WatcherOfSky

Sanctuary seems like the obvious way to go for a pure nature tier 4 payoff, love the design! Cosmetic are always a nice add as well. Keep up the good work!!

On a personal note; it is hard to believe this is Community Update 30 already! Preparing and writing these always takes much more time than expected, but I hope its appreciated by the playerbase.
Community Updates started out as a way to keep the playerbase informed about all the work going on behind the scenes, as we are always working on more content, quality of life fixes or other ways to expand upon Skylords Reborn, even if it can take a while for a new patch to go live. All of this is done by a team of about 35 volunteers working in different departments on their evenings, weekends or holidays, alongside their job, studies and social responsibilities. It's always impressive to me to see how much we get done and are willing to invest into a fan project for no profit. Sometimes the workload can be a lot, but I am extremely grateful for the fact BattleForge was not only resurrected and I get to play it again, but I also get to work with a bunch of talented and passionate people in a great community. 
Lets celebrate another year of Skylords together, and I hope to see you during the stream and in the Forge. 😄
 

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!

• 2nd Anniversary Stream

The second anniversary of Skylords Reborn is coming up! Two years ago, on the 18th of December 2020, the world of Nyn opened its doors again, allowing more than 100.000 Skylords to re-experience this one-of-a-kind game. Since then, we have been hard at work to bring you even more content, bugfixes, new cards and other features. Skylords Reborn is truly by the fans, for the fans, and we are glad we can celebrate this second anniversary with you. 
On Sunday the 18th of December at 20:00 CEST*, we will be hosting an anniversary stream on our official Twitch channel. We will look back on another year of Skylords Reborn, show off what will be included in our latest patch, and answer questions from the community. 
We hope you will be joining us! 

*Due to the busy December month, this time slot is pending, we will share the final streaming time closer to the anniversary. 
 
• Upcoming Content Patch

We are also hard at work to bring you a new content patch, aimed for release in December. It will include various balance changes, new cards, new achievements and a new feature.
Last year we focused on improving the economy and introduced Reforging; a way to make use of spare cards lying around and to adjust the prices of cards, giving even worthless cards a set minimum value and a creating a soft cap on card prices to prevent runaway inflation among the best ultra rares. We also added more achievements, increasing the number of boosters players can earn to help newer players get started on their collection.
Achievements are a great way to naturally introduce players to more cards, but also to keep players engaged with fun challenges. However, by rewarding items that interact with the economy (boosters, cards) we see some players get frustrated with achievements that provide challenges they don't enjoy or find too hard, yet feel forced to do because of the rewards.
So we started to work on an additional reward layer, and we are proud to reveal the new upcoming feature: Cosmetics.
With our new patch, we are introducing a bunch of new achievements focused on providing fun new challenges for players, while not having to worry about impacting the economy with their rewards. Instead, players will be able to earn special borders, banners and titles, allowing for more expression and fancy bling! Here is a little teaser:  

Cosmetics will be part of our upcoming patch, and we will share more about it and their connected achievements in the anniversary stream. 


• New Card Reveal: Sanctuary

In our Nature Deep Dive back in April, we already mentioned Sanctuary, a card that has been in development ever since. Sanctuary is a new tool for Pure Nature players that provides an effect similar to Mark of the Keeper to a select number of units. 
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy with it, numbers and effects might still change before release. 

Sanctuary is a new tier 4 spell for pure Nature decks, requiring four Nature orbs. The card will be Rare, and will come in two affinities. The effect of the non-upgraded version is as follows:
 
Blessed Spellbane
Up to 4 friendly units in a 25m radius will be wrapped in a countermagical aura. Affected units are surrounded by a spellblocking zone of 20m where enemies can neither use ranged attacks nor special abilities. Hostile players cannot play out cards within that zone. Additionally, affected units take 25% less damage. Lasts for 20 seconds. Reusable every 40 seconds.

Gifted Spellbane
Up to 4 friendly units in a 25m radius will be wrapped in a countermagical aura. Affected units are surrounded by a spellblocking zone of 20m where enemies can neither use ranged attacks nor special abilities. Hostile players cannot play out cards within that zone. Additionally, the duration of the immobilizing effects of Freeze and Paralyze is reduced by 75% on all affected targets. Lasts for 20 seconds. Reusable every 40 seconds.

Sanctuary continues our work on the Nature faction, alongside various balance changes coming to the faction in our upcoming patch. Sanctuary aims to provide Nature players with a reward for playing Pure Nature decks, instead of Enlightenment decks. It is a powerful effect that covers some weaknesses with which the faction struggles.
Sanctuary is planned to release in our next patch. 
 
• Art Spotlight

Work on Sanctuary started back in July, with SpiritAlpha coming up with a few sketches to explore directions. At this point, we weren't sure what the focus point would be of the spell. During design there were versions with non-nature units like the Overlord at the center of the spell. We thought it would be fun to show these very early concepts.


The art feedback channel was home to many a discussion during the progress, with as many as eight different takes up for discussion. We had versions with the focus on a village (1, 2), a focus on a single unit (Swamp Drake 3, Giant Wyrm 4, Abyssal Warder 6) to Twilight investation around the borders, being held back by the sanctuary (8).

After voting, the version with two dragons in the sky (5) was used to come to the final design. A big thanks to our artists SpiritAlpha and Tweeto for working on this piece and to our Art Critiques for providing feedback. As you can see, we always put a lot of thought and effort into our artworks, we hope it shows!

 
• Tournaments / Events

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

• CLOSING SOON – Official PvE Contest #7: Harvest season – until 02.12.2022
For this challenge, we want to see you succeed in playing the map Bad Harvest, while accomplishing several goals of varying difficulty.
The more objectives your team accomplishes, the more points you get, which will lead to greater rewards! More information. 

• NEW – CCC #9 – The Archer's Tournament – Until 10.12.2022
Once the official PvE contest is finished, a new CCC run by Kapo goes live the day. Click here for details.
 
• FINISHED – Official Halloween Event
While our Halloween event is now over, you can still play this new take on a familiar map. Instead of Encountering Twilight, Rogan Kayle finds himself in the face of new horrors. Click here for how to access the 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

Sadly, Chibiterasu has decided to quit his role of balance developer. While sad to see him go, we respect his decision and would like to thank him for all his work.
 
• Contribute to the Project

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. 
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 General-booster: HAPP-YANN-IVER-SARY

The code is valid until January 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 #29

Excited to try the new map! New update looking good as always!

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

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 finally getting the love it deserves in the transformation buffs is one of the biggest things I've been wanting since I first saw the mechanic haha. Awesome new cards and changes, really feels like all the nooks and crannies of Battleforge are being cleaned up thoroughly! 
Absolutely love it all!

Map Balance Changes

PvE Map Changes
Bad Harvest, Defending Hope, & The Soultree: Replaced player variant of Defense Tower with NPC variant.
All player variants of cards on campaign maps are being swapped out for NPC variants to prevent balance changes to player cards affecting the cards used by NPCs in campaign and random PVE maps. Crusade: Players should be able to fulfil the victory condition immediately now when both paths are cleared early.
Speedrunners can now compete for top times without having to wait a fixed period of time, therefore removing the existing set minimum time on Crusade. Defending Hope: Rogan will now also move if a player's building is in the vicinity.
This will allow the achievement "A City Strongly Compact" to be completed entirely with building cards.  Mo: Change blocking at the cliff next to the Command Walker to no longer allow units to walk through the cliff.
Raven's End: 2 Stonekin units; 1 in the center and 1 in the camp in the right side, are no longer assigned to the Bandits.
The Dwarven Riddle: The 2 inner monuments that were added in Patch 400033 will now be observable in the fog of war like the other inner monuments.
The Insane God: Replaced a Twilight Horror with a Twilight Devastator on expert difficulty at Position 1's Tier 3 location and added an additional Slaver to the camp on all difficulties. Replaced all 4 player variant Living Towers with a custom NPC variant. Increased script trigger range around temples to prevent the player from entering the center undetected. Player controlled Urzach's Seeker (transformed Priest) now have the Burrower Acid Spit active ability.
Slight change to The Insane God to continue to allow use of Nightguard on the map. The addition of a new Slaver to the camp ensures that Position 1's T3 remains similar in difficulty to capture as before for non-Nightguard or Parasite Swarm users. Fixed a bug that allowed a player to sneak into the center without triggering the defense conditions, as well as gave the transformed Priest of Urzach an active ability to make it more worthwhile to engage in the Priest mini-game for the player. The NPC version will not use the Acid Spit ability.  Titans: Replaced 3 Fathom Lords in the Northern camps of Position 4 with Custom Deep Ones (1650 damage, 1650 life points). Expert difficulty only.
Position 4 is one of the hardest positions on a multiplayer expert map and most players get through it by using Nightguards. This change allows the player to continue using Nightguards, but since Deep Ones are weaker than Fathom Lords, it will increase the difficulty of the map when using this strategy. At the same time, it will minorly decrease the difficulty of Position 4 for non-Nightguard strategies. 
Bugfixes
Emberstrike, Tempest, and Fire Worm now properly ignore the 50% damage reduction of dazed units, as their passives suggest. Amii Paladins and Amii Phantom no longer have the "human" class. They now properly only have the "Amii" class. The Tunneling ability of Burrower and Drones no longer grants paralyze immunity during the cast time of the ability. The overkill splash damage bug has been fixed on the following cards: Banzai Lord (p)'s Banzai Birds, Comet Catcher, Death Ray, Fire Dragon, Gemeye, Giant Wyrm, Skycatcher, Rifle Cultist's Dark Grenade, and Worldbreaker Gun. This should constitute a minor buff for each of these cards. Fixed several instances of Revenants' displayed damage being misaligned with the regular unit. Mountain Rowdy's Tainted Ice Block no longer affects flying units on U0-U2. Missing Twilight class was added to the Twilight bug summoned by Twilight Curse. Vulcan now specifies it can only target ground units. Fixed a bug, that caused newly uploaded maps to show an error message as their map name. Fixed a bug that allowed units to clip through terrain with buildings.  Fixed a bug that prevented the use of Twilight Transformation when switching to the other side in the Forge. Community maps should no longer claim to be 2-player maps when they are actually 1-player maps. 

Card Balance Changes

Global Balance Changes
Changes to PvE Unit Orb & Power Costs: more details can be found here: Changes to PvE Unit Orb & Power Costs
   - Additionally, the general mind control immunity on the PvE versions of Bandit Windhunter, Twilight Deathglider, and all Lost Souls units and buildings has been removed.
Each NPC unit in both campaign and random PvE maps has orb and power costs just like player units, which might come as a surprise to players used to using Nightguard and Parasite Swarm to takeover nearly any unit in the game. This is because there has been a longstanding bug, going back to the game's release, where units which are spawned in via map script did not have properly assigned orb and power costs. The original developers knew about this bug, but they do not appear to have known how to fix it. By the time Empire and the Lost Souls RPvE faction were added to the game, the original developers decided to add a universal immunity to mind control to the entire Lost Souls faction to prevent further abuses of the mind control mechanic. They also added total immunity to Windhunter and Death Glider.
The bug in question has now been fixed and as part of this fix we have gone through and updated the power and orb costs of every unit in the game. The goal of this rework was to create situations where mind control is still useful, and indeed powerful, while tampering down the current situation where mind control units, especially Nightguard, trivialize a map and thus become the universally proscribed solution to nearly any difficult situation. As part of these changes, we are also making several changes to current campaign maps, which we already started last patch with the changes to Nightmare Shard, Nightmare's End, and Behind Enemy Lines. All map changes can be found in the Map Balance Changes section in the next post.
S-unit population count: decreased from 6 ➜ 4
Total root network support cap: 10 maximum support within a network ➜ infinite amount of support possible
Twilight Transformation duration: decreased from 2 seconds ➜ 1.2 seconds
Increased turn speeds of several units: 
   - Gladiatrix, Ice Guardian, Knight of Chaos, Lightblade, Mauler, Mountain Rowdy, Rogan Kayle, Shadow Insect, Slaver, Treespirit, Viridya's Treespirit, Twilight Brute, Warlock, and Wrecker.
Lost Spellbreaker (NPC Unit): 
   - No longer casts Disenchant on-hit, still makes affected units immune to further buffs.
   - Now makes affected units unable to use their special abilities.
Lost Spellbreaker has been a perpetual headache for us as a balance team because she hard counters some factions while barely affecting others. Every single mechanic we add to the game must face the question of how it interacts with Spellbreaker. If Spellbreaker does remove it, the question then becomes if that faction can still function, particularly against the already difficult Lost Souls faction. At the same time, we want to keep Spellbreaker as a major debuff unit. As such, we decided to remove Spellbreaker's Disenchant ability while leaving the immunity to further buffs and adding on an ability silence. This change should allow players to preemptively apply buffs to their units as a way to counter Lost Spellbreaker. Our hope is that Lost Spellbreaker will remain an annoyance and a priority target, without single-handedly countering entire deck archetypes. 
Hybrid Orb requirements have been added: A Hybrid Orb allows you to meet its requirements with one of its two colors. For example, a  card can be played with either  or . Hybrid Orbs can be found on our Twilight Slayers, Twilight Hag, Treefiend, Nightshade Plant and Deepfang. 

PvE Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes, such as Deep One, Nightshade Plant, and Twilight Creeper, have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Decomposer:
   - Now only works on own units
Decomposer has been a controversial card for a long time. When usable on friendly units, Decomposer allows players to transfer power between themselves. Practically speaking, this means that Decomposer turns previously multiplayer maps into effectively single-player maps, where one player can gain power far in excess of what should be possible at a given time, even if all Power Wells were given to one player. For this reason, it is a mainstay of speedruns and goldfarming alike, to the point of choking out other potential strategies. Decomposer also stands in direct violation of our fundamental design principle that power should only be generated via Power Wells. While violations of design principles are possible to justify via card restrictions such as high power cost, tier, or orb restrictions, the power generation principle is the most fundamental of all principles and Decomposer is able to violate it as a Tier 1 Shadow card. 
There is an additional consideration which is often forgotten in discussions on this topic, and that is the experience of the player feeding the Decomposer, usually called a "feeder." While there can be no doubt that many Decomposer-based speedruns, including the existing record on Bad Harvest, are matters of strategic brilliance in terms of planning, the same is not true in terms of execution for the majority of the players in the speedrun. While feeders do contribute in a minor sense, the runner does the overwhelming majority of the actions in the run and it truly succeeds or fails based on the skill of the runner. In more casual settings, this often becomes even worse, with the feeder doing close to nothing. Decomposer transforms the feeder from a teammate into little more than a spectator. The feeder is a mere battery powering the runner, a resource to be used instead of a person with whom you play alongside. Feeding makes for a gameplay experience where teammates give up almost all of their agency. It is not engaging, and we should not be creating a situation where the player must chose between efficiency and an engaging experience. 
The continuing preservation of this kind of gameplay has done great harm to new player retention. For that reason alone we should have made this change a long time ago. In fact, we have planned this change for nearly 18 months, yet have repeatedly delayed it in hopes of releasing a Decomposer-like mode simultaneously with the nerf for players who enjoy the mechanic and who wish to opt-in, even without rewards. This optional Map Modifiers game mode is something we are still desirous of completing eventually, but as we announced in Community Update #25, without further developers we can only commit to releasing card balancing changes for the foreseeable future. Given the many factors surrounding Decomposer and the strong negative impact it creates on the game experience of many players, we have decided to finally go through and change the card to no longer allow it to transfer power between players. 
[ Tier 2 ]
 Parasite Swarm:
   - Takeover limit: 150 power cost ➜ maximum of 175 power cost
Allows us to make some units able to be transformed by Twilight Curse and taken over by Parasite Swarm, while remaining out of reach of Nightguard.
[ Tier 3 ]
 Corsair:
   - Inspirational Call: deal 50% more damage ➜ 60% more damage
Corsair was previously changed to work not just on human units, but all Bandit units. This helped a lot, but the card itself as well as Bandit's T3 is still somewhat lacking. We are giving a slight boost to its aura to help encourage more Bandit-based unit compositions. 
 Frenetic Assault:
   - General Changes: 
      - Power cost: 80 ➜ 90p
      - Initial Amok effect duration: 20s ➜ 15s
   - Frenetic is now a two-stage effect:
      - Stage 1: Bewitches the targeted hostile target attracting the aggression of up to 7 of its allied units within a 20m radius for 15 seconds.
      - Stage 2: If the target dies within 10 seconds, up to 10 of its allied units within a 20m radius are bewitched for 10 seconds.
   - Affinity swap: Gifted Aggression (g) ➜ Infused Aggression (r)
      - Infused Aggression(r): No longer slows or prevents healing, change description to clarify it can be used on buildings and units. 
Frenetic Assault is potentially the strongest card in the game. It is also the strongest crowd control spell, has no downside, and has no death effect. While not necessarily wrong, it is a bit odd for such a card to exist in Shadow. All in all, it is more a Bandit card than a Shadow card. We as a balance team have endeavored to nerf the card from an S+ tier to an A tier card, while also giving it mechanics to make it feel like a Shadow card. 
Frenetic now has two stages. The first stage affects 7 targets for 15 seconds. The second stage, which triggers off the death of the initial target within 10 seconds, affects 10 targets for 10 seconds. This gives Frenetic a total possible duration of 20 seconds if used perfectly with up to 17 total affected enemies. It should remain one of the strongest spells in the game, without being so good as to single-handedly carry entire archetypes. 
 Healing Gardens:
   - Ritual of Recovery duration: 30 seconds ➜ 45 seconds
Healing Gardens' increased rejuvenation effect is strong, but its short duration requires two Gardens to be built simultaneously. This can significantly slow down deck archetypes dependent on the effect, so we are increasing Ritual of Recovery's duration to allow the player to utilize just one instance of Healing Gardens with the downside of a slight effect downtime. Additionally, the lack of regular activation is a common problem among all active global effects in casual play. This should help to alleviate that problem by making it so that when the effect is actually activated, it stays up for longer. 
 Ice Age:
   - Now allows multiple instances of the spell to be active at the same time.
Ice Age previously had anti-synergy with itself, such that multiple Pure Frost players could not cast it simultaneously. Given that this is not an issue with healing sustain options, we decided to remove this restriction.
 Sandstorm:
   - Power cost: 160p ➜ 140p
   - Ability radius: 10m ➜ 12m
We previously gave Sandstorm two large buffs, a 70p cost reduction and the addition of L-knockback on the blue affinity. Even with these changes, Sandstorm remains an uncompelling option. As such, we are further reducing the power to 140p while increasing the radius of the tornado, which should allow the player to more easily crowd control priority targets. 
 Twilight Creeper:
   - Tainted / Infused Spit, total targets: 3 ➜ 8
   - Infused Spit(r) debuff: 30% less damage ➜ 40% less damage
Small buff to Twilight Creeper's debuff and a large buff to total target count, allowing Creeper to debuff substantially more enemies in a camp.
 Wrathgazer:
   - Disintegrating Gaze: May only disintegrate units ➜ May only disintegrate units and buildings.
   - Pain Link: 100% damage distributed ➜ 50% damage distributed.
Wrathgazer's Pain Link distributes damage before Resilient is applied. This means that as-is, 100% of damage is done to surrounding units and 50% also to Wrathgazer (assuming non-piercing damage). The total damage is thus multiplied by 50% assuming there are any allies in range. With the changed numbers, 50% of damage is now done to Wrathgazer and 50% to surrounding units. This should make Wrathgazer usable in an army without being an active detriment. Additionally, only being able to target units severely restricts Wrathgazer's usability. To remedy this, we are adding the ability to disintegrate buildings as well, allowing Wrathgazer to be more useful offensively. Note, this change does not allow wall segments, Power Wells, or Monuments to be disintegrated. Wrathgazer will also be unable to disintegrate spawn buildings, as this causes a bug where the spawn building, despite being destroyed, begins phantom spawning waves of enemies. 
[ Tier 4 ]
 Altar of Chaos:
   - Enable overkill splash damage bug fix. 
   - Mass Destruction Nether Bomb life points: 4000 ➜ 4500
Nether Bomb will no longer lose damage when overkilling enemies, constituting a minor buff for unfed bombs and a major buff for fed bombs. Additionally, the small increase in bomb life points is intended to synergize with Lost Spirit Ship's recycle ability. One bomb will now provide enough life points for 3 Lost Spirit Ship Crystals. 
 Batariel:
   - Damage: 4400 ➜ 5600
   - Purgatory's damage is no longer affected by damage modifiers, including buffs on Batariel itself and debuffs on enemies. 
   - Stage 1 Activation Threshold: 1000(r) and 1250(p) ➜ 1200 damage (both affinities)
   - Damage/Effect per Stage Batariel (p):
      (a) Stage 1: 100 dmg ➜ 100 dmg + 25% increased enemy damage taken
      (b) Stage 2: 100dmg + 35% increased damage taken ➜ 100dmg + 50% increased enemy damage taken
      (c) Stage 3: 100dmg + 75% increased damage taken ➜ 100dmg + 100% increased enemy damage taken
   - Squad damage: Only damages a squad once instead of each member individually.
   - Gates of Hell power cost: 150p ➜ 120p
It would be uncontroversial to say that Batariel and the deck that surrounds it is the strongest deck in the game. The question has never been the strength of Batariel, but what to do with it. Some do not want it changed at all. Among those in favor of nerfs, many people have suggested nerfing Batariel itself, others Enlightenment, others Frenetic Assault, still others Unholy Hero as the main source of the problem to bring Batariel from S++ tier to closer to S or A+ tier. After much discussion among all segments of the playerbase, and especially with some of the game's top players, we have come to the determination that we cannot successfully balance Batariel unless we also nerf Unholy Hero or at least decouple it from Batariel. At the same time, we cannot directly nerf Unholy Hero without affecting a large portion of decks that are otherwise balanced. Frenetic Assault, while very powerful in combination with Batariel, is also overpowered in its own right. In the end, we have settled on nerfing both Batariel and Frenetic Assault while decoupling it from Unholy Hero.
Batariel's damage aura no longer benefits from any buffs on Batariel or debuffs on enemies, including Batariel(p)'s own armor shredding aura. With this drastic step taken, we have also increased Batariel's base damage significantly, along with adjustments to its stage 1 activation threshold. Batariel can now activate stage 1 in 2 attacks against XL-units and in 3 attacks against non-XL units. A Batariel buffed with Unholy Hero can now also one-shot a small spawn building, while the base damage buff helps Batariel substantially when fighting bosses. The cost reduction to Gates of Hell allows the player to quickly and efficiently activate Batariel's stage 3 in a single ability. Overall, our tests have shown that while Batariel is slower than before, the Enlightenment-Batariel deck remains intact as a top tier deck for both skilled and casual play. 
The bigger issue in balancing Batariel came from the purple affinity regularly used in Pure Fire decks. In the current meta, Pure Fire typically uses a mix of both affinities, with the purple affinity amplifying the already substantial damage of the red affinity to even greater heights. With the changes to Batariel's aura, this damage amplification is no longer possible. As such, we had to get creative in keeping the Pure Fire deck viable. Alongside these changes, we have also buffed other Fire cards such as Bloodthirst, Magma Fiend, and Fire Sphere. The changes to Bloodthirst help make a Batariel(p) + Fire Dragon deck much more viable and significantly more durable. We increased the synergy between Batariel and Fire Dragon by making the purple affinity increase the damage taken by enemies even further. When Batariel(p) and Fire Dragons are both fully enraged with Bloodthirst, Fire Dragons deal 30,000 damage per 20 seconds. We also increased the speed of Magma Fiend to open up the option of using it with other Fire cards. Finally, the changes to Fire Sphere have proven much more substantial than initially anticipated. A perfectly executed Fire Sphere (remember it has a 10 second wind-up period) that combos with a stage 3 Batariel(p) can one shot an entire camp. All in all, while Pure Fire will prove to be much different after the changes, it increasingly has a playstyle that feels all its own.
 Bloodthirst:
   - Power cost: 160p ➜ 140p
   - Unit count: 7 total targets ➜ 8 total targets
   - Duration: 20 seconds ➜ 25 seconds
   - Healing: 175 life points per second ➜ 200 life points per second
   - Damage buff: 20% more damage ➜ 40% more damage
Our initial testing for the last round of changes showed Bloodthirst far overperforming its intended power level. Unfortunately, the new Bloodthirst received a double nerf upon release when we not only reduced its healing, but we also removed its ability to heal stack. Since then, it has performed below what is appropriate for a card of its requirements and its weak state is keeping Fire archetypes from achieving their true potential. We have buffed up nearly all aspects of the spell.
 Cluster Explosion(p)
   - Initial radius: 20m ➜ 25m
Equalizing initial radii of both affinities to be 25m.
 Coat of Protection(b)
   - Increased Ice Shield total cap, which can be strengthened to absorb from to 2500 damage ➜ 3000.
The purple affinity of Coat of Protection has by and large been the better of the two affinities. Additionally, the current cap makes using the blue affinity of Ice Age with the blue affinity of CoP quite inefficient. This change rectifies that issue.
 Fire Sphere
   - Damage maximum: 8000 ➜ 10000 in total
   - Spell radius: 15m ➜ 25m (visual FX already appeared to be 25m)
   - Knockback: Small, medium, and large units ➜ Knocks back all unit sizes in the area (regardless of whether they are damaged or not).
Fire Sphere is not a good card. It also lacks identity due to how good its competitors are in its own faction. While thinking about the card, we realized it could keep its boss killing identity while providing 3 Fire+ decks with a thematically appropriate CC effect in knock back. By changing the way its knock back applies and increasing its effect radius to match its existing visual effect, we allow the Fire player to potentially knock back an entire camp. The changes to its splash damage last patch also mean that it no longer loses damage when overkilling an enemy. Our tests have found that a perfectly timed Fire Sphere combined with a fully enraged Batariel give Pure Fire the ability to fully wipe camps in both RPvE 9+ and expert campaign maps. 
 Fire Worm:   
   - Power cost: 210p ➜ 200p
   - Charges: 4 ➜ 8
   - Attack range: 30m ➜ 40m
Fire Worm is not a bad card per se, but it lacks a firm identity and a reason to choose it over other options. Its stats are also not great, having only 2640 life points, lower than several T3 units, with a real attack value of only 4000 despite its claim to deal 4800 damage. Thinking about Fire Worm more, we have decided to move it into the role of a disposable sniper unit. The longer range helps it to survive longer and pick out priority targets without placing itself in danger. Fire Worm will be the first and only XL-unit to have 8 charges. This, along with the lower cost, will allow the player to spam them out quickly, allowing them to function as skirmisher like units without having to fear losing a precious charge on an XL-unit. 
 Grove Spirit:   
   - Healing Song healing capacity: 5000 life points ➜ 5500 life points
Minor correction to allow Grove Spirit to actually heal as much as she claims. 
 Ice Tornado:   
   - Power cost: 145p ➜ 140p
 Jorne:   
   - Wrecking Hammer radius: 20m ➜ 25m
   - Wrecking Hammer damage total: 6600 in total ➜ 8800 in total
Minor buff to Jorne and the accompanying legendary deck. This should make Jorne's anti-building ability easier to hit on multiple targets and more worth the power investment.
 Lifestream: 
   - Life Link: 20% of absorbed damage transferred ➜ 30% of absorbed damage transferred
After the recent buffs, Lifestream is in a good place but is slightly too strong. We as a team do not want to encourage strategies which can functionally create invincible armies, particularly not in a faction with already strong sustain options. As such, we are slightly toning down Lifestream by making it take more damage. This should make the downside real, with the possibility of killing the Lifestream if the player does not pay close enough attention.
 Lost Dragon: 
   - Damage: 335, up to 502 in total (3000 dp20) ➜ 416, up to 624 total (3715 dp20)
   - Life points: 3780 ➜ 4080
Lost Dragon card is very weak for its requirements, even with its very strong passive debuffs. Given it is a support unit, we considered placing more of its power budget into its debuff effects, but after consideration determined that the current debuffs are already sufficiently strong and well-designed. Lost Dragons stats are just too low. As such, we decided on a ~23% damage buff and ~8% life point buff. We wanted to preserve the existing trait of Lost Souls units, where life points are generally higher than damage. 
 Magma Fiend: 
   - Burning Liquid cost: 100p ➜ 50p
   - Movement Speed: 4.8 m/s (run) + 2.4 m/s (walk) ➜ 6.4 m/s (run) + 4.8 m/s (walk)
Burning Liquids is a decent ability, but like many abilities in the game it is overpriced. We are reducing its cost to align the price more closely with the effect produced. Additionally, we are increasing Magma Fiend's movement speed from slow to normal XL. We think that slow speeds should fit the unit in terms of balance, theme, or both. In the case of Magma Fiend, there is neither a thematic nor a balance reason for its currently slow speed, so we changed it.
 Noxious Cloud: 
   - Power cost: 250p ➜ 230p
   - Initial damage: 13 (3750 total) ➜ 24 damage every second (5640 total)
   - Time between damage increase: 2 seconds ➜ 3 seconds
Noxious Cloud is one of the most expensive spells in the game. While theoretically having a large potential total damage of 37,500, this rarely occurs as it requires all 10 initial targets to both live for the full duration and to remain inside the area for 37 seconds in total. In practice, even the Tier 3 Thunderstorm is usually better. Even in perfect situations, Noxious Cloud is heavily outcompeted by rival options such as Plague and Cluster Explosion. We wanted to buff Noxious Cloud without turning it into a copy of these other spells. As such, it continues to only affect units and we kept the total spell duration at 37 seconds. This is similar to the other Nature damage spell, such as Thunderstorm and Parasite, which have long durations and are only capable of damaging units. The new Noxious Cloud should kill most XL-units that remain within its effect for the full duration, while also cleaning up more S and M-units units due to its higher base damage. It also remains expensive, as Nature's faction identity is centered around unit-based damage, not damage dealing spells. 
 Plague: 
   - Power cost: 150p ➜ 170p
   - Parasite duration: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
Despite toning down the new Plague before release, it remains one of the strongest spells in the game and is capable of single-handedly clearing camps, any respawns, and even bosses. We have decided to increase its cost to reduce power efficiency and reduce parasite duration. This reduces each parasite's single-target damage from 1500 to 1000, while making it harder to proc the secondary parasites due to reduced duration. The reduced duration also nerfs the powerful non-immunity applying ranged silence. Overall, this should mean Plague is no longer a cast and forget spell; players will need to encourage the initial parasites to proc themselves if they want to make get full use out of the spell. 
 Primeval Watcher:
   - Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Neutral ➜ 3 Nature, 1 Neutral
   - Damage: 600 / 288 / 192 / 127 / 84 (6550 dp20) ➜  660 / 330 / 220 / 165 / 132 (7220 dp20)
   - Life points: 4650 ➜ 4850
   - Stasis Field:
      - Targets: 7 enemies ➜ 9 enemies
      - Ability cost: 0p ➜ 25p
   - New passive, "Siege": Deals 50% more damage against structures.
Primeval Watcher is Pure Nature's primarily damage dealer. As such, Pure Nature's viability as an army-centric faction rises and falls based on Primeval's performance. We have wanted to increase Primeval's stats, but its current orb requirements limited our options as it would have mainly buffed Primeval Watcher in non-Pure Nature decks. Due to this, we have decided to increase its orb requirements to 3 Nature orbs to make room for more substantial stat buffs. Additionally, given that Primeval Watcher is one of Nature's only ways to kill buildings, particularly in the back of a camp, we have given it Siege to aid in this role.
 Skycatcher:
   - Damage 520, up to 780 in total (4660 dp20) ➜ 600, up to 800 in total (5000 dp20)
   - Fixed bug where killing the initial unit would reduce all splash damage to 0.
   - Twilight Infection power cost: 50p ➜ 0p
   - Twilight Infection cooldown: 20 sec ➜ 3 sec
Slight buff to Skycatcher to allow it to better perform its role as a backline attacker. The changes to Twilight Infection will allow Skycatcher to quickly transform a T2 or T3 army into a T4 army. 
 Transcendence:
   - Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   - Kenosis, healing buff: 50% ➜ 75% more healing
   - Tyranny:
      - Healing debuff: 50% ➜ 75% less healing
      - Damage debuff: 25% ➜ 40% less damage
We are happy with Transcendence in concept but not in practice. The stats it released with have proven too low for it to be a compelling option in decks that might otherwise want to make use of it. We are buffing up its buffs and debuffs and increasing its radius to make it easier to use in chaotic T4 fights.
[ Tower 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. If you would like to learn more about our thought process behind the tower changes, please head to Skylords Reborn Documents to read our design Deep Dive on Towers, as well as other design documents. 
 Artillery:
   - Orb requirements: 2 Fire, 2 Shadow ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Shadow, 2 Neutral
   - Power cost: 190p ➜ 150p
 Deepgorge:
   - Power cost: 225p ➜ 200p
   - Damage: 480, up to 720 in total (3000 dp20) ➜ 675, up to 1015 in total (3760 dp20)
   - Cold Clutch freeze radius: 20m ➜ 25m
 Frost Crystal:
   - Power cost: 70p ➜ 60p
   - Damage: 72, up to 110 in total (728 dp20) ➜ 92, up to 138 in total (920 dp20)
   - Frost Wave freeze radius: 20m ➜ 25m
 Hammerfall:
   - Power cost: 150p ➜ 130p
Hatecaster:
   - Orb costs: 2 Fire, 2 Nature ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Nature, 2 Neutral
 Howling Shrine:
   - Life points: 3160 ➜ 4260
   - Linked Fire support: 1 support ➜ 4 support provided while out of combat
 Living Tower:
   - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 10m
 Mindweaver:
   - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
   - Damage: 250, up to 375 in total (1900 dp20) ➜ 290, up to 435 in total (2200 dp20)
 Necroblaster:
   - Splash radius: 10m ➜ 12m
   - Corpse cost per shot: 500 life points ➜ 825 life points
   - Maximum corpses storable: 4500 ➜ 6600 life points
   - Corpse gathering radius: 33m ➜ 40m
 Primal Defender:
   - Cloudstrike damage: 220 ➜ 225 per hit
 Rioter's Retreat,
   - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Stone Hurler,
   - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Time Vortex: 
   - Life points: 2820 ➜ 1830
   - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Tower of Flames:
   - Damage: 216, up to 324 in total (2160 dp20) ➜ 266, up to 399 in total (2660 dp20)
   - Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 10m
Twilight Bombard:
   - Splash radius: 10m ➜ 15m
Volcano:
   - Orb cost: 3 Fire, 1 Neutral ➜ 2 Fire, 2 Neutral
   - Gifted Eruption(g):
      - Self regeneration: 150 ➜ 200 life points per second
      - Regeneration duration: 5 sec ➜ 10 sec
[ Miscellaneous Changes ]
 - Mind controlled units can no longer be targeted by revive effects.
 - NoClaim and NoCardPlay have been removed from the effects list of The Incredible Mo and Dryad(g) as neither are debuffs nor weakening effects. This means that these two cards will no longer prevent the removal of ground presence or the removal of the ability to claim walls, Power Wells, and Monuments. 
 - The temporary immunity to revive effects on units recently resurrected by Promise of Life is now displayed as an effect. 
 - Viridya / Ravenheart: Now spawn summoned units one at a time, no longer requiring the player to kill one unit to spawn a third unit.
 - Changed several more units with unbound power costs to show 0 power as the power cost when hovering over them in-game.
 - The following units have had their class changed from Beast to Primordial: Deepcoil Worm, Deep One, Fathom Lord, Fire Worm, Magma Fiend, Shadow Worm, and Twilight Horror
 - The ability "Accelerated Construction" has been renamed to "Fast Construction" to conserve space on cards.
 - Added visual effect for Dying Breed on air units.
 - Magma Spore now properly shows it is Swift.
 - Portal Nexus's Explosive Death now has a range preview when hovered over. 
 - Viridya and promo Viridya's Treespirits have been renamed to Viridya's Treespirits.
 - The Bandit random PvE boss Equestrian Twins debuff duration has been decreased from infinite to 30 seconds.

PvP Balance Changes
 [ New Card Design Spotlight  - Twilight Crawler ]
Twilight Crawlers will be a new addition to Twilight decks in T2 and widen the pool of potential transformation targets. They will be a Twilight oriented replacement for Scythe Fiends with the upsides of lower costs and an increased durability against ranged units and spells, creating synergy with healing effects like Ravage. Their transformation ability grants a faster animation, leading to a lowered risk of getting interrupted in PvP scenarios. With fast movement, they will add more versatility to the Fire Nature T2 and even more so when opting for a Twilight unit deck.
 [ New Card Design Spotlight  - Tranquility ]
We are happy to add a second spell to the Amii faction. Tranquility was designed as a flexible T2 support spell, emphasizing Amii's current PvP identity with a strong early game oriented around low energy trading. As the majority of units accessible by Shadow Nature are very cheap, the existing single target buffs from shadow splashes exceed the unit cost, makes buffing units less efficient compared to playing a second unit most of the time. The Foreboding Whispers effect should add more counterplay when facing buffed single units, which opt into focusing down Power Wells. Beside Nightguard, who has been nerfed recently, Amii lacks direct counters for L/XL units, making them slow to take down key targets. As the spell scales fairly well into higher tiers, it might also see play in late game battles, as well as PvE scenarios.
[ Twilight Rework ]
 Twilight Transformation:
The Twilight Transformation mechanic has been perceived as disappointing by most of our players. The existing aura effects were not cost efficient, and the upside of creating strong units with reduced bound power was overshadowed by Breeding Grounds. On top of that, the transformation mechanic was very clunky. A two second channel time made it difficult to use the ability in the midst of battle. A unit would risk taking a large chunk of unnecessary damage during channel time, or even have its transformation canceled by crowd control. As we have wanted to buff Twilight Transformation effects across the board, the clunky nature of this ability needed to be addressed first. To achieve this goal, we reduced the channel time of all Twilight Transformations. To address the issue of weak transformation effects, we will buff up existing ones while also adding several new mechanics, rewarding players for engaging in smart transformations. We intend to keep working on the Twilight archetype into the future, including focusing on more PvE centric changes following the same design approach seen here. This should ideally solidify the transformation ability as a powerful mechanic and make Twilight as a faction more rewarding and fun to play overall.
 Slaver:
   - Power cost: 75p ➜ 70p
   - Blowout:
      - Now also damages air units
      - Now also triggers after transformation
   -. Infused Blowout(r):
      - Max damage: 450 ➜ 900 total damage
      - Now knocks back S-units
   - Tainted Blowout(p):
      - Max damage: 350 ➜ 810 total damage
      - Now knocks back S and M-units
Slaver was outclassed by other L-counter options in Fire Nature decks. As we want to allow more options for Twilight oriented decks, the high slot investment for its various units needs to offer more value in return. With the listed changes, we want to allow Slaver to compete with other L-counter options and also add more room for creative usage of the blowout ability. Channeling a transformation or killing the unit by yourself to get extra burst damage in critical situations should create interesting gameplay options, especially since it has an in-built L-counter bonus that gets applied even after the unit dies.
 Twilight Brute:
   - New passive, "Bloodlust": If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly units within a 20m radius to restore 25% of their damage dealt as life points. Lasts for 20 seconds.
Based on its stats, Twilight Brute has been a viable option to Fire Nature decks in the past. Its playrate was strictly limited due to deck slot issues though, as the unit was good at defending against key units like Bandit Stalker or Scythe Fiends, but didn’t add much pressure during counter-attacks compared to other M counter options like Skyfire Drake. To raise the incentive of playing him in Twilight decks, we will add a new Transformation effect, that can enable strong counterattacks after a successful defense. We will keep an eye on him to see if he can find his place in Twilight decks moving forward. We might also adjust his Burstout ability in the near future, which was not touched this patch cycle for workload reasons.
 Twilight Minions:
   - Gifted / Infused Incentive radius: 20m ➜ 25m
   - Gifted Incentive(g): Now also affects Fire and Nature units
   - Infused Incentive(r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 65%  
Twilight Minions fill the role of a main M-counter regardless of whether you want to pursue the current Fire Nature style or move towards a Twilight oriented deck. We want to make sure the transformations are a little more useful for both of these decks.
 Vileblood:
   - Gifted / Infused Liquids, radius: 15m ➜ 18m
   - Gifted Liquids(g) healing: 200 ➜ 250 life points per wave
   - Infused Liquids(r):
      - Damage: 100, up to 330 in total ➜ 130, up to 520 in total
      - Now knocks back S and M-unit
      - No longer damages structures
We are buffing the Vileblood transformation towards unit damage instead of cheesing for a guaranteed 600 damage on power wells. With the newly added knockback, it should be fairly useful to punish stacked melee counter units. Also buffing the green affinity a little bit to keep up in value.
 Mutating Maniac:
   - Removed "Hex" passive ability (both affinities).
   - New passive, "Infused Fervor"(r):
      - If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly Twilight units within a 20m radius to move 40% faster. Additionally, they will deal 50% more damage. Lasts for 15 seconds. 
   - New passive, "Gifted Fervor"(g):
      - If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly Twilight units within a 20m radius to move 40% faster. Additionally, they will be immune to all major debuffs. Lasts for 15 seconds. 
Since its previous changes, Mutating Maniac started performing fairly well in multiple decks. That said, the transformation ability remained fairly underwhelming. The effect was both very weak and there was no unit worth transforming into. Since moving Nightshade Plant to T3 will change the second part, we are remedying the first issue by replacing the current transformation effect with a more powerful one. If utilized correctly, this should make transforming worthwhile despite the significant power investment.
 Nightshade Plant:
   - Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Fire (T4) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) 
   - Damage: 6380 ➜ 4100
   - Life points: 5800 ➜ 3400
   - New passive, "Siege": Deals 50% more damage against structures.
   - New passive "Adept Mutation": Reduced transformation cost 208p ➜ 180p 
   - Tainted Tendrils, damage: 50 per sec ➜ 20 per sec
Nightshade Plant has been highly redundant in PvE due to being outclassed by Abomination. As the card's design doesn't enable a different playstyle for Twilight decks, we have decided to rework it into a T3 unit that is most efficient when being summoned through transformation. This should add more depth to the Twilight archetype in both PvP and PvE. In PvP, Fire Nature often doesn't have the option of playing more than 2 or 3 cards in T3. This led to late game issues against more defensive oriented decks. Closing out leads was often quite a tough task outside the top echelons of play. Adding a strong game finisher will help the faction to compete to a certain extent. Decks including various Twilight units from earlier game stages will have more strategic options to utilize the card through different transformation effects. Twilight Minions will provide a very cheap summoning, Twilight Crawlers can quickly move to desired locations before transforming, and Mutating Maniac will provide the most powerful transformation buff and unit synergy.
[ Bandit Touch-up ]
Bandits has been in a very strong position ever since the release of its new cards, especially in lower ELOs. As a result, we will tweak it from both ends by slightly nerfing Bandit Minefield and Bandit Stalker, while also buffing some of its most favorable matchups with Pure Nature and Fire Nature. We received a lot of feedback mainly regarding the Bandit Minefield being perceived as fairly oppressive and will closely observe whether this continues to be the case after this set of changes.
 Bandit Minefield:
   - Cooldown: 25 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
Bandit Minefield has been extremely popular since its release. We noticed the spell is getting spammed a lot, as it ensures great trades in almost any state of the game. Microing around the spell and punishing a player during its cooldown is supposed to be this spells intended counterplay. This downside demands a good understanding of matchup from the opponent's side as well as a solid level of execution, making the card even more efficient in lower ELOs. As we want to add more possibilities to play around the spell, we will increase its cooldown. This should open up bigger time windows to attack a Bandit player, who used the spell too recklessly. With reduced power on the Bandit Stalker, see below, there also should be more room to make use of beast creatures that can avoid the mines more consistently due to their mobility.
 Bandit Stalker(g):
   - Damage against Beasts: 100% more damage ➜ 80% more damage
Bandit Stalker received a powerful buff in the past to help Bandits deal with a lot of the beast units, against which the faction used to struggle. With new powerful cards added to the faction, Bandits has become a bit too good against beast reliant decks. As a result, we decided to reduce the beast bonus damage on the green affinity of Bandit Stalker, providing players with the opportunity to snowball a lead against Bandits without getting shut down by this powerful counter unit.
 Bandit Lancer:
   - Branding targeting range: 5m ➜ 8m
   - Added a targeting range preview to Branding when hovered over.
QoL changes which will make the ability smoother to use.
[ Miscellaneous Changes ]
 Deep One:
   - Life points: 1450 ➜ 1500
   - Gifted Catch root immunity duration: 20 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   - Species class: Beast ➜ Primordial
Pure Nature did not perform to the level we had hoped after its small rework. While we do think it was the right move to reduce Deep One’s health pool, we went a little too far. Pure Nature started struggling to break through strong Frost Splash defenses. We will revert some parts of the health nerfs and also reduce the CC immunity duration applied by gifted catch, which had a much longer duration compared to the usual cc abilities. Outside of that, the Nature versus Bandits matchup has been perceived as fairly oppressive amongst most players that gave us feedback. Deep One will move from Beast to the new Primordial class to make sure it is not getting hard countered by units like Bandit Stalker in the future. With more freedom to use its various units in skirmishes, Nature should also gain more room to play around Bandit Minefield. The spell strongly punishes any misplacement of Ghostspears or Spirit Hunters, which were the only viable trading units in this matchup, assuming a normal nature deck build was being played.
 Emberstrike:
   - Fire Lance can no longer damage Monuments and Power Wells.
Small change to alleviate issues regarding the card in 2vs2 in order to keep games enjoyable without affecting any PvE unit interactions.
 Icefang Raptor:
   - Infused Reserve(r): 30% ➜ 35% of damage reflected to melee attackers
   - Blessed Reserve(b): 25% ➜ 30% damage reduction
With the addition of Amii Paladins and buffs to cards like Twilight Minions or Ghostspears, the impact of small sized medium counters has increased overall. As a result, Icefang Raptor has fallen a bit behind. Its issues are amplified by the bonus counter passives of some S-units it is supposed to fight against, such as Stone Shards or Bandit Spearmen. Adding more power to the unit's passive should balance this out and push the unit further towards decks that can provide appropriate support in the first place.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
   - Debuff (both affinities): 20% ➜ 25%
Adding a bit of power to Mumbo Jumbo as the spell is fairly difficult to use. The buffs should enable a small extra reward for nature players opting into a large T1 without altering the potentially unhealthy interactions around its spawn presence denial.
 Warden's Sigil
   - New passive, "Fast Construction": Construction time is reduced by 50%
   - Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
Frost T1 has struggled a lot against early T2 attacks centered around Nightcrawlers and Burrowers. These units were capable of ignoring any counters entirely by focusing down structures. This inherent weakness often pushed players in the direction of playing frost very aggressively instead of methodically securing map control and power leads over time. These changes to Warden's Sigil should add more options for Frost to keep power wells alive without altering its capabilities in unit trading. While Warden's Sigil will be able to help a player get through the early game more consistently, it will be at the cost of fewer card slots for higher tier options. Since we did not want to support forward siege building strategies, the ability to attach on buildings under construction will only remain on the green affinity (this already got added in the last patch).

Toning down the top strategies without making them unviable is a great philosophy. I'm glad you guys finally came to a point you can agree on, and I'm excited to see what the changes are!

Toning down the top strategies without making them unviable is a great philosophy. I'm glad you guys finally came to a point you can agree on, and I'm excited to see what the changes are!

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!

• Survey Results

Once more, a big thank you to everyone who provided feedback in our 2022 Survey. 2.227 of you provided feedback regarding various topics, from general opinions regarding the project, to balance and upcoming features. We have collected the answers and provided them in a short presentation. 


• Upcoming Patch 

Last month we promised more information about our upcoming new content patch. We are almost ready to bring you a new patch that will include a ton of balance changes, map changes, bug fixes and new cards! While we sadly can't give you a concrete date on the patch yet, we are aiming for a release around mid-September. We are also planning to release some additional achievements in a small follow-up patch soon after. 
As for the upcoming content patch; we have added new Transformation effects to T2 and T3 Twilight cards, aimed at making Twilight's Transformation ability worth using. We have also made substantial changes to Fire T4 cards, while continuing our work on Nature. At the same time, we are making some much-needed changes for the health and future of the game. This patch will implement changes to Batariel, Decomposer, Frenetic Assault and mindcontrol-effects like Nightguard and Parasite Swarm. These cards have been the topic of many heated discussions over the years, which is why we would like to take some time to explain why we are making these changes. 
 
• Why Nerf Cards?

It has been the conscious choice of the Skylords Reborn Team since we began balancing the game nearly 2 years ago to avoid any PvE specific nerfs. The reasoning was twofold:
(1) Nerfs feel bad and continued nerfs of popular cards can be demoralizing to players, and
(2) There did not exist a sufficient number of strategies such that nerfing top performers would actually lead to more diverse gameplay. The top performing strategies were sometimes the only viable strategies in the game, and removing them would have just lead to an ever decreasing set of viable archetypes. 
Instead of nerfing cards, we in the faction design and balancing team have endeavored to create an increasingly large set of viable strategies, both between and within factions. Within factions, Bandits has been our greatest success, with several top tier Bandit deck archetypes being viable across all maps and game modes. Across factions, we have also steadily been succeeding in our original goal. Pure Frost and Pure Fire do not have as much intra-faction deck diversity as something like Bandits, but both do have viable archetypes capable of succeeding at all levels of play. Slowly, but steadily, we have also been working towards this same goal with Pure Nature, Pure Shadow, and their non-pure derivatives such as Shadow's Death Ray archetype. In the next few patch cycles we are hoping to touch the Stonekin, Lost Souls, and Twilight factions as well, simultaneously adding new unique strategies while also fleshing out their existing viable archetypes. All in all, we think we have come a very long way in creating both fun and viable strategies for the majority of factions, and we will labor every patch to continue this work. 
Unfortunately, despite the work that has been done, there is still a perception among much of the playerbase that decks like Pure Frost are not strong, despite Pure Frost being viable against all factions even in RPvE 10. This is because, with the exception of the addition of Banzai Lord and Plague, the top decks have remained nearly identical from release until now. This is unsurprising. In T4, Batariel-Enlightenment and Bloodhorn decks are so strong that if we attempted to make all archetypes compete with them, we would thereby trivialize the game through power creep. In T1, we have made substantial changes to ensure that every faction has a viable opening for all maps and game modes, but by and large a majority of players still progress through the campaign using Nightguard in at least a plurality if not a majority of maps. This situation of having a large set of viable playstyles but a few select ones that outshine all others, creates the impression that Skylords Reborn lacks gameplay diversity and leads to players defaulting to the same few decks over and over again. This is not a recipe for long term success. Even after the most recent patch, you can still see messages in global chat to the effect of "I wish there were other strategies than Batariel or Nightguard." There are many more strategies, it is just that some strategies are so strong that everything else seems paltry in comparison. 
Given the current state of the game, we as a balancing team have determined that it is finally time to nerf some of the game's top performers and that by doing so we will actually be expanding the set of strategies players view as viable, thereby hopefully leading to increased in-game deck diversity. Yet, our goal is not to remove the existing top strategies from the game. We want them to remain top strategies, but to be closer to the strength of other archetypes which have proven themselves to be viable alternatives. We are truly convinced this is the best course of action for the long term health of Skylords Reborn. The other options are increasing the strength of all cards to the level of these very few cards, thereby trivializing existing content, or accepting a perpetually stagnate meta where the same few strategies continue to dominate forever. 
As a final note, we want to assuage any fears that we will be going through and nerfing any and every strong card in the game. We are convinced that there are less than 10 total cards problematic enough to justify large changes. Balancing is more music than algebra. There is a band of viability within which cards sit. It is okay if some cards are better than other ones, as long as those cards are neither too powerful nor too weak. As long as a strategy is not so dominant across multiple game modes that it warps the game around itself and adversely affects the playerbase's perception of what is acceptably strong, we can and will happily turn a blind eye to it and allow it to continue unchanged. 
Our upcoming patch notes will dive into what exactly will be changed about these cards. These will be posted alongside the patch release.

• New Card Reveal: Tranquility

The results from our feedback survey shows you really like new cards, so we are excited to reveal our new Amii spell: Tranquility!

This card holds the record for longest development cycle, going all the way back to November 2021. Having changed names, effects, art and visuals multiple times during its long process since then. We are very happy with the end result though, and we hope you look forward to playing it.
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it, numbers and effects might still change before release.
Let's break down the card: 

Tranquility is a tier 2 spell for Nature/Shadow. Upgrading the card increases its effect and reduces its Power Cost. It will be a rare and won't have an affinity. As with the card Transcendence, the effect of this new Amii spell changes depending on if you cast it on an enemy or friendly unit:
 
Soothing Whispers
Empowers a friendly unit to fight more joyfully. Target friendly unit will deal 20/30/30/30% more damage and regenerate 50 life points every 2 seconds if the unit deals at least 80 damage every 5 seconds. Lasts 20 seconds. Reusable every 25 seconds.

Foreboding Whispers
Weakens an enemy unit and makes it unable to fight. Target hostile unit cannot attack or use special abilities and takes 20/20/30/30% more damage for 10 seconds. Reusable every 25 seconds.
 
Tranquility offers Skylords a flexible early game Amii spell that can be used in both PvE and PvP.
For its buff/debuff visual, we have created a completely new flower model, another milestone in our development for Skylords Reborn! 

 
• Phone Wallpaper

The artwork for Tranquility was created by Tweeto, and went through many iterations (as tends to happen with our team full of perfectionists). The final artwork goes beyond the size of what we can show on a card, which is why we decided to release the full artwork as a Phone Wallpaper. We hope you like it!  

• Skylords Reborn Instagram


Want to see more art, exclusive content and giveaways? Be sure to follow us on our new Instagram! Rumors say you might even catch a glimpse of a new and not yet revealed card in the upcoming days! Follow us now to join our upcoming giveaway for a chance to win some Twilight boosters.
 
• 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! 

• NEW - Community PvE League Season 1
In this Community-hosted PvE league, you will compete against other players of similar abilities and ranks in a series of challenges, consisting of campaign, community and rPVE maps. There are exciting prizes to be won, so be sure to click here for more information! 

• NEW- Crappy Community Contest #8
The contest-idea-contest (CCC#7) has brought some excellent ideas to light, and the yet unannounced winner will be presented tomorrow as a new contest. As always, if enough Skylords participate, there will be a booster code as prize for the whole community!

• FINISHED - Community event #4: Onslaught on the Ground
Can you finish King of the Giants Solo under 13 minutes - without using flying units? The winner of 'Onslaught on the Ground' was able to pull this off, check out his replay here.
 
• FINISHED - Battle of Tactics #1: Your actions count
How many clicks do you need to finish Encounters with Twilight? See a super-cut of how the participants tried to be as efficient as possible: watch the video. 


• 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 

A lot has happened in the team behind Skylords Reborn in the past month. 
Sadly nkmol, who worked with Freund and Maze on the web-interface, has left the team due to personal circumstances. We are grateful for his work and wish him all the best.
Luckily, we also have some good news to share! 

Ult has recently joined the team as a client and server developer. He has been working on something exciting we can't wait to show you on in a future community update! 
Katchau also joined the team as a client developer. He will be helping out in adding new features into the game that were previously blocked due to a lack of UI developers.  
Lebovim (one of our Skylords of Honor) has done a ton for the project already, but always worked alongside the team, not in it. He has now formally joined the team, and will be helping out with implementing map and card changes, among other things. 
Maxxxel is also new to the team and working on creating tools and workflows capable of editing and adding new 3D models. We hope we will be able to add new models to the game at some point, but no promises yet. 
Lastly, Dallarian will move from a Global Moderator role into the Map Department. Our survey showed loud and clear that you want more campaign maps, so he is currently exploring the map editor to make that happen.
Welcome, and we are grateful for all of you who spend their free time helping out with Skylords Reborn! 

• 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. 
We have also opened the position of Global Moderator, and are currently in need of more Russian Translators.

 
• 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 Amii-booster: REAL-SOON-THIS-TIME

The code is valid until October 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 #26

Hybrid Orbs are really exciting! Definitely opens up a whole new world in terms of color balancing for cards!

Hybrid Orbs are really exciting! Definitely opens up a whole new world in terms of color balancing for cards!

Hybrid Orbs are really exciting! Definitely opens up a whole new world in terms of color balancing for cards!

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

Greetings Skylords!

We are very excited to tell you about our newest patch. Welcome to this special Community Update! 

• Patch Release

We are currently hard at work finalizing the upcoming patch, which is planned for release later this weekend. We do not have a specific time yet, but we expect the patch to hit the live servers this Sunday. We have also created a special video for this patch, be sure to check it out! 
In this community update, we will show some of the changes that will be included in this patch. For a full list of changes, please check out the patch notes, as there are many changes not mentioned here. 
If you start the game after the patch has released, you will be greeted by a new loading screen. This is a combination of the wallpapers drawn by our former artist Nano, and additions and alterations by Tweeto. We hope you notice all the attention to detail and love they poured into it!

• New Cards

We are excited that you will finally get your hands on the cards we have been working on for the past months. With this patch, three new cards will be added to the game:

Wasteland Terror
Wasteland Terror is finally here! This awesome Bandit-take on the dragon model fires streams of sand that will lay waste to your enemies.
This card has been long in the making, check out the original announcement for an overview of its abilities. 


Transcendence
Transcendence is our first Amii spell, and provides a powerful buff or debuff as long as you keep its target alive, rewarding careful management of the fight. Check out the original announcement for more information.


Burning Spears
Burning Spears joins the Fire faction to battle an age-old weakness of its pure deck: L and XL units in the early game. 
Check out the original announcement, for more information and an artwork spotlight.



• New Promo Card: Mana Wing

Alongside our new cards, we have also added a new promo card to the game. Every player will be able to get a promo Mana Wing by completing the new achievement "A Force of Nature". The promo will not be available in boosters, but it will be trade-able. 


• New Achievements

This patch will add 18 new achievements into the game. Those are aimed at improving the new player experience, while also giving our more veteran players something to work towards. Please note that if you have beaten specific maps previously, they do not count towards these new achievements.  
 
[ Infinitely Scaling Achievement ]

Reborn in Fire  [1 Mini-booster]
Reforge Cards (Unlocks every 20 reforges, scales infinitely)

[ Beginner Achievements ]

Just a Story  [1 Twilight booster]
Complete Viridya and Brannoc's story on standard difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Soultree, Crusade, Sunbridge, King of the Giants, Titans, Ascension)
The Most Dangerous Game [1 Bandits booster]
Complete Mo's story on standard difficulty or higher {Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, Blight, Raven's End, Empire)
A Debt Unpaid  [20,000 gold]
Complete the story related to the Treasure Fleet on advanced difficulty or higher. (Bad Harvest, Treasure Fleet, Mo, Blight, Slave Master, Convoy) 
A Mile in His Shoes  [2 Stonekin boosters]
Complete Rogan's story on advanced difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Crusade, King of the Giants, Titans, Dwarven Riddle, Guns of Lyr, Empire)
A Wrinkle in Time  [250 bfp]
Win the 4-player map Empire spawning at least 5 different Lost Souls cards from a deck containing only frost, shadow, and Lost Souls cards.
Godslayer  [250 bfp]
Win the 2-player maps Sunbridge and Insane God on any difficulty. 
Apprentice  [1 booster]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 5 or higher. 
 
[ Veteran PvE Achievements ]

The Road Not Taken  [3 boosters]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 9 or higher.
Turn Back All Ye Who Enter Here  [6 boosters]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 10.
Nevermore  [2 Bandit boosters]
Complete Blight's story on expert difficulty (Blight, Raven's End, Slave Master, Ocean, and Oracle)
Make it Double  [2 Amii boosters]
Complete all 2-player maps on expert difficulty. (Crusade, Sunbridge, Nightmare Shard, Nightmare's End, The Insane God, Slave Master and Convoy)
Never Thought of Him  [100,000 gold]
Complete the story of Mo becoming the new king of the fire tribes on expert difficulty with all players in the map using decks containing only Fire cards.  (Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, and Raven's End)
The Long Journey Home  [2 Frost boosters]
Complete the story re-establishing the Kingdom of Lyr on expert difficulty using decks containing only frost cards. (Encounters with Twilight, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Bad Harvest, Dwarven Riddle, and Guns of Lyr)
Not Even My Final Form  [Rogan Kayle Card]
Win the 1-player map Encounters with Twilight on expert difficulty without using T3 or T4 cards.
Forest for the Tree  [Viridya Card]
Complete the 1-player map The Soultree on expert difficulty using only Nature cards from T1 and T2.
A City Strongly Compact  [Stronghold Card]
Win the 1-player map Defending Hope on expert difficulty with a deck containing only spell and building cards.
A Force of Nature   [Promo Mana Wing]
Complete all 1-player and 2-player scenarios on expert difficulty with all players in your team using decks containing only Nature cards.

• Map Changes

Campaign Maps
We have made adjustments to a couple of campaign maps. These changes include standardizing gold chests (adding or removing them on maps that break the standard) and adding extra power wells or additional capacity of current wells to improve the early game of maps like Nightmare Shard and The Dwarven Riddle. For a full list of changes, please reference the patch notes.


Rebalanced 2vs2 Maps
The rebalanced 2vs2 maps can now be played on the live server. Changes include removal (or adjustments) of walls, wells, slight changes to the layout, and making certain areas immovable for flying units. This should result in a better play experience and more balanced maps. These maps also have observer versions, and we have updated the minimaps to be accurate. 


• PvP changes

We have implemented multiple changes that should make playing PvP easier and more rewarding. If you need any help to get started, remember that you have access to free and fully upgraded PvP decks, and we have a great guide available, written by top players. The following changes have been made:
New Player Protection
To protect new players from facing top players when they are just getting started in ranked play, it is no longer possible to get matched with players with a base ELO above 135.000, if your own base ELO is below 102.000.

Made Player Names Anonymous
To prevent players from dodging bad match-ups, player names have been anonymized in the ranked lobby. This does not affect the sparring lobbies. 

Losses Are Now Hidden
It has been proven in other competitive games that showing losses on the ranked ladder results in demotivation and higher entry barriers. We have therefore removed losses from the ladder. The information is still accessible on your profile if you so desire. 

Updates To The Free PvP Decks
We have made some changes to the cards contained in the free PvP decks to compete with the new meta. If we made updates to the free PvP decks you have currently selected, you will now have the option to either swap to the new cards, or keep your current set up. Changes have been made to Pure Nature (Parasite over Shrine of Memory), Twilight (Twilight Minions over Ghost Spears), Pure Shadow (Executor over Nightguard) and Pure Fire (Burning Spears over Scorched Earth). 

Improved Rewards
We have removed the gold penalty that was currently active for playing sparring games. Quests that require you to play 2vs2 games, now also count 3vs3 games for completion. 

We have also allowed you to drain the reserve while looking for a match. If you queue for at least 5 minutes, even if you don't find an opponent, you will earn BFP as if you were ingame, meaning you get BFP not just for playing, but also while searching for matches. 

Happy Hours
Happy Hours are specific time periods where players will receive additional gold and BFP for playing PvP. During Happy Hours, there will be an in-game announcement and the icon on the world map will indicate Happy Hours are active. 

Happy Hours will take place during the following times:
- 1vs1 happy hours: 7pm-9pm CET
- 2vs2 happy hours: 9pm-10pm CET
- 1vs1 happy hours: 4am-5am CET
By clustering players together during certain time frames, players will have an easier time finding matches more frequently. 

• rPvE Fire Balance Changes

We have rolled out some balance adjustments to the fire faction for rPvE. The Fire faction in rPvE can be extremely strong, but due to its high attack and low defense, it is extra vulnerable to Crowd Control spells. We tried to counter this weakness with a brand-new building that removes Crowd Control effects from nearby units.
Some major enemy damage dealers have been rebalanced, which should result in an improved experience for all skill levels. For more information on exactly what was changed, please reference the patch notes. 
We have also expanded the wiki to contain information regarding the various bosses you might encounter.

 
• Balance Changes

This patch also contains rebalancing of over 40 cards, with a large focus on Nature cards. These changes follow the mindset written out in our Nature Deep Dive. While already a great step forward, our work on (Pure) Nature is not yet finished, with some of the more complicated changes (f.e. Abyssal Warder and Grove Spirit) still being worked on. Regardless, these changes should have a positive impact on the faction. 
Players will enjoy seeing a Forest Elder on the battlefield, since the card now has a mobile Breeding Grounds effect, reducing the cost of friendly units spawned by its side. Promise of Life has gone down a tier, now requiring only 3 Nature orbs, while Shrine of Memory has gone up a tier, now costing 2 Nature + 1 Neutral orb but increasing its effect greatly.
These are just a couple of examples from the many changes that will be included. You will be able to check out all the details in the patch notes soon. 

• Tournaments / Events

• NEW - Official PvE Contest #6: The Soultree Faction Battle - Until 19.06.2022
In this event, you can show off how much you like your favorite faction. Beat the single player map 'The Soultree' on advanced difficulty using only mixed-colored units and buildings! The event will start after the new patch is live. More information.

• NEW - Skylords Battleship Kahoot Quiz - June 12th 2022 16:00 CEST
Dallarian and Volin are hosting a Skylords Reborn knowledge quiz! The quiz will be streamed on Twitch and use Kahoot, which is easy to access by phone or PC. There are a ton of prizes up for grabs, so the majority of players should win something. More information.
 
• NEW - The Skylords Open #15 - June 19th 2022 - 14:00 CEST
The new balance changes and addition of Burning Spears should shake up the PvP meta, so what better time to host another Skylords Open? This 1vs1 tournament is open for all players, and will be streamed live on Twitch. If possible, please sign-up in advance. More Information.
 
• FINISHED - CCC #5 - Prophecy, Prophecy, PROPHECYYY!
Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest© on an altered Oracle map. Players had access to 16 orbs and 10.000 power to beat the map as fast as possible. As with all CCC, the more players attend, the better the prizes are, resulting in a free booster for the whole community. View the event and the code.

• FINISHED - Skylords Bounty: Spring Forge
A Skylords Bounty is an open-source task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. For this Bounty, we asked the community to help us create a spring-themed Forge. We got multiple submissions, and will now work together with the most promising candidate. Every serious attempt will also be rewarded with a Nature booster. If you participated, you will hear from us in the coming week. 

• 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. 

• Team Changes

Hirooo has joined our team as Faction Designer / Balance Developer. He has already been helping us a lot with testing and balancing PvP, so we are happy to welcome him to our team!

Sadly, MarcoMaar (UI Developer) and RookieN (Map Designer) will leave the team due to long inactivity. We do want to thank them for their contribution to the project!
 
• Contribute To Skylords Reborn

We are currently looking for more people to help us create new content. Many upcoming features are on hold or take a long time due to a lack of volunteers, so we encourage you to take a look at our open positions. 
For example, we are looking for a Map Artist to help us with Defense rPvE, and a Map Designer to work on creating new Campaign Maps. And we could always use more developers to improve the game in general. 
If you want to help with creating new cards, we encourage you to consider our Artist and Balance Developer roles. We can always use more people in those departments to speed up progress. Adding voice lines to our new cards is currently on hold due to us missing an Audio Editor. 
We would also like to improve our marketing; you can help out as a Marketeer, but also a Video Editor, creating short card reveal videos and exciting trailers would be greatly appreciated. 

If you don't want to join the staff, you can still help with proofreading, testing our maps or creating a community event. 

• In Conclusion

We really hope you will enjoy our latest patch "Force of Nature"! 

To celebrate the release, and to help you out with your Nature decks, we have a special scratch code for you. 
This code will reward you with two Nature boosters! SOIL-ROOT-TREE-LEAF
Feel free to share this code, but please do so by pointing players towards the Community Update instead of sharing the code itself. 
The code is valid until July 1st, when we will bring you our next Community Update.
Going forward, we will bring you these Community Updates monthly, on the first day of every month.

What changes are you most excited for? What decks will you build around the new cards? We would love to hear in the comments!  

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #23

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!

• Soon™

Last Community Update we revealed our upcoming new achievements and ever since we get daily questions when those (and the patch in general) will hit the live server. We are currently hard at work finalizing the upcoming patch, but aren't able to reveal a concrete release date just yet.
We expect to share more information with you regarding its release in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. 
In the meantime, we are excited to reveal a new card today! 

• New Card Reveal: Burning Spears

Burning Spears is a new tier 2 fire unit, requiring two fire orbs. Upgrading the card reduces its power cost and increases its stats. The values noted here are for U3. It will be an Uncommon and won't have an affinity. 

Burning Spears is an S-sized squad unit that contains a weapon-switch similar to Ghost Spears. They will also have the Steadfast passive ability, meaning they can't be knocked back. 
 
Weapon Change
Type: mode-switch
Makes unit more effective against large units instead of extra-large ones. Lasts until deactivated.
 
Weapon Change
Type: mode-switch
Makes unit more effective against extra-large units instead of large ones. Lasts until deactivated.
 
Burning Lance / Scorching Injury (passive ability)
Enemies hit by Burning Spear's attacks will be set on fire and take additional damage that steadily increases the longer they burn. The burn deals 2 damage per second and stacks up to 25 times. Attacked units may only walk at walk speed for 15 seconds.
 
Design Goals
Burning Spears are designed as a new tool to increase deck building options in pure Fire. The faction currently has a limited pool of pure cards in PvP, leading to a very M-unit centric deck design with a limited amount of deck building options and balancing levers to change specific matchup behaviors.
The addition of Burning Spears will add a versatile small sized unit into the faction, that is supposed to help with some of the factions counter issues against L and XL units in T2, while demanding a deck slot investment in return. The passive ability enables very high backloaded damage potential to punish players that try to ignore them, whereas the slow and steadfast ability allow Burning Spears to stick to their priority targets while enabling further spell synergies with cards like Wildfire.
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.
 
• Artwork Spotlight

Now that our art team has grown, we tried a different approach for our creation process. The card was already play tested, so we knew its effects and that it would use the Ghost Spears model, but there were no other hard restrictions for the art. 
Our artist Spirit Alpha worked together with Tweeto to explore some ideas, which resulted in multiple concept arts. They settled on a barbaric look. 


The next step was to visualize the design in-game, and make sure what we had in mind would actually be possible to implement, preventing a mismatch between art and model.

Once the theme, colors and general appearance were fleshed out, it was time to start working on the artwork. Different compositions were explored again.



 
Spirit Alpha then handed in this artwork. While we were generally happy with how this design turned out, there were still some things to be done. While the Deep One claw was a nice touch, we found it did make the artwork more cluttered and distracted the viewer's eye. With the help of Tweeto, adjustments were also made to the background, contrast and skin, left arm anatomy, right arm shape and the spear. 
 

After a couple of extra iterations (and lots of discussion about flames with our art critique), we finally settled on the current design. A big thanks to our artists Spirit Alpha and Tweeto for drawing the artwork, to Friendly Firefly for working on the ability icons and to our art critiques for their support and comments. 
As you can see, a ton of work went into this, and we haven't even showed you half of the iterations. 
We are very happy with how it turned out, and hope you like it as well!
 
• Upcoming PvP changes

While PvP has a very passionate community, the game mode currently has certain flaws that prevent players from getting into it. We hope to tackle these in our upcoming patch. Here are some of the changes we will implement:

Queue will drain the BFP reserve
PvP often enters a "Spiral of Death" when too few players are online. It takes too long to find a match, so players stop queuing, which results in it taking longer to find a match... We want to give players an incentive to wait in the ranked lobby for more than a few minutes, resulting in the lobby no longer being empty and the next person who wants to play finding an opponent quickly. If you queue for at least 5 minutes, even if you don't find an opponent, you will earn BFP as if you were ingame, meaning you get BFP not just for playing, but also while searching for matches. 

Hide Player Names
We have seen that some players tend to dodge certain high ranked players while playing ranked, not queuing up when they see higher skilled opponents in the lobby. To prevent this behavior, we will hide player names in the ranked lobby. To not impact casual play, we have separated the sparring and ranked lobbies, allowing you to still invite players into your lobby and make things like tournaments and Toggy's Fightclub still possible.

Hide Losses
Another reason that prevents players from queuing up is the fear of messing up their win/loss ratio, or even feeling shame to have their losses publicly shown on the ladder. It has been proven in other competitive games that showing losses results in demotivation and higher entry barriers. We hope this change encourages players to focus on what matters (playing the game and improving yourself) instead of stats that might not even represent your current skill level.

New Player Protection
To protect new players from facing top players when they are just getting started, we will prevent players with <102.000 base ELO from getting matched with players at >135.000 base ELO. 

Changes to Free PvP Decks
With upcoming balance adjustments and new cards, we will update our free PvP decks to compete with the new meta. Additionally, we have made changing these decks more flexible; resulting in no longer having to reset all the free PvP decks when we make these changes.
If we update one of the free PvP decks you have currently selected, you will now have the option to either swap to the new cards, or keep your current set up. We are currently planning to make the following changes:

Pure Nature:
+ Parasite
- Shrine of Memory

Fire/Nature
+ Twilight Minions (G)
- Ghost Spears

Pure Shadow
+ Executor
- Nightguard

Rebalanced 2vs2 Maps
While we mostly balance the game around 1vs1, we know players really enjoy 2vs2 as well. We are very happy with how our rebalanced 1vs1 maps turned out, and we want to give 2vs2 the same treatment. 

Changes include removal (or adjustments) of walls, wells, slight changes to the layout, and making certain area's immovable for flying units. This should result in a better play experience and more balanced maps. 

These maps will also have observer versions, meaning it will now be possible to host 2vs2 tournaments again! We also updated the minimaps to be accurate. 


PvP Happy Hours
A feature long in the works and finally nearing release is Happy Hours. Happy Hours are specific time periods where players will receive additional gold and BFP for playing PvP. 
We have noticed PvP is currently quite scattered, with a lot of players wanting to play, but going offline again when they can't find opponents. While rewarding to queue is one incentive to have players stay online longer when the lobbies are empty, we also want to help players find opponents in general. We hope that by clustering players together during certain time frames, players will have an easier time finding matches more frequently. 
Happy Hours will take place during the following times:
- 1vs1 happy hours: 7pm-9pm CET
- 2vs2 happy hours: 9pm-10pm CET
- 1vs1 happy hours: 4am-5am CET

These times were decided upon by going over our available data and keeping different time zones in mind where possible. During Happy Hours, there will be an in-game announcement and the icon on the world map will indicate Happy Hours are active. 

We hope to release all these features with our next patch, though Happy Hours is currently still in active development. We hope to finish it in time to be included as well. 

• Team Changes

We have a new teammember in Nukie, who has joined the team recently as a Global Moderator. Welcome, and thanks for your help!

• Open Positions Rework

We have made some changes to our open positions and spotlighted them in their own forum section. It is now easier than ever to see the current open positions, and we also added some extra information to each role, better showcasing what you will be doing. 

Skylords Reborn is always looking for motivated volunteers to help out the project. You can currently help out in multiple areas, ranging from artwork to development, map design and much more. 

Want to help out but don't want to join the staff? No problem! We also have positions like proofreader and map tester where you can more easily drop in and out, helping out when you have time. Lastly, we also have open-source projects and our Skylords Bounty (see below). Please take a look!

 
• Active Bounty

While we already have some nice contenders, our current Bounty to create a Spring Forge is still open. A Skylords Bounty is an open-source task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. If your entry gets chosen, you can win a great prize, and we will reward everyone who applies with a serious attempt with a participation reward as well. View more information on Active bounties.

• OPEN - Spring Forge Bounty
Spring Forge Bounty is an opportunity for the community to have full engagement with the next upcoming Forge. This allows everyone to submit a possible design for how they would like the Forge to look! The winning design will be rewarded with a Promo Razorleaf!
A tutorial video has been provided to assist and help the community take its first steps for doing so!

• Tournaments / Events

• NEW - Toggys Tome Tournament #4 17.05.22 
A midweek tournament held on Tuesday May 17th, at 18:30 CEST (Berlin time). The format will be Tome, meaning you will build your decks for this tournament out of a booster pool Toggy provide to you. Tome tournaments always result in crazy decks and cards you dont see very often, so be sure to join the action or watch the tournament on Twitch. The tournament will be played on the Testserver. More information and sign-up. 


• STREAM - Official 2p rPvE Contest#3 Last Resort - 25.05.2022 16:30 CEST
In this event, players were only allowed to use units, not spells or buildings. We will host a stream revealing the winners of this contest on Wednesday 25rd of May, 16:30 on our official twitch channel. 

• FINISHED - CCC #4
Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest© on the map Mo. Players were encouraged to play as few cards as possible to complete the map. As one of the first events to not focus on speed, this resulted in some interesting strategies. As with all CCC, the more players attend, the better the prizes are, in this case resulting in a free booster for the whole community. 
 
• FINISHED - Skylords Open 14
The Skylords Open returned with a blast! We saw some of the best players battle it out, with some match results that would surprise you. You can rewatch the matches here. 

• 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. 
 
• 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 mini-booster: FIRE-CARD-HYPE-TIME
The code is valid until June 4th, 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 #22

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!

• Nature Deep Dive

After Frost and Bandits, it is now time for a Deep Dive into one of the more popular factions among (new) players: Nature. In this Deep Dive we will look into the faction's strengths, weaknesses and upcoming changes. You can expect more incentive to play pure Nature, adjustments to the root network, important changes to cards like Abyssal Warder and Forest Elder and a sneak peek into two upcoming Nature cards. We are currently testing the changes, and you can expect most of these changes to hit the live server with our next content patch. 

We have also opened up multiple forum posts about the proposed changes. 
From the beginning of the project, community involvement has been, and continues to be, important to us. We have thus decided to institute a change in the structure of our balance discussions. Going forward, balance discussions will be transitioning from discord to the forums with the hope of facilitating better discussion and involving more people.
 
• Introducing Skylords Bounty: Seasonal Forge

We are aware there are quite a few players who want to contribute to Skylords Reborn, but don't have the time or motivation to fully apply as a team member. Today we introduce an alternative: Skylords Bounty! 

A Skylords Bounty is a task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. If your entry gets chosen, you can win a great prize; in this case a Promo Razorleaf! Even if your entry is not chosen, everyone who applies with a serious attempt will earn a participation reward.
For our first Skylords Bounty, we have selected the task to help us create the next Seasonal Forge. During our December update, we gave the Forge a snowy look. We are now looking to give the Forge a spring make-over. This is your chance to get your work into the game!

Please check out this forum post for more information and a short tutorial video on how to create a Forge. We hope we can count on your contributions! 
 
• Mana Wing Promo

It is time to reveal our latest promo! A few months ago players were able to vote for their favorite card to get the promo treatment, and Mana Wing was the clear winner. Joining Snapjaws, here is the second Skylords Reborn promo: 

A huge thanks to everyone involved. From artwork to model adjustments and special effects, multiple people spent weeks on getting everything just right. The wings have a shining glow, and as icing on the cake there are also golden dots when the unit is flying around. We are very proud of the result, and hope you will like it as well!
We will reveal how you can get your hands on this promo in the next community update, so stay tuned for that!
 
• Artwork

The artwork behind the promo was a team effort from three talented artists. The starting point was the Mana Wing wallpaper from ArtRhino. A great piece of art, but it shares the same colors as the original Mana Wing. To give it that promo feel it thus needed some changes. Our two artists, Spirit Alpha and Tweeto, then worked together to create a new look and color palette for our feathery friend.  


• Survey: Events

Once again, we would like some feedback on our events. What do you like about them? Which ones were your favorite? And most importantly: Why? 


We use this information to provide better events for you, so please take a few minutes to complete the survey. If you have never joined one of our events, please let us know in the survey why that is the case. Thanks a lot in advance!

• Tournaments / Events

You will now also be able to find the events on our Forum Calendar! We hope this will make it easier to keep track of them, and tease future events in advance! 

• NEW - PvP League - Register now
The PvP League has been a project long in the making, but sign-ups are finally open! 
The league will consist of small groups (divisions) of about 8 players who will fight each other, one opponent per week. A season ends when everyone played everyone in the group. Players should be roughly equal in skill level and can move up or down in groups depending on their results. This makes the league a perfect place to play PvP; both for new and experienced players! More information and sign-up.

• NEW - Official PvE Contest#5: They See Me Walkin', They Hatin' - Until 14.04.2022
For this challenge, we want to see you succeed in playing the map Convoy on Advanced difficulty while using pure colored decks.
Depending on what color deck you use, you will be able to get different rewards. If you want to increase the challenge, you can also try to tackle the map on your own or on expert difficulty for some bonus rewards. More information and sign-up. 

• FINISHED -  Official 1 Player  rPvE Contest#3 The Minimalistic Firewatch
This event was very popular; we received exactly 120 different replays! In this event, people had to beat the map of the month on difficulty 7 but with an interesting twist: use as few cards as possible! Check out the results here. 

• 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. 
 
• Team Changes

Welcome aodpi! He's our new Tool Developer. He will create and improve various tools which aim to optimize the user experience and also speed up the internal development process. He is currently helping out with our new updater. 
We also have a new webdeveloper: nkmol! He is mostly helping back-end wise for the web interface. Welcome, and thank you for your contribution!
We are always looking for more help and support for the project. Please look over our open positions and apply if you see a role you like! We have multiple positions open, from development to audio or visual editors.  
 
• 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 nature-booster: DEEP-DIVE-MANA-WING

The code is valid until April 23rd, 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 #20
Nature_Deep_Dive.pdf
 

Statistical Analysis

The Skylords Reborn Wiki has recently been updated with a List of Card Statistics page, which includes the stat ratios used by the faction design team when balancing. While raw combat stats cannot tell the full story when it comes to balancing cards, it is still a very important tool, especially in the case of combat-oriented cards. Unfortunately, using statistic analysis when balancing towers is particularly difficult because of three factors. One, most towers have a randomness factor built-in, which makes their attack speeds variable. For example, a given Northern Keep can spawn with an attack rate of between 14 and 17 attacks in a 40-second period. Two, most of the attack speeds displayed on the card in-game are incorrect, which also means the displayed attack value is incorrect. Three, towers take up space, meaning their stat efficiencies are also tied to their sizes. 
To account for this variance and the existing inaccuracies, we have gone through each tower individually and performed repeated tests to calculate each towers average attack speed. Additionally, we have collected the model radius of each tower and used it to calculate stat efficiency by area. The pictures below represent an updated table of all current average combat values and many of the proposed combat values as well. In the future, we hope to update and correct all the attack speeds for towers. Explanations for the different ratios can be found in the Wiki page linked above.

As we announced in our recent 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 all tower based discussion. 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.
Armored Tower Bandit Launcher Deepgorge Lost Launcher Necroblaster Rocket Tower Stronghold Splash Radius Changes 

A majority of buildings will receive updates to their splash radius in line with the principles outlined in the Deep Dive. The followings towers will only have their splash radius increased. 
Living Tower: 5m --> 10m Rioter's Retreat: 5m --> 8m Stone Hurler: 5m --> 8m Twilight Bombard: 10m --> 15m 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. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Fire --> 1 Shadow, 1 Fire, 2 Neutral
2. Power cost: 190p --> 150p
Frost Crystal
1. Ice Shard (auto-attack):
   A. Damage: 72, up to 110 in total (637 dp20) --> 92, up to 138 in total (805 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m
2. Frost Wave ability radius (active): 20m --> 25m
Hammerfall
1. Power cost: 150p --> 130p
Hatecaster
1. Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Fire --> 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 2 Neutral
Howling Shrine
1. New Passive, "Strong Supporter":  Counts as 4 connected entities for the sake of determining root network supports while out of combat. 
2. Life points: 3160 --> 4260
Infected Tower
1. Slime Cannon (auto-attack):
   A. Damage: 114, up to 172 in total (1216 dp20) --> 124, up to 186 in total (1318 dp20)
   B. Splash Radius: 5m --> 8m
2. Virus (active): Change spawning effect to check for population limit, so Infected Tower cannot be used to infinitely exceed the population cap. 
Mindweaver
1. Edict of Command (active): Restricted to units with a maximum of 300 power costs --> Restricted to units with a maximum of 250 power costs.
2. Psionic Blast (auto-attack): 
   A. Damage: 250, up to 375 in total (2188 dp20) --> 290, up to 435 in total (2538 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m
Time Vortex
1. Life points: 2830 --> 1830
2. Splash radius: 5m --> 8m
3. Potentially tweak thresholds on shadow affinity (p) to make it a viable alternative in more scenarios.
Tower of Flames
1. Fire Ball (auto-attack): 
   A. Damage: 216, up to 324 in total (2430 dp20) --> 266, up to 399 in total (2993 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 5m --> 10m
Volcano
1. Orb cost: 3 Fire, 1 Neutral --> 2 Fire, 2 Neutral
2. Gifted Eruption Healing: 150 life points every second for 5 seconds --> 200 life points every second for 10 seconds.

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!



• Teaser rPvE Nature

As decided (quite overwhelmingly) by vote, Nature will follow up Fire and be the next faction to become available as a new rPvE enemy.
We are still in the early stages of both design and balance, so it will still take quite a while before you can fight your way through a new challenge, but we wanted to give you a little teaser of what to expect. 


• Expectation management

For these community updates, we always carefully decide what to share with the public already. We aim to strike the right balance between giving an insight into what we are working on while not giving false expectations about their expected release. When deciding on what to share, our rule of thumb is that it should be something that is definitely happening, even if it might still take quite a while.
For example, Wasteland Terror and PvP Happy Hours are still happening, although in hindsight we probably revealed them too soon. Another example would be the Tower Deepdive from the last community update. This has lead to multiple questions expecting these changes to hit the server soon, even though we are still in early iterations. In this case, the reason we shared the Deepdive already was to let the community join into the discussion and provide feedback about our intended changes.
In other cases, we are sometimes just excited about what we are working on and want to share them with you already! We hope you are patient while we work on our next patch, even if it will probably not include Nature rPvE already. Rest assured that we are hard at work on other exciting things though! 
 
• New artwork reveal

On the day of our previous community update, SpiritAlpha has joined the team as a 2D artist. Since then, he has been hard at work and we can already show you two pieces of his artwork. The first is our new art for the Banzai Birds, spawned from our new card Banzai Lord. Since the card is quite popular, we felt the birds deserved a proper artwork, instead of a recolor of the old artwork. 
                   
The second artwork is an icon for Stronghold's new ability "Bombardment", as mentioned in our Tower Deepdive. Bombardment will become an active ability with a power cost and a long cooldown. It deals area of effect damage with knockback and has a long range to enable Stronghold to counter siege units on its own.
Icons will be quite small in the game, but we still like the details that went into this one. We plan to add more icons to other missing abilities, like Thug's and Lost Shade's Unity buff, so look forward to those!
 
• New tools for new players

Skylords Reborn is an awesome game, but it can be quite hard to get the grasp of it when you are starting out. Various community members have been trying to help newer players get started or improve, including a recently started tutoring program.
• NEW - Volin's Random Rushhour
Every Thursday, Volin hosts a new stream series focused on helping players improve in rPvE. Every week covers different topics, and of course players are encouraged to ask questions and interact. Follow Volin on Twitch, or keep an eye on the stream-channel on our Discord to be notified when the stream starts. 

• NEW - Workshops
The recently started community project REBORN hosts special workshops for new players looking for guidance. In these workshops, you get supported by a mentor guiding you through various topics like deck building, spawn mechanics, power management and of course gameplay. You will get helpful feedback from participants and mentors and get advice on your deck and applying the knowledge on the battleground with one of the mentors. The workshops are not a lecture and one-sided, you are highly encouraged to openly engage in discussions with the mentors. The workshops take place every Sunday, if you are interested, be sure to sign-up. 


• PvP - Toggy's Fightclub
Every Wednesday, Toggy hosts a PvP Fightclub, where players can train and get commentary on their matches. Whether you are a veteran PvP player wanting to put on a show or a new player in need of some helpful feedback, Fightclub is where you want to be. Starting around 18:30 CET every Wednesday, you can watch the Fightclub live on Twitch, while joining the games in the sparring lobby. You are encouraged to spectate and join the fun! Follow Toggy on Twitch, or keep an eye on the stream-channel on our Discord to be notified when Fightclub starts. 

Need more help on PvP? Be sure to check out the Tutor and Apprentice Discord, and the PvP guide written by two of the best PvP players; RadicalX and Hirooo. 

• Patreon update

Skylords Reborn is being worked on by a team of volunteers. The game is free to play, and we do not make any profit of it. We have been able to pay for our server through the donation of generous Patrons, and our current savings are high enough to support server upkeep costs for years to come. Since we are currently not allowed to spend money on other areas (like marketing), we decided to put the Patreon donations on pause. Should this situation change, we will open it up again.
Thank you so much for supporting Skylords Reborn over the years!
 
• Skylords Reborn Wallpapers

Now that the Patreon is not available anymore, we have decided to release our previously Patreon exclusive wallpapers to the public. Our former artist ArtRhino has created 38 great wallpapers with a new take on various units, spells, buildings and area's in the game. You might have seen some of them already during our stream or as banners for the Community Update. Now you can look at them in all of their glory and tell that coworker glancing at your screen about our great game! 
You can find all the wallpapers here.

 
• Tournaments / Events

• NEW - Community Map Challenge #4: “Lyr’s Distress Call” - UNTIL 21st February 2022
Dallarian has hosted another winter themed event! The event will be run on a brand new one-player community map, “Aeglos Fortress”. Complete the map with a few restrictions and win some prizes! Be sure to check it out, since there are also prizes for the less experienced players. 

• FINISHED - Official 2p rPvE Contest#2: The Bandit Alliance
We were looking for the fastest time with only one rule: each player could only spawn one single unit with ground presence through the whole run!
You can rewatch the stream and find out the winners on our official twitch channel. 
 
• SOON™ - PvP League
Some exciting news for our PvP players. Toggy is hard at work on creating a PvP league, where players can compete against opponents from the same skill level over the duration of multiple weeks. More info in the coming weeks! 

• Host your own event / tournament
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. 
 
• Team changes

Our team has seen quite a few changes in the past weeks. 
Pascal has left the team as our Lead Moderator. Dutchy will take over his role and is our new Lead Moderator. 
Our Global Moderators DragonOfTime and Lontzek have also left the moderation team. To fill in these spots, Dallarian and Naturee are our new Global Moderators. 
We would like to thank each of them for their contributions. Moderation has always been a very important part of the Skylords Reborn project, and we wouldn't have the community we have now without their help! 
As mentioned above, SpiritAlpha has joined the team as 2D-artist, working alongside Tweeto to add new artwork into the game. 
Lastly, Killbuster has joined the PvP taskforce. He helped us greatly with the testing process while providing very constructive feedback and suggestions.
 

• We need your help

Unfortunately, we currently do not have enough volunteers to continue implementing any further voice lines and sound effects into the game.
Now that we are able to implement voice lines and audio into the game (thanks to some great voice actors helping us out!), we are looking for someone to help us with audio post-production and quality control.
• Open Position: Audio Editor
We would love to continue adding voice lines for more cards and narration for new maps. As an Audio Editor, you will be responsible for selecting and extracting the best takes, doing post-production and making sure the overall quality is high enough to be implemented into the game. If you have more skills, you will also be able to design new sounds for the game as Audio Producer. Click here to read more and apply.
 
We are also still looking for a new Community Manager, who can help us with these Community Updates. If you are interested or have any questions, please reach out to us. 
• Open Position - Community Manager
As a community manager, you are responsible with aiding the communication to and from the community. You will work closely with the Project Coordinator (previously Community Manager) to communicate staff and project decisions to the community through, for example, The Community Updates and self-written announcements. Furthermore, you will act as a contact person for the community to share project feedback and suggestions and are expected to keep the staff informed and be up-to-date with the state of the community. Click here to read more and apply.

• 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 mini-booster: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S19B
The code is valid till March 12th, 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 (Deepdives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #18

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!

• Small Patch
We are hard at work on our new content patch, which will still take quite a while. However, we plan to release a small patch this weekend including some small features and bug fixes. We have also added a much requested feature: you will now be notified when a friend comes online. 
Below, you can read about two highlighted changes from this patch. The patch also includes various bugfixes, for example being able to queue into yourself in PvP.
 
• Adjustments to the booster images
During our anniversary patch, we noticed that the booster images in the game had plenty of issues. First of all, the ratios are all over the place, with some boosters being tall, where others are wide. Additionally, the positioning angles and BattleForge logo placement is not consistent and some images had shadows where others didn't. We gave them some touchups and have added new images for the boosters. 
Old booster packaging:

New booster packaging:

 
• Winter Forge
While the holidays are over, winter is still here. We thought it would be fun to give the Forge a different look during winter, spring, summer and autumn, so we have updated it to a snowy theme! For the spring, summer and autumn Forges we plan to include the Community, so stay tuned for that!
In a previous patch, we added powerwells and monuments into the forge for testing. We are curious to hear if you enjoy changes like this, even if they are purely cosmetic. 

Is the new look too cold for your taste? Feel free to swap it back to the neutral forge with the new slider on the top right.
 
• Current State of the Economy & Reforging
On the 18th of December we released both Reforging and a 100BFP booster discount. As expected, this heavily impacted the economy of Skylords Reborn. Now that the dust has settled and the booster discount has expired, we can slowly start looking at the state of the economy. Windhunter has shared some statistics and thoughts on this topic.  
"The market trends pre-update (not shown here) were that Common cards were largely worthless, Uncommon cards were following the same trend, Rare cards were steadily decreasing in price (even among sought after cards such as Overlord, Bloodhorn, and Amii Monument), and desirable Ultra-rare and promo cards were increasingly inflating. This was because Ultra-rare and promo cards were the only remaining sources of value left in the economy. Reforging changed this by condensing the total price range of the market and by giving each card in the game a base level of value." 
You can read the whole post and check the stats for yourself here. 
 
• Deep Dive: Towers
As we continue to work towards the release of DRPvE, a topic of much discussion has been the current state of towers in the game. While some towers over perform, most are not worth a deckslot.
In this Deep Dive, we take a look at the different kinds of towers in Skylords Reborn, their strengths and weaknesses, and how we plan to make changes to them in the future. Please note we are still in the early stages of our tower rebalance; ideas are not final and these changes will take quite a while to implement once they are finalized. Either way, we hope you enjoy this insight into our current philosophy regarding Towers in Skylords Reborn, and that it provides you with the necessary information to join the discussion in our balance discord.
DeepDive_Towers.pdf
The next design document you can expect will be our in progress Nature Deep Dive. You can find all our Deep Dives and other documents here.
 
• Changing the size of buildings
While working on the above topic, we came across a new possibility for the game: resizing towers. We are now able to change the size of a building (visual and collision-shape-wise), which will be very relevant for cards like Rocket Tower, that take up way more space than you would expect from its model. This will be another helpful tool in adding some QoL changes to Skylords Reborn! 
Please note: the image below is an example, there are currently no concrete changes to Tunnel planned. 


• Art Timelapse
With our anniversary patch, it was revealed that the artwork of the new bandit cards combine into a single art piece: the new Bandit loading screen. If you are a frequent reader of the community updates, you have seen the work that went into each different new bandit cards over the last few months, including sketches of early iterations. However, if you are interested in more behind the scenes, we have a nice treat for you. Tweeto has actually recorded his design process, and we created a time-lapse video showing all the steps that went into this latest art piece. Did you know Bandit Sniper is actually standing on a dead Burrower? Find out everything that was added (and removed) in the video here. 
Big thanks to Tweeto for his hard work and jabbyay for helping to create this video. Tweeto is already hard at work on the next art piece, which we will show off in a later community update. Like this kind of content? Please be sure to let us know!
 
 
• Advanced Filtering
We would like to take a quick moment to thank everyone for taking our survey about your use of advanced filtering. We are working on a full documentation for the filters that are currently available in the game. If you don't want to wait for that, you can find a Work in Progress version in the game files under BattleForge/docs/advanced_filtering.txt once the patch hits. 
We have also added a few new filters and a lot of alternative words for current filters. 
 
• Tournaments & Events
• NEW - Toggy's Tome Tournament - 30.01.2022
It's time for another Tome Tournament! In Tome you play 1vs1 PvP but with a twist; your deck is build right before the tournament from the content of a number of boosters. This results in wacky decks and a very different PvP experience, so be sure to check it out. The tournament will be streamed live, check out the full rules and sign-up here. 

• NEW - CCC #2 The Besieged Forge - UNTIL 05.02.2022
Kapo has started another Crappy Community Contest! Participating in it will result in a reward for the entire community, so be sure to check it out. In this contest, players are playing on a new map created specifically for this contest! Check out the full rules here. 

• ALMOST ENDING - Official 2p rPvE Contest#2: The Bandit alliance UNTIL 31.01.2022
You only have a few days left to compete in this event! For this challenge, we want to see your adaptability in unique situations.
We are looking for the fastest time with only one rule: each player may only spawn one single unit with ground presence through the whole run!

• COMING SOON – Community 1p PvE Contest – early February
Hope you didn’t hide your warm clothes yet! To celebrate the end of winter, we will pay a visit to another Frost themed map. This time the challenge will be for a single Skylord, so bring your best deck and face the unknown. All the details should be published next week, stay tuned.

• Host your own event/tournament
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. 
 

 
• We need your help!
Now that we are able to implement voicelines and audio into the game (thanks to some great voiceactors helping us out!), we are looking for someone to help us with audio post-production and quality control. Unfortunately we currently do not have enough volunteers to continue implementing any further voicelines and sound effects into the game.
• Open Position: Audio Editor
We would love to continue adding voicelines for more cards and narration for new maps. As an Audio Editor, you will be responsible for selecting and extracting the best takes, doing post-production and making sure the overall quality is high enough to be implemented into the game. If you have more skills, you will also be able to design new sounds for the game as Audio Producer. Click here to read more and apply.
 
• Team changes
We are excited to finally add a marketeer/outreach coordinator to our team! Runeseeker will help us out with promoting the project and attracting new and old players alike. We appreciate the help and are happy to have him on our team! 
We also have various potential team members doing their trial tasks. In the near future we hope to add more balance developers, moderators and an artist. 
 
• 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 mini-booster: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S18B
The code is valid till February 19th, 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 #17

Very much like the proposed changes to towers. A lot of towers need some love!

Hello everyone, 
As everyone knows, the in-game economy shifted massively after the advent of the Reforging system. This has led a number of players to express concerns about the health of the economy, and as such we would like to share some relevant economic data with the community. 
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.
Control Data Set: Contains data prior to the release of Reforging, from June to September 2021.

 
Post-Reforging Data Set: Contains data from two weeks after the release of Reforging, approximately December 25th 2021 to January 5th 2022.

Initial Analysis of Data Set:
At first glance, you can quickly see that after the update the following changes occurred:
The average, median, and minimum prices of Common cards increased across the board.  The minimum and median prices of Uncommon cards increased across the board, while the maximum and average prices decreased. The decrease in average prices can be attributed to 1-2 outlier cards in most factions, such as Frost Mage and Shaman, which substantially increased the average price of Uncommon cards in their respective factions. 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.  General booster worth decreased from 378 bfp to 311 bfp. Given booster prices are still discounted by 100 bfp until January 18th, this means it is actually more worthwhile to open boosters after the update than it was before. On average, the daily discounted booster will profit a player 61 bfp post-update versus 28 bfp pre-update. How this data will move after the discount is removed remains to be seen, but we expect a slow creep up in prices for cards across the board. Reforging established a minimum base worth for all cards dependent on rarity that did not exist prior. For now this seems to be: Common: 4-5 bfp Uncommon: 14-16 bfp Rare: 62-64 bfp Ultra-rare: 153-165 bfp  Neutral Cards - A Control Set
Control Data Set: Neutral card prices;

Post-Reforging Data Set: Neutral card prices

Neutral cards were purposefully excluded from the Reforging feature. As such, they can only be put into the Reforging system but can never come out. This makes them a good control for examining the data because their prices should only increase when combined with Reforging. While this happened with the Common and Uncommon cards, the same is not true for Rare and Ultra-rare cards. The only increases to Rare and Ultra-rare cards seem to be in-line with those cards increasing to match the base value of other cards of their rarities. This can be seen with Curse Well and Curse Orb and partially in Queek Queek, though it is possible due to the low trading volume of QueekQueek the numbers were simply erratic in the period examined.
This decrease in the value of Rare cards and the value stagnation of undesirable Ultra-rare cards we see in Neutral cards was a consistent trend among all card values pre-update. If you look above, you will see that the maximum price of Shadow Pool cards in the control data is shown as 3865 bfp. As many of you might have guessed, this data point refers to Infect. Now if you were active in the weeks before the update, you will also know that the price of Infect at the time was actually in the 4500-5000 bfp range. In only a 2-month period, the average price of Infect inflated by between 700-1200 bfp. This trend was not confined to only Infect but to every desirable Ultra-rare card in the game.
The market trends pre-update (not shown here) were that Common cards were largely worthless, Uncommon cards were following the same trend, Rare cards were steadily decreasing in price (even among sought after cards such as Overlord, Bloodhorn, and Amii Monument), and desirable Ultra-rare and promo cards were increasingly inflating. This was because Ultra-rare and promo cards were the only remaining sources of value left in the economy. Reforging changed this by condensing the total price range of the market and by giving each card in the game a base level of value.