WindHunter

Please see my answer and a previous discussion of this topic here: 
Legendary and Bandit cards are not the same thing, even if they might have a strong correlation in the campaign. It is a general design rule of ours that we do not add arbitrary exceptions to faction mechanics or card interactions. Ravens are their own self-contained archetype and making them count as Bandits units for the sake of Corsair not only heavily disrupts their existing state of balance, but it also severely limits all future cards and abilities which would target Bandits as they would also need to be balanced around the Raven archetype. 

Card Balance Changes

Global Balance Changes
Random PvE Boss Leader Immunity:
   - Added Steadfast to all rPvE bosses.
Ranged attack delays re-randomized:
   - Towers and ranged units are now assigned a randomized 0.3-0.7 second delay on a per-attack basis instead of a standardized 0.5 second delay on spawn. This only modifies cards affected by the bug, many ranged units and towers will be unaffected by the change. 
Last patch, we changed the randomized attack delay assigned on spawn from ranging between 0.1-1.1 seconds to a standardized delay of 0.5 seconds. While this successfully achieved our goal of making each unit and tower a player spawns equal, it introduced other problems. The chief concern reported by the playerbase was an aesthetic one. While previously battles in BattleForge felt very alive, with units and towers on each side attacking continuously, with the standardized delay combat started to feel more turn-based. Your units would attack, their units would attack, then your units would attack again. This also led to easy kiting of enemies, particularly NPC enemies, because you could play around the standard delay to unleash volleys of attacks then retreat until the next volley was ready. Given the widespread and consistent feedback we received that something unique to the BattleForge experience had been lost by this change, we decided to pursue a few alternative solutions that would fix both the old and the new problems. The solution we settled on was to re-add the attack delay with a smaller range and to make it apply on a per-attack instead of a per-spawn basis. This means each affected unit or tower will have a slightly different attack speed for each attack, but will on average have the same attack speed over a long enough period. The chaotic nature of combat should also return, with both sides continuously attacking instead of engaging in a semi turn-based encounter.
Revenant's Doom Costs Standardization:
   - Standardize Revenant's Doom costs by tier, with an increasing discount as the tiers progress: T2: 75%, T3: 65%, T4: 50% of unit's normal power cost
NPC Building Power and Orb Cost Fix:
   - All NPC buildings now have an assigned power and orb cost. 
Similar to how we fixed the missing power and orb costs for NPC units several patches ago, we have now given each NPC building its own power and orb cost. One motivation for this change is to allow us to add new cards and card abilities that can be limited in terms of which buildings they can and cannot be taken over, which would otherwise not be possible. A second motivation is to create consistency between NPC buildings. Prior to this change, buildings added with Fire rPvE had properly assigned costs, which is also true of the new Nature rPvE buildings, while the original buildings did not. This created a major inconsistency between and within game modes in regard to Matter Mastery, making it difficult or impossible to know when to bring one or the other affinity. A third motivation was to create a real distinction between the two existing affinities of Matter Mastery. Previously, before this change, the nature affinity could overtake every building in the game, meaning there was no real reason to use the tainted affinity or for it to exist. At the same time, we do not want to strongly nerf the nature affinity, which we do not view as inherently problematic. As such, as part of this change, we are also changing the nature affinity of Matter Mastery to work on T3 buildings, up to a power cost of 140p. Below, we have listed each building affected by this change and what will be its new tier and power cost.
Tier 2 - 100p
Bandit Launcher, Stonekin Hurler, Twilight Infected Tower, Lost Launcher
Tier 3 - 140p
Bandit Sky Defender, Bandit Waystation, Bandit Wizard Tower, Stonekin Deepgorge, Stonekin Launcher, Stonekin Shatterer, Twilight Fleshbender, Twilight Hatecaster, Twilight Skyscorcher, Lost Banestone, Lost Converter, Lost Disruptor
Tier 4 - 200p
Bandit Artillery, Stonekin Hammerfall, Stonekin Shredder, Twilight Bombard, Twilight Willsapper
XL-unit Turn Speed Increase:
   - Increased the turn speed of all player XL-units based on category.
Ground XL: 25% faster turn speed
Flying XL: 40% faster turn speed
Worm XL: 200% faster turn speed
Global Disenchant Hostile versus Friendly Root Distinction:
   - Disenchant's immunity no longer prevents the application of the Immobile, Immobileroot is still prevented.
BattleForge has two types of root effects, one called Immobile and the other Immobileroot. The distinction between them is that Immobile is only applied by friendly effects, while Immobileroot is applied by hostile effects. This change makes it so that a friendly effect which causes a unit to be rooted in place is no longer prevented by Disenchant's immunity effect. The primary reason behind this change is that effects which self-root a unit or its allies are baked into the balancing considerations of a card and its effects. The ability to bypass this downside, which has become easier as we have added, and likely will continue to add, more ways to apply Disenchant, has therefore become a constant balance consideration for both upcoming and existing cards. We are forced to ask ourselves if we can really buff Forest's Vim if we have to account for a Razorleaf that can walk around at normal speed, attacking the entire time. As we work on campaign maps with longer T4 sequences, we have to consider that a player can summon a Dreadnought and have it permanently stay in its Pledge of the Giants mode while walking around, trivializing vast portions of the map with ease. In such cases, do we nerf the Dreadnought and the Razorleaf, or do we nerf the mechanic which is causing the issue? Our decision was to nerf the Disenchant interaction.
Squad Position Fix:
   - Game now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other.
Any unit has two positions. A squad position and a unit position, which is equal to what we see on screen. This position tends to be close or equal to the units position itself but seems to behave slightly different for some actions. For example,. a Magma Hurler will shift his squad position slightly behind himself when attacking. This is not problematic. But some actions lead to only the unit position being updated while the squad position remained stationary. Prime candidates for this are hold position orders or rooting effects. The squad position can remain at the initial spot while the unit including its unit position can move to attack. Squad position is used by many abilities and spells to check if they should apply to the corresponding unit. Meaning, a unit with a squad position far away from its unit position would no longer be hit by things like CC or AoE attacks targeting the unit position. The fix going live now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other. Worms are not included here due to issues with worm movement.

PvE 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 ]
 Banner of Glory:
1. Life points: 500 ➜ 300
2. Void return percentage: 33% ➜ 40%
Higher percentage void return will allow more efficient cycling of lower tier units into real power. The life points were lowered to avoid situations in PvP where it becomes too strong, such as offensively inside an Aura of Corruption.
 Decomposer:
1. Void return percentage: 50% ➜ 60%
 Frost Mage:
1. Remove knock back from damage cone
2. Add non-damaging cone with reduced range, that applies knock back. A 33m knock back cone should result in Frost Mage consistently applying damage to squads she attacks, fixing the issue where units are knocked outside of her damage range, but she continues to attack them anyway.
 Imperials:
1. Add passive, "Protected Rush:" While under the effect of an Ice Shield, the unit gains significantly increased movement speed.
   A. Only works while Defensive Stance is active
   B. Movement speed while shielded = 4.8 m/s
Improve Frost Sorceress and Ice Shield Tower synergy with Imperials. 
 Scorched Earth (p):
1. Tainted Deconstruction (p):
   A. Damage debuff: 50% ➜ 75%
   B. Remove “The erection of buildings that are presently under construction will be interrupted and it will not be possible to repair anything.” from functionally and description.
The increase of Scorched Earth(p)'s debuff allows it to become a semi-suppression of buildings in a large area (20m) and to protect your fragile Fire units in PvE. We removed the construction-suppression effect to reduce double-scorched usage in PvP, which also gives each affinity a role in either PvE or PvP. 
 Snapjaws:
1. Remove Splash Damage: 5 damage, up to 9 in total ➜ 7 damage
Snapjaws have an abysmal splash radius of only 3m. This is so small it effectively does not exist and only serves to reduce the unit's damage against squad units. We are removing the splash and changing the unit's damage to single-target. This increases the unit's single-target damage from 138 to 193 dp20, a +40% increase in total effective damage. This will change the damage of Satanael's Snapjaws from 414 dp20 to 579 dp20.
 Tunnel:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 35p
2. Life points: 880 ➜ 600
Encourage Tunnel play by slightly lowering cost. HP reduction to prevent issues with an overly health efficient Tunnel.
 Witchclaws:
1. Power cost: 65 ➜ 70
2. Damage: 630 ➜ 680
3. Add passive, "Corpse Gathering:" Harvests energy from nearby corpses equal to their former maximum life points to enable more powerful explosions. A maximum of 3000 life points can be stored at once.
4. Infiltration Rework:
   A. Damage (both affinities): 330, up to 1650 in total damage + up to 600 damage per target, up to 5 targets in total based on the number of corpses gathered
   B. Enable splash overflow fix for ability.
   C. Both affinities now damage units and buildings.
   D. Explosion radius: 20m ➜ 15m
   E. Fire affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws deal 50% more damage after teleporting.
   F. Shadow affinity ➜ Frost Affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws take 50% less damage after teleporting.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Breeding Grounds:
1. Power cost: 70p ➜ 90p
Breeding Grounds is one of the stronger cards in the game and has some of the best scaling of any T2 card or building. At only 1 Nature orb and available as easy as T2, it grants a permanent -25% discount to all own and allied units. While the card is something of a third rail due to its popularity, now that we have significantly buffed nearly all parts of Nature, we believe it is time to give the card a minor nerf. When considering what to do with the card, we considered several options, such as making the discount scale upwards or downwards with tier (i.e. 15% discount if player is T2, 20% if T3, etc.) or just nerfing the -25% discount outright. In the end, we settled on a slap-on-the-wrist nerf, at least initially. The increased bound power will delay players initially in T2, but only cost them 2 extra permanent power if they destroy the building. At the same time, the increased bound power cost should encourage players to actually destroy Breeding Grounds made obsolete by map progression, and it will provide a much needed nerf in the PvP game mode as well. 
 Burrow Ritual:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
Reducing the card's tier should allow more synergy with Tunnel, allowing for more strategies to emerge and helping to better justify Burrow Ritual's inclusion in a deck.
 Defenders:
1. Crossbow Attack damage: 9 per shot (540 dp20) → 10 per shot (600 dp20)
2. Life points: 810 → 750
Stat realignment to make Defenders more viable offensively and a more attractive option. Life points are worth less than damage when considering stat efficiency, particularly amongst ranged units in PvE.
 Earthkeeper:
1. Fixed a bug which allowed Earthkeeper to make connected units immune to all damage while also not affecting Earthkeeper. 
 Lost Priest:
1. Exhaustion:
   A. Cast range: 30➜ 40m
   B. Total targets: 5 ➜ 10
   C. Debuff Timer: 20 sec ➜ 30s
   D. Jump speed increase
   E. Debuff strength: 30% ➜ 40%
Improvements to Lost Priest's support capacity will help its viability in PvE, particularly in combination with other units such as Lost Shade and Lost Dancer. 
 Matter Mastery (g):
1. Gifted Takeover (g): maximum of 2 orbs and 100 power costs ➜ maximum of 3 orbs and 140 power costs
See Global Balance Changes above for more details. We are also considering more substantial changes to the tainted affinity in a future update. 
 Revenant's Blessing:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
2. Radius: 20m ➜ 25m
3. Gifted Immortal healing: 15 ➜ 30 life points per second
4. Infused Immortal damage: 25% ➜ 30% more damage
5. Bugfix: Allow overlapping Revenant's Blessings to reapply the effect without requiring the unit to exit and re-enter the area.
We are working towards improving the current use case of Revenant's Doom through direct buffs to it and through improving its support tools. With this change, Lost Shades are usable without needing Viridya and the spell scales better into the higher tiers for those you want to use revenants. More support to the faction and to revenants in particular will come in the next patch when we finish the rest of the upcoming Lost Souls rework. 
 Root Nexus:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
2. Life points: 850 ➜ 650
Moving Root Nexus to T1 gives Treespirit a much-needed support card. Life points reduced to prevent too health efficient blocking options in T1. 
 Spikeroot:
1. Waves per root attack: 2.5 spike waves ➜ 2 spike waves
2. Damage per wave: 100, up to 150 in total ➜ 125, up to 190 in total (+25% increase)
Overall damage remains identical. Spikeroot now always deals the same damage at each point in its attack, instead of having high and low points. 
 Sunken Temple:
1. Added Mode-change, "Hibernate:" Pest Creepers enter a state of dormancy and are no longer summoned.
2. Pest Creepers now aggro against enemies in an area around the Temple.
The new mode change will allow the player to temporarily turn off Pest Creepers. This will be especially helpful when using a large number of Sunken Temples, which quickly fill up the unit population limit, and you want to summon new non-Creeper units. The other change will make it so that Pest Creepers no longer stand around waiting for enemies to either attack them or move within a short distance. They will now actively aggro on enemies that come within a moderate radius around the Temple which spawned them. Overall, these changes should make the card function much more fluidly. 
 Unholy Power:
1. Stored Strength (ammo): 2000 ➜ 3000
2. Ammo is refreshed whenever Unholy Power is recast on a unit already affected by another instance of Unholy Power.
3. Bugfix: Unholy Power no longer decays all remaining ammo when a previous instance of the spell expires. 
Unholy Power is a highly inconsistent spell, and a lot of that regards bugs in its original implementation. By fixing the decay issue, new applications of Unholy Power existing concurrently with previous applications should no longer be removed by older instances expiring. Additionally, new applications, in addition to continuing to stack additively, now refresh the card's ammo pool back to full. On top of these important changes to the card's functioning, we also increased its total strength pool by 50% from 2000 to 3000 which should help it to scale better into T3. With all these changes, Unholy Power should become a significantly stronger and more consistent buff spell.  
 Viridya (normal and promo versions):
1. Viridya’s Blessing is now able to restore lost squad members
 Wallbreaker:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Fire (T1)
Opens up several early use cases for the card on Titans, Dwarven Riddle, and Sunbridge. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Abyssal Warder:
1. New Active ability for large and medium-sized golems, "Reassemble:" Bond with two other Abyssal Warders of the same size in a 20m radius to reform into an Abyssal Warder of a larger size.
2. Frost affinity effect, Ice Shield duration: 15s ➜ 30 seconds
There is a large disparity between the usefulness of the two Abyssal Warder affinities in terms of effects. The fire affinity (r) provides a permanent buff, while the blessed affinity (b) only grants an Ice Shield for 15 seconds. In an attempt to partially remedy this issue, we have doubled the length of the smaller Warders' Ice Shields to 30 seconds. Additionally, we have finally been able to add a new effect to the small and medium sized Warders which will allow them to rebuild themselves into a larger Warder. Reassemble requires 3 Warders to work, meaning that it is not inherently efficient, though it provides another strong synergy with Promise of Life and builds on the buffs to Abyssal Warder last patch. 
 Blood Healing:
1. Charges 12 ➜ 16
 Thornbark:
1. Melee damage: 1400 dp20 ➜ 1550 dp20
 Mutating Frenzy:
1. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 sec ➜ 5 sec
 Santa Claus:
1. Blue Gift, Red Gift, Christmas Peace cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
 Satanael:
1. Fealty (both affinities):
   A. Cannot be activated if the player is at or above 125 population. 
   B. Summoned Snapjaws damage: 200% ➜ 120%
Removing all instances of infinite spawning in the game due to the attendant performance issues they cause. Buffing Snapjaws individually as compensation. Overall, the damage of each summoned Snapjaws squad is increased slightly. 
 Shrine of Martyrs:
1. Void return per frozen unit: 12% ➜ 18% of current void pool
2. Bugfix: Void return effect is no longer triggered multiple times per entity.
Regular users of Shrine of Martyrs know that the void return effect is often inconsistent. The same group of enemies could provide wildly different void return rates when frozen due to the fact that the effect would switch between applying once or multiple times per enemy. We fixed this inconsistency, but it left the shrine, which is likely already the weakest of the four standard options, even weaker. As such, we have given it a large +50% buff to its void return percentage in compensation for removing the existing bug. This change will allow players to develop an intuitive understanding of how much void is actually returned per frozen enemies. The percentage we chose is a bit of a guess and is subject to change based on the feedback we receive from player testing.  
 Shrine of War:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 2 Neutral (T3) ➜ 2 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
When we first began nerfing cards, many people asked us when we were planning on touching Shrine of War. We previously delayed any changes to the card due to its importance to the rPvE game mode at all levels and because other factions, such as Frost and Nature, lacked sufficient methods of void return, an aspect we think is integral to the balance of all factions. Now that all factions have a viable method of void return, we have decided to give Shrine of War a nerf. We were between the two ideas of nerfing its void return percentage or increasing its orb restrictions. While Shrine of War has by far the most efficient void return when accounting for multiple players out of all the available options, we decided that we did not think its efficiency was outside the line of acceptability, but that the Shrine was too splashable compared to the other options. As such, we choose to leave Shrine of War as the best void return shrine in the game, but to require the player to invest into 2 Fire orbs to access it. 
[ Tier 4 ]
 Altar of Chaos:
1. Change Nether Bomb cast range to work like spells instead of like units & buildings. Still limited to own ground presence only.
This seemingly small change substantially increases the positioning capacities of the Nether Bomb and allows own units to be much farther away when placing bombs. 
 Battleship:
1. Barrage damage per shot: 550, up to 3300 in total ➜ 800, up to 2400 in total
Battleship's ability has a long range of 50m and can be used to snipe out enemies far into the enemy's backline while remaining safe itself. The ability has a very large amount of splash damage, able to fully damage up to 6 enemies in its target radius. At the same time, the target radius is only 12m making it very unlikely there are 6 enemies to damage. Additionally, despite its long animation and unleashing 5 shots, the single-target damage is not even able to destroy a large spawn building. We are reducing the total splash damage in favor of higher single-target damage, increasing the damage dealt to one target from 2750 to 4000 in total. 
 Cluster Explosion (p):
1. Tainted Burst radii per successive explosion: 25m / 20m / 15m / 10m / 5m ➜ 25m / 20m / 15m / 12m / 10m
Increased the radius of the explosion for the 3rd and 4th waves of Cluster Explosion (p). These radii were so small, they often failed to hit any enemies. By increasing them, we hope to give a slight buff to this affinity in ideal situations with a lot of closely clustered enemies. 
 Earthen Gift:
Earthen Gift Redesign
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Infused Earth (r) ➜ Blessed Earth (b):
   A. Damage buff: 30% ➜ 50%
3. Tainted Earth (p) ➜ Gifted Earth (g):
   A. Affects Elemental units, not structures
   B. Remove "Every hostile building in the current game will deal 50% less damage."
   C. Damage buff: +50% more damage
   D. Healing per second: 10% ➜ 5%
Earthen Gift is one of the worst cards in the entire game. Before Reforging, its normal price was 3 BFP despite being a Rare spell. As Stonekin's Pure T4 spell, it ought to be one of the reasons why a player goes 2 Nature and 2 Frost orbs, but right now it is a waste of a card slot. The card's existing identity is as a combined buff and healing card, but it is restricted to only work on structures. Even on structures it is not useful.
Instead of completely rejecting the card's initial design, we are attempting to improve on it for the one affinity by increasing the damage buff where it may prove useful upon the release of defensive rPvE. For the other affinity, we are swapping its effect from structures to elemental units, which includes all Stonekin units, and modifying its heal and damage buff accordingly. The idea is to potentially allow the spell to replace Regrowth while also giving Stonekin access to a minor damage buff for itself and any other friendly elemental units. Between this and the Grinder buff, Stonekin's T4 should feel significantly stronger.
 Evil Eye:
1. Damage now ticks every 0.5 seconds instead of every 1 second. Rage still takes the same amount of time to activate.
2. Initial damage delay for Evil Eye's Searing Sight has been removed. Damage will now starts as soon as Evil Eye targets an enemy.
 Grinder:
1. Harmony: Added a yellow bar akin to Mountaineer showing when the healing effect will next occur.
2. Provoke (both affinities): Single target ➜ All enemies in a 15m radius
   A. Infused Provoke Buff: 50% more damage ➜ 75% more damage
Quality of life change to Grinder's harmony ability. Added some increased strength and flexibility to Grinder's taunt by allowing it to affect multiple targets in a small area. This will also allow Grinder (r) to taunt the empty air versus bosses, allowing it to still generate the personal damage buff, which has been increased to +75%, regards of whether or not any enemy units are actually taunted. Stonekin struggles against strong single target enemies such as bosses and this is one step in an attempt to remedy that without damaging the faction's existing identity.
 Lost Evocation:
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Cast time reduction: 2 seconds ➜ 0.8 seconds
3. Infused Revenant damage buff: 50% ➜ 100%
The charge increase allows Lost Souls to get access to its primary support spell without having to use two deck slots on Rifle Cultists + Offering. The cast time reduction prevents the use of both Evocations simultaneously, while the buff to the fire affinity (r)'s damage buff makes it a more compelling option for a faction whose main damage dealing occurs through units.
 Shadow Worm:
1. Increase turn rate of disintegration turrets: 200 ➜ 260
 Tempest:
1. Whirlwind splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Damage: 44 ➜ 64 life points per second
2. Healing (both affinities): Both affinities now heal friendly Twilight units by equivalent damage as they deal to enemies.
3. Change Gifted Affinity (g) ➜ Infused Affinity (r)
   A. Add +30% damage buff for friendly Twilight units
Improvements in nearly all aspects of Twilight's marquee spell. Previously, the blessed affinity (b) was the only one worth using due to the damage reduction it provides. We decided to roll the healing effect of the gifted affinity (g) into the base spell and create an alternative damage buff variant instead. The goal with this change is to allow Twilight Pestilence to be a more flexible spell, one able to provide a supportive effect while also clearing minor enemies and recovering chip damage to player units that might otherwise prompt the player to cast an additional healing spell. 
 Void Maw:
1. Void Shear ability cost: 75p ➜ 60p
[ 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 towers up 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. 
Tower Targeting Fixes:
1. Changed the damage delay of the auto-attacks for a large range of towers to the standard delay of 0.1 sec. These towers should now have an easier time hitting moving targets, including swift units. 
   A. Affects the following towers, including both affinities when applicable: Artillery, Hammerfall, Defense Tower, Lifestealer, Northern Keep, Primal Defender, Twilight Bombard, Tower of Flames
 Blaster Cannon:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Tainted Magma: 15m ➜ 20m
 Defense Tower:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Howling Shrine:
1. Essence Bolts firing arc: 90 degrees ➜ 135 degrees
2. New passive, “Restoration:” Regenerate 30 life points every second.
To truly fulfill its role as a fortress and to provide a meaningful choice between itself and Razorleaf, Howling Shrine must be a self-sufficient defender able to justify the massive amount of space it occupies. The restoration effect will allow the tower to persist even absent player attention or when facing continuous attack waves that prevent repair. The increase to the firing arc of its main weapon is a much needed change. Prior to this, Howling Shrine could only target most enemies with one turret at a time and XL units with two turrets only if the tower was positioned perfectly with respect to the XL unit's path. The tower should now be able to target units of all sizes with two turrets in most cases. 
 Lifestealer:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Still alive regeneration: 5 life points per second ➜ 8 life points per second
3. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 3 seconds
 Lost Disruptor:
1. Damage: 300, up to 330 in total ➜ 300, up to 450 in total (3000 dp20)
2. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 10m
3. Disruption cost: 50p ➜ 20p
Increase Lost Disruptor's effectiveness against multiple enemies. Also, Lost Disruptor's ability is one of the better counters to Shrine of Memory in 2v2 PvP. By decreasing the cost, we better enable players to make use of the card simply for its ability effect.
 Northern Keep:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Primal Defender:
1. Earthstrike splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Cloudstrike:
   A. Damage (add splash): 225 ➜ 250, up to 375 in total (2030 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 0m ➜ 8m
Buff to Primal Defender's anti-air capacity. This leaves it as a middle ground between a non-raged and a fully raged Blaster Cannon, and should hopefully allow the tower to better aid Nature T1 in dealing with anti-air threats, particularly those which can counter small and medium units.
 Rocket Tower
1. Orb cost: 2 Fire ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Neutral
2. Power cost: 80p ➜ 70p
3. Life points: 2000 ➜ 1480
4. Rocket Barrage:
   A. Total rockets: 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 ➜ 4 on all upgrade levels
   B. Attack speed: Every 5 seconds ➜ every 4 seconds
   C. Damage per rocket: 85 ➜ 90 (900 dp20)
Fire T2 currently lacks a splash tower, while Pure Fire T2 has 2 towers. We think Pyromaniac sufficiently fills the slot of T2 tower for Pure Fire, so we are transitioning Rocket Tower into a splash card. As part of this change, we will be cutting down on its large pool of life points while otherwise increasing the consistency of Rocket Tower, both in terms of knockback and damage dealing. Even with the cost decrease, this change will make Rocket Tower mildly less stat efficient against large groups in exchange for a lower start up cost and the ability to consistently knockback multiple enemies due to the fixed targeting and increased rate of fire. These changes should allow Rocket Tower to fulfill its role as a knockback-centric tower while its high damage allies provide the necessary fire power. 
 Skydefender:
1. Damage: 128 up to 192 in total ➜ 153 up to 230 (2300 dp20)
2. Life points: 1400 ➜ 1600
3. Range: 40m ➜ 50m
4. Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 8m
Substantial buff to Skydefender to give it more teeth against the T3 and T4 air threats it is designed to counter. The range increase will make it able to fight back against Raven Battleships, which are one of the most common flying enemies in the campaign. 
 Time Vortex (p):
1. Tainted Void Shock (p), attack speed increase void levels: Above 150, 300, 600, 1200 void ➜ Above 100, 200, 400, 800 void
Improve the efficiency of the tainted affinity (p) by decreasing the amount of void which is required to trigger each attack speed increase.  
 Volcano:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 200p
2. Damage: 581, up to 872 (3990 dp20) ➜ 766, up to 1149 (5270 dp20)
3. Life points: 4390 ➜ 5690
4. Infused Eruption (r) Rage:
   A. Rage scaling: 100% 1st stage, 200% 2nd stage ➜ 75% 1st stage, 150% 2nd stage
   B. Rage reset timer: 7 sec ➜ 10 seconds
5. Lava Sea:
   A. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   B. Bugfix - Lava Sea now works as described
   C. Added a new visual effect
The goal is to make Volcano more "dense" by increasing its power cost and then adjusting its stats accordingly. Making each Volcano more powerful helps to mitigate the tower's large size and also makes it a better target for building buff effects such as those provided by Frost's Skyelves. Total damage when enraged is slightly increased despite the Rage nerf (12,000 dp20 ➜ 13175 dp20). Overall, Volcano loses a very small amount of total stat efficiency, but gains in total strength by having an ability that actually works. The old Lava Sea provided zero value to the tower because it did not work. The new Lava Sea, which functions as described on the card, turns this Fire fortress into a terrifying strongpoint capable of wiping out hordes of enemy units.  

PvP Balance Changes
[ Tier 1 ]
 Life Weaving:
1. No longer affects buildings.
Life Weaving changes are made to weaken its scaling potential into higher tiers considering most shadow splashes tend to be fairly strong at later game stages anyway. Buffed single unit attacks with straight well focus are very easy to execute and fairly annoying to play against when any damage on the target also increases the damage against your Power Well.
 Sunstriders:
1. Suppression Fire ability cost: 25p ➜ 10p
In PvP, Suppression Fire's most relevant applications arise on higher tech levels, where a 50 energy investment for a fragile T1 unit is already enough of a restriction. As a result, there is room to buff the ability power cost for those niche cases.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Bandit Launcher:
1. Power cost: 60p ➜ 50p
2. Firebug ability cost: 40/35/30/25p ➜ 40p on all upgrade levels
The addition of a weaker building with reduced construction time led to some rather unique T2 strategies, but the high bound power requirements restrict its relevance. This change should open up some more room for creative usage of Bandit Launcher and the Fire Bug ability.
 Bandit Minefield:
1. Mine spawn speed reduced by 0.25 seconds per mine. 
Bandit Minefield has been a fairly controversial topic. The spell was very powerful and played an important role in every game mode. Based on play rates and general feedback, our PvP faction overhaul succeeded in making Bandits more viable and fun to play, but there was a lot of frustration when playing against the faction due to an overly dominant Minefield. After recent tweaks, play rates have dropped by about 20% and Bandits seems to be in a very healthy position based on global faction popularity and high ELO presence ever since. However, the experience of playing against Minefield continued to be perceived as frustrating by many of our players. The intended goal of this set of changes is to keep the faction at a similar level of strength, but distribute its power more evenly across Bandit T2 cards and strategies.
Mine spawn speed will be reduced to enable counter play without removing its zoning power and damage potential upon being ignored. The design direction of allowing placement under units is absolutely intended, crucial for the faction viability, and differentiates the card from basic trap card design. Due to a lack of crowd control and building protection, Bandits needs a tool to defend vs melee unit well focus consistently. A major issue in PvP is that outside of its intended design direction (melee unit zoning and S unit denial), Minefield generates too much trading value as its damage is almost guaranteed. The spell tends to trade up against anything except for swift unit micro. This should be addressed.
In return, we will buff Commandos, Sniper, and Bandit Launcher in compensation. As Warriors Death came up to the discussion for compensations: The card design is not healthy for PvP due to a lack of counterplay, as such we will just leave the card as is since its mechanic is also powerful in end game PvE content.
 Bandit Sniper:
1. Damage: 75 dmg per hit (750 dp20) ➜ 78 dmg per hit (780 dp20)
Slight damage increase to compensate for Bandit Minefield nerfs.
 Commandos:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 65p
2. Concentrate ability cost: 10p ➜ 20p
After some testing, we think it is safe to make Commandos a little stronger, as long as the upfront cost of mode-switching remains the same. This should be beneficial for the card in all game modes.
 Gravity Surge:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
Allow Gravity Surge to be more functional as a niche counter for air unit heavy strategies.
 Lyrish Knight:
1. Damage: 400 dp20 ➜ 800 dp20
2. Life points: 980 ➜ 900
3. Surge of Strength:
   A. No longer increases damage by 100%
   B. Now increases damage dealt to frozen targets by 50%
While we had the intentions to give Lyrish Knight a more meaningful role in the game, finding a healthy buff for the card just by tweaking the stats has not proven easy. The extraordinarily high health ratio makes the unit very powerful when combined with health scaling mechanics like Nasty Surprise. Furthermore, the card is easily spammable and can take over games. As a result, we will allow the card to interact more with Frost's spell arsenal rather than just adding value through raw stats.
 Mauler:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 70p
After Mountaineer fell out of the meta, Mauler lost its main purpose in PvP. A slight cost reduction should help him shine more in niche situations.
 Mountain Rowdy:
1. Tainted Ice Block damage (p): 25 dmg/sec ➜ 20 dmg/sec
2. Blessed Ice Block (b):
   A. Damage reduction: 25% ➜ 30%
   B. Now affects friendly air units.
With the previous changes, Mountain Rowdy (p) played a strong role in pure Frost due to its high damage potential, which made it a little too effortless to shut down T2 aggression. While Frost should be strong at deflecting attacks around own structures, we want to give players a fair chance to punish the faction when a player acquires a strong tempo lead. Mountain Rowdy (b), on the other hand, has been rather underwhelming, so we will buff the damage reduction percentage a bit.
 Shadow Mage:
1. Sacrifice range: 30m ➜ 40m
2. Foul Play:
   A. Damage percentage: 300% ➜ 400%
   B. Duration until explosion: 20 seconds ➜ 12 seconds
   C. Cast range: 30m ➜ 40m
   D. Now deals half damage to buildings
Despite her great stat efficiency, Shadow Mage's abilities have been rather underwhelming in relation to what the card is supposed to do with them. By adding a burst limit against structures, we open up a lot of room for Foul Play buffs in order to make this ability more rewarding in unit combat.
 Spirit Hunter (p):
1. Tainted Bow Attack poison damage: 20 dmg per second ➜ 25 dmg per second
The current damage loss compared to the green affinity does not get compensated by the additional piercing damage. This change should grant Spirit Hunters purple some better niche uses.
 Stone Shards (b):
1. Blessed Fury ➜ Shatter Ice
   A. No longer deals increased damage to demons and undead
   B. Now deals full damage to frozen targets
Stone Shards (b) are currently unused across all game modes. The affinity effect being effectively useless plays a big role here. This change is supposed to enable alternative strategies in Stonekin (Shards (b) + Spirit Hunters (p) + Coldsnap) without overbuffing the already powerful T2.
 Stone Tempest:
1. Stone Rest healing: 20 life points per second ➜ 40 life points per second
This change is supposed to give the self-heal ability a more meaningful role given that the self-cc almost always outweighs the benefits of using this mechanic. As many of the factions received more tools to counter the unit (i.e. Burning Spears release), we think it is safe to enable more ways to use the card without directly strengthening patterns that have been perceived as oppressive in the past.
 Twilight Curse:
1. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 2 seconds
Allow Twilight Curse to scale into high energy T2s without increasing card efficiency.
 Warlock (r):
1. Infused Witchcraft damage buff: 15% ➜ 25%
We agree that the previous buff reduction was unnecessary when we reduced unit power cost. This has now been reverted.
[ Tier 3 ]
 Drones:
1. Life points: 1760 ➜ 1840
The recent changes for Drones did not help the card as much as we had hoped. Stat efficiency will be increased a bit further.
 Nox Carrier:
1. New passive, "Push the Cart:" Increase movement speed to 6.4 m/s when at least 3 friendly units are within a 25m radius
Based on some previous suggestions by the community in the balancing discord, we will add a conditional movement speed increase to Nox Carrier in order to make sure it actually reaches its destination.
 Sandstorm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
 Shield Building:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
Shield building has been very powerful for a long time, and a card nerf has been requested by the community rather frequently. We agree. 100% uptime on a shield, strong enough to outlast XL unit focus, is too much value even if you invest a full deck slot for a purely defensive spell.
 Timeshifter Spirit
1. Healing per jump: 275 / 220 / 165 / 110 / 55 life points ➜ 300 / 240 / 180 / 120 / 60
 Tremor:
1. Ground Slam:
   A. Ability cost: 30p ➜ 40p
   B. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 20 seconds
2. Tremor's walk speed (2.4 m/s) is now half of its normal speed (4.8m/s), instead of being identical. 
Tremor is one of the most popular and most powerful siege units in T3. We will be making some minor changes to the ability in order to bring it more in line with other T3 options.
 Unstable Demon
1. Demonic Rage:
   A. Bonus movement speed: 25% ➜ 60%
   B. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
After the initial round of changes, Unstable Demon is not being used as much as we had hoped. As the card is very difficult to use, we will strengthen it to reward good unit management a little bit more.

Patch #400042 - Nature's Awakening
Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our eighth balance patch for the game, a brand-new card, all kinds of quality of life features, and many other changes, enjoy!

Patch Preview
- One new card is now available! Jump in-game to collect Sleet Storm.
- Nature becomes the next faction to join the party in random PvE. 
- The first half of our two-part gold rework for PvE game modes and card upgrade costs.
- The Community Map menu has been completely reworked to increase usability. Also, gold rewards and a new achievement have been added for community maps. 
- Our third balance pass on towers, numerous buffs to well-designed but underperforming cards, and some of our first changes to NPC enemies.
- New quality of life features including a single-player pause feature, key down versus key up interactions, the ability to copy text from the in-game chat, the ability to immediately import a deck when a valid code is pasted in chat, and many more!

General Changes
The Community Map section has been completely revamped. Players can now better filter between maps, rank maps themselves, search for high-rated maps from other players, and receive overtime gold rewards while playing both featured and non-featured community maps. Cards played in featured community maps now also count towards daily quest rewards, and a new achievement to play and beat featured community maps will reward players with the Spring Forge skin. This rework will open up a lot of new content with which players can engage, and hopefully encourage more community members to bless their fellow Skylords with their map making talents. For more information, check out the February 2023 Community Update. Players can now pause PvE matches when they are the only active player in the game, including situations where multiple players were previously active in the match but have since left. The game automatically pauses whenever you open the options menu, showing a pause message while darkening the screen, and automatically unpauses when you close the options menu. Players will still be able to earn progress towards quests and achievements when pausing, but any game where a pause occurred will be removed from the leaderboard. Pausing solo matches can be disabled in the config file by changing the "allow_pausing_solo_games" option under the "application" section to false. The game now handles global key events on key down rather than on key up interactions. BattleForge is an outlier among modern games in that hotkeys are activated when a player releases a key, not when it is first pressed. By changing this, the game now feels much smoother and more responsive. Players can change back to using key up interactions by changing the line "global_key_events_on_key_down" in the config file to false. Gold rewards for rPvE have been changed. Random PvE now rewards players with overtime gold rewards based on map difficulty and whether they are playing 1p, 2p, or 4p. Gold earned from a 4p level 9 match will be roughly identical, while the gold reward for most other levels has been increased. 1p and 2p rPvE matches now reward significantly more gold than previously. Additionally, all rPvE matches now reward 15% of the expected rewards on-loss.  The gold cost to purchase and apply upgrades has been restructured. Previously, the application cost accounted for 28% of the total gold cost; it has now been increased to 40% while the cost to purchase upgrades has been decreased proportionately. Additionally, common and uncommon cards now have higher gold costs, while rare and ultra-rare cards have lower gold costs. The total cost to purchase and apply all upgrades, approximately 5.7 million gold for all cards, remains unchanged. This change is intended to make higher rarity cards easier to upgrade for newer players, while making lower rarity upgrades more valuable. More changes to upgrades and their procurement will be coming in a follow-up patch when we rework and increase the rewards for playing campaign maps.  Card upgrade drop locations are now provided in-game. When upgrading a card, it will now tell players where they can find the other upgrades they are missing. Additionally, each map now has a "Show Upgrades" button where players can filter and search for what upgrades the map provides at each difficulty level. For more information, see the March 2023 Community Update. All card upgrades have had their locations changed. Each map now has a roughly equal amount of commons, uncommons, rares, and ultra-rares. The 12p maps Passage to Darkness and Ascension are unchanged and will continue to only provide gold.  Players now have the ability to compare their profiles. Right now, this feature is limited to just comparing what achievements each player has completed, though it may be expanded to include more details in the future depending on community feedback. The feature is set to "Friends only" by default (meaning only people that you personally have added as a friend can see your profile), but it can be opened to the public or restricted completely in the settings.  Nature has been added as an enemy faction in rPvE. Face iconic Nature units, discover new bosses, battle through enemy root networks, and overcome the ultimate control faction in this newest addition to the random PvE game mode! For more information, and an interview with the designer, see the May 2023 Community Update. Shaman users rejoice, gold chests are now openable in-combat! Two new chat options have been added to the right-click context menu. Players can now copy messages directly from the chat and import decks from any message that contains a valid deck code automatically. Additionally, the context menu now only shows currently available actions instead of every possible action at all times.  Major changes have been made to the global effects system. More than 5 global effects are now shown at the top-left of the match window, with temporary effects, like Shrine of War, taking precedence over permanent effects, like Wheel of Gifts. Players should now be able to see all, or nearly all, global effects currently active in the game.  Twilight Transformation now counts as playing a card for the sake of achievements, meaning it can no longer be used to bypass achievement unit or card restrictions. Does not affect Not Even My Final Form.
New Cards
Sleet Storm  - 60p T3 Frost  
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map Defending Hope.
Two issues plague Frost in the higher tiers of PvE. The first is that the faction's only source of area CC is freeze. Given that a unit or building can only be frozen once, freeze application cards overlap in non-productive ways. The second issue is that while one orb of other factions gives the player powerful tools, the same is not true of one Frost orb. Most good Frost cards are locked behind 2 Frost orbs. We therefore wanted to address both issues at once by releasing a new Frost CC which was fully splashable. We made it an area Gravity Surge effect to synergize with Construct and to give other deck archetypes that lack anti-air easy access to it. For more information, check out the April 2023 Community Update.

Card Balance Changes

Global Balance Changes
Random PvE Boss Leader Immunity:
   - Added Steadfast to all rPvE bosses.
Ranged attack delays re-randomized:
   - Towers and ranged units are now assigned a randomized 0.3-0.7 second delay on a per-attack basis instead of a standardized 0.5 second delay on spawn. This only modifies cards affected by the bug, many ranged units and towers will be unaffected by the change. 
Last patch, we changed the randomized attack delay assigned on spawn from ranging between 0.1-1.1 seconds to a standardized delay of 0.5 seconds. While this successfully achieved our goal of making each unit and tower a player spawns equal, it introduced other problems. The chief concern reported by the playerbase was an aesthetic one. While previously battles in BattleForge felt very alive, with units and towers on each side attacking continuously, with the standardized delay combat started to feel more turn-based. Your units would attack, their units would attack, then your units would attack again. This also led to easy kiting of enemies, particularly NPC enemies, because you could play around the standard delay to unleash volleys of attacks then retreat until the next volley was ready. Given the widespread and consistent feedback we received that something unique to the BattleForge experience had been lost by this change, we decided to pursue a few alternative solutions that would fix both the old and the new problems. The solution we settled on was to re-add the attack delay with a smaller range and to make it apply on a per-attack instead of a per-spawn basis. This means each affected unit or tower will have a slightly different attack speed for each attack, but will on average have the same attack speed over a long enough period. The chaotic nature of combat should also return, with both sides continuously attacking instead of engaging in a semi turn-based encounter.
Revenant's Doom Costs Standardization:
   - Standardize Revenant's Doom costs by tier, with an increasing discount as the tiers progress: T2: 75%, T3: 65%, T4: 50% of unit's normal power cost
NPC Building Power and Orb Cost Fix:
   - All NPC buildings now have an assigned power and orb cost. 
Similar to how we fixed the missing power and orb costs for NPC units several patches ago, we have now given each NPC building its own power and orb cost. One motivation for this change is to allow us to add new cards and card abilities that can be limited in terms of which buildings they can and cannot be taken over, which would otherwise not be possible. A second motivation is to create consistency between NPC buildings. Prior to this change, buildings added with Fire rPvE had properly assigned costs, which is also true of the new Nature rPvE buildings, while the original buildings did not. This created a major inconsistency between and within game modes in regard to Matter Mastery, making it difficult or impossible to know when to bring one or the other affinity. A third motivation was to create a real distinction between the two existing affinities of Matter Mastery. Previously, before this change, the nature affinity could overtake every building in the game, meaning there was no real reason to use the tainted affinity or for it to exist. At the same time, we do not want to strongly nerf the nature affinity, which we do not view as inherently problematic. As such, as part of this change, we are also changing the nature affinity of Matter Mastery to work on T3 buildings, up to a power cost of 140p. Below, we have listed each building affected by this change and what will be its new tier and power cost.
Tier 2 - 100p
Bandit Launcher, Stonekin Hurler, Twilight Infected Tower, Lost Launcher
Tier 3 - 140p
Bandit Sky Defender, Bandit Waystation, Bandit Wizard Tower, Stonekin Deepgorge, Stonekin Launcher, Stonekin Shatterer, Twilight Fleshbender, Twilight Hatecaster, Twilight Skyscorcher, Lost Banestone, Lost Converter, Lost Disruptor
Tier 4 - 200p
Bandit Artillery, Stonekin Hammerfall, Stonekin Shredder, Twilight Bombard, Twilight Willsapper
XL-unit Turn Speed Increase:
   - Increased the turn speed of all player XL-units based on category.
Ground XL: 25% faster turn speed
Flying XL: 40% faster turn speed
Worm XL: 200% faster turn speed
Global Disenchant Hostile versus Friendly Root Distinction:
   - Disenchant's immunity no longer prevents the application of the Immobile, Immobileroot is still prevented.
BattleForge has two types of root effects, one called Immobile and the other Immobileroot. The distinction between them is that Immobile is only applied by friendly effects, while Immobileroot is applied by hostile effects. This change makes it so that a friendly effect which causes a unit to be rooted in place is no longer prevented by Disenchant's immunity effect. The primary reason behind this change is that effects which self-root a unit or its allies are baked into the balancing considerations of a card and its effects. The ability to bypass this downside, which has become easier as we have added, and likely will continue to add, more ways to apply Disenchant, has therefore become a constant balance consideration for both upcoming and existing cards. We are forced to ask ourselves if we can really buff Forest's Vim if we have to account for a Razorleaf that can walk around at normal speed, attacking the entire time. As we work on campaign maps with longer T4 sequences, we have to consider that a player can summon a Dreadnought and have it permanently stay in its Pledge of the Giants mode while walking around, trivializing vast portions of the map with ease. In such cases, do we nerf the Dreadnought and the Razorleaf, or do we nerf the mechanic which is causing the issue? Our decision was to nerf the Disenchant interaction.
Squad Position Fix:
   - Game now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other.
Any unit has two positions. A squad position and a unit position, which is equal to what we see on screen. This position tends to be close or equal to the units position itself but seems to behave slightly different for some actions. For example,. a Magma Hurler will shift his squad position slightly behind himself when attacking. This is not problematic. But some actions lead to only the unit position being updated while the squad position remained stationary. Prime candidates for this are hold position orders or rooting effects. The squad position can remain at the initial spot while the unit including its unit position can move to attack. Squad position is used by many abilities and spells to check if they should apply to the corresponding unit. Meaning, a unit with a squad position far away from its unit position would no longer be hit by things like CC or AoE attacks targeting the unit position. The fix going live now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other. Worms are not included here due to issues with worm movement.

PvE 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 ]
 Banner of Glory:
1. Life points: 500 ➜ 300
2. Void return percentage: 33% ➜ 40%
Higher percentage void return will allow more efficient cycling of lower tier units into real power. The life points were lowered to avoid situations in PvP where it becomes too strong, such as offensively inside an Aura of Corruption.
 Decomposer:
1. Void return percentage: 50% ➜ 60%
 Frost Mage:
1. Remove knock back from damage cone
2. Add non-damaging cone with reduced range, that applies knock back. A 33m knock back cone should result in Frost Mage consistently applying damage to squads she attacks, fixing the issue where units are knocked outside of her damage range, but she continues to attack them anyway.
 Imperials:
1. Add passive, "Protected Rush:" While under the effect of an Ice Shield, the unit gains significantly increased movement speed.
   A. Only works while Defensive Stance is active
   B. Movement speed while shielded = 4.8 m/s
Improve Frost Sorceress and Ice Shield Tower synergy with Imperials. 
 Scorched Earth (p):
1. Tainted Deconstruction (p):
   A. Damage debuff: 50% ➜ 75%
   B. Remove “The erection of buildings that are presently under construction will be interrupted and it will not be possible to repair anything.” from functionally and description.
The increase of Scorched Earth(p)'s debuff allows it to become a semi-suppression of buildings in a large area (20m) and to protect your fragile Fire units in PvE. We removed the construction-suppression effect to reduce double-scorched usage in PvP, which also gives each affinity a role in either PvE or PvP. 
 Snapjaws:
1. Remove Splash Damage: 5 damage, up to 9 in total ➜ 7 damage
Snapjaws have an abysmal splash radius of only 3m. This is so small it effectively does not exist and only serves to reduce the unit's damage against squad units. We are removing the splash and changing the unit's damage to single-target. This increases the unit's single-target damage from 138 to 193 dp20, a +40% increase in total effective damage. This will change the damage of Satanael's Snapjaws from 414 dp20 to 579 dp20.
 Tunnel:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 35p
2. Life points: 880 ➜ 600
Encourage Tunnel play by slightly lowering cost. HP reduction to prevent issues with an overly health efficient Tunnel.
 Witchclaws:
1. Power cost: 65 ➜ 70
2. Damage: 630 ➜ 680
3. Add passive, "Corpse Gathering:" Harvests energy from nearby corpses equal to their former maximum life points to enable more powerful explosions. A maximum of 3000 life points can be stored at once.
4. Infiltration Rework:
   A. Damage (both affinities): 330, up to 1650 in total damage + up to 600 damage per target, up to 5 targets in total based on the number of corpses gathered
   B. Enable splash overflow fix for ability.
   C. Both affinities now damage units and buildings.
   D. Explosion radius: 20m ➜ 15m
   E. Fire affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws deal 50% more damage after teleporting.
   F. Shadow affinity ➜ Frost Affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws take 50% less damage after teleporting.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Breeding Grounds:
1. Power cost: 70p ➜ 90p
Breeding Grounds is one of the stronger cards in the game and has some of the best scaling of any T2 card or building. At only 1 Nature orb and available as easy as T2, it grants a permanent -25% discount to all own and allied units. While the card is something of a third rail due to its popularity, now that we have significantly buffed nearly all parts of Nature, we believe it is time to give the card a minor nerf. When considering what to do with the card, we considered several options, such as making the discount scale upwards or downwards with tier (i.e. 15% discount if player is T2, 20% if T3, etc.) or just nerfing the -25% discount outright. In the end, we settled on a slap-on-the-wrist nerf, at least initially. The increased bound power will delay players initially in T2, but only cost them 2 extra permanent power if they destroy the building. At the same time, the increased bound power cost should encourage players to actually destroy Breeding Grounds made obsolete by map progression, and it will provide a much needed nerf in the PvP game mode as well. 
 Burrow Ritual:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
Reducing the card's tier should allow more synergy with Tunnel, allowing for more strategies to emerge and helping to better justify Burrow Ritual's inclusion in a deck.
 Defenders:
1. Crossbow Attack damage: 9 per shot (540 dp20) → 10 per shot (600 dp20)
2. Life points: 810 → 750
Stat realignment to make Defenders more viable offensively and a more attractive option. Life points are worth less than damage when considering stat efficiency, particularly amongst ranged units in PvE.
 Earthkeeper:
1. Fixed a bug which allowed Earthkeeper to make connected units immune to all damage while also not affecting Earthkeeper. 
 Lost Priest:
1. Exhaustion:
   A. Cast range: 30➜ 40m
   B. Total targets: 5 ➜ 10
   C. Debuff Timer: 20 sec ➜ 30s
   D. Jump speed increase
   E. Debuff strength: 30% ➜ 40%
Improvements to Lost Priest's support capacity will help its viability in PvE, particularly in combination with other units such as Lost Shade and Lost Dancer. 
 Matter Mastery (g):
1. Gifted Takeover (g): maximum of 2 orbs and 100 power costs ➜ maximum of 3 orbs and 140 power costs
See Global Balance Changes above for more details. We are also considering more substantial changes to the tainted affinity in a future update. 
 Revenant's Blessing:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
2. Radius: 20m ➜ 25m
3. Gifted Immortal healing: 15 ➜ 30 life points per second
4. Infused Immortal damage: 25% ➜ 30% more damage
5. Bugfix: Allow overlapping Revenant's Blessings to reapply the effect without requiring the unit to exit and re-enter the area.
We are working towards improving the current use case of Revenant's Doom through direct buffs to it and through improving its support tools. With this change, Lost Shades are usable without needing Viridya and the spell scales better into the higher tiers for those you want to use revenants. More support to the faction and to revenants in particular will come in the next patch when we finish the rest of the upcoming Lost Souls rework. 
 Root Nexus:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
2. Life points: 850 ➜ 650
Moving Root Nexus to T1 gives Treespirit a much-needed support card. Life points reduced to prevent too health efficient blocking options in T1. 
 Spikeroot:
1. Waves per root attack: 2.5 spike waves ➜ 2 spike waves
2. Damage per wave: 100, up to 150 in total ➜ 125, up to 190 in total (+25% increase)
Overall damage remains identical. Spikeroot now always deals the same damage at each point in its attack, instead of having high and low points. 
 Sunken Temple:
1. Added Mode-change, "Hibernate:" Pest Creepers enter a state of dormancy and are no longer summoned.
2. Pest Creepers now aggro against enemies in an area around the Temple.
The new mode change will allow the player to temporarily turn off Pest Creepers. This will be especially helpful when using a large number of Sunken Temples, which quickly fill up the unit population limit, and you want to summon new non-Creeper units. The other change will make it so that Pest Creepers no longer stand around waiting for enemies to either attack them or move within a short distance. They will now actively aggro on enemies that come within a moderate radius around the Temple which spawned them. Overall, these changes should make the card function much more fluidly. 
 Unholy Power:
1. Stored Strength (ammo): 2000 ➜ 3000
2. Ammo is refreshed whenever Unholy Power is recast on a unit already affected by another instance of Unholy Power.
3. Bugfix: Unholy Power no longer decays all remaining ammo when a previous instance of the spell expires. 
Unholy Power is a highly inconsistent spell, and a lot of that regards bugs in its original implementation. By fixing the decay issue, new applications of Unholy Power existing concurrently with previous applications should no longer be removed by older instances expiring. Additionally, new applications, in addition to continuing to stack additively, now refresh the card's ammo pool back to full. On top of these important changes to the card's functioning, we also increased its total strength pool by 50% from 2000 to 3000 which should help it to scale better into T3. With all these changes, Unholy Power should become a significantly stronger and more consistent buff spell.  
 Viridya (normal and promo versions):
1. Viridya’s Blessing is now able to restore lost squad members
 Wallbreaker:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Fire (T1)
Opens up several early use cases for the card on Titans, Dwarven Riddle, and Sunbridge. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Abyssal Warder:
1. New Active ability for large and medium-sized golems, "Reassemble:" Bond with two other Abyssal Warders of the same size in a 20m radius to reform into an Abyssal Warder of a larger size.
2. Frost affinity effect, Ice Shield duration: 15s ➜ 30 seconds
There is a large disparity between the usefulness of the two Abyssal Warder affinities in terms of effects. The fire affinity (r) provides a permanent buff, while the blessed affinity (b) only grants an Ice Shield for 15 seconds. In an attempt to partially remedy this issue, we have doubled the length of the smaller Warders' Ice Shields to 30 seconds. Additionally, we have finally been able to add a new effect to the small and medium sized Warders which will allow them to rebuild themselves into a larger Warder. Reassemble requires 3 Warders to work, meaning that it is not inherently efficient, though it provides another strong synergy with Promise of Life and builds on the buffs to Abyssal Warder last patch. 
 Blood Healing:
1. Charges 12 ➜ 16
 Thornbark:
1. Melee damage: 1400 dp20 ➜ 1550 dp20
 Mutating Frenzy:
1. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 sec ➜ 5 sec
 Santa Claus:
1. Blue Gift, Red Gift, Christmas Peace cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
 Satanael:
1. Fealty (both affinities):
   A. Cannot be activated if the player is at or above 125 population. 
   B. Summoned Snapjaws damage: 200% ➜ 120%
Removing all instances of infinite spawning in the game due to the attendant performance issues they cause. Buffing Snapjaws individually as compensation. Overall, the damage of each summoned Snapjaws squad is increased slightly. 
 Shrine of Martyrs:
1. Void return per frozen unit: 12% ➜ 18% of current void pool
2. Bugfix: Void return effect is no longer triggered multiple times per entity.
Regular users of Shrine of Martyrs know that the void return effect is often inconsistent. The same group of enemies could provide wildly different void return rates when frozen due to the fact that the effect would switch between applying once or multiple times per enemy. We fixed this inconsistency, but it left the shrine, which is likely already the weakest of the four standard options, even weaker. As such, we have given it a large +50% buff to its void return percentage in compensation for removing the existing bug. This change will allow players to develop an intuitive understanding of how much void is actually returned per frozen enemies. The percentage we chose is a bit of a guess and is subject to change based on the feedback we receive from player testing.  
 Shrine of War:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 2 Neutral (T3) ➜ 2 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
When we first began nerfing cards, many people asked us when we were planning on touching Shrine of War. We previously delayed any changes to the card due to its importance to the rPvE game mode at all levels and because other factions, such as Frost and Nature, lacked sufficient methods of void return, an aspect we think is integral to the balance of all factions. Now that all factions have a viable method of void return, we have decided to give Shrine of War a nerf. We were between the two ideas of nerfing its void return percentage or increasing its orb restrictions. While Shrine of War has by far the most efficient void return when accounting for multiple players out of all the available options, we decided that we did not think its efficiency was outside the line of acceptability, but that the Shrine was too splashable compared to the other options. As such, we choose to leave Shrine of War as the best void return shrine in the game, but to require the player to invest into 2 Fire orbs to access it. 
[ Tier 4 ]
 Altar of Chaos:
1. Change Nether Bomb cast range to work like spells instead of like units & buildings. Still limited to own ground presence only.
This seemingly small change substantially increases the positioning capacities of the Nether Bomb and allows own units to be much farther away when placing bombs. 
 Battleship:
1. Barrage damage per shot: 550, up to 3300 in total ➜ 800, up to 2400 in total
Battleship's ability has a long range of 50m and can be used to snipe out enemies far into the enemy's backline while remaining safe itself. The ability has a very large amount of splash damage, able to fully damage up to 6 enemies in its target radius. At the same time, the target radius is only 12m making it very unlikely there are 6 enemies to damage. Additionally, despite its long animation and unleashing 5 shots, the single-target damage is not even able to destroy a large spawn building. We are reducing the total splash damage in favor of higher single-target damage, increasing the damage dealt to one target from 2750 to 4000 in total. 
 Cluster Explosion (p):
1. Tainted Burst radii per successive explosion: 25m / 20m / 15m / 10m / 5m ➜ 25m / 20m / 15m / 12m / 10m
Increased the radius of the explosion for the 3rd and 4th waves of Cluster Explosion (p). These radii were so small, they often failed to hit any enemies. By increasing them, we hope to give a slight buff to this affinity in ideal situations with a lot of closely clustered enemies. 
 Earthen Gift:
Earthen Gift Redesign
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Infused Earth (r) ➜ Blessed Earth (b):
   A. Damage buff: 30% ➜ 50%
3. Tainted Earth (p) ➜ Gifted Earth (g):
   A. Affects Elemental units, not structures
   B. Remove "Every hostile building in the current game will deal 50% less damage."
   C. Damage buff: +50% more damage
   D. Healing per second: 10% ➜ 5%
Earthen Gift is one of the worst cards in the entire game. Before Reforging, its normal price was 3 BFP despite being a Rare spell. As Stonekin's Pure T4 spell, it ought to be one of the reasons why a player goes 2 Nature and 2 Frost orbs, but right now it is a waste of a card slot. The card's existing identity is as a combined buff and healing card, but it is restricted to only work on structures. Even on structures it is not useful.
Instead of completely rejecting the card's initial design, we are attempting to improve on it for the one affinity by increasing the damage buff where it may prove useful upon the release of defensive rPvE. For the other affinity, we are swapping its effect from structures to elemental units, which includes all Stonekin units, and modifying its heal and damage buff accordingly. The idea is to potentially allow the spell to replace Regrowth while also giving Stonekin access to a minor damage buff for itself and any other friendly elemental units. Between this and the Grinder buff, Stonekin's T4 should feel significantly stronger.
 Evil Eye:
1. Damage now ticks every 0.5 seconds instead of every 1 second. Rage still takes the same amount of time to activate.
2. Initial damage delay for Evil Eye's Searing Sight has been removed. Damage will now starts as soon as Evil Eye targets an enemy.
 Grinder:
1. Harmony: Added a yellow bar akin to Mountaineer showing when the healing effect will next occur.
2. Provoke (both affinities): Single target ➜ All enemies in a 15m radius
   A. Infused Provoke Buff: 50% more damage ➜ 75% more damage
Quality of life change to Grinder's harmony ability. Added some increased strength and flexibility to Grinder's taunt by allowing it to affect multiple targets in a small area. This will also allow Grinder (r) to taunt the empty air versus bosses, allowing it to still generate the personal damage buff, which has been increased to +75%, regards of whether or not any enemy units are actually taunted. Stonekin struggles against strong single target enemies such as bosses and this is one step in an attempt to remedy that without damaging the faction's existing identity.
 Lost Evocation:
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Cast time reduction: 2 seconds ➜ 0.8 seconds
3. Infused Revenant damage buff: 50% ➜ 100%
The charge increase allows Lost Souls to get access to its primary support spell without having to use two deck slots on Rifle Cultists + Offering. The cast time reduction prevents the use of both Evocations simultaneously, while the buff to the fire affinity (r)'s damage buff makes it a more compelling option for a faction whose main damage dealing occurs through units.
 Shadow Worm:
1. Increase turn rate of disintegration turrets: 200 ➜ 260
 Tempest:
1. Whirlwind splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Damage: 44 ➜ 64 life points per second
2. Healing (both affinities): Both affinities now heal friendly Twilight units by equivalent damage as they deal to enemies.
3. Change Gifted Affinity (g) ➜ Infused Affinity (r)
   A. Add +30% damage buff for friendly Twilight units
Improvements in nearly all aspects of Twilight's marquee spell. Previously, the blessed affinity (b) was the only one worth using due to the damage reduction it provides. We decided to roll the healing effect of the gifted affinity (g) into the base spell and create an alternative damage buff variant instead. The goal with this change is to allow Twilight Pestilence to be a more flexible spell, one able to provide a supportive effect while also clearing minor enemies and recovering chip damage to player units that might otherwise prompt the player to cast an additional healing spell. 
 Void Maw:
1. Void Shear ability cost: 75p ➜ 60p
[ 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 towers up 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. 
Tower Targeting Fixes:
1. Changed the damage delay of the auto-attacks for a large range of towers to the standard delay of 0.1 sec. These towers should now have an easier time hitting moving targets, including swift units. 
   A. Affects the following towers, including both affinities when applicable: Artillery, Hammerfall, Defense Tower, Lifestealer, Northern Keep, Primal Defender, Twilight Bombard, Tower of Flames
 Blaster Cannon:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Tainted Magma: 15m ➜ 20m
 Defense Tower:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Howling Shrine:
1. Essence Bolts firing arc: 90 degrees ➜ 135 degrees
2. New passive, “Restoration:” Regenerate 30 life points every second.
To truly fulfill its role as a fortress and to provide a meaningful choice between itself and Razorleaf, Howling Shrine must be a self-sufficient defender able to justify the massive amount of space it occupies. The restoration effect will allow the tower to persist even absent player attention or when facing continuous attack waves that prevent repair. The increase to the firing arc of its main weapon is a much needed change. Prior to this, Howling Shrine could only target most enemies with one turret at a time and XL units with two turrets only if the tower was positioned perfectly with respect to the XL unit's path. The tower should now be able to target units of all sizes with two turrets in most cases. 
 Lifestealer:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Still alive regeneration: 5 life points per second ➜ 8 life points per second
3. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 3 seconds
 Lost Disruptor:
1. Damage: 300, up to 330 in total ➜ 300, up to 450 in total (3000 dp20)
2. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 10m
3. Disruption cost: 50p ➜ 20p
Increase Lost Disruptor's effectiveness against multiple enemies. Also, Lost Disruptor's ability is one of the better counters to Shrine of Memory in 2v2 PvP. By decreasing the cost, we better enable players to make use of the card simply for its ability effect.
 Northern Keep:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Primal Defender:
1. Earthstrike splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Cloudstrike:
   A. Damage (add splash): 225 ➜ 250, up to 375 in total (2030 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 0m ➜ 8m
Buff to Primal Defender's anti-air capacity. This leaves it as a middle ground between a non-raged and a fully raged Blaster Cannon, and should hopefully allow the tower to better aid Nature T1 in dealing with anti-air threats, particularly those which can counter small and medium units.
 Rocket Tower
1. Orb cost: 2 Fire ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Neutral
2. Power cost: 80p ➜ 70p
3. Life points: 2000 ➜ 1480
4. Rocket Barrage:
   A. Total rockets: 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 ➜ 4 on all upgrade levels
   B. Attack speed: Every 5 seconds ➜ every 4 seconds
   C. Damage per rocket: 85 ➜ 90 (900 dp20)
Fire T2 currently lacks a splash tower, while Pure Fire T2 has 2 towers. We think Pyromaniac sufficiently fills the slot of T2 tower for Pure Fire, so we are transitioning Rocket Tower into a splash card. As part of this change, we will be cutting down on its large pool of life points while otherwise increasing the consistency of Rocket Tower, both in terms of knockback and damage dealing. Even with the cost decrease, this change will make Rocket Tower mildly less stat efficient against large groups in exchange for a lower start up cost and the ability to consistently knockback multiple enemies due to the fixed targeting and increased rate of fire. These changes should allow Rocket Tower to fulfill its role as a knockback-centric tower while its high damage allies provide the necessary fire power. 
 Skydefender:
1. Damage: 128 up to 192 in total ➜ 153 up to 230 (2300 dp20)
2. Life points: 1400 ➜ 1600
3. Range: 40m ➜ 50m
4. Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 8m
Substantial buff to Skydefender to give it more teeth against the T3 and T4 air threats it is designed to counter. The range increase will make it able to fight back against Raven Battleships, which are one of the most common flying enemies in the campaign. 
 Time Vortex (p):
1. Tainted Void Shock (p), attack speed increase void levels: Above 150, 300, 600, 1200 void ➜ Above 100, 200, 400, 800 void
Improve the efficiency of the tainted affinity (p) by decreasing the amount of void which is required to trigger each attack speed increase.  
 Volcano:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 200p
2. Damage: 581, up to 872 (3990 dp20) ➜ 766, up to 1149 (5270 dp20)
3. Life points: 4390 ➜ 5690
4. Infused Eruption (r) Rage:
   A. Rage scaling: 100% 1st stage, 200% 2nd stage ➜ 75% 1st stage, 150% 2nd stage
   B. Rage reset timer: 7 sec ➜ 10 seconds
5. Lava Sea:
   A. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   B. Bugfix - Lava Sea now works as described
   C. Added a new visual effect
The goal is to make Volcano more "dense" by increasing its power cost and then adjusting its stats accordingly. Making each Volcano more powerful helps to mitigate the tower's large size and also makes it a better target for building buff effects such as those provided by Frost's Skyelves. Total damage when enraged is slightly increased despite the Rage nerf (12,000 dp20 ➜ 13175 dp20). Overall, Volcano loses a very small amount of total stat efficiency, but gains in total strength by having an ability that actually works. The old Lava Sea provided zero value to the tower because it did not work. The new Lava Sea, which functions as described on the card, turns this Fire fortress into a terrifying strongpoint capable of wiping out hordes of enemy units.  

PvP Balance Changes
[ Tier 1 ]
 Life Weaving:
1. No longer affects buildings.
Life Weaving changes are made to weaken its scaling potential into higher tiers considering most shadow splashes tend to be fairly strong at later game stages anyway. Buffed single unit attacks with straight well focus are very easy to execute and fairly annoying to play against when any damage on the target also increases the damage against your Power Well.
 Sunstriders:
1. Suppression Fire ability cost: 25p ➜ 10p
In PvP, Suppression Fire's most relevant applications arise on higher tech levels, where a 50 energy investment for a fragile T1 unit is already enough of a restriction. As a result, there is room to buff the ability power cost for those niche cases.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Bandit Launcher:
1. Power cost: 60p ➜ 50p
2. Firebug ability cost: 40/35/30/25p ➜ 40p on all upgrade levels
The addition of a weaker building with reduced construction time led to some rather unique T2 strategies, but the high bound power requirements restrict its relevance. This change should open up some more room for creative usage of Bandit Launcher and the Fire Bug ability.
 Bandit Minefield:
1. Mine spawn speed reduced by 0.25 seconds per mine. 
Bandit Minefield has been a fairly controversial topic. The spell was very powerful and played an important role in every game mode. Based on play rates and general feedback, our PvP faction overhaul succeeded in making Bandits more viable and fun to play, but there was a lot of frustration when playing against the faction due to an overly dominant Minefield. After recent tweaks, play rates have dropped by about 20% and Bandits seems to be in a very healthy position based on global faction popularity and high ELO presence ever since. However, the experience of playing against Minefield continued to be perceived as frustrating by many of our players. The intended goal of this set of changes is to keep the faction at a similar level of strength, but distribute its power more evenly across Bandit T2 cards and strategies.
Mine spawn speed will be reduced to enable counter play without removing its zoning power and damage potential upon being ignored. The design direction of allowing placement under units is absolutely intended, crucial for the faction viability, and differentiates the card from basic trap card design. Due to a lack of crowd control and building protection, Bandits needs a tool to defend vs melee unit well focus consistently. A major issue in PvP is that outside of its intended design direction (melee unit zoning and S unit denial), Minefield generates too much trading value as its damage is almost guaranteed. The spell tends to trade up against anything except for swift unit micro. This should be addressed.
In return, we will buff Commandos, Sniper, and Bandit Launcher in compensation. As Warriors Death came up to the discussion for compensations: The card design is not healthy for PvP due to a lack of counterplay, as such we will just leave the card as is since its mechanic is also powerful in end game PvE content.
 Bandit Sniper:
1. Damage: 75 dmg per hit (750 dp20) ➜ 78 dmg per hit (780 dp20)
Slight damage increase to compensate for Bandit Minefield nerfs.
 Commandos:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 65p
2. Concentrate ability cost: 10p ➜ 20p
After some testing, we think it is safe to make Commandos a little stronger, as long as the upfront cost of mode-switching remains the same. This should be beneficial for the card in all game modes.
 Gravity Surge:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
Allow Gravity Surge to be more functional as a niche counter for air unit heavy strategies.
 Lyrish Knight:
1. Damage: 400 dp20 ➜ 800 dp20
2. Life points: 980 ➜ 900
3. Surge of Strength:
   A. No longer increases damage by 100%
   B. Now increases damage dealt to frozen targets by 50%
While we had the intentions to give Lyrish Knight a more meaningful role in the game, finding a healthy buff for the card just by tweaking the stats has not proven easy. The extraordinarily high health ratio makes the unit very powerful when combined with health scaling mechanics like Nasty Surprise. Furthermore, the card is easily spammable and can take over games. As a result, we will allow the card to interact more with Frost's spell arsenal rather than just adding value through raw stats.
 Mauler:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 70p
After Mountaineer fell out of the meta, Mauler lost its main purpose in PvP. A slight cost reduction should help him shine more in niche situations.
 Mountain Rowdy:
1. Tainted Ice Block damage (p): 25 dmg/sec ➜ 20 dmg/sec
2. Blessed Ice Block (b):
   A. Damage reduction: 25% ➜ 30%
   B. Now affects friendly air units.
With the previous changes, Mountain Rowdy (p) played a strong role in pure Frost due to its high damage potential, which made it a little too effortless to shut down T2 aggression. While Frost should be strong at deflecting attacks around own structures, we want to give players a fair chance to punish the faction when a player acquires a strong tempo lead. Mountain Rowdy (b), on the other hand, has been rather underwhelming, so we will buff the damage reduction percentage a bit.
 Shadow Mage:
1. Sacrifice range: 30m ➜ 40m
2. Foul Play:
   A. Damage percentage: 300% ➜ 400%
   B. Duration until explosion: 20 seconds ➜ 12 seconds
   C. Cast range: 30m ➜ 40m
   D. Now deals half damage to buildings
Despite her great stat efficiency, Shadow Mage's abilities have been rather underwhelming in relation to what the card is supposed to do with them. By adding a burst limit against structures, we open up a lot of room for Foul Play buffs in order to make this ability more rewarding in unit combat.
 Spirit Hunter (p):
1. Tainted Bow Attack poison damage: 20 dmg per second ➜ 25 dmg per second
The current damage loss compared to the green affinity does not get compensated by the additional piercing damage. This change should grant Spirit Hunters purple some better niche uses.
 Stone Shards (b):
1. Blessed Fury ➜ Shatter Ice
   A. No longer deals increased damage to demons and undead
   B. Now deals full damage to frozen targets
Stone Shards (b) are currently unused across all game modes. The affinity effect being effectively useless plays a big role here. This change is supposed to enable alternative strategies in Stonekin (Shards (b) + Spirit Hunters (p) + Coldsnap) without overbuffing the already powerful T2.
 Stone Tempest:
1. Stone Rest healing: 20 life points per second ➜ 40 life points per second
This change is supposed to give the self-heal ability a more meaningful role given that the self-cc almost always outweighs the benefits of using this mechanic. As many of the factions received more tools to counter the unit (i.e. Burning Spears release), we think it is safe to enable more ways to use the card without directly strengthening patterns that have been perceived as oppressive in the past.
 Twilight Curse:
1. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 2 seconds
Allow Twilight Curse to scale into high energy T2s without increasing card efficiency.
 Warlock (r):
1. Infused Witchcraft damage buff: 15% ➜ 25%
We agree that the previous buff reduction was unnecessary when we reduced unit power cost. This has now been reverted.
[ Tier 3 ]
 Drones:
1. Life points: 1760 ➜ 1840
The recent changes for Drones did not help the card as much as we had hoped. Stat efficiency will be increased a bit further.
 Nox Carrier:
1. New passive, "Push the Cart:" Increase movement speed to 6.4 m/s when at least 3 friendly units are within a 25m radius
Based on some previous suggestions by the community in the balancing discord, we will add a conditional movement speed increase to Nox Carrier in order to make sure it actually reaches its destination.
 Sandstorm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
 Shield Building:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
Shield building has been very powerful for a long time, and a card nerf has been requested by the community rather frequently. We agree. 100% uptime on a shield, strong enough to outlast XL unit focus, is too much value even if you invest a full deck slot for a purely defensive spell.
 Timeshifter Spirit
1. Healing per jump: 275 / 220 / 165 / 110 / 55 life points ➜ 300 / 240 / 180 / 120 / 60
 Tremor:
1. Ground Slam:
   A. Ability cost: 30p ➜ 40p
   B. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 20 seconds
2. Tremor's walk speed (2.4 m/s) is now half of its normal speed (4.8m/s), instead of being identical. 
Tremor is one of the most popular and most powerful siege units in T3. We will be making some minor changes to the ability in order to bring it more in line with other T3 options.
 Unstable Demon
1. Demonic Rage:
   A. Bonus movement speed: 25% ➜ 60%
   B. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
After the initial round of changes, Unstable Demon is not being used as much as we had hoped. As the card is very difficult to use, we will strengthen it to reward good unit management a little bit more.

Patch #400042 - Nature's Awakening
Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our eighth balance patch for the game, a brand-new card, all kinds of quality of life features, and many other changes, enjoy!

Patch Preview
- One new card is now available! Jump in-game to collect Sleet Storm.
- Nature becomes the next faction to join the party in random PvE. 
- The first half of our two-part gold rework for PvE game modes and card upgrade costs.
- The Community Map menu has been completely reworked to increase usability. Also, gold rewards and a new achievement have been added for community maps. 
- Our third balance pass on towers, numerous buffs to well-designed but underperforming cards, and some of our first changes to NPC enemies.
- New quality of life features including a single-player pause feature, key down versus key up interactions, the ability to copy text from the in-game chat, the ability to immediately import a deck when a valid code is pasted in chat, and many more!

General Changes
The Community Map section has been completely revamped. Players can now better filter between maps, rank maps themselves, search for high-rated maps from other players, and receive overtime gold rewards while playing both featured and non-featured community maps. Cards played in featured community maps now also count towards daily quest rewards, and a new achievement to play and beat featured community maps will reward players with the Spring Forge skin. This rework will open up a lot of new content with which players can engage, and hopefully encourage more community members to bless their fellow Skylords with their map making talents. For more information, check out the February 2023 Community Update. Players can now pause PvE matches when they are the only active player in the game, including situations where multiple players were previously active in the match but have since left. The game automatically pauses whenever you open the options menu, showing a pause message while darkening the screen, and automatically unpauses when you close the options menu. Players will still be able to earn progress towards quests and achievements when pausing, but any game where a pause occurred will be removed from the leaderboard. Pausing solo matches can be disabled in the config file by changing the "allow_pausing_solo_games" option under the "application" section to false. The game now handles global key events on key down rather than on key up interactions. BattleForge is an outlier among modern games in that hotkeys are activated when a player releases a key, not when it is first pressed. By changing this, the game now feels much smoother and more responsive. Players can change back to using key up interactions by changing the line "global_key_events_on_key_down" in the config file to false. Gold rewards for rPvE have been changed. Random PvE now rewards players with overtime gold rewards based on map difficulty and whether they are playing 1p, 2p, or 4p. Gold earned from a 4p level 9 match will be roughly identical, while the gold reward for most other levels has been increased. 1p and 2p rPvE matches now reward significantly more gold than previously. Additionally, all rPvE matches now reward 15% of the expected rewards on-loss.  The gold cost to purchase and apply upgrades has been restructured. Previously, the application cost accounted for 28% of the total gold cost; it has now been increased to 40% while the cost to purchase upgrades has been decreased proportionately. Additionally, common and uncommon cards now have higher gold costs, while rare and ultra-rare cards have lower gold costs. The total cost to purchase and apply all upgrades, approximately 5.7 million gold for all cards, remains unchanged. This change is intended to make higher rarity cards easier to upgrade for newer players, while making lower rarity upgrades more valuable. More changes to upgrades and their procurement will be coming in a follow-up patch when we rework and increase the rewards for playing campaign maps.  Card upgrade drop locations are now provided in-game. When upgrading a card, it will now tell players where they can find the other upgrades they are missing. Additionally, each map now has a "Show Upgrades" button where players can filter and search for what upgrades the map provides at each difficulty level. For more information, see the March 2023 Community Update. All card upgrades have had their locations changed. Each map now has a roughly equal amount of commons, uncommons, rares, and ultra-rares. The 12p maps Passage to Darkness and Ascension are unchanged and will continue to only provide gold.  Players now have the ability to compare their profiles. Right now, this feature is limited to just comparing what achievements each player has completed, though it may be expanded to include more details in the future depending on community feedback. The feature is set to "Friends only" by default (meaning only people that you personally have added as a friend can see your profile), but it can be opened to the public or restricted completely in the settings.  Nature has been added as an enemy faction in rPvE. Face iconic Nature units, discover new bosses, battle through enemy root networks, and overcome the ultimate control faction in this newest addition to the random PvE game mode! For more information, and an interview with the designer, see the May 2023 Community Update. Shaman users rejoice, gold chests are now openable in-combat! Two new chat options have been added to the right-click context menu. Players can now copy messages directly from the chat and import decks from any message that contains a valid deck code automatically. Additionally, the context menu now only shows currently available actions instead of every possible action at all times.  Major changes have been made to the global effects system. More than 5 global effects are now shown at the top-left of the match window, with temporary effects, like Shrine of War, taking precedence over permanent effects, like Wheel of Gifts. Players should now be able to see all, or nearly all, global effects currently active in the game.  Twilight Transformation now counts as playing a card for the sake of achievements, meaning it can no longer be used to bypass achievement unit or card restrictions. Does not affect Not Even My Final Form.
New Cards
Sleet Storm  - 60p T3 Frost  
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map Defending Hope.
Two issues plague Frost in the higher tiers of PvE. The first is that the faction's only source of area CC is freeze. Given that a unit or building can only be frozen once, freeze application cards overlap in non-productive ways. The second issue is that while one orb of other factions gives the player powerful tools, the same is not true of one Frost orb. Most good Frost cards are locked behind 2 Frost orbs. We therefore wanted to address both issues at once by releasing a new Frost CC which was fully splashable. We made it an area Gravity Surge effect to synergize with Construct and to give other deck archetypes that lack anti-air easy access to it. For more information, check out the April 2023 Community Update.

Card Balance Changes

Global Balance Changes
Random PvE Boss Leader Immunity:
   - Added Steadfast to all rPvE bosses.
Ranged attack delays re-randomized:
   - Towers and ranged units are now assigned a randomized 0.3-0.7 second delay on a per-attack basis instead of a standardized 0.5 second delay on spawn. This only modifies cards affected by the bug, many ranged units and towers will be unaffected by the change. 
Last patch, we changed the randomized attack delay assigned on spawn from ranging between 0.1-1.1 seconds to a standardized delay of 0.5 seconds. While this successfully achieved our goal of making each unit and tower a player spawns equal, it introduced other problems. The chief concern reported by the playerbase was an aesthetic one. While previously battles in BattleForge felt very alive, with units and towers on each side attacking continuously, with the standardized delay combat started to feel more turn-based. Your units would attack, their units would attack, then your units would attack again. This also led to easy kiting of enemies, particularly NPC enemies, because you could play around the standard delay to unleash volleys of attacks then retreat until the next volley was ready. Given the widespread and consistent feedback we received that something unique to the BattleForge experience had been lost by this change, we decided to pursue a few alternative solutions that would fix both the old and the new problems. The solution we settled on was to re-add the attack delay with a smaller range and to make it apply on a per-attack instead of a per-spawn basis. This means each affected unit or tower will have a slightly different attack speed for each attack, but will on average have the same attack speed over a long enough period. The chaotic nature of combat should also return, with both sides continuously attacking instead of engaging in a semi turn-based encounter.
Revenant's Doom Costs Standardization:
   - Standardize Revenant's Doom costs by tier, with an increasing discount as the tiers progress: T2: 75%, T3: 65%, T4: 50% of unit's normal power cost
NPC Building Power and Orb Cost Fix:
   - All NPC buildings now have an assigned power and orb cost. 
Similar to how we fixed the missing power and orb costs for NPC units several patches ago, we have now given each NPC building its own power and orb cost. One motivation for this change is to allow us to add new cards and card abilities that can be limited in terms of which buildings they can and cannot be taken over, which would otherwise not be possible. A second motivation is to create consistency between NPC buildings. Prior to this change, buildings added with Fire rPvE had properly assigned costs, which is also true of the new Nature rPvE buildings, while the original buildings did not. This created a major inconsistency between and within game modes in regard to Matter Mastery, making it difficult or impossible to know when to bring one or the other affinity. A third motivation was to create a real distinction between the two existing affinities of Matter Mastery. Previously, before this change, the nature affinity could overtake every building in the game, meaning there was no real reason to use the tainted affinity or for it to exist. At the same time, we do not want to strongly nerf the nature affinity, which we do not view as inherently problematic. As such, as part of this change, we are also changing the nature affinity of Matter Mastery to work on T3 buildings, up to a power cost of 140p. Below, we have listed each building affected by this change and what will be its new tier and power cost.
Tier 2 - 100p
Bandit Launcher, Stonekin Hurler, Twilight Infected Tower, Lost Launcher
Tier 3 - 140p
Bandit Sky Defender, Bandit Waystation, Bandit Wizard Tower, Stonekin Deepgorge, Stonekin Launcher, Stonekin Shatterer, Twilight Fleshbender, Twilight Hatecaster, Twilight Skyscorcher, Lost Banestone, Lost Converter, Lost Disruptor
Tier 4 - 200p
Bandit Artillery, Stonekin Hammerfall, Stonekin Shredder, Twilight Bombard, Twilight Willsapper
XL-unit Turn Speed Increase:
   - Increased the turn speed of all player XL-units based on category.
Ground XL: 25% faster turn speed
Flying XL: 40% faster turn speed
Worm XL: 200% faster turn speed
Global Disenchant Hostile versus Friendly Root Distinction:
   - Disenchant's immunity no longer prevents the application of the Immobile, Immobileroot is still prevented.
BattleForge has two types of root effects, one called Immobile and the other Immobileroot. The distinction between them is that Immobile is only applied by friendly effects, while Immobileroot is applied by hostile effects. This change makes it so that a friendly effect which causes a unit to be rooted in place is no longer prevented by Disenchant's immunity effect. The primary reason behind this change is that effects which self-root a unit or its allies are baked into the balancing considerations of a card and its effects. The ability to bypass this downside, which has become easier as we have added, and likely will continue to add, more ways to apply Disenchant, has therefore become a constant balance consideration for both upcoming and existing cards. We are forced to ask ourselves if we can really buff Forest's Vim if we have to account for a Razorleaf that can walk around at normal speed, attacking the entire time. As we work on campaign maps with longer T4 sequences, we have to consider that a player can summon a Dreadnought and have it permanently stay in its Pledge of the Giants mode while walking around, trivializing vast portions of the map with ease. In such cases, do we nerf the Dreadnought and the Razorleaf, or do we nerf the mechanic which is causing the issue? Our decision was to nerf the Disenchant interaction.
Squad Position Fix:
   - Game now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other.
Any unit has two positions. A squad position and a unit position, which is equal to what we see on screen. This position tends to be close or equal to the units position itself but seems to behave slightly different for some actions. For example,. a Magma Hurler will shift his squad position slightly behind himself when attacking. This is not problematic. But some actions lead to only the unit position being updated while the squad position remained stationary. Prime candidates for this are hold position orders or rooting effects. The squad position can remain at the initial spot while the unit including its unit position can move to attack. Squad position is used by many abilities and spells to check if they should apply to the corresponding unit. Meaning, a unit with a squad position far away from its unit position would no longer be hit by things like CC or AoE attacks targeting the unit position. The fix going live now checks and updates the Squad position to the unit position if they are too far away from each other. Worms are not included here due to issues with worm movement.

PvE 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 ]
 Banner of Glory:
1. Life points: 500 ➜ 300
2. Void return percentage: 33% ➜ 40%
Higher percentage void return will allow more efficient cycling of lower tier units into real power. The life points were lowered to avoid situations in PvP where it becomes too strong, such as offensively inside an Aura of Corruption.
 Decomposer:
1. Void return percentage: 50% ➜ 60%
 Frost Mage:
1. Remove knock back from damage cone
2. Add non-damaging cone with reduced range, that applies knock back. A 33m knock back cone should result in Frost Mage consistently applying damage to squads she attacks, fixing the issue where units are knocked outside of her damage range, but she continues to attack them anyway.
 Imperials:
1. Add passive, "Protected Rush:" While under the effect of an Ice Shield, the unit gains significantly increased movement speed.
   A. Only works while Defensive Stance is active
   B. Movement speed while shielded = 4.8 m/s
Improve Frost Sorceress and Ice Shield Tower synergy with Imperials. 
 Scorched Earth (p):
1. Tainted Deconstruction (p):
   A. Damage debuff: 50% ➜ 75%
   B. Remove “The erection of buildings that are presently under construction will be interrupted and it will not be possible to repair anything.” from functionally and description.
The increase of Scorched Earth(p)'s debuff allows it to become a semi-suppression of buildings in a large area (20m) and to protect your fragile Fire units in PvE. We removed the construction-suppression effect to reduce double-scorched usage in PvP, which also gives each affinity a role in either PvE or PvP. 
 Snapjaws:
1. Remove Splash Damage: 5 damage, up to 9 in total ➜ 7 damage
Snapjaws have an abysmal splash radius of only 3m. This is so small it effectively does not exist and only serves to reduce the unit's damage against squad units. We are removing the splash and changing the unit's damage to single-target. This increases the unit's single-target damage from 138 to 193 dp20, a +40% increase in total effective damage. This will change the damage of Satanael's Snapjaws from 414 dp20 to 579 dp20.
 Tunnel:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 35p
2. Life points: 880 ➜ 600
Encourage Tunnel play by slightly lowering cost. HP reduction to prevent issues with an overly health efficient Tunnel.
 Witchclaws:
1. Power cost: 65 ➜ 70
2. Damage: 630 ➜ 680
3. Add passive, "Corpse Gathering:" Harvests energy from nearby corpses equal to their former maximum life points to enable more powerful explosions. A maximum of 3000 life points can be stored at once.
4. Infiltration Rework:
   A. Damage (both affinities): 330, up to 1650 in total damage + up to 600 damage per target, up to 5 targets in total based on the number of corpses gathered
   B. Enable splash overflow fix for ability.
   C. Both affinities now damage units and buildings.
   D. Explosion radius: 20m ➜ 15m
   E. Fire affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws deal 50% more damage after teleporting.
   F. Shadow affinity ➜ Frost Affinity: Additionally, when 3000 corpses have been gathered, Witchclaws take 50% less damage after teleporting.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Breeding Grounds:
1. Power cost: 70p ➜ 90p
Breeding Grounds is one of the stronger cards in the game and has some of the best scaling of any T2 card or building. At only 1 Nature orb and available as easy as T2, it grants a permanent -25% discount to all own and allied units. While the card is something of a third rail due to its popularity, now that we have significantly buffed nearly all parts of Nature, we believe it is time to give the card a minor nerf. When considering what to do with the card, we considered several options, such as making the discount scale upwards or downwards with tier (i.e. 15% discount if player is T2, 20% if T3, etc.) or just nerfing the -25% discount outright. In the end, we settled on a slap-on-the-wrist nerf, at least initially. The increased bound power will delay players initially in T2, but only cost them 2 extra permanent power if they destroy the building. At the same time, the increased bound power cost should encourage players to actually destroy Breeding Grounds made obsolete by map progression, and it will provide a much needed nerf in the PvP game mode as well. 
 Burrow Ritual:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
Reducing the card's tier should allow more synergy with Tunnel, allowing for more strategies to emerge and helping to better justify Burrow Ritual's inclusion in a deck.
 Defenders:
1. Crossbow Attack damage: 9 per shot (540 dp20) → 10 per shot (600 dp20)
2. Life points: 810 → 750
Stat realignment to make Defenders more viable offensively and a more attractive option. Life points are worth less than damage when considering stat efficiency, particularly amongst ranged units in PvE.
 Earthkeeper:
1. Fixed a bug which allowed Earthkeeper to make connected units immune to all damage while also not affecting Earthkeeper. 
 Lost Priest:
1. Exhaustion:
   A. Cast range: 30➜ 40m
   B. Total targets: 5 ➜ 10
   C. Debuff Timer: 20 sec ➜ 30s
   D. Jump speed increase
   E. Debuff strength: 30% ➜ 40%
Improvements to Lost Priest's support capacity will help its viability in PvE, particularly in combination with other units such as Lost Shade and Lost Dancer. 
 Matter Mastery (g):
1. Gifted Takeover (g): maximum of 2 orbs and 100 power costs ➜ maximum of 3 orbs and 140 power costs
See Global Balance Changes above for more details. We are also considering more substantial changes to the tainted affinity in a future update. 
 Revenant's Blessing:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
2. Radius: 20m ➜ 25m
3. Gifted Immortal healing: 15 ➜ 30 life points per second
4. Infused Immortal damage: 25% ➜ 30% more damage
5. Bugfix: Allow overlapping Revenant's Blessings to reapply the effect without requiring the unit to exit and re-enter the area.
We are working towards improving the current use case of Revenant's Doom through direct buffs to it and through improving its support tools. With this change, Lost Shades are usable without needing Viridya and the spell scales better into the higher tiers for those you want to use revenants. More support to the faction and to revenants in particular will come in the next patch when we finish the rest of the upcoming Lost Souls rework. 
 Root Nexus:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Nature (T1)
2. Life points: 850 ➜ 650
Moving Root Nexus to T1 gives Treespirit a much-needed support card. Life points reduced to prevent too health efficient blocking options in T1. 
 Spikeroot:
1. Waves per root attack: 2.5 spike waves ➜ 2 spike waves
2. Damage per wave: 100, up to 150 in total ➜ 125, up to 190 in total (+25% increase)
Overall damage remains identical. Spikeroot now always deals the same damage at each point in its attack, instead of having high and low points. 
 Sunken Temple:
1. Added Mode-change, "Hibernate:" Pest Creepers enter a state of dormancy and are no longer summoned.
2. Pest Creepers now aggro against enemies in an area around the Temple.
The new mode change will allow the player to temporarily turn off Pest Creepers. This will be especially helpful when using a large number of Sunken Temples, which quickly fill up the unit population limit, and you want to summon new non-Creeper units. The other change will make it so that Pest Creepers no longer stand around waiting for enemies to either attack them or move within a short distance. They will now actively aggro on enemies that come within a moderate radius around the Temple which spawned them. Overall, these changes should make the card function much more fluidly. 
 Unholy Power:
1. Stored Strength (ammo): 2000 ➜ 3000
2. Ammo is refreshed whenever Unholy Power is recast on a unit already affected by another instance of Unholy Power.
3. Bugfix: Unholy Power no longer decays all remaining ammo when a previous instance of the spell expires. 
Unholy Power is a highly inconsistent spell, and a lot of that regards bugs in its original implementation. By fixing the decay issue, new applications of Unholy Power existing concurrently with previous applications should no longer be removed by older instances expiring. Additionally, new applications, in addition to continuing to stack additively, now refresh the card's ammo pool back to full. On top of these important changes to the card's functioning, we also increased its total strength pool by 50% from 2000 to 3000 which should help it to scale better into T3. With all these changes, Unholy Power should become a significantly stronger and more consistent buff spell.  
 Viridya (normal and promo versions):
1. Viridya’s Blessing is now able to restore lost squad members
 Wallbreaker:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T2) ➜ 1 Fire (T1)
Opens up several early use cases for the card on Titans, Dwarven Riddle, and Sunbridge. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Abyssal Warder:
1. New Active ability for large and medium-sized golems, "Reassemble:" Bond with two other Abyssal Warders of the same size in a 20m radius to reform into an Abyssal Warder of a larger size.
2. Frost affinity effect, Ice Shield duration: 15s ➜ 30 seconds
There is a large disparity between the usefulness of the two Abyssal Warder affinities in terms of effects. The fire affinity (r) provides a permanent buff, while the blessed affinity (b) only grants an Ice Shield for 15 seconds. In an attempt to partially remedy this issue, we have doubled the length of the smaller Warders' Ice Shields to 30 seconds. Additionally, we have finally been able to add a new effect to the small and medium sized Warders which will allow them to rebuild themselves into a larger Warder. Reassemble requires 3 Warders to work, meaning that it is not inherently efficient, though it provides another strong synergy with Promise of Life and builds on the buffs to Abyssal Warder last patch. 
 Blood Healing:
1. Charges 12 ➜ 16
 Thornbark:
1. Melee damage: 1400 dp20 ➜ 1550 dp20
 Mutating Frenzy:
1. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 sec ➜ 5 sec
 Santa Claus:
1. Blue Gift, Red Gift, Christmas Peace cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
 Satanael:
1. Fealty (both affinities):
   A. Cannot be activated if the player is at or above 125 population. 
   B. Summoned Snapjaws damage: 200% ➜ 120%
Removing all instances of infinite spawning in the game due to the attendant performance issues they cause. Buffing Snapjaws individually as compensation. Overall, the damage of each summoned Snapjaws squad is increased slightly. 
 Shrine of Martyrs:
1. Void return per frozen unit: 12% ➜ 18% of current void pool
2. Bugfix: Void return effect is no longer triggered multiple times per entity.
Regular users of Shrine of Martyrs know that the void return effect is often inconsistent. The same group of enemies could provide wildly different void return rates when frozen due to the fact that the effect would switch between applying once or multiple times per enemy. We fixed this inconsistency, but it left the shrine, which is likely already the weakest of the four standard options, even weaker. As such, we have given it a large +50% buff to its void return percentage in compensation for removing the existing bug. This change will allow players to develop an intuitive understanding of how much void is actually returned per frozen enemies. The percentage we chose is a bit of a guess and is subject to change based on the feedback we receive from player testing.  
 Shrine of War:
1. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 2 Neutral (T3) ➜ 2 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
When we first began nerfing cards, many people asked us when we were planning on touching Shrine of War. We previously delayed any changes to the card due to its importance to the rPvE game mode at all levels and because other factions, such as Frost and Nature, lacked sufficient methods of void return, an aspect we think is integral to the balance of all factions. Now that all factions have a viable method of void return, we have decided to give Shrine of War a nerf. We were between the two ideas of nerfing its void return percentage or increasing its orb restrictions. While Shrine of War has by far the most efficient void return when accounting for multiple players out of all the available options, we decided that we did not think its efficiency was outside the line of acceptability, but that the Shrine was too splashable compared to the other options. As such, we choose to leave Shrine of War as the best void return shrine in the game, but to require the player to invest into 2 Fire orbs to access it. 
[ Tier 4 ]
 Altar of Chaos:
1. Change Nether Bomb cast range to work like spells instead of like units & buildings. Still limited to own ground presence only.
This seemingly small change substantially increases the positioning capacities of the Nether Bomb and allows own units to be much farther away when placing bombs. 
 Battleship:
1. Barrage damage per shot: 550, up to 3300 in total ➜ 800, up to 2400 in total
Battleship's ability has a long range of 50m and can be used to snipe out enemies far into the enemy's backline while remaining safe itself. The ability has a very large amount of splash damage, able to fully damage up to 6 enemies in its target radius. At the same time, the target radius is only 12m making it very unlikely there are 6 enemies to damage. Additionally, despite its long animation and unleashing 5 shots, the single-target damage is not even able to destroy a large spawn building. We are reducing the total splash damage in favor of higher single-target damage, increasing the damage dealt to one target from 2750 to 4000 in total. 
 Cluster Explosion (p):
1. Tainted Burst radii per successive explosion: 25m / 20m / 15m / 10m / 5m ➜ 25m / 20m / 15m / 12m / 10m
Increased the radius of the explosion for the 3rd and 4th waves of Cluster Explosion (p). These radii were so small, they often failed to hit any enemies. By increasing them, we hope to give a slight buff to this affinity in ideal situations with a lot of closely clustered enemies. 
 Earthen Gift:
Earthen Gift Redesign
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Infused Earth (r) ➜ Blessed Earth (b):
   A. Damage buff: 30% ➜ 50%
3. Tainted Earth (p) ➜ Gifted Earth (g):
   A. Affects Elemental units, not structures
   B. Remove "Every hostile building in the current game will deal 50% less damage."
   C. Damage buff: +50% more damage
   D. Healing per second: 10% ➜ 5%
Earthen Gift is one of the worst cards in the entire game. Before Reforging, its normal price was 3 BFP despite being a Rare spell. As Stonekin's Pure T4 spell, it ought to be one of the reasons why a player goes 2 Nature and 2 Frost orbs, but right now it is a waste of a card slot. The card's existing identity is as a combined buff and healing card, but it is restricted to only work on structures. Even on structures it is not useful.
Instead of completely rejecting the card's initial design, we are attempting to improve on it for the one affinity by increasing the damage buff where it may prove useful upon the release of defensive rPvE. For the other affinity, we are swapping its effect from structures to elemental units, which includes all Stonekin units, and modifying its heal and damage buff accordingly. The idea is to potentially allow the spell to replace Regrowth while also giving Stonekin access to a minor damage buff for itself and any other friendly elemental units. Between this and the Grinder buff, Stonekin's T4 should feel significantly stronger.
 Evil Eye:
1. Damage now ticks every 0.5 seconds instead of every 1 second. Rage still takes the same amount of time to activate.
2. Initial damage delay for Evil Eye's Searing Sight has been removed. Damage will now starts as soon as Evil Eye targets an enemy.
 Grinder:
1. Harmony: Added a yellow bar akin to Mountaineer showing when the healing effect will next occur.
2. Provoke (both affinities): Single target ➜ All enemies in a 15m radius
   A. Infused Provoke Buff: 50% more damage ➜ 75% more damage
Quality of life change to Grinder's harmony ability. Added some increased strength and flexibility to Grinder's taunt by allowing it to affect multiple targets in a small area. This will also allow Grinder (r) to taunt the empty air versus bosses, allowing it to still generate the personal damage buff, which has been increased to +75%, regards of whether or not any enemy units are actually taunted. Stonekin struggles against strong single target enemies such as bosses and this is one step in an attempt to remedy that without damaging the faction's existing identity.
 Lost Evocation:
1. Charges: 4 ➜ 8
2. Cast time reduction: 2 seconds ➜ 0.8 seconds
3. Infused Revenant damage buff: 50% ➜ 100%
The charge increase allows Lost Souls to get access to its primary support spell without having to use two deck slots on Rifle Cultists + Offering. The cast time reduction prevents the use of both Evocations simultaneously, while the buff to the fire affinity (r)'s damage buff makes it a more compelling option for a faction whose main damage dealing occurs through units.
 Shadow Worm:
1. Increase turn rate of disintegration turrets: 200 ➜ 260
 Tempest:
1. Whirlwind splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Damage: 44 ➜ 64 life points per second
2. Healing (both affinities): Both affinities now heal friendly Twilight units by equivalent damage as they deal to enemies.
3. Change Gifted Affinity (g) ➜ Infused Affinity (r)
   A. Add +30% damage buff for friendly Twilight units
Improvements in nearly all aspects of Twilight's marquee spell. Previously, the blessed affinity (b) was the only one worth using due to the damage reduction it provides. We decided to roll the healing effect of the gifted affinity (g) into the base spell and create an alternative damage buff variant instead. The goal with this change is to allow Twilight Pestilence to be a more flexible spell, one able to provide a supportive effect while also clearing minor enemies and recovering chip damage to player units that might otherwise prompt the player to cast an additional healing spell. 
 Void Maw:
1. Void Shear ability cost: 75p ➜ 60p
[ 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 towers up 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. 
Tower Targeting Fixes:
1. Changed the damage delay of the auto-attacks for a large range of towers to the standard delay of 0.1 sec. These towers should now have an easier time hitting moving targets, including swift units. 
   A. Affects the following towers, including both affinities when applicable: Artillery, Hammerfall, Defense Tower, Lifestealer, Northern Keep, Primal Defender, Twilight Bombard, Tower of Flames
 Blaster Cannon:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Tainted Magma: 15m ➜ 20m
 Defense Tower:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Howling Shrine:
1. Essence Bolts firing arc: 90 degrees ➜ 135 degrees
2. New passive, “Restoration:” Regenerate 30 life points every second.
To truly fulfill its role as a fortress and to provide a meaningful choice between itself and Razorleaf, Howling Shrine must be a self-sufficient defender able to justify the massive amount of space it occupies. The restoration effect will allow the tower to persist even absent player attention or when facing continuous attack waves that prevent repair. The increase to the firing arc of its main weapon is a much needed change. Prior to this, Howling Shrine could only target most enemies with one turret at a time and XL units with two turrets only if the tower was positioned perfectly with respect to the XL unit's path. The tower should now be able to target units of all sizes with two turrets in most cases. 
 Lifestealer:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Still alive regeneration: 5 life points per second ➜ 8 life points per second
3. Sacrifice cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 3 seconds
 Lost Disruptor:
1. Damage: 300, up to 330 in total ➜ 300, up to 450 in total (3000 dp20)
2. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 10m
3. Disruption cost: 50p ➜ 20p
Increase Lost Disruptor's effectiveness against multiple enemies. Also, Lost Disruptor's ability is one of the better counters to Shrine of Memory in 2v2 PvP. By decreasing the cost, we better enable players to make use of the card simply for its ability effect.
 Northern Keep:
1. Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
 Primal Defender:
1. Earthstrike splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m
2. Cloudstrike:
   A. Damage (add splash): 225 ➜ 250, up to 375 in total (2030 dp20)
   B. Splash radius: 0m ➜ 8m
Buff to Primal Defender's anti-air capacity. This leaves it as a middle ground between a non-raged and a fully raged Blaster Cannon, and should hopefully allow the tower to better aid Nature T1 in dealing with anti-air threats, particularly those which can counter small and medium units.
 Rocket Tower
1. Orb cost: 2 Fire ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Neutral
2. Power cost: 80p ➜ 70p
3. Life points: 2000 ➜ 1480
4. Rocket Barrage:
   A. Total rockets: 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 ➜ 4 on all upgrade levels
   B. Attack speed: Every 5 seconds ➜ every 4 seconds
   C. Damage per rocket: 85 ➜ 90 (900 dp20)
Fire T2 currently lacks a splash tower, while Pure Fire T2 has 2 towers. We think Pyromaniac sufficiently fills the slot of T2 tower for Pure Fire, so we are transitioning Rocket Tower into a splash card. As part of this change, we will be cutting down on its large pool of life points while otherwise increasing the consistency of Rocket Tower, both in terms of knockback and damage dealing. Even with the cost decrease, this change will make Rocket Tower mildly less stat efficient against large groups in exchange for a lower start up cost and the ability to consistently knockback multiple enemies due to the fixed targeting and increased rate of fire. These changes should allow Rocket Tower to fulfill its role as a knockback-centric tower while its high damage allies provide the necessary fire power. 
 Skydefender:
1. Damage: 128 up to 192 in total ➜ 153 up to 230 (2300 dp20)
2. Life points: 1400 ➜ 1600
3. Range: 40m ➜ 50m
4. Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 8m
Substantial buff to Skydefender to give it more teeth against the T3 and T4 air threats it is designed to counter. The range increase will make it able to fight back against Raven Battleships, which are one of the most common flying enemies in the campaign. 
 Time Vortex (p):
1. Tainted Void Shock (p), attack speed increase void levels: Above 150, 300, 600, 1200 void ➜ Above 100, 200, 400, 800 void
Improve the efficiency of the tainted affinity (p) by decreasing the amount of void which is required to trigger each attack speed increase.  
 Volcano:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 200p
2. Damage: 581, up to 872 (3990 dp20) ➜ 766, up to 1149 (5270 dp20)
3. Life points: 4390 ➜ 5690
4. Infused Eruption (r) Rage:
   A. Rage scaling: 100% 1st stage, 200% 2nd stage ➜ 75% 1st stage, 150% 2nd stage
   B. Rage reset timer: 7 sec ➜ 10 seconds
5. Lava Sea:
   A. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   B. Bugfix - Lava Sea now works as described
   C. Added a new visual effect
The goal is to make Volcano more "dense" by increasing its power cost and then adjusting its stats accordingly. Making each Volcano more powerful helps to mitigate the tower's large size and also makes it a better target for building buff effects such as those provided by Frost's Skyelves. Total damage when enraged is slightly increased despite the Rage nerf (12,000 dp20 ➜ 13175 dp20). Overall, Volcano loses a very small amount of total stat efficiency, but gains in total strength by having an ability that actually works. The old Lava Sea provided zero value to the tower because it did not work. The new Lava Sea, which functions as described on the card, turns this Fire fortress into a terrifying strongpoint capable of wiping out hordes of enemy units.  

PvP Balance Changes
[ Tier 1 ]
 Life Weaving:
1. No longer affects buildings.
Life Weaving changes are made to weaken its scaling potential into higher tiers considering most shadow splashes tend to be fairly strong at later game stages anyway. Buffed single unit attacks with straight well focus are very easy to execute and fairly annoying to play against when any damage on the target also increases the damage against your Power Well.
 Sunstriders:
1. Suppression Fire ability cost: 25p ➜ 10p
In PvP, Suppression Fire's most relevant applications arise on higher tech levels, where a 50 energy investment for a fragile T1 unit is already enough of a restriction. As a result, there is room to buff the ability power cost for those niche cases.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Bandit Launcher:
1. Power cost: 60p ➜ 50p
2. Firebug ability cost: 40/35/30/25p ➜ 40p on all upgrade levels
The addition of a weaker building with reduced construction time led to some rather unique T2 strategies, but the high bound power requirements restrict its relevance. This change should open up some more room for creative usage of Bandit Launcher and the Fire Bug ability.
 Bandit Minefield:
1. Mine spawn speed reduced by 0.25 seconds per mine. 
Bandit Minefield has been a fairly controversial topic. The spell was very powerful and played an important role in every game mode. Based on play rates and general feedback, our PvP faction overhaul succeeded in making Bandits more viable and fun to play, but there was a lot of frustration when playing against the faction due to an overly dominant Minefield. After recent tweaks, play rates have dropped by about 20% and Bandits seems to be in a very healthy position based on global faction popularity and high ELO presence ever since. However, the experience of playing against Minefield continued to be perceived as frustrating by many of our players. The intended goal of this set of changes is to keep the faction at a similar level of strength, but distribute its power more evenly across Bandit T2 cards and strategies.
Mine spawn speed will be reduced to enable counter play without removing its zoning power and damage potential upon being ignored. The design direction of allowing placement under units is absolutely intended, crucial for the faction viability, and differentiates the card from basic trap card design. Due to a lack of crowd control and building protection, Bandits needs a tool to defend vs melee unit well focus consistently. A major issue in PvP is that outside of its intended design direction (melee unit zoning and S unit denial), Minefield generates too much trading value as its damage is almost guaranteed. The spell tends to trade up against anything except for swift unit micro. This should be addressed.
In return, we will buff Commandos, Sniper, and Bandit Launcher in compensation. As Warriors Death came up to the discussion for compensations: The card design is not healthy for PvP due to a lack of counterplay, as such we will just leave the card as is since its mechanic is also powerful in end game PvE content.
 Bandit Sniper:
1. Damage: 75 dmg per hit (750 dp20) ➜ 78 dmg per hit (780 dp20)
Slight damage increase to compensate for Bandit Minefield nerfs.
 Commandos:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 65p
2. Concentrate ability cost: 10p ➜ 20p
After some testing, we think it is safe to make Commandos a little stronger, as long as the upfront cost of mode-switching remains the same. This should be beneficial for the card in all game modes.
 Gravity Surge:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
Allow Gravity Surge to be more functional as a niche counter for air unit heavy strategies.
 Lyrish Knight:
1. Damage: 400 dp20 ➜ 800 dp20
2. Life points: 980 ➜ 900
3. Surge of Strength:
   A. No longer increases damage by 100%
   B. Now increases damage dealt to frozen targets by 50%
While we had the intentions to give Lyrish Knight a more meaningful role in the game, finding a healthy buff for the card just by tweaking the stats has not proven easy. The extraordinarily high health ratio makes the unit very powerful when combined with health scaling mechanics like Nasty Surprise. Furthermore, the card is easily spammable and can take over games. As a result, we will allow the card to interact more with Frost's spell arsenal rather than just adding value through raw stats.
 Mauler:
1. Power cost: 75p ➜ 70p
After Mountaineer fell out of the meta, Mauler lost its main purpose in PvP. A slight cost reduction should help him shine more in niche situations.
 Mountain Rowdy:
1. Tainted Ice Block damage (p): 25 dmg/sec ➜ 20 dmg/sec
2. Blessed Ice Block (b):
   A. Damage reduction: 25% ➜ 30%
   B. Now affects friendly air units.
With the previous changes, Mountain Rowdy (p) played a strong role in pure Frost due to its high damage potential, which made it a little too effortless to shut down T2 aggression. While Frost should be strong at deflecting attacks around own structures, we want to give players a fair chance to punish the faction when a player acquires a strong tempo lead. Mountain Rowdy (b), on the other hand, has been rather underwhelming, so we will buff the damage reduction percentage a bit.
 Shadow Mage:
1. Sacrifice range: 30m ➜ 40m
2. Foul Play:
   A. Damage percentage: 300% ➜ 400%
   B. Duration until explosion: 20 seconds ➜ 12 seconds
   C. Cast range: 30m ➜ 40m
   D. Now deals half damage to buildings
Despite her great stat efficiency, Shadow Mage's abilities have been rather underwhelming in relation to what the card is supposed to do with them. By adding a burst limit against structures, we open up a lot of room for Foul Play buffs in order to make this ability more rewarding in unit combat.
 Spirit Hunter (p):
1. Tainted Bow Attack poison damage: 20 dmg per second ➜ 25 dmg per second
The current damage loss compared to the green affinity does not get compensated by the additional piercing damage. This change should grant Spirit Hunters purple some better niche uses.
 Stone Shards (b):
1. Blessed Fury ➜ Shatter Ice
   A. No longer deals increased damage to demons and undead
   B. Now deals full damage to frozen targets
Stone Shards (b) are currently unused across all game modes. The affinity effect being effectively useless plays a big role here. This change is supposed to enable alternative strategies in Stonekin (Shards (b) + Spirit Hunters (p) + Coldsnap) without overbuffing the already powerful T2.
 Stone Tempest:
1. Stone Rest healing: 20 life points per second ➜ 40 life points per second
This change is supposed to give the self-heal ability a more meaningful role given that the self-cc almost always outweighs the benefits of using this mechanic. As many of the factions received more tools to counter the unit (i.e. Burning Spears release), we think it is safe to enable more ways to use the card without directly strengthening patterns that have been perceived as oppressive in the past.
 Twilight Curse:
1. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 2 seconds
Allow Twilight Curse to scale into high energy T2s without increasing card efficiency.
 Warlock (r):
1. Infused Witchcraft damage buff: 15% ➜ 25%
We agree that the previous buff reduction was unnecessary when we reduced unit power cost. This has now been reverted.
[ Tier 3 ]
 Drones:
1. Life points: 1760 ➜ 1840
The recent changes for Drones did not help the card as much as we had hoped. Stat efficiency will be increased a bit further.
 Nox Carrier:
1. New passive, "Push the Cart:" Increase movement speed to 6.4 m/s when at least 3 friendly units are within a 25m radius
Based on some previous suggestions by the community in the balancing discord, we will add a conditional movement speed increase to Nox Carrier in order to make sure it actually reaches its destination.
 Sandstorm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 12
 Shield Building:
1. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
Shield building has been very powerful for a long time, and a card nerf has been requested by the community rather frequently. We agree. 100% uptime on a shield, strong enough to outlast XL unit focus, is too much value even if you invest a full deck slot for a purely defensive spell.
 Timeshifter Spirit
1. Healing per jump: 275 / 220 / 165 / 110 / 55 life points ➜ 300 / 240 / 180 / 120 / 60
 Tremor:
1. Ground Slam:
   A. Ability cost: 30p ➜ 40p
   B. Cooldown: 15 seconds ➜ 20 seconds
2. Tremor's walk speed (2.4 m/s) is now half of its normal speed (4.8m/s), instead of being identical. 
Tremor is one of the most popular and most powerful siege units in T3. We will be making some minor changes to the ability in order to bring it more in line with other T3 options.
 Unstable Demon
1. Demonic Rage:
   A. Bonus movement speed: 25% ➜ 60%
   B. Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds
After the initial round of changes, Unstable Demon is not being used as much as we had hoped. As the card is very difficult to use, we will strengthen it to reward good unit management a little bit more.

Welcome back. Unfortunately our forum is fairly low activity, but if you want to chat with people you can pop over to the Skylords Reborn discord which is quite active. 

Welcome back. Unfortunately our forum is fairly low activity, but if you want to chat with people you can pop over to the Skylords Reborn discord which is quite active. 

The issue here is that the whole reason we designed the card was to put it on walls. With our defensive rPvE finally moving towards an endpoint in the foreseeable future, we are trying to add units which can be used in the game mode. The other issue is that design-wise we were intending to have it leave a pool of magma on the ground which burned enemies, but with 4 to 6 small worms this cluttered the screen. So, many small issues with the card, which is not that uncommon, but the community usually does not see the "failures."
Yes, I agree. Also as a hint towards some coming changes to the upgrade system, we have redistributed all upgrades in the game across the maps evenly by rarity. So every map now has more-or-less the same number of Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare cards.  

The issue here is that the whole reason we designed the card was to put it on walls. With our defensive rPvE finally moving towards an endpoint in the foreseeable future, we are trying to add units which can be used in the game mode. The other issue is that design-wise we were intending to have it leave a pool of magma on the ground which burned enemies, but with 4 to 6 small worms this cluttered the screen. So, many small issues with the card, which is not that uncommon, but the community usually does not see the "failures."
Yes, I agree. Also as a hint towards some coming changes to the upgrade system, we have redistributed all upgrades in the game across the maps evenly by rarity. So every map now has more-or-less the same number of Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare cards.  

The issue here is that the whole reason we designed the card was to put it on walls. With our defensive rPvE finally moving towards an endpoint in the foreseeable future, we are trying to add units which can be used in the game mode. The other issue is that design-wise we were intending to have it leave a pool of magma on the ground which burned enemies, but with 4 to 6 small worms this cluttered the screen. So, many small issues with the card, which is not that uncommon, but the community usually does not see the "failures."
Yes, I agree. Also as a hint towards some coming changes to the upgrade system, we have redistributed all upgrades in the game across the maps evenly by rarity. So every map now has more-or-less the same number of Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare cards.  

Wow, this update makes me look bad, why are we showing everyone I have only played a single map on standard?
On a serious note: We also ran into the issue that Fire Wormlings were intended to work on walls and this seemed to bother most of our playtesters. We will consider whether we can fix the current issues and kept them mostly as-is, or if we will have to make them M-sized instead. 

The issue here is that the whole reason we designed the card was to put it on walls. With our defensive rPvE finally moving towards an endpoint in the foreseeable future, we are trying to add units which can be used in the game mode. The other issue is that design-wise we were intending to have it leave a pool of magma on the ground which burned enemies, but with 4 to 6 small worms this cluttered the screen. So, many small issues with the card, which is not that uncommon, but the community usually does not see the "failures."
Yes, I agree. Also as a hint towards some coming changes to the upgrade system, we have redistributed all upgrades in the game across the maps evenly by rarity. So every map now has more-or-less the same number of Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare cards.  

Wow, this update makes me look bad, why are we showing everyone I have only played a single map on standard?
On a serious note: We also ran into the issue that Fire Wormlings were intended to work on walls and this seemed to bother most of our playtesters. We will consider whether we can fix the current issues and kept them mostly as-is, or if we will have to make them M-sized instead. 

Patch #400033 - Force of Nature
Welcome to our newest patch, titled "Force of Nature"!
This update contains our fifth balance patch for the game, brand-new cards, and many other changes, enjoy!

Patch Preview
 - Three new cards are now available! Jump in-game to collect Wasteland Terror, Burning Spears, and Transcendence.
 - Major changes to the PvP game mode, including PvP Happy Hours, reward reworks, hiding player loses, and more. 
 - Added 18 new, primarily PvE achievements for both beginners and veterans alike. Including one to earn the new promo Mana Wing!
 - Rebalanced Fire RPvE to provide a still challenging but less frustrating experience
 - Rebalanced over 40 cards, with a large focus on Nature cards. 
 - Changed several PvP and PvE maps to improve player experience 

General Changes
Updated in-game player banner colors for GM accounts to represent the current roles. Added ability to search for missing copies and charges in the Auction House. For example, writing `(charge=2 & copies<2) | (charge=1 & copies<3) | (charge=0 & copies<4)` in the textbox will show you all the cards you can still potentially buy to get a fully charged collection. Added ability to play cards by clicking on the upgrades in the upgrade scroll view or the upgrades in the upgrade window. Added ability to change the play speed in the forge, or to pause and unpause it. New hotkeys are available in the options menu. The default hotkeys are J, K and L for decreasing speed, toggling pause, and increasing speed. Added a responsive deck counter to the decks window that shows how many decks the player has, relative to the maximum number of allowed decks. Improved the UI that displays what is remaining to complete an achievement. Previously, players could hover over the progress bar to see a tooltip, but this was unclear. Now, there will be a clearly visible (?) icon next to the progress bar that has the tooltip instead. Added ability to press the Space button in the reforge window to reforge the current cards in the window. This removes the need to press the Reforge cards button.   Increased unit icon (dot) size on in-game minimaps from 4x4 to 5x5 pixels. Added the new Force of Nature loading screen. Added ability to change how the automatically generated replays are named. There is an extra setting in the GUI section of the configuration file at `/Battleforge/config.json` called `savereplaysnameparts` for this.
New Cards
Burning Spears - 80p T2 Pure Fire
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map Oracle. 
S-unit designed to counter Large and Extra Large units. For more information, check out our design spotlight below in the PvP Balance Changes, section as well as Community Update #23.
 
Wasteland Terror - 260p T4 Pure Bandits  (Fire and Nature Affinity)
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map Blight (Fire Affinity) and Raven's End (Nature Affinity).
Bandit dragon for those Bandits players who want other options besides Tortugun. Its ability acts as a mass Disenchant to let your army continue to more forward through crowd control. For more information, check out Community Update #14. 
 
Transcendence - 90p T4 Amii Spell 
You will find the upgrade for this card on the map Sunbridge. 
Our first Amii spell is castable on both enemies and allies, with different effects depending on the target. When cast on enemies, it buffs one unit and debuffs all of its surrounding allies. When cast on allies, it debuffs one unit and buffs and its surrounding allies. In both cases, it rewards careful target selection and micromanagement from the player side. For more information, check out Community Update #20.

Mana Wing - New Promo Card 
While not a new card, we have also added a new promo 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. For more information, check out Community Update #24.
 

PvP Game Mode Changes
[ 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 want to look it up. 
[ 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 ranked 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. The daily boost / reserve will drain at a factor of 1.5x, while you will also get 1BFP per minute extra for queuing. For 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. 

New Achievements
Skylords Reborn currently faces primary two issues in terms of content: early game progression is too steep, and endgame content is nearly nonexistent. These achievements are intended to make the first step in tackling both issues. Smaller, more digestible progressive achievements will mean a player will no longer finish the campaign on standard, with the next goal in sight being to play all the maps again on advanced before being rewarded. New players will now be slowly guided through the campaign and RPvE, allowing them to steadily accumulate cards along the way. 
At the same time, we are adding our first set of endgame achievements to the game. This will provide more content for our veteran players and give them a reason to replay old maps, often with a twist. We hope you all enjoy these new challenges, and we will continue to expand the endgame content into the future.  
[ 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.

Those who complete "A Force of Nature" will be rewarded with a Promo Mana Wing! This promo is unique to this achievement and will not be available from boosters, but it will be trade-able. We hope you look forward to the challenge!

We are dealing with this. Expect changes soonish. 

We are dealing with this. Expect changes soonish. 

We are dealing with this. Expect changes soonish. 

We are dealing with this. Expect changes soonish. 

We are dealing with this. Expect changes soonish. 

SpiritAlpha did a great job on both the card artwork and the model textures. 
Try using it with Promise of Life, it is a whole different card. Promise of Life is also useful in T4 to unbind your Forest Elder, greatly increasing your rate of building an army. 
We discovered this before releasing the last round of changes but did not have time to fix it. We are still investigating the issue. 
We do not think on-death abilities of this kind are fitting for Fire units. 
I think this is a great explanation of what makes the challenges different than our regularly occurring events. Several of the achievements are spins on previous events as well, but now there is no time or social pressure on the player. 

Hey WindHunter,

then I'll make the start on this one again. But let me say first, for many things this not even 2 weeks are not enough for me to share more then a first impression. Even more as I have limited time and internet currently and I did not personally test everything as deep as I wanted.
 
Only T1 card I checked myself so far is Strikers. I still don't see any really use case beside to have a fun opener in the Thugs and Striker changes. Nothing that hurts, but nothing that gave me excitement.
In T3 I liked most the changes to Rageflame, did not test it yet, but I'm excited to do so. The Unity nerf is reasonable, though it hurts my currently most beloved deck. In one match against Fire I really struggled to keep my army alive, but to early to say that it came from this quite small change, perhaps just executed poorly by me.

Fire Sphere nerf really hurts, but tbh - it feels more balanced now. Sad, Fire was lately just behind bandits decks in terms of meta speedy decks and fell now a slight bit behind. But still fire is in the best state ever. Batariel buff makes up for the Sphere buff from my feeling, as you get a higher stage more consistently. The buff for the purple one was not needed, but feels good!

Forest Elder finally feels almost worth the 4th Nature Orb, great job! Mind Control got a ton better, every addressed issue was perfectly hit imo. Good inventory, good solution!
Other T4 changes I really liked to read, but I did not test myself yet are Shadow Worm and Gemeye. But seen a Stonekin deck today where I was a bit disappointed. But we did learn with this patch, "Its the player, not the cards" - need to test this myself soon.

 
Raven Walker seems weaker as expected on the first glance, but only made 2 games with it so far. I feel also that I did not find the perfect deck for it so far. It feels a bit clunky to use it to perfect conditions, but that is a thing I want and need to explore further. My first fears that it sounds/looks a bit OP have not come true. If it is really viable in the current state, it seems that you need quite some micro and a good deck composition to make it working really good.
Sanctuary green feels way better then expected after the final changes and the 75% CC reduction are more viable as I would have guessed. Finally a good tool against Zappers and worthy enough to me to have some more use of the 4th nature orb. The reduction is enough to bring even a smaller army in position and deal clean with Twilight camps, works even in a 3-Zapper camp though it needs quite some micro. I like it!

Sanctuary blue feels a bit pointless to me. Where do I use that and why? Perhaps a cpve thingy I could imagine, but rpve just wants the green one.
 
Yes! All! None!

Jokes aside, I mean its achievements. Something you can do, nothing you must do. I mean I can complain fast, but see nothing to complain here. If someone thinks: Oh this is to tedious to me - just leave it aside. Or take it as extra motivation after all other things are done. If someone thinks that one is maybe too hard - leave it out for now. I guess for any of the new achievements you will find at least a handful of people who are grateful for that.
Really good job on this one. What brings us to
 

Hell yes! I feel a good mix of rewards as we have it currently should be a good way to make the majority of people happy. There is stuff for everyone, some achievements grant a ton of boosters (or can be converted to hard BFP), some give a promo (that are behind a challenge, but not too harsh so that everybody can get those with some investment of time and effort) and others just reward you with nice fluff.


This patch was a milestone for SR for sure, alongside the buffs/changes to the pure factions and reforging tool.

Fanboy over and out. 🙂



PS: Nah - one last thing. Big love for taking all the community feedback (where I was quite loud for sure) on the buffed Batariel issue. I had not played it for quite some time and this was really one of the first things I tested. I would not have expected from the numbers, but he is back! ❤️ I love that the deck is finally playable again, even if not in that old state, but good enough to carry a 10 like it should or to use at least 1-2 Batas in a speedrun again. Not as OP as it was, but really enjoyable if executed well. I really hope that we (the community) and you (the balancing team) can agree on the current state as a compromise.
Tho I will still miss a beautiful 2-3 sec last row clear like seen sometimes if everything was executed really perfectly 🥺

EDIT PPS: Who is the genius behind the WBG promo. Damn I did not use WBG for quite a while, but this looks so awesome that I will play it once again in near future. What. A. Beauty.

I like the mix/range of options/rewards achievements gives now. I replayed Siege of Hope way more times than I would had to get Shield Texture with "No Human Left Behind" because doing maps with extra conditions (beside time) is up my alley and achievement/events would be the motivation.

Balance changess yesss. 
Some cards I tested because they were already in decks I recently played: 
I like Strikers change to be able to gang up with orks, would be cool if there are more other orks than thugs tho. Maybe some ork-archers (crossbow).
Earthkeeper´s change is what I was waiting for! Thanks 😄 finally 🙂 BUT it seems to be buggy - his damage taken should be spread out to stonekin-units nearby, but some don´t work. At first I thought certain units don´t receive any of the spread damage, but Now it looks to me like the raduis is just bugged.
- > stonekin units SIDEWAYS to earthkeeper can stand 25m away and still receive parts of the damage, while units BEHIND Earhkeeper cant go farther away than 10m to still receive dmg. How can this not be a circle?
Also the text on the card is wrong (german) because it states that stonekins within 40m take damage, thats certainly not the case.
And 40m is the max range the tether works, but for activation the Earthkeeper has to move withing a range of like 25m. Then the connected unit can walk a bit further away, thats a bit cluncy to use.
AbyssalWarder´s ability finally doesn´t feel completele useless in PvE and you can see it deals real damage. Not too strong tho. What´s sad is that the XL unit dies sooo fast and being left with the smaller ones that can´t use the active is not that good in some situations. 
Artillery has something weird going on - I think I can´t tell the building to focus enemies that are further away than it´s original range, but it does attack enemies 60m away by itself (just not the ones I want it to hit). 
Firebomb is funny now, as it can be set up whilst in fights (PvE) 😄 the new "allow to hit air" change sounds nice, but the range of the explosion is actually quite small so some enemies dodge this by default
Infected Tower´s damage increase certainly feels good, this tower can now properly defence by itself and not only function as a creep spawner. 
Viridia´s splash-dmg change is nice.
(didnt test this card but) Nox Carrier feels weird now, because the unit is so slow and can´t defend itself or anything. Do the Rippers spawn whenever the carrier dies or only when the ability goes off? If only when ability this is still very weak and completely useless in PvE.
QueekQueek it´s nice to see that this one gets some attention, but a teleport-friendly-units-ability would still be nice (and fitting for the teleporting-pig as is in cpve)
Vulcan can still not hit air units and thus can´t really be used in PvE sadly, I don´t get it why Rageflame does get the change but Vulcan doesnt. The ability can imo still only hit ground but his normal attack should dmg flyers aswell. 
I would still love to see a change being made to Gravity Sourge tho - to affect all flying units (up to 5 f.e.) in an area instead of just one, so this 2 cards could be used together very well.