WindHunter

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

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

I would recommend giving the new Infernal Chain a spin before writing it off. It is far more user friendly and better in 99% of situations, particularly as relates to high-end PvE content. 
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. Additionally, the Crystal and Recycle changes are substantial buffs since you can now vacuum up revenants, who will die eventually anyway, as fodder for the Crystal.
The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. It would knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
Finally, given its new revenant synergy, LSS is much stronger when used in a dedicated Lost Souls deck. It acts as both damage dealer and healer (or speed buff provider) while Lost Warlord and Lost Evocation make sure it always has enough stored life points for another Crystal. 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Ah, ok fair enough. I really had not considered this much as... well I just used it because ghost rocket go boom and, well; for lost souls there really wasn't much else for that orb range.

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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

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

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

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

Tutorial Missions
Twenty-five new tutorial missions have been added to the game. These missions are designed to help new and old players alike to discover basic game features, as well as many of the new functionalities the Skylords Reborn team has added since the game's revival. Completing all 25 missions will reward players with 12 common cards, 8 uncommon cards, 1200 gold, and the new in-game title "Lyrish Scholar." These rewards are designed to help new players and function as a supplement to the existing starter decks. All missions are completable within an hour.
Tutorial Missions will be the new focus of attention when opening the rewards window, but focus will revert to quests once the missions are complete. 

 
 

Card Balance Changes
 

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

Balance Changes
While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. 
[ Tier 1 ]
 Envenom:
1. Base damage: Restored one missing tick on both affinities
2. Infused Intoxication: Scaling damage: Each time the 80 dmg threshold is reached, the poison damage increases by 10, stacking up to 6 times up to a maximum of 95 damage per second, and refreshing the spell duration.
This change should allow the card to remain near its current state in PvP by allowing the player to micro their unit away before the poison stacks out of control, while providing a powerful new tool for Nature T1 in PvE as powerful singular units steadily kill themselves by stacking the poison damage higher and higher.
 Mumbo Jumbo:
1. Power cost: 40p ➜ 50p
2. Targeting: Units only ➜ Units and buildings
3. Debuff strength (both affinities): 25% ➜ 35%
Improve Mumbo Jumbo's usability in PvE by allowing it to target buildings. This will be especially useful with the infused affinity (r) which increases damage taken by 35%. This should help Nature T1 focus down troublesome towers and spawners.
[ Tier 2 ]
 Earthkeeper:
1. Damage: 540 dp20 ➜ 660 dp20
2. Back Up, power cost: 25p ➜ 0p
Improve use cases for Back Up by removing activation cost and give the card slightly more in-combat power by giving it a 22% damage boost.
 Lost Reaver:
1. Mob:
   A. Targets: Hostile and friendly units ➜ Hostile units
   B. Corpse cost: 1500 ➜ 2000
   C. Crawler health: 310 ➜ 440 life points
2. Corpse Gathering maximum amount: 1500 ➜ 2000
Lost Reaver's ability seems made for PvE, but it has anti-synergy because it damages other friendly units and even its fellow crawlers. We have increased the corpse cost to make it slightly harder to use in PvP, while increase crawler health for better survivability. Additionally, and most importantly, we have removed the ability's friendly fire, which will allow players to spawn multiple crawler groups at a time without worrying about them killing each other instead of the enemy.
 Lost Shade(p):
1. Tainted Union
   A. Remove existing reflect effect.
   B. New effect, "When surrounded by at least 2 other Lost Shades, each individual unit will deal 61/61/61/68 damage per second and take 15% more damage."
Lost Shade(p)'s reflection effect has never quite worked, the more shades are in the union, the less damage is actually reflected. Instead of attempting to salvage an affinity effect we think is unfitting to the unit, we have instead decided to make the tainted affinity the true opposite of its frosty counterpart. Tainted Shades will receive more damage but deal more in turn, making them a high risk-high reward option.
 Vileblood(g):
1. Gifted Liquids (g) healing per wave: 300 life points equally spread ➜ 160 life points, up to 800 in total
Now works similar to Forest Elder's healing ability, with a separated single-target and multi-target healing amount. There are 6 total healing waves, meaning this changes the spell from 1800 total healing to 960 single-target healing to up to 5 targets. 
[ Tier 3 ]
 Ethereal Storm:
1. Charges: 8 ➜ 16
2. Power: 150p ➜ 130p
3. Duration: 21 / 21 / 21 / 26 ➜ 25 seconds on all upgrade levels
4. Now only damages hostile units.
5. Blessed affinity (b): All enemies in range take full damage, even when frozen (everything does full damage).
6. Infused affinity (r): Enemy units take 20% more damage.
7. Remove all stages except 1:
   A. Only one stage, baseline (0 Revenants) and stage 1 (1 Revenant).
   B. Baseline: 40 damage / Stage 1: 100 damage
The existing scaling effect is bugged, so we are simplifying the mechanic. There is now a base effect and an improved effect if one Revenant is present. This gives LS a consistent damage spell for itself but with reduced effectiveness in helping allies due to a lack of Revenants unless the player also casts Lost Evocation. The affinity effects provide missing things in the faction, such as the ability to ignore freeze's damage reduction.
 Lost Banestone:
1. Underworld Gate:
   A. Remove existing effect
   B. Add affinities, Tainted and Blessed
   C. Now spawns an own Lost Shade Revenant of the respective affinity
   D. Duration: Infinite ➜ 20 seconds
   E. Cooldown: 60 seconds ➜ 40 seconds
2. Tainted Underworld Gate (p):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, it explodes dealing 300 damage to every enemy in a 10m radius and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Shadow will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
3. Blessed Underworld Gate (b):
   A. New effect: "Activate to curse the targeted enemy unit. Every second, the targeted unit will lose 70 life points. Additionally, if the target dies, Lost Banestone is fully repaired and a Lost Shade revenant with an affinity toward Frost will spawn out of its corpse with a lifetime of 25 seconds."
4. Glacial ➜ Everlasting
   A. Remove affinities, now one effect
   B. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m
   C. Now suspends the duration of any friendly revenants in the area.
With its new aura and the ability to generate unbound defenders, Lost Banestone will allow players to transition their T2 offensive units into T3 defenders. This fits in line with the new Revenant-based playstyle we envision for the faction. This will also remove the exploit where Banestone can permanently stop enemies on some cPvE maps from spawning, such as Bad Harvest and Siege of Hope. While this exploit is well known and used, these maps are perfectly completable without them, and they trivialize defending by functionally turning the map off.
 Promise of Life:
1. Affected units can no longer be healed.
2. Blessed Revive (b):
   A. Spawn delay: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds
   B. Ice Shield strength: 800 ➜ 1500
Improve blue affinity without impacting the current workaround to spawn extra legendary units. Additionally, add a new effect to both affinities preventing units affected by Promise of Life from being healed. This should especially help in multiplayer, where well-intentioned allies heal units you want to die. 
 Stone Launcher:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Frost, 1 Neutral (T3)
 Twilight Slayers:
1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
[ Tier 4 ]
 Green Peace:
1. Protect the Environment! allied buff duration: 20 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
2. Protect the Environment! (r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 60%
 Infernal Chain:
1. Orb cost: 2 Shadow, 2 Neutral (T4) ➜ 4 Shadow (T4)
2. Power cost: 150p ➜ 100p
   A. Spell now costs 50p to cast once applied to the unit.
3. Ability Rework:
   A. Target: Single-target ➜ Up to 5 enemy units
   B. Bugfix: Allow Infernal Chain's healing to regenerate squad members
3. Blessed Bond (b) ➜ Tainted Bond (p):
   A. Remove 50% damage reduction for caster ➜ Add healing effect (55 per second) for each bond established
   B. Affected enemies now return 12% of current void power as power from the void
4. Gifted Bond (g): 
   A. Healing: 75 per second ➜ 55 per second per bond
   B. Stuns affected targets after 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Two dedicated Shadow orb decks already have a lot going for them, 3 dedicated Shadow orb decks have both Death Ray and Plague, and Shadow Worm fails to provide a sufficient reason to go Pure Shadow on its own. The changes allow multiple bonds, with healing occurring per bond. This is intended to synergize with Shadow Worm's life loss from Mass Disintegration. Each affinity has a different role: the shadow affinity provides in the field void return, and the nature affinity grants a crowd control effect. 
 Lost Evocation:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 140p
 Lost Spirit Ship:
1. Torpedo Changes:
   A. Splash Radius: 15m ➜ 10m
   B. Knockback: Remove S & M-knockback
2. Life points:  3930 ➜ 3630
3. Power cost: 240p ➜ 230p
4. Recycling:
   A. Target: Own buildings ➜ Own buildings and Revenants
   B. Cooldown: 10 seconds ➜ 5 seconds
   C. Ability description simplified
5. Crystal Rework:
   A. Gifted Crystal (g): Damage effect removed, it now only heals
   B. Infused Crystal (r): Grants a +40% movement speed increase to friendly Lost Souls units
   C. Ability description simplified
Lost Spirit Ship (LSS) is the major damage dealer for Lost Souls, which relies on units to deal damage. Therefore, we would be unable to remove its high damage without providing heavy compensation in other places. Instead of doing a full stat realignment of Lost Souls units, we are focusing on LSS.
While the changes might look like LSS was significantly nerfed, this is less true than it first appears. First off, the card has the same stat efficiency as previously due to the cost decrease. The splash reduction is a direct nerf, but the removal of S & M-knockback is actually a buff. LSS would frequently knock back units, particularly S-squads, so far that it and other splash cards could no longer damage them. Additionally, there is a hitbox bug with flying S-units which makes it so that when they are knocked back their "click-box" extends over a massive radius. This issue was a major problem for LSS which is supposed to move around the camp to stay safe and to damage enough targets, as the player could no longer click a location to move, but now only press "attack" on the displaced S-unit."
The crystal is being changed to either heal or increase movement speed, with the pointless spawn zone effect being removed. By allowing it to vacuum up Revenants, we add strong synergy with both Lost Warlord's new ability and Lost Evocation. This means that LSS will scale in strength the more a player invests into Lost Souls.
 Lost Warlord:
1. New passive, "Undying": 
   A. Blessed Undying (b): The unit's revenant form spawns with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 3000 damage. The Ice Shield refreshes every 25 seconds. 
   B. Infused Undying (r): The unit's revenant form deals 50% more damage.
2. Onslaught rework:
   A. Remove affinity
   B. Provides ground presence.
   C. New effect - "Activate for Lost Warlord to project a revenant of himself to a destination within a 40m range. This revenant provides ground presence, has no abilities, and lasts for 25 seconds. Reusable every 30/25/25/25 40/35/35/35 seconds."
With these changes, we hope to make Lost Warlord into the ultimate Lost Souls card, with a heavy focus on Revenants that synergizes with Nether Warp for quick movement of armies. We view this violation of fundamental game principles to be justified by the card's high orb restrictions and the recognition that by T4, the exploits enabled by teleporting ground presence are largely moot. The blue affinity is being buffed to have a refreshing Ice Shield for when players use cards like Lost Banestone and Revenant's Blessing to extend Revenant life times. This should help to equalize the two affinities.
 Overlord:
1. Blood Share:
   A. Life point cost: 1000 life points ➜ 1500 life points
   B. Healing: 1500 life points ➜ 1500 life points, up to 7500 in total
   C. Cooldown: 5 seconds ➜ 30 seconds
   D. Ability cost: 0p ➜ 20p
This change makes Overlord's "Blood Share" work similar to Forest Elder's "Forest Charm" in that it heals the group and the individual in different amounts. The goal here is to allow Overlord to function more fully as a sustain tank for the units it is protecting, as it already does for itself. This will help it to support army-based Shadow compositions, such as Shadow Worms, which is important because Overlord is the only melee Shadow unit in T4.
 Twilight Pestilence:
1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 120p

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