WindHunter

Why I think Battleforge/Skylords Reborn has one of the best RTS tutorials.
Hey guys, I have been an RTS enthusiast since i was roughly 7 years old, I could barely hold the mouse in my hand back then and of course I was really bad. I played Command and Conquer and Starcraft, and even up to this day I still look around for new RTS to play and enjoy, and especially now is a good time to be a fan of RTS games as we have some very exciting games coming up, like Zerospace, Tempest Rising, Stormgate and D.O.R.F.. 
And even though I've played so much RTS in my life, which is arguably my most favorite genre, I still always check out the tutorial of new games, and sometimes I even catch myself how I check out the tutorial of a game that I have played a thousand times just to see how they handled the tutorial. Were they doing a good job explaining stuff? Was the pacing good? Did they let you have some freedom in it or was it extremely strict and limited?
I still check out these tutorials because at the end of the day, I would still consider myself being a casual RTS player, I don't need difficult challenges to overcome, for me the S in RTS stands for sandbox (took the quote from GiantGrantGames). I just wanna have fun! But in order for that to happen I need a good tutorial. One that teaches me all the unique stuff about this particular RTS. They still can do the little control tutorial part but it shouldn't be overdone. (As you never know if this is a players first RTS or not, so littlebit of control tutorial should be part of it)
RTS games that I have played are Starcraft 1/2, Warcraft 3, Age of Empires 2/3, Star Wars Empire at War, Age of Mythology, Command & Conquer (almost all of them except 4), 8-Bit Armies, Battle for Middleearth 1/2, War of the Ring, Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends, Dawn of War 1, SWINE, Arena Wars, Pikmin 2/3/4, A year of rain, Warparty, Stronghold (1, Crusader 1/2 and Warlords) and of course Skylords Reborn. But among all these i actually think Skyloords has the best tutorial out there.
Age of empires 2 was fine but also extremely long and slow. Some of the tutorial missions could have been thrown together.
Starcraft 2 was also fine but it didn't leave you much freedom to just go and try stuff. It was very limited.
Warcraft 3 almost takes the win, but instead of having Thrall explain things to you or a grunt, its just a disembodied voice as a narrator.
Dawn of war 1 was basically just a skirmish with an extradumb AI and another disembodied voice.
This is where I think Battleforge back then nailed it.
1. First of all, the narrator. Youre being guided through the tutorial by Moon, a character that is relevant for the entire campaign. And shes not talking to you breaking the fourth wall, she talks to you as an equivalent, you are a fellow skylord as well. The way she talks to you is way more immersive than in some other games were they basically remind you that this is a game.
2. The whole control stuff with the camera and unitcontrol is being dealt with quickly. The basecontrols of any RTS games is just never the difficult part, its easy to pick up and doesn't need much explaination. She also doesn't force you to things that you might never end up doing anyway. There were games were you had to spin the camera, or click on the minimap to move the camera but in the actual game you just never did it because its just not necessary.
3. Next is the explaination of the ressource system, its quick and easy to understand, but that is part of the game mechanics itself.
4. The tutorial is actually disguised as an actual mission. You not here in a bootcamp like situation, there are bandits and they need to be dealt with. At one point even Moon was shocked how well equipped the bandits were and she even helped you with an earthquake spell. This was not just a trial or an exam, it was a mission!
5. The pacing in general is very well done, you are not dumped with too many informations at one point without doing too much in the meantime. It was well proportioned overall, a little bit of info, then you got to some stuff again.
6. In the introduction you also had to not only attack, but also defend. Some tutorials always show you just how to A-move and then they are done, but here you also  had to defend on that wall. Whats even more interesting is, when she wants you to defend, you are tasked to build a cannon tower, building something takes time. But instead of waiting until its finished the enemy attack wave is already on the way. You are not idly sitting around doing nothing waiting for the tower to be finished you already being attacked, the tower finishes midcombat and then helps you out a lot.
There are even more little things that I could point out, like the way abilities were explained, spell showcase, or construction of walls with the right direction. But the final important thing about this tutorial is the ending.
7. Once you have arrived at the third monument, the mission opens up. You can play with more stuff and there is a lot to do. You get access to magma hurler and tremors, which when I played the game for the first time were cool as heck! Moon tasked with the task to take out the remaining enemies and their boss. A BOSS... IN A TUTORIAL! This was awesome, you have access to everything now and can do whatever you want, there is a bunch more enemies to deal with, even with a little camp to the side where you can find more power wells (its not worth it building them up as they wont pay for themselves anymore but its just plain fun, finding stuff and being rewarded for being curious) The choice of your final two units is also well made, you got the magma hurler as pretty good ranged damage dealer without abilities, so you can just A-move them, but the tremor have an aoe that knocks back smaller targets, is it strong? No but it also doesn't need to be, just seeing all the enemies sent flying with the skill is awesome. 
And then there is the boss, is he difficult? No but he got a very strong healer and if that one isn't dealt with the fight can take way longer. It rewards the player realizing the situation and figuring stuff out. Sure looking back its not that impressive, but newer players will feel good after this.
Overall I think of all the tutorials that I have played this is one of the best of all time. I'm curios to see how the upcoming RTS are gonna handle this stuff.
If there is one thing that I would add is maybe at least a voice line telling you about the effectiveness of counters and that its a 50% damagebuff. Not everything must be within a tutorial but I think that one would be nice.
So this is my opinion on this, again I'm just a casual and probably some people are gonna disagree with some of the things that I said.
What did you think of the introduction, or which RTS tutorial did you think did it best?

Making both affinities of a card equally viable is a difficult task. It is something we have achieved on probably less than 20% of all cards with affinities. It is also why we do not add affinities to a lot of the new cards we introduce into the game, because we do not want to contribute to an already substantial problem.
In terms of Banditos, I think it is fine if the green affinity's primary use is in combination with Corsair. But even then, I think you underestimate how important damage scaling is on S-units. While Bandits might lose to Thugs in an army vs. army match-up, this is hardly representative of scenarios players will encounter in PvE. The new Girl Power (Fire Force) will provide damage reduction scaling, giving Banditos more survivability, while the natural limitations of melee S-units means more damage per squad member is one of the highest prized stats. Melee units have an attack limit against enemies and S-units are the ones most affected by this. There reaches a point where more squad members simply cannot attack the enemy. The damage scaling of Banditos is a creative way around this limitation. 
Will this be enough? Honestly I am not sure. Melee S-units will likely never be top tier strategies, there are simply too many structural issues at play for them to thrive. But we are hoping they become viable, which is a different standard entirely. 

It is the same dancing flame, yes. And glad to hear you are enjoying the game, that is really why all of us continue to do this. 

First of all, great post. You did a good job of analyzing the state of the card and you did so through the lens of the existing literature we have on card rarity and the Bandit faction. 
We as a dev team agree with your assessment and we actually have proposed some Banditos changes for next patch in our official card balancing discord.
Banditos - Iteration 1
1. Alliance friendly unit requirement: 3 per stage ➜ 2 per stage
2. Blessed Alliance Rework:
   A. No longer based on nearby enemies.
   B. Now grants increasingly more damage reduction based on number of friendly units nearby.
   C. Description: "The unit will be incited to resist more damage when being surrounded by friendly units within a 25m radius. Per every 2 friendly ground units around them, Banditos will receive 20% less damage up to a maximum of 6 units that will spur them on."
With these changes we want to buff the swarm aspect of the card by giving them access to their scaling buffs earlier. We think this is a better approach than trying to turn Banditos into a trading card or a one-unit wonder. As you pointed out, the blue affinity simply lacks the tools to be an anti-swarm card, so we are giving it scaling damage reduction, like the red affinity has a scaling damage increase, and making it into a swarm card as well. We have also proposed changing Girl Power into a melee unit swarm support card on our balance discord. If these changes both go through, we hope it will help to carve out a new melee swarm archetype in Fire T2 splash decks. We also know this will constitute an indirect buff to Corsair, and we think that is perfectly acceptable.

First of all, great post. You did a good job of analyzing the state of the card and you did so through the lens of the existing literature we have on card rarity and the Bandit faction. 
We as a dev team agree with your assessment and we actually have proposed some Banditos changes for next patch in our official card balancing discord.
Banditos - Iteration 1
1. Alliance friendly unit requirement: 3 per stage ➜ 2 per stage
2. Blessed Alliance Rework:
   A. No longer based on nearby enemies.
   B. Now grants increasingly more damage reduction based on number of friendly units nearby.
   C. Description: "The unit will be incited to resist more damage when being surrounded by friendly units within a 25m radius. Per every 2 friendly ground units around them, Banditos will receive 20% less damage up to a maximum of 6 units that will spur them on."
With these changes we want to buff the swarm aspect of the card by giving them access to their scaling buffs earlier. We think this is a better approach than trying to turn Banditos into a trading card or a one-unit wonder. As you pointed out, the blue affinity simply lacks the tools to be an anti-swarm card, so we are giving it scaling damage reduction, like the red affinity has a scaling damage increase, and making it into a swarm card as well. We have also proposed changing Girl Power into a melee unit swarm support card on our balance discord. If these changes both go through, we hope it will help to carve out a new melee swarm archetype in Fire T2 splash decks. We also know this will constitute an indirect buff to Corsair, and we think that is perfectly acceptable.

As per the design documents, Bandits has always had problems with the identity of their cards and splash redundancy. Skyfire Drake is to Windhunter, Gunner to Ashbone Pyro, Frenetic Assault to Amok and further. Banditos faces the largest redundancies in the lineup as a S->S type, which even T1 unit cards are outperforming. This post is made as a long standing Bandit's player, and isn't meant to be any sole verdict on the state of cards within Battleforge, nor any effort to change the game beyond Banditos themselves*. First let us look at the card itself:
Banditos are a swarm/anti swarm unit through their passive, Alliance. Swarms being within the Bandit archetype. Banditos have a Complexity Calculation of 2, having only passives, with Alliance containing external dependencies (sum of surrounding enemy/ally units). While Alliance stacks multiple times with itself, the function of the passive remains consistent and straightforward (though it may be interpreted as more complex or multi-stage, Alliance requires no further game knowledge). Banditos lack synergy with other Bandits cards, which is contrasted by other Bandits cards granting them a factional synergy. Banditos has the highest health value among Bandit unit cards in T2 at 840 HP (beating Bandit Spearmen by 30 HP). Banditos has a low attack power for a T2 melee unit at 660 ATK, which rises with 3 surrounding units up to 990 ATK, and a maximum potential of 1650 ATK at 9 surrounding units (comparable with Nightcrawler's Frenzied 1630 ATK). Banditos can be summoned four at a time by the T3 Corsair (Nature) for 120 power, a design choice seemingly made for Gifted Alliance to be active without needing the Corsair itself nearby, or for Motivate/Blood Healing to be more easily used underneath a supporting Corsair. Within PvE, Banditos can grant a significant advantage when swarming, but in practice suffers from a lack of support options such as Nature's healing spells. Earth Crystal and Ice Crystal appear to be heavily encouraged within Bandits, as many cards have a Nature or Frost affinity available, but these neutral buildings just help an already ahead player get further ahead. Banditos require a large power pool to make a difference, and only when they're not being knocked down or facing area damage.
For PvP, Banditos face significant use-case issues:
Army deterioration near immediately disables Alliance. Bandit's limited sustainability and high offense exasperates Banditos' lackluster statistics, especially when contrasted with Bandit Spearmen (who do not rely upon a conditional effect) having nearly the same statistics of a Banditos with Alliance active (without factoring in Bandit Spearmen's weapon change ability). Banditos (Nature) requires a significant lead to utilize fully, and in the situations 7-10 units can be massed up (and not lost to spells) the match has likely been decided first by other cards. Banditos (Frost) is a counter to swarms (without any ability to intercept said swarms). Banditos (Frost) are not useful against any swarm cards. Banditos do not counter Sunken Temple and its Pest Creepers, nor Undead Army or Harvester, while Thugs will always beat an equal power's worth of Banditos if Gang Up is active alongside proper targeting. Fire/Shadow has other S->S counter units, which Banditos offers no play advantages over. Thugs are more durable when swarming in T1 saving you a deck slot, Rippers will bounce back from spells and counter corpse use, while Dark Elf Assassins are already one of the most power-effective S->S units; and happen to be ranged. The primary issue with balancing Banditos is that they are produced by Corsair (Nature) for 30 power each, without binding power. While I personally believe the impact of buffing Corsair (Nature)'s Banditos will not shake PvE's balance, there may be significant problems in PvP if Banditos' are over tweaked. Corsair drops (especially Banditos) are currently in an okay spot balance wise for T3 PvP, but this is about the T2 unit, Banditos, not Corsair! So what can be done?
Tweaking the units combat statistics to better compete with other cards in Fire/Shadow which are S->S unit counters. Again, this could be an issue with Corsair, but Banditos are not winning games outside of being the ability of another card. Raising Banditos' complexity, since the unit has a budget as an uncommon card for new effects. Maybe something which will support a swarm playstyle earlier for Bandits than T3 (as admitted to be the case by the Bandit Design documents). Perhaps a controversial take, but lowering Banditos power cost (maybe below 50 even) may grant the card some space in a deck without altering Corsair's functionality. Thugs are already outperforming Banditos with their Gang Up ability, but its questionable whether this approach would actually enable swarms, instead encouraging smaller trades over and over. Another route (which may be better as its own card) may be for Banditos to include a rapid constructing building, and over time it resummons these Banditos or has an ability which you can spawn another for a price. Again this isn't an effort to change the game beyond Banditos themselves, with Corsair it's a tricky subject to approach. The state of play for Banditos is defined by other cards in a deck of limited slots, and currently Banditos don't have a role alongside other Fire/Shadow cards.

It is the same dancing flame, yes. And glad to hear you are enjoying the game, that is really why all of us continue to do this. 

Defensive random PvE has been on hold while we work on campaign maps. We plan to get back to it once we release our first set of maps, hopefully sometime in the summer. 

That was an amazing update. Thank you so much for all the hard work you guys are putting into this! What you are doing is simply amazing. 
The new updates look great (Nice April Fools joke, by the way), I've recently come back to the game again and I've been thinking about Lost Souls or Stonekin; these new cards look fantastic. I'm really excited for the upcoming Amii faction too.
I'm also excited about the PvP AI; I always felt a bit intimidated by the prospect of playing multiplayer battles. I want to go into that one day, but the addition of an AI would lower the treshold. 
Thank you again for the update.

Elemental Mastery Suggestion - Megathread

Our intention as a team is to create a new category of mini-achievements specific to each faction called elemental masteries. These masteries will be split into two categories:
Individual - these will track specific card actions, such as the number of spawns erupted to death. General - these will will track player progress with the overall faction, such as how many maps a player has completed with Pure Fire. Each category will reward minor rewards along the way, mostly in the form of faction-specific cosmetics. Our goal is for this topic to function as a brainstorming area for which masteries we want to track.
The goal is for each faction to track 5 interactions per tier, as well as 5-10 general faction progress trackers. We are interested in the community's ideas for what types of card actions they would like to track, with focus on things which are commonly repeatable. Focus can be either PvP or PvE, though the final choices will be a mix of both.
Examples of Trackable Actions
Due to recent advancements in our understanding of the game, we can track most internal and external card interactions. Below are a list of some of these trackable events, all of which have been taken from Fire cards.  
Number of units charged by Enforcer Enemy spawn buildings erupted to death Buildings suppressed (Sunstriders + Suppression) Enemies knocked back with Lava Field Total time Batariel has spent in his stage 3 burning phase Total damage dealt by Fire Dragons Void returned with Shrine of War
Further Discussion
Brainstorming is also taking place in our official discord dedicated to discussion of card balancing in Skylords Reborn. Please join us there if you would like to see more elemental mastery suggestions or if you would like to participate in discussions relating to proposed changes to the game before they happen.

Elemental Mastery Suggestion - Megathread

Our intention as a team is to create a new category of mini-achievements specific to each faction called elemental masteries. These masteries will be split into two categories:
Individual - these will track specific card actions, such as the number of spawns erupted to death. General - these will will track player progress with the overall faction, such as how many maps a player has completed with Pure Fire. Each category will reward minor rewards along the way, mostly in the form of faction-specific cosmetics. Our goal is for this topic to function as a brainstorming area for which masteries we want to track.
The goal is for each faction to track 5 interactions per tier, as well as 5-10 general faction progress trackers. We are interested in the community's ideas for what types of card actions they would like to track, with focus on things which are commonly repeatable. Focus can be either PvP or PvE, though the final choices will be a mix of both.
Examples of Trackable Actions
Due to recent advancements in our understanding of the game, we can track most internal and external card interactions. Below are a list of some of these trackable events, all of which have been taken from Fire cards.  
Number of units charged by Enforcer Enemy spawn buildings erupted to death Buildings suppressed (Sunstriders + Suppression) Enemies knocked back with Lava Field Total time Batariel has spent in his stage 3 burning phase Total damage dealt by Fire Dragons Void returned with Shrine of War
Further Discussion
Brainstorming is also taking place in our official discord dedicated to discussion of card balancing in Skylords Reborn. Please join us there if you would like to see more elemental mastery suggestions or if you would like to participate in discussions relating to proposed changes to the game before they happen.

Nightmare's End - Proposed Changes - Iteration 2
A major issue with Nightmare's End is that the map requires the player to defend a substantial amount of locations, but almost none of these locations are capable of being fortified. This encourages players to fight back against the map, warping its mechanics in an attempt to reduce the defensive load on the player. Our goal with these proposed changes is to improve the experience of playing the map in the way intended by the original designers, without impacting the creative approaches to conquering the map that have emerged over the years.  
All changes mentioned here are proposals. Some, all, or none of the proposed changes might make it into the game depending on the results of community feedback and map testing.

Elemental Node Changes
All nodes have been moved to the back of their respective area, freeing up more space for buildings and maneuvering units All nodes now have buildable walls behind the Amii Gates, allowing players to fortify their position and defend the nodes more easily. Note: the walls in the pictures below are not pre-built, they are only shown that way for illustrative purposes. Shadow Node

Nature Node

Fire Node

Frost Node


Shard of the Forge Changes
Add buildable walls to the left and right side of the Shard of the Forge. This will help to foreshadow the final defense for new players and give everyone a more stable defensive location. This is particularly important because the final attack adds a major point of failure to a map that exceeds 40 minutes in average playtime.  Move the final wave spawn caves to prevent the attack waves from instantly aggroing onto the new walls surrounding the Shard. Shard Defensive Walls

Final Attack Wave Spawn Locations


Southwest Spawn & Monument Changes
Move the Monument + 3 Power Wells in the southwest to the right to create more space to place defenses and lengthen the time between when attack waves arrive. Move the spawn cave north to see if we can redirect the waves to attack the western player's T1 location which has defensive walls to aid the player in defending. This change is experimental and will require testing to see if it works.  Southwest Monument + Well Location

Southwest Spawn Cave

The gold system and the bfp system are designed to be entirely separate systems. This separateness makes it easier for us to balance them individually, and it also ensures that we avoid gold selling schemes which could get the project in trouble. 
After we released some veteran-oriented achievements in January 2023, we spent the last year working on the early to mid-game experience. We think these are now in a good place with the gold rework, tutorial missions, and early game achievements. As such, we will be focusing on late-game content moving forward with one of the intentions being gold sinks.

Hey ReleeSquirrel,
All friendly buildings cause the units around them to passively regenerate a percentage of their life points each second, as long as they have not taken damage recently. So this is a feature not just of Construction Hut, but also your wells, orbs, and all other buildings. This passive regeneration is a big reason why people bring Ice Barrier in Frost decks, because it can function as a 20p healing location. 
The blue ring around Construction Hut reflects the area in which the "Maintenance" effect takes place. The area in which units can passively regen is likely 5-10m smaller.

Hey ReleeSquirrel,
All friendly buildings cause the units around them to passively regenerate a percentage of their life points each second, as long as they have not taken damage recently. So this is a feature not just of Construction Hut, but also your wells, orbs, and all other buildings. This passive regeneration is a big reason why people bring Ice Barrier in Frost decks, because it can function as a 20p healing location. 
The blue ring around Construction Hut reflects the area in which the "Maintenance" effect takes place. The area in which units can passively regen is likely 5-10m smaller.

We have considered using AI artworks before and have had less than satisfactory results. While our artists sometimes still use it for the concepting phase, the actual quality is far below our art standards. As an example, I have included 4 artworks from SR-team released cards below. Which ones do you think were drawn using an AI base and which ones do you think were hand drawn?
Also regarding the examples here, the gems look like mobile game icons to me. While I think AI art might eventually be decent enough to use assuming we can train it on existing BattleForge artwork, I do not think the public-facing tools are quite there yet, particularly when you consider that we do not have any budget to use for high-end tools.

Final Hotfix - 11 February 2024

General Changes
Added a new "Leader" tab to the Forge Menu. It allows spawning bosses from randomly generated scenarios.
Card Fixes
Resolved an issue with Altar of Chaos not using its stored lifepoints for damage calculations.  

Beyond an initial wipe, the timers are the only method of loss in random PvE. They are therefore a necessary component of a mode which is based around speed. If the timers are leading you to regularly lose matches, I would recommend playing at a lower difficulty level until you can get used to some of the mode's mechanics. Our recent changes to the gold rewards are ensured that lower levels of random PvE properly compensate players for their time.

Beyond an initial wipe, the timers are the only method of loss in random PvE. They are therefore a necessary component of a mode which is based around speed. If the timers are leading you to regularly lose matches, I would recommend playing at a lower difficulty level until you can get used to some of the mode's mechanics. Our recent changes to the gold rewards are ensured that lower levels of random PvE properly compensate players for their time.

Beyond an initial wipe, the timers are the only method of loss in random PvE. They are therefore a necessary component of a mode which is based around speed. If the timers are leading you to regularly lose matches, I would recommend playing at a lower difficulty level until you can get used to some of the mode's mechanics. Our recent changes to the gold rewards are ensured that lower levels of random PvE properly compensate players for their time.

Card Balance Changes
 

Global Balance Changes
Neutral Units are now limited on a per-player basis: 
   - Each player will now be able to play one copy of each neutral units. Neutral buildings are still limited on a per-team basis.
We have been increasing neutral unit synergies and releasing new neutral cards, but an issue is that if one player is running a neutral archetype, say Ravenheart & Raven Archwalker, the other members of the team are also restricted in their deckbuilding choices. We think this is contrary to the spirit of the game, and since there are no balance considerations preventing a change, we are loosening the restriction while keeping the uniqueness of neutral units intact.

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes 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 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

Miscellaneous Changes
Added Nature faction classes to generic NPC Nature buildings: Mark of the Keeper, Primal Defender, Stranglehold, Healing Well, Living Tower, Root Nexus, Healing Gardens, Howling Shrine, Mindweaver, Gateway of Nature, Temple of Nature, Wheel of Resilience, Wheel of Juvenescence, Wheel of Strength, Earth Crystal, and Fortress of Nature. Added Fire faction classes to generic NPC Fire buildings: Makeshift Tower, Rocket Tower, Blaster Cannon, Pyromaniac, Volcano, Tower of Flames, Gateway of Fire, Temple of Fire, Flame Crystal Added over 20 new Shadow NPC enemies for use in community maps. Includes units, towers, and spawn buildings. Units - Dreadcharger, Forsaken, Skeleton Warriors, Wrath Blades, Nox Trooper, Harvester, Shadow Mage, Mutating Frenzy, Cultist Master, Rifle Cultists, Necrofury, Unstable Demon, Ashbone Pyro, and Grim Bahir. Buildings - Stone of Torment, Lifestealer, Soul Splicer, Time Vortex, Necroblaster, Church of Negation, Embalmer's Shrine, Incubator (small spawner), and Shrine of Greed (large spawner)  Worldbreaker Gun: Fixed animations not playing on U3. Fixed the normal maps of several map objects to correct their interaction with light. Nomad: Improved upgrade description to be more consistent.

Patch #400045 - Revenant's Doom
Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our tenth balance patch for the game, two brand-new cards, a rework of the rPvE difficulty system, tutorial missions, and many other changes, enjoy!

Patch Preview
Two new cards are now available! Jump in-game to collect Tectonic Shift and Lost Manabeast. Added tutorial missions! New and old players alike can now receive rewards for simple missions meant to explain some of the harder to understand mechanics of BattleForge. A new rPvE difficulty and changes to the existing difficulty system to align it better with the campaign map difficulties. Our much anticipated Lost Souls rework, a large number of buffs to well-designed but underperforming cards, and a change to the neutral unit exclusion rule. A complete rework of the campaign reward system, with individualized upgrades, gold rewards overtime, and gold rewards on-loss.
General Changes
Pause, Speed-up, and Slow-down buttons have been added to the Forge. Standard difficulty has been removed for the 12p maps Passage of Darkness and Ascension. Achievements have been adjusted accordingly.  The game will now remember the difficulty you selected for each map until you restart the game. Removed post-game message "Maximum rank achieved" for those players who are Master of the Forge rank in PvE. The post-game reward screen now always displays the player's current rank and experience earned. A description of the achievement completed has been added to achievement reward mail. Added previews when hovering over card and boosters rewards for achievements.  The networking library used for the client has been updated. Linux users will now need Wine 7.13 or higher to play the game. The game should still work on Windows 7, but support has been discontinued. General Fixes
Improved user interface responsiveness. Longer gaming sessions were previously experiencing slowdowns. Resolved an issue that prevented free PvP decks from being cloned. Fixed a game crash related to map scripts, most commonly affecting the "Titans" map.
New Cards
Tectonic Shift - 50p T3 Stonekin Spell 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "King of the Giants".
When thinking about Stonekin's design, we determined that more buildings interactions fit well with the faction. More specifically, we thought that a building-based archetype was the natural expansion for a faction of living stones. Tectonic Shift is a T3 spell that adds a teleport ability to friendly Stonekin, Frost, and Nature buildings. This teleportation ability functions highly similar to Phase Tower's ability as a permanent addition, similar to how Santa and Infernal Chain add new abilities to a unit. For more information, check out Community Update - September 2023.
Lost Manabeast - 120p T3 Lost Souls 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Titans".
As part of our Lost Souls rework, we wanted to add the well-known NPC unit Lost Manabeast to the faction. The player version of Lost Manabeast is a ranged unit, which collects the souls of its victims to reset the revenant timer of allied Lost Souls units. It is a perfect fit for those players wanted to engage in revenant-based gameplay. For more information, check out Community Update - December 2023.
 

Random PvE Difficulty Redesign
A major part of the upcoming update is the addition of a new random PvE difficulty between level 9 and level 10. The significant gap that exists between level 9 and level 10 is well known, and this new difficulty, often referred to as level 9.5, is meant to help players prepare themselves to make the jump into level 10. Alongside this new difficulty, we are also changing the naming scheme of the random PvE difficulties and removing difficulty levels 1 to 3, which are almost never played. We hope this new system will make it easier for players to understand what difficulty is right for their skill level.
[ New Difficulty Naming Scheme ]
Standard difficulty - Old level 4 Standard+ difficulty - Old level 5 Standard++ difficulty - Old level 6 Advanced difficulty - Old level 7 Advanced+ difficulty - Old level 8 Advanced++ difficulty - Old level 9 Expert difficulty - NEW level 9.5 Expert+ difficulty - Old level 10
Campaign Loot Rework
Anyone who plays PvE in Skylords Reborn knows that the most commonly played multiplayer game mode is random PvE. One part of this is due to the ease of matchmaking, you can go to the 4p area and join a random PvE game of any difficulty without needing to jump around the map checking lobbies, and the other part is due to rewards. In most cases, random PvE simply rewards the player better, unless you get lucky while looking for an expensive level 3 upgrade. While our upcoming improvements to campaign map matchmaking will have to wait for a future patch, we are now rectifying the reward discrepancy between the two modes. 
[ Campaign Reward Changes ]
Campaign maps now reward gold over time. The total amount of gold rewarded has been substantially increased at all difficulty levels, even if players previously disenchanted all upgrades. Solo maps and multiplayer maps now give the same rewards. Campaign maps also reward players who lose a map part of the gold they would have obtained had they won. Standard maps reward 70%, advanced maps 40%, and expert maps 25% of the expected gold on-loss. Gold on-loss cannot be earned unless at least 5 minutes have passed in-game. The new Pick reward mode has replaced Random, Need/Greed, and Assign, which have been removed from the game.  Upgrades are now decided on a per-player basis, with each player able to choose the upgrade(s) of their choice. Expert and advanced maps reward 1 upgrade, while standard maps reward 2 upgrades. In the future, players will have the ability to earn more upgrades per map completion under special circumstances. Disenchanting an upgrade now rewards the same gold regardless of the rarity of the upgrade, while also providing the player with PvE experience, depending on the level of the upgrade. 

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-one new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 21 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 900 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

Global Balance Changes
Neutral Units are now limited on a per-player basis: 
   - Each player will now be able to play one copy of each neutral units. Neutral buildings are still limited on a per-team basis.
We have been increasing neutral unit synergies and releasing new neutral cards, but an issue is that if one player is running a neutral archetype, say Ravenheart & Raven Archwalker, the other members of the team are also restricted in their deckbuilding choices. We think this is contrary to the spirit of the game, and since there are no balance considerations preventing a change, we are loosening the restriction while keeping the uniqueness of neutral units intact.

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes 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 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

Miscellaneous Changes
Added Nature faction classes to generic NPC Nature buildings: Mark of the Keeper, Primal Defender, Stranglehold, Healing Well, Living Tower, Root Nexus, Healing Gardens, Howling Shrine, Mindweaver, Gateway of Nature, Temple of Nature, Wheel of Resilience, Wheel of Juvenescence, Wheel of Strength, Earth Crystal, and Fortress of Nature. Added Fire faction classes to generic NPC Fire buildings: Makeshift Tower, Rocket Tower, Blaster Cannon, Pyromaniac, Volcano, Tower of Flames, Gateway of Fire, Temple of Fire, Flame Crystal Added over 20 new Shadow NPC enemies for use in community maps. Includes units, towers, and spawn buildings. Units - Dreadcharger, Forsaken, Skeleton Warriors, Wrath Blades, Nox Trooper, Harvester, Shadow Mage, Mutating Frenzy, Cultist Master, Rifle Cultists, Necrofury, Unstable Demon, Ashbone Pyro, and Grim Bahir. Buildings - Stone of Torment, Lifestealer, Soul Splicer, Time Vortex, Necroblaster, Church of Negation, Embalmer's Shrine, Incubator (small spawner), and Shrine of Greed (large spawner)  Worldbreaker Gun: Fixed animations not playing on U3. Fixed the normal maps of several map objects to correct their interaction with light. Nomad: Improved upgrade description to be more consistent.

Patch #400045 - Revenant's Doom
Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our tenth balance patch for the game, two brand-new cards, a rework of the rPvE difficulty system, tutorial missions, and many other changes, enjoy!

Patch Preview
Two new cards are now available! Jump in-game to collect Tectonic Shift and Lost Manabeast. Added tutorial missions! New and old players alike can now receive rewards for simple missions meant to explain some of the harder to understand mechanics of BattleForge. A new rPvE difficulty and changes to the existing difficulty system to align it better with the campaign map difficulties. Our much anticipated Lost Souls rework, a large number of buffs to well-designed but underperforming cards, and a change to the neutral unit exclusion rule. A complete rework of the campaign reward system, with individualized upgrades, gold rewards overtime, and gold rewards on-loss.
General Changes
Pause, Speed-up, and Slow-down buttons have been added to the Forge. Standard difficulty has been removed for the 12p maps Passage of Darkness and Ascension. Achievements have been adjusted accordingly.  The game will now remember the difficulty you selected for each map until you restart the game. Removed post-game message "Maximum rank achieved" for those players who are Master of the Forge rank in PvE. The post-game reward screen now always displays the player's current rank and experience earned. A description of the achievement completed has been added to achievement reward mail. Added previews when hovering over card and boosters rewards for achievements.  The networking library used for the client has been updated. Linux users will now need Wine 7.13 or higher to play the game. The game should still work on Windows 7, but support has been discontinued. General Fixes
Improved user interface responsiveness. Longer gaming sessions were previously experiencing slowdowns. Resolved an issue that prevented free PvP decks from being cloned. Fixed a game crash related to map scripts, most commonly affecting the "Titans" map.
New Cards
Tectonic Shift - 50p T3 Stonekin Spell 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "King of the Giants".
When thinking about Stonekin's design, we determined that more buildings interactions fit well with the faction. More specifically, we thought that a building-based archetype was the natural expansion for a faction of living stones. Tectonic Shift is a T3 spell that adds a teleport ability to friendly Stonekin, Frost, and Nature buildings. This teleportation ability functions highly similar to Phase Tower's ability as a permanent addition, similar to how Santa and Infernal Chain add new abilities to a unit. For more information, check out Community Update - September 2023.
Lost Manabeast - 120p T3 Lost Souls 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Titans".
As part of our Lost Souls rework, we wanted to add the well-known NPC unit Lost Manabeast to the faction. The player version of Lost Manabeast is a ranged unit, which collects the souls of its victims to reset the revenant timer of allied Lost Souls units. It is a perfect fit for those players wanted to engage in revenant-based gameplay. For more information, check out Community Update - December 2023.
 

Random PvE Difficulty Redesign
A major part of the upcoming update is the addition of a new random PvE difficulty between level 9 and level 10. The significant gap that exists between level 9 and level 10 is well known, and this new difficulty, often referred to as level 9.5, is meant to help players prepare themselves to make the jump into level 10. Alongside this new difficulty, we are also changing the naming scheme of the random PvE difficulties and removing difficulty levels 1 to 3, which are almost never played. We hope this new system will make it easier for players to understand what difficulty is right for their skill level.
[ New Difficulty Naming Scheme ]
Standard difficulty - Old level 4 Standard+ difficulty - Old level 5 Standard++ difficulty - Old level 6 Advanced difficulty - Old level 7 Advanced+ difficulty - Old level 8 Advanced++ difficulty - Old level 9 Expert difficulty - NEW level 9.5 Expert+ difficulty - Old level 10
Campaign Loot Rework
Anyone who plays PvE in Skylords Reborn knows that the most commonly played multiplayer game mode is random PvE. One part of this is due to the ease of matchmaking, you can go to the 4p area and join a random PvE game of any difficulty without needing to jump around the map checking lobbies, and the other part is due to rewards. In most cases, random PvE simply rewards the player better, unless you get lucky while looking for an expensive level 3 upgrade. While our upcoming improvements to campaign map matchmaking will have to wait for a future patch, we are now rectifying the reward discrepancy between the two modes. 
[ Campaign Reward Changes ]
Campaign maps now reward gold over time. The total amount of gold rewarded has been substantially increased at all difficulty levels, even if players previously disenchanted all upgrades. Solo maps and multiplayer maps now give the same rewards. Campaign maps also reward players who lose a map part of the gold they would have obtained had they won. Standard maps reward 70%, advanced maps 40%, and expert maps 25% of the expected gold on-loss. Gold on-loss cannot be earned unless at least 5 minutes have passed in-game. The new Pick reward mode has replaced Random, Need/Greed, and Assign, which have been removed from the game.  Upgrades are now decided on a per-player basis, with each player able to choose the upgrade(s) of their choice. Expert and advanced maps reward 1 upgrade, while standard maps reward 2 upgrades. In the future, players will have the ability to earn more upgrades per map completion under special circumstances. Disenchanting an upgrade now rewards the same gold regardless of the rarity of the upgrade, while also providing the player with PvE experience, depending on the level of the upgrade. 

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-one new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 21 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 900 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

Global Balance Changes
Neutral Units are now limited on a per-player basis: 
   - Each player will now be able to play one copy of each neutral units. Neutral buildings are still limited on a per-team basis.
We have been increasing neutral unit synergies and releasing new neutral cards, but an issue is that if one player is running a neutral archetype, say Ravenheart & Raven Archwalker, the other members of the team are also restricted in their deckbuilding choices. We think this is contrary to the spirit of the game, and since there are no balance considerations preventing a change, we are loosening the restriction while keeping the uniqueness of neutral units intact.

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes 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 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 40 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

Miscellaneous Changes
Added Nature faction classes to generic NPC Nature buildings: Mark of the Keeper, Primal Defender, Stranglehold, Healing Well, Living Tower, Root Nexus, Healing Gardens, Howling Shrine, Mindweaver, Gateway of Nature, Temple of Nature, Wheel of Resilience, Wheel of Juvenescence, Wheel of Strength, Earth Crystal, and Fortress of Nature. Added Fire faction classes to generic NPC Fire buildings: Makeshift Tower, Rocket Tower, Blaster Cannon, Pyromaniac, Volcano, Tower of Flames, Gateway of Fire, Temple of Fire, Flame Crystal Added over 20 new Shadow NPC enemies for use in community maps. Includes units, towers, and spawn buildings. Units - Dreadcharger, Forsaken, Skeleton Warriors, Wrath Blades, Nox Trooper, Harvester, Shadow Mage, Mutating Frenzy, Cultist Master, Rifle Cultists, Necrofury, Unstable Demon, Ashbone Pyro, and Grim Bahir. Buildings - Stone of Torment, Lifestealer, Soul Splicer, Time Vortex, Necroblaster, Church of Negation, Embalmer's Shrine, Incubator (small spawner), and Shrine of Greed (large spawner)  Worldbreaker Gun: Fixed animations not playing on U3. Fixed the normal maps of several map objects to correct their interaction with light. Nomad: Improved upgrade description to be more consistent.