RadicalX

Most of the recent/upcoming content is based on community requests, the card contest, balancing discord, forums, our 2022 feedback survey, or just general play-data. We do not ignore constructive feedback by any means, we sometimes just lack the resources to implement ideas quickly, even the ones that are undeniably good for the game. We always need feedback aimed at improving ideas or proposals, helping us to ultimately make better decisions for the game. The responses that some of our staff members have received from a very small group of players have been insulting rather than constructive though. The fact that this has happened repeadately with almost every card nerf only serves to reduce our willingness to engage with said members. However, this does not affect our attitude towards the community as a whole, which has been extremely helpful.

New Slavemaster record and update on Convoy.

1) There was a global reset for speedrun times in September 2022. There are forum posts in the PvE section featuring records before and after the reset. You can also find the times from 2013. 2) The main reason for a full ladder reset would be drastic changes to the meta and a fundamental shift in strategy on a global scale. In September 2022 Decomposer, Batariel and Nightguard all received major nerfs. This changes the strategic approach on at least 10 campaign maps (probably more, I only count the strategies I know for sure), with every rPvE run also being strongly affected. To give an example: Prior to September 2022, rPvE 10 4p speedruns were played with 2-3 carries (depends on pathing) on Batariel decks, with the remaining players sacrificing their energy pool into decmposers after the early game. After the changes this pattern has changed to featuring different viable decks depending on a players energy level. Bloodhorn is the go-to deck, but Ember and various dps spell support decks that push a single Batariel player are viable alternatives depending on map conditions. The last patch removed the possibility for the SoW player to start with double shadow, which did enable a more carry oriented late game role due to access to Ressource Booster. This was not always the optimal play as you trade this for a slower SoW timing slightly weakening the remaining players. The other players are entirely unaffected from this change, the SoW player is losing one scaling option in the opening while still having access to multiple meta tools later on. This is not fundamentally changing the way the game is played here. Same can be said about BG, which delays certain spawnpoints by a few seconds, but every other playpattern stays identical. 3) Generally, yes. With the exception of Slavemaster (looter vs Twilight Emitter was removed two patches ago -> requires a new strategy) any record post ladder reset should be achievable. Overall it is very difficult to gauge the true impact on all time records per patch as every update features numerous card changes (including mostly buffs and QoL adjustments), player skill and activity varies, cumulative knowledge aquistions have a major impact on map completion times and there is just a general lack of data to make more precise assessments. So unless there will be a major meta update changing strategies entirely, we will not do global resets based on assumptions about theoretical best cleartimes.

Sent out all the rewards yesterday! If you played in the tournament, but didn't receive a price yet, please let me know 🙂 Also congratulations to Nenber for winning the random draw for the Promo Fallen Skyelf!

The tournament is over! Congratulations to the winners, I will send out the prices during the upcoming days. If you didn't receive your prices after a week, please contact me. Thank you everyone for participating and watching the stream!

As the person, who is mainly responsible for PvP changes, I disagree with this. Fire is considered the best starting faction in rPvE 10, yet cards like Nomad or Mine are not even viable in PvP. While the impact on different game modes might lead to change restrictions towards a specific card, there are almost no limitations in terms of what can be done for a faction as a whole. To give a super oversimplified example: Add a 90 energy spell that destroys a building with 1200 or less hp (not castable on power wells/orbs). Put this on any T1 faction and it would be highly valued in rPvE 10 immediately with zero impact on PvP.

I admit your tournament-draw track record has been my inspiration for this rule😄

Just FYI the sign up page didn't work properly yesterday, the issues have been resolved by now. 🙂

Hello fellow Skyladies and Skylords! It is time to get another PvP tournament rolling! Who are the strongest players out there? Who prepared some fancy tricks on the new patch? We will find out! Any player is very welcome to join, regardless of your skill level! Tournament Date and Stream On Sunday 5th March starting at 14:00 p.m. CEST (Berlin time). A live stream covering the tournament will take place on my twitch.tv channel https://www.twitch.tv/radicalx5. Streaming will start around 13:30 p.m. CEST (Berlin time). I will use the stream to communicate with the players, so be sure to join the stream to be notified of last minute updates. Everyone is welcome to hang out and watch the action as well! Sign up The tournament brackets will be on challonge, so register and join the tournament there using the button below. Deadline will be the start of the tournament, but please sign-up in advance if possible! Reply in this thread if you have questions, I will answer them as soon as possible. Use your Battleforge name for the tournament. If your Challonge account differs from your Battleforge account name, use the "Sign up with an alternate name" feature or change your name for the tournament in the settings. Finding your opponent will be a LOT easier this way. Format The tournament will be played as a 1on1, Best of 3, double elimination tournament, meaning if you lose a set, you move to the lower bracket and can still make the finals! Grand finals will be bo5, no bracket reset, but game 1 map choice for the player coming from the winnerbracket. Prize Pool I tried to place rewards so that almost every series matters, regardless whether you are playing losers bracket R1 or grand finals! The total price pool will roughly range from 40.000 bfp up to 75.000 bfp. The more players join, the more prices will be headed out. Big shoutouts to MadDoggo and MrDanilov, who helped making this possible with massive donations. 1) Every participant will win one random card, which is at least rare! With some luck you might even catch something bigger! 2) Every player, who wins at least a single bo3, will earn 3 boosters!* 3) Furthermore there will be random draws for a Promo Fallen Skyelf on top of that. Even if you lose in both rounds you will be eligible for the reward as long as you played your matches. 4) The following winner prizes will be added on top of the previously listed ones. Rank 1 - 7 Boosters + Promo Construct Rank 2 - 6 Boosters + Infect Rank 3 - 5 Boosters Rank 4 (Locked until we hit 8 players) - 4 Boosters Rank 5-8 (Locked until we hit 16 players) - 3 Boosters Rank 9-12 (Locked until we hit 24 players) - 2 Booster Rank 13-16 (Locked until we hit 32 players) - 1 Booster 5) The audience reward: You can join some competition even without actively playing. There will be some quizzes during the stream and you can earn some big prices there from a 10.000 bfp pool. *Blessing in disguise: If you end up being matched with one of the 2 highest rated (base elo) players in round 1, just playing all of your games will also make you eligible for the 3 Boosters. Rules (read this if you want to participate!) • Disconnection during a game results in a default loss. If both sides agree, it is possible to have a remake. • Not showing up to your match after 15 minutes results in a default loss. The plan is to play a round of matches every ~30 mins. • After your match, go to Challonge and insert the result. That is done by clicking on your match and selecting the winner/stats. The brackets will be updated automatically. • The Map Pool is: Haladur, Simai, Elyon, Lajesh, Uro, Yrmia and Wazhai (beware as this not the same pool as in ranked duel!). • The first map to play on will be decided by the players alternately banning maps (grand finals are an exception with G1 mapchoice for the winnerbracket player). The first player to ban is decided at random (use the /roll function). • After that it is the loser's choice • The winning player (who won the previous match in the bo3) also has to lock in his deck first. • The brackets for the tournament will be shuffled before the tournament starts! Looking forward to a lot of sign ups and an awesome tournament! Best regards, RadicalX

I wanted to finish the explanations for the new player rating section and update the free PvP deck pictures before announcing the update. Will catch up on that 😄

2p10 solo (Dec 2022)

grants access to Banzai Lord & Bloodhorn (arguable the best T4 units rn), so you are not reliant on Deathray. While the deck might be not as durable as others this combo is far from the worst when played casually and even the absolute best deck for speedrunning in rPvE. For more casual gameplay you can stack a lot of Banzai Lords, activate the ability early and use Nether Warp right into a camp. With enough birds this will probably burst down more than 50% of the enemies and with Emberstrike + Bloodhealing you have more than enough durability. Use Plague whenever you can afford it. Offering can be really good to replenish charges if necessary (use it on banzai birds or emberstrike for T4 charges). Against any strong XL boss you can add bloodhorn as an excellent counter (ability stacks with unholy hero). You can methodically take out one camp after another, which is really fun to play and not hard to execute once you get used to the pattern. I would consider to be the worst combination for casual play, simply because of the weakest XL unit line up you can get (Ironclad + Construct). I agree, that Winterwitch provides more than sufficient durability and the deck would be playable for casual rPvE 9, but to me it offers less than other options. might be another contender as it proivdes the least amount of durability and you might get some serious trouble with reaching spawn buildings. But with Plague, Infect, Frenetic and Lost Spirit Ship green for additional healing it should be okay for rPvE 9 and your damage output is actually good. 2 or more fire orbs will always grant value for casual runs because of XL unit stacking + unity and strong damage spells. 3+ Nature orbs are not that amazing, but with primeval watcher you have a powerful XL unit that can be supported dependend on what you are splashing into (Transcendence for shadow, Earthshaker & suppression for fire, Gemeye for Frost). As strong crowd control and healing spells are easy to use these decks should be rather convenient.

The tier list below only includes rPvE performance as my pure Fire knowledge at campaign is fairly limited. For Global Warming I would like to add that I'm referring to the red affinity here. The blue one would rate way lower, but it was the only affinity you could select in this list.

Considering you are interested about various Frost combinations I can already go a little in depth about the Northern Keep opening. The main use of this strategy is to enable smooth early game clears in a very difficult settings like various lvl 10s, but also helps to deal with close base T3 on 1p 9s, where the entire camp would be pulled whenever you want to take your T2. To successfully execute this follow these steps. Step 1: Build up 2 Northern Keeps safely outside of the aggro range and make an army of Master Archers. For beginners I would recommend roughly 11-12 units, once you get more comfortable you can reduce the unit count for faster early game progression. Step 2: After obtaining your units, wait for a little bit of power and play one Glyph of Frost to freeze the entire camp while focussing down the spawner right away. This is why you never want to play Frost mages in this particular situation, because their cone damage might be blocked by units in front of the spawn buidling. Step 3: After destroying the Spawner do not keep fighting and immediately retreat until you reached your towers. Leave the units in front of them and activate the Northern Keep ability. Step 4: Make sure one of your Northern Keeps is active from now on. 2 towers are enough to maintain 100% uptime. Your units will not take any damage and as long as they are in front of the Northern Keep, the tower does not get targeted. This is also the main reason you use red over blue affinity, because the blue affinity only increases effective hp on the turret. Since it usually isn't in danger of getting destroyed in the first place the damage buff on your Master Archers tends to be more useful overall. Step 5: Keep fighting until the entire camp is cleared. Ideally freeze the incoming T3 wave by leaving 1 unit alive for smoother progression. Also do not forget your mainbase, because there probably will be a wave hitting your T1. Further things to consider: - To find a good position for your turret placement in the first place you can use Glyph of Frost to scout into the fog of war giving you a rough idea where the enemies are. As it's a trap spell it shows whenver there is an enemy nearby. - Lost Spellbreaker can remove the immunity buff from your units. Therefore, Lost Souls will be your most difficult opponent. - Homesoil can be used to increase the damage for additional clearspeed, but does not stack with the Northern Keep (r) damage buff, so don't spam it too much. I illustrated the basic engagement in the following pictures against a Fire map (1p lvl 10). I hope this is somewhat helpful.

On maps like Dwarfen Riddle you could reach T2 without any card being played out. You just had start with a teammate who left immediately. There was a bug where neutral orb + T2 allowed you to spawn 1 T4 card so you could play a Giant Wyrm right at the start. Hilarious bug, was fixed a very long time ago of course.

Hey Sonaris, Thank you for your feedback. We will keep track on pure Nature's performance in PvP and definitely follow up with number changes if something feels off. We do believe some of these design changes were necessary though as pure Nature was creating a lot of scenarios that were not creating a fun experience on both ends. Nature collapsed to any type of well executed early aggression while energy manipulation -> permahealed Deep Ones felt oppressive to play against at mid game on the other hand. We definitely want to keep a unique design approach for pure Nature with Energy Parasite and Deep One both maintaining strong positions in the game. That said we want to move away from the extremes here and add more counterplay on both ends. With spell buffs we want to give pure natures more of a control based faction feeling while toning down the "stall for the snowball" behavior. I agree that omnipresent allrounders like Stormsinger, which define multiple deck identities, are far from optimal design and we do not want to shift more factions into such a direction at all. When it comes down to the Shrine of Memory, the card had severe issues due to the presence of very powerful hard counter tools. In higher elo games people would already spam Suppression rendering the Shrine entirely useless given its bound 100 power would never pay off. This would quickly carry over into the more average games if pure nature starts getting more popular as there is no micro load involved to execute this. With Matter Mastery in mind 50% of decks already posses such hard counter options that also do not create interesting gameplay patterns. Now keeping nature's matchups with access to these hard-counters balanced while maintaining a healthy dynamic against the decks that don't have such options, would be next to impossible. This is why we went towards a more PvE oriented focus for the building as it bears large potential to enrichen the gameplay experience over there. So all in all we want to keep a unique identity for nature in PvP, but reduce the very exploitable early game into full snowball pattern a little bit. I hope these explanations are understandable. Please keep us up to date on how you feel about these changes and matchup dynamics overall as we want to improve the gameplay experience as much as we can!

Just wanted to mention single player rPvE 10 is not up to date. Mocaak did beat the record in January 2022 (11:04.0). Replay was also posted on my youtube channel if you look to confirm this (as 1p rPvE ladder isn't fixed yet).