustments to some older cards. We are planning to make use of Hybrid orbs for Treefiend, Twilight Hag, Deepfang and our upcoming new Nightshade Plant design. While we could also make use of this for tier 2 and tier 4 cards in the future, we currently only have plans for using it on tier 3 cards. We won't use Hybrid orbs for Tier 1 cards either, one of the reasons being the first card played decides what orb you get, running into all kind of weird issues with hybrid T1 cards and orbs. 
Hybrid orbs have been the topic of many conversations in the past, and we are very happy to finally introduce them into the game! 
 
 
 
 
 



• New Card: Twilight Slayers

Our first new card to make use of Hybrid orbs is a card that has been requested quite a bit over the years: a new tier 3 archer unit: the Twilight Slayers! The card will be a common and come in two affinities, impacting the damage output towards certain factions. Let's break down the card. 
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it and feel comfortable revealing it, numbers and effects might still change before release.

 
Bow Attack
Every 2 seconds, unit fires arrows at enemies that deal 19 / 20 / 22 / 25 damage. Deals 50% reduced damage if a hostile unit is within an 8m radius, unless Twilight Slayers are mounted on a wall segment. Has a range of 30m.

Infused Fury
Deals 50% more damage against elemental units

Tainted Fury
Deals 50% more damage against Human and Ogre units. 

Like all Twilight units, Twilight Slayers will come with the faction's ability "Transformation". While transforming Twilight Slayers does not trigger any additional effects, we are working on a shift towards more impactful transformation effects for other Twilight units, making transforming your units more worthwhile.

In our Force of Nature patch, we already changed the power cost reduction for Transform effects, and we will also make adjustments to the transformation speed in our next patch. On our balance discord, you can find out more about our future Twilight plans, such as our intention to change the card Nightshade Plant to be an exciting tier 3 Twilight pay-off card.
We hope you are looking forward to this new card and the changes coming to the Twilight faction.
 
• Artwork Spotlight

The artwork for Twilight Slayers has been created by SpiritedAlpha. As always, there were multiple iterations and feedback sessions to reach the final artwork. Here are some earlier versions, where you can notice a slightly different color scheme and background, alongside other ideas that were improved upon, adjusted, or removed to better fit the piece (sorry Twilight Negator!). A big thanks to SpiritAlpha and everyone who gave feedback during the process. 
    
Twilight Slayers are a recreation of the original NPC enemy, but we found the artwork (especially for a playable card) below the standard we have set for our Skylords Reborn additions. Looking at the artwork side by side shows the drastic difference in quality between them. 
     
2009 / 2022
• Adjustments to Reforging

It has now been 8 months since the advent of the Reforging system. Back in January, we gave the community an update on the health of the economy, and we would like to do the same again today. 
Some important information on the data: When it says "Fire Pool" it includes every card in the game which includes a Fire Orb. The data was collected and presented in this manner because this is how Reforging works when it tells you that the output card has an X% chance of containing a Fire Orb. Additionally, all price information presented is an average of actual sales in the auction house over a given period. While some extreme outliers were removed from the data set, such as 5 bfp Harvesters and 400 bfp Northguards, in 99% of instances the data was accepted as-is without tampering from our side.
Data Set: (Click to pop-out and expand)

Updated Analysis of Data Set:
At first glance, you can quickly see that after the update the following changes occurred (Neutral Cards are excluded from the analysis as they are the control set):
The average, median, minimum, and maximum prices of Common cards increased across the board.  With two exceptions, the average, minimum, and median prices of Uncommon cards increased across the board, while the maximum decreased. The decrease in average Frost prices can be attributed to 3 outlier cards in the Frost Pool, (Coldsnap, Frost Mage, and Lost Spirit Ship) which pre-reforging were very expensive for Uncommon cards. The increase in maximum Uncommon prices in the Fire Pool is caused by Wasteland Terror, which as a new card is still quite expensive for its rarity. Wasteland Terror is in general causing an inflation of the maximum Uncommon card costs in the Fire, Shadow, and All Card Pools.  The same thing happened to Rare cards as happened to Uncommon cards. Average, median, and max price of Ultra-rare cards decreased across the board while minimum price increased. The one exception is the Nature Pool, where the median price of Ultra-rare cards actually decreased. If you look closely, you can see that the median prices for cards in the Fire Pool and among All Cards are almost identical before and after Reforging. The average prices of All Cards is also only slightly negative and has been steadily trending upwards in recent months.  General booster worth increased from 378 bfp to 420 bfp. This means Reforging has made it more worthwhile to open boosters after the update than it was before. Promos have been excluded from the data set, making this even more true. On average, the daily discounted booster will profit a player 70 bfp post-update versus 28 bfp pre-update. The data is at this point fairly stable. Reforging established a minimum base worth for all cards dependent on rarity that did not exist prior. This seems to have stabilized around: Common: 5-6 bfp Uncommon: 22-23 bfp Rare: 100-102 bfp Ultra-rare: 200-220 bfp 
Fun Facts about Reforging:
- To date, 2.35 million cards have been Reforged. 64.4% of the cards were Common, 27.2% were Uncommon, 8.1% were Rare, and 1.3% were Ultra-rare.
- Only 0.87% of all Reforges produce Forge Shards (FYI, it usually is not worth it to produce Forge Shards)

Changes to Reforging:
The introduction of Reforging has accomplished many of our goals for the economy. At the same time, we have noticed the total amount of Reforges has steadily decreased as time has progressed, which is expected, but it has also come coupled with a slow increase in the prices of Ultra-rare cards. While prices for the most expensive Ultra-rare cards are down substantially, the average and median prices of Ultra-rare cards are steadily moving towards parity with the old prices. This is an issue, because the average price of all cards has risen due to Reforging, making it harder for new players to collect and charge cards. The introduction of many new beginner achievements last patch has helped to slightly alleviate this issue, but it still exists, even in reduced form. As such, we have made the following changes to incentivize Reforging and to make it easier for all players, not only those with large gold and card stockpiles, to interact with the system. We intend for these to be the last changes we make to Reforging.
 
Gold Cost to Reforge into the Following Rarities:
Common = 125 gold --> 50 gold
Uncommon = 300 gold --> 150 gold
Rare = 750 gold --> 400 gold
Ultra-rare = 1500 gold --> 800 gold
 
Reforging Rates:
We have made it easier to produce an Ultra-rare card when Reforging. For example, 4 identical Rare cards will now guarantee an Ultra-rare card. 
 
The changes to Reforging have been implemented today, and are now live on the server. 

• Tournaments / Events

Now that the Community Updates moved to a monthly schedule, events might come and go in between Community Updates. Be sure to keep a close eye on the ingame event-tab and the forum calendar to not miss any events! 

There are currently two gameplay events planned by Dutchy and Ultralord, which can be found on the calendar already. More info about them soon!

• NEW - CCC #7 - Contest-ception
A new CCC is now live: a contest to come up with... a contest! Share your wildest ideas and get rewarded for it! We hope to see many cool ideas that we might use in future contest, so be sure to brainstorm cool stuff and join the contest! More information.
 
• FINISHED - CCC #6 - Back to the Roots
Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest, this time on a very special map. This custom map is a copy of the Introduction map with a few new jumps and turns, where you play with a Shadow/Nature deck instead. As with all CCC, the more players attended, the better the prizes became, resulting in a free booster for the whole community! View the event and the code.
 
• FINISHED - Skylords Bounty Spring Forge
It has been a while since we have closed this bounty and players have been wondering what happened to the Spring Forge. While we had a clear winner (congratulations Wanky!), the entry was not fully ready for release yet, and working on it took more time from the team than we had anticipated for a community bounty. Since spring is long gone, we will move this Forge over to next year. 

• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers Hiko and/or Metagross to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 

• Contribute to the Project

In our last Community Update, we went over various features that could be added to the game if we get the right people to work on them, please take a look if you haven't done so already.

We have also added a new contributor (non-staff) role: Internal Tester. 
As an Internal Tester, you will be testing and exploring in-game mechanics with additional information that is normally hidden from players. Your contribution will allow us to fix bugs and create new designs. 
 
As always, we hope you will consider helping out the project. Please take a look at all our open positions on how you can do so. 

• In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a Twilight-booster: MORE-PLAY-WITH-ORBS

The code is valid until September 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments! 
 

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #25

@Volin @Kapo

It would be SO MUCH cooler if the Treespirits got spawned from the projectile, not from the unit itself. I mean, it is literally called a "Spore Launcher".
Having it on every auto attack (or every few ones) would be amazing but it would have some wonky quirks to work out. The amount of spawned Treespirits could even scale with the amount of spores shot and therefore with support, as far as I have seen. They'd have to be temporary though.

Imagine if attackers got swamped like that. Could take Spore Launcher into an entirely different direction. Nerf the amount of default spores it shoots from 3 to 1 but let every attack spawn a Treespirit, amount of spores and Treespirits scaling with support. Unfortunately, the Treespirits would take up pop cap as we don't currently have a way to introduce new pop-counts per unit ...

As part of our upcoming Nature balance changes, Spore Launcher will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change:
Iteration 1
1. Remove slow (normal XL speed, 6.4 m/s)
2. Linked Fire support: 6 max --> 8 max
3. New Active, "Sprout Spore:"
   A. Cost: 80p
   B. Summon 2 Treespirits which take 50% less damage. Treespirits have shadow affinity.
   C. *Description:* "Activate to sprout 2 Treespirits. They will have the same upgrade level as Spore Launcher. Summoned Treespirits take 50% less damage. Reusable every 60 seconds."
Iteration 1 Goals
As regards Spore Launcher, we must wonder why the original developers gave the unit Siege. Was the card actually intended to be an offensive unit? If so, what would that even look like, and could we somehow achieve it ourselves? It is in pursuit of such a goal that we will be making the following changes to Spore Launcher. First, we are removing the unit’s slow and increasing its speed to that of a normal XL-unit. Next, we will be increasing its support capacity, that is the number of units that it can be supported by, from 6 to 8. This should allow Spore Launcher to outscale its T3 counterpart in Razorleaf. Finally, we are introducing a new active called Sprout Spore which spawns 2 Treespirits in like manner as Satanael spawns Snapjaws. This should allow Spore Launcher to create a semi-mobile unbound power root support battery which when combined with Sylvan Gate should give the unit the ability to function as an attacker while it utilizes its long range of 50m.

I don't see why these changes should change that. The new orb requirement to 3nature1neutral will not make this better.

I use him quite frequently in rPvE in a deck and it work super well. I'm a bit sad, that this deck will no longer work afterwards, but maybe I can find a new way to play it afterwards.

I really wonder why there was no thread for Mo 😃

There is one point I would heavily suggest to change: If you kill the Walker, it shouldn't respawn - no matter which difficulty. It is presented on this map as a "special boss" option, and once you kill it, it shouldn't come back.

Oh I remember sketching those concepts during first days of war... Sirens and withering of hope. Yet never give up till you breathe and do what you must! And you can see how it progressed, together we all will win.✊