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Salutations everyone, I am the WaterMelonLord and this is how I play the game. This is not a smart way of playing the game and limits you so much, obviously this is really only for the crazy people out there and new players (do not make another account you will get banned) but you can really try ironman mode whenever you like. The name is stolen from Runescape and they probably stole the name from something else idk. So how I play the game is no trading anyone, no buying cards off of the marketplace, I do receive mails from other players for example Mr Titan gave me 3 mines and some bandit minefields (thank you) I think, but you could also play with the rule of not receiving any mail from people (mail from the game obviously fine), reforging is allowed, so I wouldn't recommend to play like this as trade is a big part of the game, but this is an option, an insane option. I also only buy normal boosters limiting myself even more. So basically getting charges is very difficult, getting an exact card is very difficult, getting rares and ultra rares is very difficult, but this is for some weird reason how I play the game and it will take me a very long time to get all cards, especially charges and upgrades, but I guess I'm here for the long run. An example of how painful this is, I got an evil eye again I think Mr Titan gave it to me so thank you to him again, but I literally have one charge for evil eye and it is painful, but imagine the dopamine when I open a booster and get a evil eye, I will be so happy (it's gonna take ages). So yeah there is the insight of ironman made, even though I have sort of (not really) created this mode, I do not recommend for you to try it, unless you want a challenge. Thank you for reading this and I hope you have a great time playing the game in whatever capacity you do. 🍉

o m g If you guys are going to keep pumping out epic looking barrier card artworks (not to mention for t4 pure spells) i demand we get more character icon slots because I literally cant help myself. But FR amazing work keep it up, you guys are the best ♥

Oh, great to see you guys are already on it, that's cool. I forgot about those. Soulhunter also has an issue with this LoS thing and turn-rate when casting mines. To be honest, I think most units with abilities suffer from this LoS/Turning Problem. And yeah, the melee pathfinding is another problem altogether. In rPvE, it makes playing them extremely unattractive since you lose a ton of DPS and HP for no reason. The units are constantly shifting around and missing out on attacks. They often also change their targets mid-swing.. Another issue is with the "melee slots" available on a target. If several Melees are piled onto a target, and one of them uses an ability, that unit loses its "melee slot", and another unit will step forward to take its place and the original unit is left idle. Best example commonly is the Bloodhorn in rPvE9. It's attacking the boss. Now you want to kill the boss quickly using Tainted Enrage + Unholy Hero. The Bloodhorn plays its Roar Animation, you buff Unholy Hero... and some other XL Unit now takes its slot, and the 30k DPS Bloodhorn just sits idle. However, Melee Pathfinding is a problem in just about any RTS. Age of Empires 2 has struggled with this forever despite, even now in DE. I figure it's really really hard to code a flawless melee pathfinding. I think that's another reason why it's much preferable to play a single strong Melee like Batariel or Bloodhorn and buff it to the max, or just mass ranged units than to play several melees. It just turns into a giant pathfinding and melee-slot mess. Nowadays I stick to a single, or two Bloodhorns and spam Fire Dragons behind since their DPS is reliable. Same goes for spamming Spells.

As true as this is on the one end I'm not sure if I would go with this for this topic. If we speak about 4p maps I think a bit optimisation is just... polite. I can't say too much about the topic, as I don't understand french. Don't know if this is about playing known maps (motm) or random, neither I know if it is 1p or 4p. What I can say: Pure Nature can even be challenging in very hard 9s and is very hard to play in some 10 scenarios. If you take this challenge you should be really on an expert level. Furthermore I see 5 very non-optimal slots (Shaman, T2 Tower, 2 units too much in T3 and finally worst: Wheels). Any of this slots is a handicap on many 10 maps. As Hrdina said the T1 needs to be extended, I would take 2-3 if that slots for this. Dryad (B) can be very helpful in 10s, mentioned Hurricane can be a pick and usually it's very helpful to play either Motk or Stranglehold. But as long as you don't have a very solid knowledge about the game mode nature is not a start that can be recomended anyways. Usually it makes sense to go with Fire as it is the teamplay option until you are very familiar with 10 starts. Sadly 10s are a bit unbalanced in T2 and for Random maps all pure colors can struggle (if not played on very expert level) - this T2 is probably the optimal for nature. In T3 it is very hard to say what nature can deal most optimal with early boss scenarios. Best option for T3 could be just Enlightenment instead of any units. Wheels are for sure hurting a lot here due to the harsh time limit (4players). The T4 unit composition is imo good, but you need to keep in mind that you may still struggle here if you want/need to clear a path on your own. Nature has low-med dmg and comes to its limits very fast when you fight bigger camps. Green Peace can be a nice option to block half of a camp here. Last thing that you can say in general: Communication before start is key to a good win rate. In 10s a (most early) Shrine of War can be very important (again the harsh time limit) and makes all other shrines obsolete. Usually only play SoM's when really no SoW can be played. As only 2-3 Shadow orb decks, and perhaps good played Frost splashes can out-CC camps good enough to skip Inc Mo, the SoMe here should probably be replaced with Inc Mo in most groups. Nature would be just shut down when facing LS without it. As last words I would recommend a more mixed color deck for 10 until you are really deep into that mode. At least Shadow and Nature have no T4 pure cards that would justify going pure here. For the start I already pointed out that Fire would be the meta solution. Only play non fire here if you can really make sure that you do not need to rely on your fire playing mates. In many matches it is just the fire players bailing out non-fire starters to therefore delay their own progress, seen that really a hundred times. The very last thing: Know your gamemode. Knowledge about map layout, spawns and what really happens is the most important thing here - and is even way more important then the cards you play. If you gather knowledge and experience on that you will see more and more what card do you need in certain deck and which not.

As we announced in our Towers Deep Dive, our faction design team has been working on performing a balance pass across all attack buildings in the game. Some of these changes are relatively minor, while other changes are more substantial. This thread will function as the main thread for our second round of building changes. The original master thread can be found here. Minor changes are included here, while major changes have their own threads linked to below. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change. Substantial Reworks and Balance Changes The following buildings have significant enough changes to warrant their own threads. Previously Announced: Rocket Tower Stronghold Newly Announced or Updated: Armored Tower Ice Shield Tower Fortress Changes One category of towers we spoke of in our Deep Dive were Fortresses. Fortresses are expensive towers from T3+ that have large models. Due to the way space works in BattleForge, larger towers should have higher stats in comparison to other towers as you can build less of them in a given area. We have decided, outside of the unique case of Church of Negation, to make 200p the base cost of Fortresses. This allows us room to pack more stats into a single building. Our goal is to move Fortresses in the direction of self-sufficient defenses that can hold positions even in those locations where you might only be able to build one or two. Deepgorge 1. Cold Clutch radius: 25m ➜ 30m. While Deepgorge has substantially increased in strength since the most recent changes, particularly in connection with North Star(b) with which it naturally synergizes. Unfortunately, due to the tower's large size, its ability radius is still too small when the tower is placed behind a wall making it difficult even for a well-placed Deepgorge to hit all melee attackers on long walls. Howling Shrine 1. Essence Bolts damage: 600, up to 900 in total ➜ 750, up to 1125 in total (3750 dp20) 2. Crowd control duration (both affinities): 10 sec ➜ 15 seconds Howling Shrine is feeling better after the buffs both to itself and to the root network in general. When the initial changes were proposed, some people suggested larger buffs to the card but we urged caution due to the difficulty in account for how things would change once the full set of root network changes came through. Now that we can evaluate the changes more fully, it appears that Howling Shrine is still a tad on the weak side. To remedy this, we are giving it a +25% damage increase and increasing the duration of both its root and paralyze to help it keep dangerous melee units at a safe distance. Volcano 1. Power cost: 150p ➜ 200p 2. Damage: 581, up to 872 (3990 dp20) ➜ 766, up to 1149 (5270 dp20) 3. Life points: 4390 ➜ 5690 4. Infused Eruption's (red affinity) Rage: A. Rage scaling: 100%/200% ➜ 75%/150% B. Rage timer: 7 sec ➜ 10 seconds C. Attacks per stack: 4 attacks ➜ 3 attacks 5. Lava Sea A. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m B. Bugfix the ability so that it works Making Volcano more "dense" by increasing its power cost and then adjusting its stats accordingly. Total damage when enraged is slightly increased despite the nerf to Rage's percentile damage increase (12,000 --> 13175 dp20). Additionally, the rage should activate substantially sooner. Previously it took 29 seconds in combat to full scale, now it should only take 22 seconds. One thing we learned in the wake of Volcano's previous changes is that its Lava Sea ability is bugged and does not work. Fixing the ability to function as advertised should do much to make Volcano a larger threat. Worldbreaker Gun 1. Life points: 4500 ➜ 5400 2. Descriptive: Add "Has a long range of 50m" to its Ground Attack description. WBG is the best defense in the entire game, but that is achieved primarily through its Heavy Snowball ability augmented by Skyelf Sage. In terms of functions as a tower, it is still good but has uncharacteristically low life points for its cost and tier. We are giving it a slight bump in total health, which should help it when functioning as a tower while leaving it unchanged as a long range artillery piece. Minor Changes It is the general principle of the faction design team not to change abilities or introduce complex mechanics needlessly. Cards should generally perform a single function and perform that function well. A lot of the buildings in the game are already well-designed but lack sufficient stats or possess too strict of requirements. As such, we have opted wherever possible to introduce simple changes to bring the tower to the appropriate power level. All values below are U3. Artillery 1. Range: 50m ➜ 60m 2. Increase turret turn speed. Allow Artillery to damage siege units even when placed behind a wall. Fire Bomb 1. Damage: 715 up to 1650 in total ➜ 720, up to 1800 in total 2. Add "Fast Construction" - Construction time is reduced by 50%. 3. Allow to hit air units & enable splash overflow fix. Hammerfall 1. Increase turret turn speed. 2. Breeze of Life (g) / Breeze of Strength (b): A. Maximum capacity: 1500 ➜ 3000 B. Recharge rate: 15 per second ➜ 40 per second C. Radius: 20m ➜ 25m 3. Breeze of Strength, Ice Shield cost: 495 capacity ➜ 600 capacity Increased turret turn speed should increase damage output due to faster target tracking. Change to affinity effects: Higher maximum capacity should make both affinity effects better, but especially the healing one which is only drained as required. Higher recharge rate means that a new Ice Shield can be bestowed every 15 seconds instead of every 33 seconds, even with the higher cost. Range increase to make it easier to place units around it. Total charge time is now 90 seconds. Additionally, Hammerfall's shields do not decay while within the aura. This makes them a stable source of extra health for allied units. Hammerfall's recharge and healing is still less than Healing Well's, a T2 60p card, with the same maximum capacity. Infected Tower 1. Damage: 114, up to 172 in total (1215 dp20) ➜ 138, up to 207 in total. (1466 dp20) 2. Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 8m +20% damage increase and small splash radius increase. Changes to Infected Tower's ability have been postponed until we can properly rework it. Kobold Laboratory 1. Mason Mastery radius: 25m ➜ 30m 2. Material Research: A. Changed buildings ➜ buildings and walls B. Allow repairing while in combat C. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m D. New description: "Friendly buildings and walls in a 30m radius have 50 / 50 / 50 / 70% lower repair costs and are repairable in combat." Allow Kobold Laboratory to have a niche use in defense and to provide something beyond what Glaciation is capable of providing. Change is meant in preparation for DRPvE and will also be useful in maps with prolonged defenses, especially near walls. Lost Converter 1. Add Soul Splicer's "Soul Suction" ability to the card, allowing it to gather corpses outside its passive range. 2. Corpse cost to freeze: 200 ➜ 250 stored life points Morklay Trap 1. Enable splash overflow fix 2. Explosion Blast total damage: 2640 in total ➜ 4400 in total Increase total targets from 3 to 5 and enable splash damage properly transferred even when units die. Stone Hurler 1. Damage: 100 damage, up to 150 in total (834 dp20) ➜ 120 up to 180 in total (1000 dp20) Align actual damage with stated damage on the card. Twilight Bombard 1. Remove "Siege" from Infused affinity 2. Add "Rage" to Infused affinity. A. Stage 1: +25%; Stage 2: +50% damage B. Attacks per stage: 3 C. Reset timer: 10 seconds 3. Increase turret turn speed. Twilight Bombard (r) has Siege as its affinity effect, which is largely useless. By changing it to Rage instead, we make the choice between the two affinities one of increased damage versus crowd control. Waystation 1. Add Soul Splicer's "Soul Suction" ability to the card, allowing it to gather corpses outside its passive range. 2. New passive, Fast Construction: Construction time is reduced by 50%. 3. Infused damage buff: 30% ➜ 40% 4. Tainted poison damage: 30 life points every second ➜ 40 life points every second 5. Corpse storage: 2500 total ➜ 4500 total 6. Corpse cost per potion/poison (both affinities): 180 ➜ 400 stored life points will be used up. 7. Radius: 25m ➜ 30m The first step in what will eventually be a full rework of Waystation. For now, the addition of fast construction means it can be set up offensively as its name suggests and the addition of Soul Suction means it should be able to easily gather corpses to fuel itself. Gave a small boost to both affinity effects and increased the radius to require ranged units to enter its effective radius to damage it.

One reason every tier diversity is low-ish is, that decks are limited to 20 slots and almost all maps revolve around starting T1 and reaching T4 (notable exceptions Bad Harvest, Convoy). This restricts players into just 5 cards per tier on average, but since bound energy exists, the distribution is heavily favoring massing T1 units. And supporting them wirh stronger and stronger spells while sprinkeling in a couple of higher tier units while progressing. Only when a hard wall or T4 is reached, the army gets cycled. Dedicated T3 phases pretty much don't exist in cPvE and if they exist, there's Amii Monument to build up T4 in advance (Enlighten doesn't really do that IMO - anyhow back on topic...). Cards on T2 and T3 offer diversity, specialists card and are generally strong, but - more often than not - are not required since a specialist card alrrady exists in T1 and simply waste time and energy by having to cycle your current army. Bound power/void return is another factor I've noted. Decomposer and/or FoF allows Shadow to spawn Harvester within acceptable time. No other faction would be able to play a T2 300 energy unit in a reasonable amount of time, even if they'd have access to one (there are of course cPvE maps where poweraccumulation on T1 is high where it would be possible). In conclusion, IMO the map content restricts more divercity in T2 & T3 situations. Power and void power mechanics hinders players in investing into T2 & T3. And lastly Amii Monument exists. I'd rather see more map content tackeling those issues than more low tier cards that serve a function, but are ultimatly too costly for the deckslot.

With the last changes to the root netwok it got way easier to set up a great defense without wasting to many deck slots and units. If you are looking for a T3 def, was is definitly the biggest strengh of root network you only need sylvan gate, thornbark and razorleaf, since 2 thornbarks are now enough to fully power up the razorleaf. You can then build your deck around that with a strong nature T1, lots of CC and heals. For T4 giantwyrm and regrowth is often enough, but stuff like forestelder or the other nature T4 units are pretty cool too 🙂

Card Balance Changes Global Balance Changes Changes to PvE Unit Orb & Power Costs: more details can be found here: Changes to PvE Unit Orb & Power Costs - Additionally, the general mind control immunity on the PvE versions of Bandit Windhunter, Twilight Deathglider, and all Lost Souls units and buildings has been removed. Each NPC unit in both campaign and random PvE maps has orb and power costs just like player units, which might come as a surprise to players used to using Nightguard and Parasite Swarm to takeover nearly any unit in the game. This is because there has been a longstanding bug, going back to the game's release, where units which are spawned in via map script did not have properly assigned orb and power costs. The original developers knew about this bug, but they do not appear to have known how to fix it. By the time Empire and the Lost Souls RPvE faction were added to the game, the original developers decided to add a universal immunity to mind control to the entire Lost Souls faction to prevent further abuses of the mind control mechanic. They also added total immunity to Windhunter and Death Glider. The bug in question has now been fixed and as part of this fix we have gone through and updated the power and orb costs of every unit in the game. The goal of this rework was to create situations where mind control is still useful, and indeed powerful, while tampering down the current situation where mind control units, especially Nightguard, trivialize a map and thus become the universally proscribed solution to nearly any difficult situation. As part of these changes, we are also making several changes to current campaign maps, which we already started last patch with the changes to Nightmare Shard, Nightmare's End, and Behind Enemy Lines. All map changes can be found in the Map Balance Changes section in the next post. S-unit population count: decreased from 6 ➜ 4 Total root network support cap: 10 maximum support within a network ➜ infinite amount of support possible Twilight Transformation duration: decreased from 2 seconds ➜ 1.2 seconds Increased turn speeds of several units: - Gladiatrix, Ice Guardian, Knight of Chaos, Lightblade, Mauler, Mountain Rowdy, Rogan Kayle, Shadow Insect, Slaver, Treespirit, Viridya's Treespirit, Twilight Brute, Warlock, and Wrecker. Lost Spellbreaker (NPC Unit): - No longer casts Disenchant on-hit, still makes affected units immune to further buffs. - Now makes affected units unable to use their special abilities. Lost Spellbreaker has been a perpetual headache for us as a balance team because she hard counters some factions while barely affecting others. Every single mechanic we add to the game must face the question of how it interacts with Spellbreaker. If Spellbreaker does remove it, the question then becomes if that faction can still function, particularly against the already difficult Lost Souls faction. At the same time, we want to keep Spellbreaker as a major debuff unit. As such, we decided to remove Spellbreaker's Disenchant ability while leaving the immunity to further buffs and adding on an ability silence. This change should allow players to preemptively apply buffs to their units as a way to counter Lost Spellbreaker. Our hope is that Lost Spellbreaker will remain an annoyance and a priority target, without single-handedly countering entire deck archetypes. Hybrid Orb requirements have been added: A Hybrid Orb allows you to meet its requirements with one of its two colors. For example, a card can be played with either or . Hybrid Orbs can be found on our Twilight Slayers, Twilight Hag, Treefiend, Nightshade Plant and Deepfang. PvE Balance Changes While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes, such as Deep One, Nightshade Plant, and Twilight Creeper, have important consequences for both game modes. Our PvE and PvP balance teams work closely together to ensure that the impact of all changes are evaluated for both game modes. Below, we have listed both the changes and our reasoning behind them. [ Tier 1 ] Decomposer: - Now only works on own units Decomposer has been a controversial card for a long time. When usable on friendly units, Decomposer allows players to transfer power between themselves. Practically speaking, this means that Decomposer turns previously multiplayer maps into effectively single-player maps, where one player can gain power far in excess of what should be possible at a given time, even if all Power Wells were given to one player. For this reason, it is a mainstay of speedruns and goldfarming alike, to the point of choking out other potential strategies. Decomposer also stands in direct violation of our fundamental design principle that power should only be generated via Power Wells. While violations of design principles are possible to justify via card restrictions such as high power cost, tier, or orb restrictions, the power generation principle is the most fundamental of all principles and Decomposer is able to violate it as a Tier 1 Shadow card. There is an additional consideration which is often forgotten in discussions on this topic, and that is the experience of the player feeding the Decomposer, usually called a "feeder." While there can be no doubt that many Decomposer-based speedruns, including the existing record on Bad Harvest, are matters of strategic brilliance in terms of planning, the same is not true in terms of execution for the majority of the players in the speedrun. While feeders do contribute in a minor sense, the runner does the overwhelming majority of the actions in the run and it truly succeeds or fails based on the skill of the runner. In more casual settings, this often becomes even worse, with the feeder doing close to nothing. Decomposer transforms the feeder from a teammate into little more than a spectator. The feeder is a mere battery powering the runner, a resource to be used instead of a person with whom you play alongside. Feeding makes for a gameplay experience where teammates give up almost all of their agency. It is not engaging, and we should not be creating a situation where the player must chose between efficiency and an engaging experience. The continuing preservation of this kind of gameplay has done great harm to new player retention. For that reason alone we should have made this change a long time ago. In fact, we have planned this change for nearly 18 months, yet have repeatedly delayed it in hopes of releasing a Decomposer-like mode simultaneously with the nerf for players who enjoy the mechanic and who wish to opt-in, even without rewards. This optional Map Modifiers game mode is something we are still desirous of completing eventually, but as we announced in Community Update #25, without further developers we can only commit to releasing card balancing changes for the foreseeable future. Given the many factors surrounding Decomposer and the strong negative impact it creates on the game experience of many players, we have decided to finally go through and change the card to no longer allow it to transfer power between players. [ Tier 2 ] Parasite Swarm: - Takeover limit: 150 power cost ➜ maximum of 175 power cost Allows us to make some units able to be transformed by Twilight Curse and taken over by Parasite Swarm, while remaining out of reach of Nightguard. [ Tier 3 ] Corsair: - Inspirational Call: deal 50% more damage ➜ 60% more damage Corsair was previously changed to work not just on human units, but all Bandit units. This helped a lot, but the card itself as well as Bandit's T3 is still somewhat lacking. We are giving a slight boost to its aura to help encourage more Bandit-based unit compositions. Frenetic Assault: - General Changes: - Power cost: 80 ➜ 90p - Initial Amok effect duration: 20s ➜ 15s - Frenetic is now a two-stage effect: - Stage 1: Bewitches the targeted hostile target attracting the aggression of up to 7 of its allied units within a 20m radius for 15 seconds. - Stage 2: If the target dies within 10 seconds, up to 10 of its allied units within a 20m radius are bewitched for 10 seconds. - Affinity swap: Gifted Aggression (g) ➜ Infused Aggression (r) - Infused Aggression(r): No longer slows or prevents healing, change description to clarify it can be used on buildings and units. Frenetic Assault is potentially the strongest card in the game. It is also the strongest crowd control spell, has no downside, and has no death effect. While not necessarily wrong, it is a bit odd for such a card to exist in Shadow. All in all, it is more a Bandit card than a Shadow card. We as a balance team have endeavored to nerf the card from an S+ tier to an A tier card, while also giving it mechanics to make it feel like a Shadow card. Frenetic now has two stages. The first stage affects 7 targets for 15 seconds. The second stage, which triggers off the death of the initial target within 10 seconds, affects 10 targets for 10 seconds. This gives Frenetic a total possible duration of 20 seconds if used perfectly with up to 17 total affected enemies. It should remain one of the strongest spells in the game, without being so good as to single-handedly carry entire archetypes. Healing Gardens: - Ritual of Recovery duration: 30 seconds ➜ 45 seconds Healing Gardens' increased rejuvenation effect is strong, but its short duration requires two Gardens to be built simultaneously. This can significantly slow down deck archetypes dependent on the effect, so we are increasing Ritual of Recovery's duration to allow the player to utilize just one instance of Healing Gardens with the downside of a slight effect downtime. Additionally, the lack of regular activation is a common problem among all active global effects in casual play. This should help to alleviate that problem by making it so that when the effect is actually activated, it stays up for longer. Ice Age: - Now allows multiple instances of the spell to be active at the same time. Ice Age previously had anti-synergy with itself, such that multiple Pure Frost players could not cast it simultaneously. Given that this is not an issue with healing sustain options, we decided to remove this restriction. Sandstorm: - Power cost: 160p ➜ 140p - Ability radius: 10m ➜ 12m We previously gave Sandstorm two large buffs, a 70p cost reduction and the addition of L-knockback on the blue affinity. Even with these changes, Sandstorm remains an uncompelling option. As such, we are further reducing the power to 140p while increasing the radius of the tornado, which should allow the player to more easily crowd control priority targets. Twilight Creeper: - Tainted / Infused Spit, total targets: 3 ➜ 8 - Infused Spit(r) debuff: 30% less damage ➜ 40% less damage Small buff to Twilight Creeper's debuff and a large buff to total target count, allowing Creeper to debuff substantially more enemies in a camp. Wrathgazer: - Disintegrating Gaze: May only disintegrate units ➜ May only disintegrate units and buildings. - Pain Link: 100% damage distributed ➜ 50% damage distributed. Wrathgazer's Pain Link distributes damage before Resilient is applied. This means that as-is, 100% of damage is done to surrounding units and 50% also to Wrathgazer (assuming non-piercing damage). The total damage is thus multiplied by 50% assuming there are any allies in range. With the changed numbers, 50% of damage is now done to Wrathgazer and 50% to surrounding units. This should make Wrathgazer usable in an army without being an active detriment. Additionally, only being able to target units severely restricts Wrathgazer's usability. To remedy this, we are adding the ability to disintegrate buildings as well, allowing Wrathgazer to be more useful offensively. Note, this change does not allow wall segments, Power Wells, or Monuments to be disintegrated. Wrathgazer will also be unable to disintegrate spawn buildings, as this causes a bug where the spawn building, despite being destroyed, begins phantom spawning waves of enemies. [ Tier 4 ] Altar of Chaos: - Enable overkill splash damage bug fix. - Mass Destruction Nether Bomb life points: 4000 ➜ 4500 Nether Bomb will no longer lose damage when overkilling enemies, constituting a minor buff for unfed bombs and a major buff for fed bombs. Additionally, the small increase in bomb life points is intended to synergize with Lost Spirit Ship's recycle ability. One bomb will now provide enough life points for 3 Lost Spirit Ship Crystals. Batariel: - Damage: 4400 ➜ 5600 - Purgatory's damage is no longer affected by damage modifiers, including buffs on Batariel itself and debuffs on enemies. - Stage 1 Activation Threshold: 1000(r) and 1250(p) ➜ 1200 damage (both affinities) - Damage/Effect per Stage Batariel (p): (a) Stage 1: 100 dmg ➜ 100 dmg + 25% increased enemy damage taken (b) Stage 2: 100dmg + 35% increased damage taken ➜ 100dmg + 50% increased enemy damage taken (c) Stage 3: 100dmg + 75% increased damage taken ➜ 100dmg + 100% increased enemy damage taken - Squad damage: Only damages a squad once instead of each member individually. - Gates of Hell power cost: 150p ➜ 120p It would be uncontroversial to say that Batariel and the deck that surrounds it is the strongest deck in the game. The question has never been the strength of Batariel, but what to do with it. Some do not want it changed at all. Among those in favor of nerfs, many people have suggested nerfing Batariel itself, others Enlightenment, others Frenetic Assault, still others Unholy Hero as the main source of the problem to bring Batariel from S++ tier to closer to S or A+ tier. After much discussion among all segments of the playerbase, and especially with some of the game's top players, we have come to the determination that we cannot successfully balance Batariel unless we also nerf Unholy Hero or at least decouple it from Batariel. At the same time, we cannot directly nerf Unholy Hero without affecting a large portion of decks that are otherwise balanced. Frenetic Assault, while very powerful in combination with Batariel, is also overpowered in its own right. In the end, we have settled on nerfing both Batariel and Frenetic Assault while decoupling it from Unholy Hero. Batariel's damage aura no longer benefits from any buffs on Batariel or debuffs on enemies, including Batariel(p)'s own armor shredding aura. With this drastic step taken, we have also increased Batariel's base damage significantly, along with adjustments to its stage 1 activation threshold. Batariel can now activate stage 1 in 2 attacks against XL-units and in 3 attacks against non-XL units. A Batariel buffed with Unholy Hero can now also one-shot a small spawn building, while the base damage buff helps Batariel substantially when fighting bosses. The cost reduction to Gates of Hell allows the player to quickly and efficiently activate Batariel's stage 3 in a single ability. Overall, our tests have shown that while Batariel is slower than before, the Enlightenment-Batariel deck remains intact as a top tier deck for both skilled and casual play. The bigger issue in balancing Batariel came from the purple affinity regularly used in Pure Fire decks. In the current meta, Pure Fire typically uses a mix of both affinities, with the purple affinity amplifying the already substantial damage of the red affinity to even greater heights. With the changes to Batariel's aura, this damage amplification is no longer possible. As such, we had to get creative in keeping the Pure Fire deck viable. Alongside these changes, we have also buffed other Fire cards such as Bloodthirst, Magma Fiend, and Fire Sphere. The changes to Bloodthirst help make a Batariel(p) + Fire Dragon deck much more viable and significantly more durable. We increased the synergy between Batariel and Fire Dragon by making the purple affinity increase the damage taken by enemies even further. When Batariel(p) and Fire Dragons are both fully enraged with Bloodthirst, Fire Dragons deal 30,000 damage per 20 seconds. We also increased the speed of Magma Fiend to open up the option of using it with other Fire cards. Finally, the changes to Fire Sphere have proven much more substantial than initially anticipated. A perfectly executed Fire Sphere (remember it has a 10 second wind-up period) that combos with a stage 3 Batariel(p) can one shot an entire camp. All in all, while Pure Fire will prove to be much different after the changes, it increasingly has a playstyle that feels all its own. Bloodthirst: - Power cost: 160p ➜ 140p - Unit count: 7 total targets ➜ 8 total targets - Duration: 20 seconds ➜ 25 seconds - Healing: 175 life points per second ➜ 200 life points per second - Damage buff: 20% more damage ➜ 40% more damage Our initial testing for the last round of changes showed Bloodthirst far overperforming its intended power level. Unfortunately, the new Bloodthirst received a double nerf upon release when we not only reduced its healing, but we also removed its ability to heal stack. Since then, it has performed below what is appropriate for a card of its requirements and its weak state is keeping Fire archetypes from achieving their true potential. We have buffed up nearly all aspects of the spell. Cluster Explosion(p) - Initial radius: 20m ➜ 25m Equalizing initial radii of both affinities to be 25m. Coat of Protection(b) - Increased Ice Shield total cap, which can be strengthened to absorb from to 2500 damage ➜ 3000. The purple affinity of Coat of Protection has by and large been the better of the two affinities. Additionally, the current cap makes using the blue affinity of Ice Age with the blue affinity of CoP quite inefficient. This change rectifies that issue. Fire Sphere - Damage maximum: 8000 ➜ 10000 in total - Spell radius: 15m ➜ 25m (visual FX already appeared to be 25m) - Knockback: Small, medium, and large units ➜ Knocks back all unit sizes in the area (regardless of whether they are damaged or not). Fire Sphere is not a good card. It also lacks identity due to how good its competitors are in its own faction. While thinking about the card, we realized it could keep its boss killing identity while providing 3 Fire+ decks with a thematically appropriate CC effect in knock back. By changing the way its knock back applies and increasing its effect radius to match its existing visual effect, we allow the Fire player to potentially knock back an entire camp. The changes to its splash damage last patch also mean that it no longer loses damage when overkilling an enemy. Our tests have found that a perfectly timed Fire Sphere combined with a fully enraged Batariel give Pure Fire the ability to fully wipe camps in both RPvE 9+ and expert campaign maps. Fire Worm: - Power cost: 210p ➜ 200p - Charges: 4 ➜ 8 - Attack range: 30m ➜ 40m Fire Worm is not a bad card per se, but it lacks a firm identity and a reason to choose it over other options. Its stats are also not great, having only 2640 life points, lower than several T3 units, with a real attack value of only 4000 despite its claim to deal 4800 damage. Thinking about Fire Worm more, we have decided to move it into the role of a disposable sniper unit. The longer range helps it to survive longer and pick out priority targets without placing itself in danger. Fire Worm will be the first and only XL-unit to have 8 charges. This, along with the lower cost, will allow the player to spam them out quickly, allowing them to function as skirmisher like units without having to fear losing a precious charge on an XL-unit. Grove Spirit: - Healing Song healing capacity: 5000 life points ➜ 5500 life points Minor correction to allow Grove Spirit to actually heal as much as she claims. Ice Tornado: - Power cost: 145p ➜ 140p Jorne: - Wrecking Hammer radius: 20m ➜ 25m - Wrecking Hammer damage total: 6600 in total ➜ 8800 in total Minor buff to Jorne and the accompanying legendary deck. This should make Jorne's anti-building ability easier to hit on multiple targets and more worth the power investment. Lifestream: - Life Link: 20% of absorbed damage transferred ➜ 30% of absorbed damage transferred After the recent buffs, Lifestream is in a good place but is slightly too strong. We as a team do not want to encourage strategies which can functionally create invincible armies, particularly not in a faction with already strong sustain options. As such, we are slightly toning down Lifestream by making it take more damage. This should make the downside real, with the possibility of killing the Lifestream if the player does not pay close enough attention. Lost Dragon: - Damage: 335, up to 502 in total (3000 dp20) ➜ 416, up to 624 total (3715 dp20) - Life points: 3780 ➜ 4080 Lost Dragon card is very weak for its requirements, even with its very strong passive debuffs. Given it is a support unit, we considered placing more of its power budget into its debuff effects, but after consideration determined that the current debuffs are already sufficiently strong and well-designed. Lost Dragons stats are just too low. As such, we decided on a ~23% damage buff and ~8% life point buff. We wanted to preserve the existing trait of Lost Souls units, where life points are generally higher than damage. Magma Fiend: - Burning Liquid cost: 100p ➜ 50p - Movement Speed: 4.8 m/s (run) + 2.4 m/s (walk) ➜ 6.4 m/s (run) + 4.8 m/s (walk) Burning Liquids is a decent ability, but like many abilities in the game it is overpriced. We are reducing its cost to align the price more closely with the effect produced. Additionally, we are increasing Magma Fiend's movement speed from slow to normal XL. We think that slow speeds should fit the unit in terms of balance, theme, or both. In the case of Magma Fiend, there is neither a thematic nor a balance reason for its currently slow speed, so we changed it. Noxious Cloud: - Power cost: 250p ➜ 230p - Initial damage: 13 (3750 total) ➜ 24 damage every second (5640 total) - Time between damage increase: 2 seconds ➜ 3 seconds Noxious Cloud is one of the most expensive spells in the game. While theoretically having a large potential total damage of 37,500, this rarely occurs as it requires all 10 initial targets to both live for the full duration and to remain inside the area for 37 seconds in total. In practice, even the Tier 3 Thunderstorm is usually better. Even in perfect situations, Noxious Cloud is heavily outcompeted by rival options such as Plague and Cluster Explosion. We wanted to buff Noxious Cloud without turning it into a copy of these other spells. As such, it continues to only affect units and we kept the total spell duration at 37 seconds. This is similar to the other Nature damage spell, such as Thunderstorm and Parasite, which have long durations and are only capable of damaging units. The new Noxious Cloud should kill most XL-units that remain within its effect for the full duration, while also cleaning up more S and M-units units due to its higher base damage. It also remains expensive, as Nature's faction identity is centered around unit-based damage, not damage dealing spells. Plague: - Power cost: 150p ➜ 170p - Parasite duration: 15 seconds ➜ 10 seconds Despite toning down the new Plague before release, it remains one of the strongest spells in the game and is capable of single-handedly clearing camps, any respawns, and even bosses. We have decided to increase its cost to reduce power efficiency and reduce parasite duration. This reduces each parasite's single-target damage from 1500 to 1000, while making it harder to proc the secondary parasites due to reduced duration. The reduced duration also nerfs the powerful non-immunity applying ranged silence. Overall, this should mean Plague is no longer a cast and forget spell; players will need to encourage the initial parasites to proc themselves if they want to make get full use out of the spell. Primeval Watcher: - Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Neutral ➜ 3 Nature, 1 Neutral - Damage: 600 / 288 / 192 / 127 / 84 (6550 dp20) ➜ 660 / 330 / 220 / 165 / 132 (7220 dp20) - Life points: 4650 ➜ 4850 - Stasis Field: - Targets: 7 enemies ➜ 9 enemies - Ability cost: 0p ➜ 25p - New passive, "Siege": Deals 50% more damage against structures. Primeval Watcher is Pure Nature's primarily damage dealer. As such, Pure Nature's viability as an army-centric faction rises and falls based on Primeval's performance. We have wanted to increase Primeval's stats, but its current orb requirements limited our options as it would have mainly buffed Primeval Watcher in non-Pure Nature decks. Due to this, we have decided to increase its orb requirements to 3 Nature orbs to make room for more substantial stat buffs. Additionally, given that Primeval Watcher is one of Nature's only ways to kill buildings, particularly in the back of a camp, we have given it Siege to aid in this role. Skycatcher: - Damage 520, up to 780 in total (4660 dp20) ➜ 600, up to 800 in total (5000 dp20) - Fixed bug where killing the initial unit would reduce all splash damage to 0. - Twilight Infection power cost: 50p ➜ 0p - Twilight Infection cooldown: 20 sec ➜ 3 sec Slight buff to Skycatcher to allow it to better perform its role as a backline attacker. The changes to Twilight Infection will allow Skycatcher to quickly transform a T2 or T3 army into a T4 army. Transcendence: - Radius: 25m ➜ 30m - Kenosis, healing buff: 50% ➜ 75% more healing - Tyranny: - Healing debuff: 50% ➜ 75% less healing - Damage debuff: 25% ➜ 40% less damage We are happy with Transcendence in concept but not in practice. The stats it released with have proven too low for it to be a compelling option in decks that might otherwise want to make use of it. We are buffing up its buffs and debuffs and increasing its radius to make it easier to use in chaotic T4 fights. [ Tower Changes ] It is the general principle of the faction design team not to change abilities or introduce complex mechanics needlessly. Cards should generally perform a single function and perform that function well. A lot of the buildings in the game are already well-designed but lack sufficient stats or possess too strict of requirements. As such, we have opted wherever possible to introduce simple changes to bring the tower to the appropriate power level. If you would like to learn more about our thought process behind the tower changes, please head to Skylords Reborn Documents to read our design Deep Dive on Towers, as well as other design documents. Artillery: - Orb requirements: 2 Fire, 2 Shadow ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Shadow, 2 Neutral - Power cost: 190p ➜ 150p Deepgorge: - Power cost: 225p ➜ 200p - Damage: 480, up to 720 in total (3000 dp20) ➜ 675, up to 1015 in total (3760 dp20) - Cold Clutch freeze radius: 20m ➜ 25m Frost Crystal: - Power cost: 70p ➜ 60p - Damage: 72, up to 110 in total (728 dp20) ➜ 92, up to 138 in total (920 dp20) - Frost Wave freeze radius: 20m ➜ 25m Hammerfall: - Power cost: 150p ➜ 130p Hatecaster: - Orb costs: 2 Fire, 2 Nature ➜ 1 Fire, 1 Nature, 2 Neutral Howling Shrine: - Life points: 3160 ➜ 4260 - Linked Fire support: 1 support ➜ 4 support provided while out of combat Living Tower: - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 10m Mindweaver: - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m - Damage: 250, up to 375 in total (1900 dp20) ➜ 290, up to 435 in total (2200 dp20) Necroblaster: - Splash radius: 10m ➜ 12m - Corpse cost per shot: 500 life points ➜ 825 life points - Maximum corpses storable: 4500 ➜ 6600 life points - Corpse gathering radius: 33m ➜ 40m Primal Defender: - Cloudstrike damage: 220 ➜ 225 per hit Rioter's Retreat, - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m Stone Hurler, - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m Time Vortex: - Life points: 2820 ➜ 1830 - Splash radius: 5m ➜ 8m Tower of Flames: - Damage: 216, up to 324 in total (2160 dp20) ➜ 266, up to 399 in total (2660 dp20) - Splash Radius: 5m ➜ 10m Twilight Bombard: - Splash radius: 10m ➜ 15m Volcano: - Orb cost: 3 Fire, 1 Neutral ➜ 2 Fire, 2 Neutral - Gifted Eruption(g): - Self regeneration: 150 ➜ 200 life points per second - Regeneration duration: 5 sec ➜ 10 sec [ Miscellaneous Changes ] - Mind controlled units can no longer be targeted by revive effects. - NoClaim and NoCardPlay have been removed from the effects list of The Incredible Mo and Dryad(g) as neither are debuffs nor weakening effects. This means that these two cards will no longer prevent the removal of ground presence or the removal of the ability to claim walls, Power Wells, and Monuments. - The temporary immunity to revive effects on units recently resurrected by Promise of Life is now displayed as an effect. - Viridya / Ravenheart: Now spawn summoned units one at a time, no longer requiring the player to kill one unit to spawn a third unit. - Changed several more units with unbound power costs to show 0 power as the power cost when hovering over them in-game. - The following units have had their class changed from Beast to Primordial: Deepcoil Worm, Deep One, Fathom Lord, Fire Worm, Magma Fiend, Shadow Worm, and Twilight Horror - The ability "Accelerated Construction" has been renamed to "Fast Construction" to conserve space on cards. - Added visual effect for Dying Breed on air units. - Magma Spore now properly shows it is Swift. - Portal Nexus's Explosive Death now has a range preview when hovered over. - Viridya and promo Viridya's Treespirits have been renamed to Viridya's Treespirits. - The Bandit random PvE boss Equestrian Twins debuff duration has been decreased from infinite to 30 seconds. PvP Balance Changes [ New Card Design Spotlight - Twilight Crawler ] Twilight Crawlers will be a new addition to Twilight decks in T2 and widen the pool of potential transformation targets. They will be a Twilight oriented replacement for Scythe Fiends with the upsides of lower costs and an increased durability against ranged units and spells, creating synergy with healing effects like Ravage. Their transformation ability grants a faster animation, leading to a lowered risk of getting interrupted in PvP scenarios. With fast movement, they will add more versatility to the Fire Nature T2 and even more so when opting for a Twilight unit deck. [ New Card Design Spotlight - Tranquility ] We are happy to add a second spell to the Amii faction. Tranquility was designed as a flexible T2 support spell, emphasizing Amii's current PvP identity with a strong early game oriented around low energy trading. As the majority of units accessible by Shadow Nature are very cheap, the existing single target buffs from shadow splashes exceed the unit cost, makes buffing units less efficient compared to playing a second unit most of the time. The Foreboding Whispers effect should add more counterplay when facing buffed single units, which opt into focusing down Power Wells. Beside Nightguard, who has been nerfed recently, Amii lacks direct counters for L/XL units, making them slow to take down key targets. As the spell scales fairly well into higher tiers, it might also see play in late game battles, as well as PvE scenarios. [ Twilight Rework ] Twilight Transformation: The Twilight Transformation mechanic has been perceived as disappointing by most of our players. The existing aura effects were not cost efficient, and the upside of creating strong units with reduced bound power was overshadowed by Breeding Grounds. On top of that, the transformation mechanic was very clunky. A two second channel time made it difficult to use the ability in the midst of battle. A unit would risk taking a large chunk of unnecessary damage during channel time, or even have its transformation canceled by crowd control. As we have wanted to buff Twilight Transformation effects across the board, the clunky nature of this ability needed to be addressed first. To achieve this goal, we reduced the channel time of all Twilight Transformations. To address the issue of weak transformation effects, we will buff up existing ones while also adding several new mechanics, rewarding players for engaging in smart transformations. We intend to keep working on the Twilight archetype into the future, including focusing on more PvE centric changes following the same design approach seen here. This should ideally solidify the transformation ability as a powerful mechanic and make Twilight as a faction more rewarding and fun to play overall. Slaver: - Power cost: 75p ➜ 70p - Blowout: - Now also damages air units - Now also triggers after transformation -. Infused Blowout(r): - Max damage: 450 ➜ 900 total damage - Now knocks back S-units - Tainted Blowout(p): - Max damage: 350 ➜ 810 total damage - Now knocks back S and M-units Slaver was outclassed by other L-counter options in Fire Nature decks. As we want to allow more options for Twilight oriented decks, the high slot investment for its various units needs to offer more value in return. With the listed changes, we want to allow Slaver to compete with other L-counter options and also add more room for creative usage of the blowout ability. Channeling a transformation or killing the unit by yourself to get extra burst damage in critical situations should create interesting gameplay options, especially since it has an in-built L-counter bonus that gets applied even after the unit dies. Twilight Brute: - New passive, "Bloodlust": If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly units within a 20m radius to restore 25% of their damage dealt as life points. Lasts for 20 seconds. Based on its stats, Twilight Brute has been a viable option to Fire Nature decks in the past. Its playrate was strictly limited due to deck slot issues though, as the unit was good at defending against key units like Bandit Stalker or Scythe Fiends, but didn’t add much pressure during counter-attacks compared to other M counter options like Skyfire Drake. To raise the incentive of playing him in Twilight decks, we will add a new Transformation effect, that can enable strong counterattacks after a successful defense. We will keep an eye on him to see if he can find his place in Twilight decks moving forward. We might also adjust his Burstout ability in the near future, which was not touched this patch cycle for workload reasons. Twilight Minions: - Gifted / Infused Incentive radius: 20m ➜ 25m - Gifted Incentive(g): Now also affects Fire and Nature units - Infused Incentive(r) damage buff: 50% ➜ 65% Twilight Minions fill the role of a main M-counter regardless of whether you want to pursue the current Fire Nature style or move towards a Twilight oriented deck. We want to make sure the transformations are a little more useful for both of these decks. Vileblood: - Gifted / Infused Liquids, radius: 15m ➜ 18m - Gifted Liquids(g) healing: 200 ➜ 250 life points per wave - Infused Liquids(r): - Damage: 100, up to 330 in total ➜ 130, up to 520 in total - Now knocks back S and M-unit - No longer damages structures We are buffing the Vileblood transformation towards unit damage instead of cheesing for a guaranteed 600 damage on power wells. With the newly added knockback, it should be fairly useful to punish stacked melee counter units. Also buffing the green affinity a little bit to keep up in value. Mutating Maniac: - Removed "Hex" passive ability (both affinities). - New passive, "Infused Fervor"(r): - If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly Twilight units within a 20m radius to move 40% faster. Additionally, they will deal 50% more damage. Lasts for 15 seconds. - New passive, "Gifted Fervor"(g): - If the unit is transformed, it will incite friendly Twilight units within a 20m radius to move 40% faster. Additionally, they will be immune to all major debuffs. Lasts for 15 seconds. Since its previous changes, Mutating Maniac started performing fairly well in multiple decks. That said, the transformation ability remained fairly underwhelming. The effect was both very weak and there was no unit worth transforming into. Since moving Nightshade Plant to T3 will change the second part, we are remedying the first issue by replacing the current transformation effect with a more powerful one. If utilized correctly, this should make transforming worthwhile despite the significant power investment. Nightshade Plant: - Orb cost: 2 Nature, 2 Fire (T4) ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Fire, 1 Hybrid (T3) - Damage: 6380 ➜ 4100 - Life points: 5800 ➜ 3400 - New passive, "Siege": Deals 50% more damage against structures. - New passive "Adept Mutation": Reduced transformation cost 208p ➜ 180p - Tainted Tendrils, damage: 50 per sec ➜ 20 per sec Nightshade Plant has been highly redundant in PvE due to being outclassed by Abomination. As the card's design doesn't enable a different playstyle for Twilight decks, we have decided to rework it into a T3 unit that is most efficient when being summoned through transformation. This should add more depth to the Twilight archetype in both PvP and PvE. In PvP, Fire Nature often doesn't have the option of playing more than 2 or 3 cards in T3. This led to late game issues against more defensive oriented decks. Closing out leads was often quite a tough task outside the top echelons of play. Adding a strong game finisher will help the faction to compete to a certain extent. Decks including various Twilight units from earlier game stages will have more strategic options to utilize the card through different transformation effects. Twilight Minions will provide a very cheap summoning, Twilight Crawlers can quickly move to desired locations before transforming, and Mutating Maniac will provide the most powerful transformation buff and unit synergy. [ Bandit Touch-up ] Bandits has been in a very strong position ever since the release of its new cards, especially in lower ELOs. As a result, we will tweak it from both ends by slightly nerfing Bandit Minefield and Bandit Stalker, while also buffing some of its most favorable matchups with Pure Nature and Fire Nature. We received a lot of feedback mainly regarding the Bandit Minefield being perceived as fairly oppressive and will closely observe whether this continues to be the case after this set of changes. Bandit Minefield: - Cooldown: 25 seconds ➜ 30 seconds Bandit Minefield has been extremely popular since its release. We noticed the spell is getting spammed a lot, as it ensures great trades in almost any state of the game. Microing around the spell and punishing a player during its cooldown is supposed to be this spells intended counterplay. This downside demands a good understanding of matchup from the opponent's side as well as a solid level of execution, making the card even more efficient in lower ELOs. As we want to add more possibilities to play around the spell, we will increase its cooldown. This should open up bigger time windows to attack a Bandit player, who used the spell too recklessly. With reduced power on the Bandit Stalker, see below, there also should be more room to make use of beast creatures that can avoid the mines more consistently due to their mobility. Bandit Stalker(g): - Damage against Beasts: 100% more damage ➜ 80% more damage Bandit Stalker received a powerful buff in the past to help Bandits deal with a lot of the beast units, against which the faction used to struggle. With new powerful cards added to the faction, Bandits has become a bit too good against beast reliant decks. As a result, we decided to reduce the beast bonus damage on the green affinity of Bandit Stalker, providing players with the opportunity to snowball a lead against Bandits without getting shut down by this powerful counter unit. Bandit Lancer: - Branding targeting range: 5m ➜ 8m - Added a targeting range preview to Branding when hovered over. QoL changes which will make the ability smoother to use. [ Miscellaneous Changes ] Deep One: - Life points: 1450 ➜ 1500 - Gifted Catch root immunity duration: 20 seconds ➜ 10 seconds - Species class: Beast ➜ Primordial Pure Nature did not perform to the level we had hoped after its small rework. While we do think it was the right move to reduce Deep One’s health pool, we went a little too far. Pure Nature started struggling to break through strong Frost Splash defenses. We will revert some parts of the health nerfs and also reduce the CC immunity duration applied by gifted catch, which had a much longer duration compared to the usual cc abilities. Outside of that, the Nature versus Bandits matchup has been perceived as fairly oppressive amongst most players that gave us feedback. Deep One will move from Beast to the new Primordial class to make sure it is not getting hard countered by units like Bandit Stalker in the future. With more freedom to use its various units in skirmishes, Nature should also gain more room to play around Bandit Minefield. The spell strongly punishes any misplacement of Ghostspears or Spirit Hunters, which were the only viable trading units in this matchup, assuming a normal nature deck build was being played. Emberstrike: - Fire Lance can no longer damage Monuments and Power Wells. Small change to alleviate issues regarding the card in 2vs2 in order to keep games enjoyable without affecting any PvE unit interactions. Icefang Raptor: - Infused Reserve(r): 30% ➜ 35% of damage reflected to melee attackers - Blessed Reserve(b): 25% ➜ 30% damage reduction With the addition of Amii Paladins and buffs to cards like Twilight Minions or Ghostspears, the impact of small sized medium counters has increased overall. As a result, Icefang Raptor has fallen a bit behind. Its issues are amplified by the bonus counter passives of some S-units it is supposed to fight against, such as Stone Shards or Bandit Spearmen. Adding more power to the unit's passive should balance this out and push the unit further towards decks that can provide appropriate support in the first place. Mumbo Jumbo: - Debuff (both affinities): 20% ➜ 25% Adding a bit of power to Mumbo Jumbo as the spell is fairly difficult to use. The buffs should enable a small extra reward for nature players opting into a large T1 without altering the potentially unhealthy interactions around its spawn presence denial. Warden's Sigil - New passive, "Fast Construction": Construction time is reduced by 50% - Cooldown: 20 seconds ➜ 15 seconds Frost T1 has struggled a lot against early T2 attacks centered around Nightcrawlers and Burrowers. These units were capable of ignoring any counters entirely by focusing down structures. This inherent weakness often pushed players in the direction of playing frost very aggressively instead of methodically securing map control and power leads over time. These changes to Warden's Sigil should add more options for Frost to keep power wells alive without altering its capabilities in unit trading. While Warden's Sigil will be able to help a player get through the early game more consistently, it will be at the cost of fewer card slots for higher tier options. Since we did not want to support forward siege building strategies, the ability to attach on buildings under construction will only remain on the green affinity (this already got added in the last patch).

I can add to this list aswell: - PS: But joking aside, I played one here and math says it was worth building it (as I had some unused slots anyway) or it did not matter (for the action count). If it not saved me an action, it was worth time wise, as I had a very long T2 phase.

Here is a comprehensive list of maps and wells where Juicy Tank is actually viable: - Jokes aside, Juice Tank lives in the contradiction of being a card that one wants to build as soon as possible (to maximize long-term return) but only gets value from a certain point - that is whenever the well would run out of power (since production per time increment remains the same). Consider a 600 capacity power well - it lasts for 20m. That's the lowest well capacity in the game. If you build JT as soon as the well its built you maximize the long-term power gain. However JT is effectively useless for those 20mins due to the production per time remaining the same. Playing a card that is only a waste of power for such a long time is never worthed in my opinion.

Looks good! As written, I prefer the green Rioter's Retreat. Mine and Shrine of War should then replace Unholy Power and Unholy Hero in the future. If you have enough charges for your T4 units, you don't need Rifle Cultists + Offering green anymore. Then you have two more deck slots free again (f.e. Amok, Inferno and/or Cluster Explosion red). But remember: Banidts can be difficult to play for beginners due to lack of cc and healing spells. However, it is an A-/S-tier faction if you can master it. So don't be discouraged. PS: This is what my allrounder Bandit deck would look like (cPvE). Depending on the map, I would choose between Sunstriders or Nomads. But the whole thing changes significantly, of course, when you play a map where you have to defend a lot.

Not really sure if it is doable in 20 numbers (byte/characters) but easily doable in 40 to 80 (a brute force way is just to have 20 slots of card ids, you can take a few extra bits for upgrade/charges or not). I sometimes use hashes to generate a set (e.g. some decks are really the same just different order).

Hotfix - 06 June 2022 Fixed game crashes caused by damage abilities like Cluster Explosion. Fixed empty deck slots preventing progression in some of the new achievements. Fixed unobtainable orb on the map "Behind Enemy Lines" in the northwest. Fixed occasional errors in the reforging system, which occurred when reforging the last remaining copies of the same card.

Map Balance Changes PvE Map Changes Behind Enemy Lines: increased initial power wells from 2 to 3. All three have a capacity of 1200, equivalent to a 40 min lifetime. Behind Enemy Lines is a map with a high failure rate with non-Nightguard strategies, and is none to have substantial periods where the player is forced to wait. The primary goal is to keep the map strategic and difficult, while removing the tedious moments. A secondary goal is to buff non-Nightguard strategies in preparation for the upcoming changes to mind control. Convoy: buildings are now properly blocked from being built in the canyon in the center of the map in all locations. Nightmare Shard: increased initial power wells from 2 to 3 and increased the capacity of the T2 & T3 power wells from 600 (20 min) to 900 (30 min). Once the goal is activated to destroy the infected Twilight spawns (which occurs either after the player has reached the Shard or the first Twilight Witch spawns, whichever is first) the fog of war over each infected camp is cleared in a 35m radius. The average completion time for this map on expert is 48 minutes. The idea is to increase early power generation to reduce waiting, and to increase well capacity in-line with how long the map actually takes. Additionally, many players do not have a good idea of the strength of the various Twilight camps. The choice to remove the fog of war over the camps should help the players to make a better informed decision of where next to attack. Nightmare's End: increased initial power wells from 2 to 3 and increased initial well capacity from 900 (30 min) to 1200 (40 min). Increased the capacity of the T2 power wells from 600 (20 min) to 900 (30 min). Nightmare's End has an average completion time of 72 minutes. This makes it the longest map in the game, and it is notoriously frustrating, leading to low replayability. Initial power generation and well capacity does not match the map's actual difficulty or length, so we are hopeful these changes can help bring about a smoother gameplay experience. There are other issues with the map in need of changing, but they will need to wait for a future patch. The Dwarven Riddle: added a monument and 3 power wells on each side of the map, regardless of number of players. This change will allow both players to go T4. It should only affect players who play the map in a more "standard" method, in contrast to the speedrun method. Standardized all official single player campaign maps to have 4 gold chests. Defending Hope: added 2 gold chests to match the standard. Ocean: removed 2 gold chests to match the standard. The Soultree: added 1 gold chest to match the standard Introduction: added one gold chest to introduce new players to the concept of gold chests. PvP Map Changes While PvP has been moving steadily towards a more and more balanced state, a major issue we still face is the maps themselves. Just like we previously made changes to the 1v1 maps, we are happy to finally unveil our changes to all the 2v2 PvP maps (and Yrmia). These changes should create a more competitive and fair play environment, with many existing imbalances and cheese opportunities removed. All minimaps have been adjusted to reflect the changes and to be more accurate in general. [ 1v1 Maps ] Yrmia / Yrmia (Spectator Map): Decreased the capacity of all power wells with 900 capacity to 600 capacity (1). Decreased the capacity of all power wells with 1500 capacity to 600 capacity (2). [ 2v2 Maps ] Danduil: Removed the 4 fortification walls surrounding the Monuments on both sides. Added 1 power well of 600 power capacity at each of the 4 monument positions in the corners. Fixed an issue where it was not possible to spawn non-S-sized units by the ground presence solely provided by the outer power wells (2 and 3). Swapped the starting positions including the power wells and monuments of the teams, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Fyre: Increased the construction cost of the 4 outer fortification walls from 25 to 50 energy. Decreased these wall's distance to the power wells. These walls can no longer be built by enemies if the player or ally own the power well closest to the wall. Additionally, slightly narrowed the layout of the respective area around the wall in the bottom left to enable the same effect there. Added flying blocking at the 2 big lakes in the center to prevent sieging across them with long-ranged flying units. This is now visualized by permanently present clouds in the area. The power wells in the top left of the upper starting base now provide spawn presence for units and buildings. The power wells in the bottom right of the lower starting base now provide better spawn presence for units and buildings. Fixed various other minor blocking issues. Swapped the starting positions including the power wells and monuments of the teams, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Gorgash: Increased the construction cost of the fortification walls at each starting position from 25 to 50 power. These walls are no longer pre-built at the start of the game. Increased all player's starting void power from 400 to 425 to compensate for wall changes. Decreased the power cost of the walls at the central northern and southern bases at the border of map from 75 to 50 energy. Adjusted the position of the monuments and power wells in all 6 bases in the north and south of the map to decrease distance to the wall. These walls can no longer be built by enemies if the player or ally owns the power well or monument closest to it. Removed the 2 walls around the northern and southern bases in the center of the map. Changed the layout of power wells and monuments in these bases by rotating each cluster by 180 degrees. Moved the power wells and monuments in these bases outwards, hence further away from the center of the map. Removed the northern and southern power well in the well cluster in the middle of the map. Moved the 4 power well clusters near the outer left and outer right bases closer to the center. Swapped the starting positions including the power wells and monuments of the teams, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Koshan: Swapped the starting positions between players, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Added 2 ramps to the sides of the new start positions, granting access to the plateau behind. Opened up the plateaus in the corners by creating connecting ramps towards the diagonal of the map. Adjusted the positions of wells, so that they are further away from the nearby wall, and thus hostile units mounted on the wall cannot attack the wells anymore. Nadai: Added 1 power well of 1200 capacity at each side of the center monument position. Adjusted the positions of monuments and walls, so that 4 of the walls cannot be taken anymore if an enemy has taken the adjacent monument. Adjusted the positions of monuments, so that they are further away from the nearby wall, and thus hostile units mounted on the wall cannot attack the orb anymore. Swapped the starting positions including the starting power wells and monuments only within teams for consistency, whilst preserving map symmetry. Turan: Opened up the middle of the map by creating 4 connecting paths between the power well clusters and the central monument. Swapped the starting positions including the power wells and monuments of the teams, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Yshia: Adjusted the positions of the 4 outer fortification walls to prevent offensive walling, by moving them outwards and thus closer to the power wells and monuments there. Opened up the plateaus by adding 2 ramps to each of them. Widened one of the ramps leading up to the two small plateaus. Increased the cost of the plateau walls from 25 to 50. Moved the well clusters more towards the center of the plateau, but keeping them close to the wall to prevent offensive walling. Moved the monuments previously located off the plateau to add to each of them 1 power well of 600 power capacity. Swapped the starting positions including the power wells and monuments of the teams, whilst preserving previous symmetry. Zahadune: Added flying blocking at various places at the borders of the bodies of water to prevent sieging across them with long-ranged flying units. This is now visualized by permanently present clouds in the area. Fire Random PvE Balance Changes Fire was added as an enemy faction in rPvE in our Anniversary Patch. While we are currently working on adding Nature as the next faction to fight against, we have been keeping a close eye on the balance and player experience against Fire among all skill levels. With this patch, we will be making some changes to improve the experience. [ System Changes ] - Significantly reduced the difficulties 6 and below. - Volcano now only spawns in level 4 camps and beyond.* - Incoming attack waves should now be less oppressive on higher difficulties. [ Bosses ] Removed fire class from all fire boss units - Protector's Seal no longer blocks the damage of Fire bosses. Abaddon: - Rage: - Reduced the damage bonus from the second stage from 300% to 200%. - Gates of Hell: - Reduced the initial damage from 800 (2400 in total) to 400 (1200 in total). - Reduced the eruption damage from 2000 (6000 in total) to 1000 (3000 in total). Aspect of Summer: - Global Warming: No longer prevents ice shield from being applied to target units. Brannoc: - Reduced life points from 65000 to 60000. - Fire Sphere: - Increased channeling time from 3 to 5 seconds. - Reduced damage from 2000 (10000 in total) to 1500 (7500 in total). - Reduced the radius from 25m to 20m. - Reduced the casting range 30m to 25m. Fireback: - Increased life points from 30000 to 40000. Fiend of Fire: - Flamethrower: Reduced damage per second from 600 to 500. Molten Golem: - Blazing Surface: Reduced damage returned from 50% to 25%. Vulcanos: - Unit is now XL. - Can now damage air units. [ Units ] Emberstrike: - Fire Lance - Reduced damage from 1200 (3100 in total) to 1000 (2500 in total). - Only deals 50% damage to structures. Firesworn: - Fixed a bug that prevented the unit from attacking units other than L-sized units. Fire Dragon: - Rage: Reduced the damage bonus from the second stage from 300% to 200%. Fire Worm: - Earthquake: - Reduced the damage per hit from 1000 to 500. - Now properly deals L counter damage. Magma Spore: - Ground Blast: - Reduced the damage from 720 (1120 in total) to 350 (1050 in total). - Reduced the area Radius 15m -> 10m. Spitfire: - Fire Bomb: Reduced range from 50m to 35m. [ Buildings ] Pyromaniac: - Reduced the duration of the damage over time debuff from 10 seconds to 3 seconds. Tower of Flames: - Volcanic Ground: - Reduced the damage from 6 times 200/1000 to 6 times 150/750. - Reduced the range from 25m to 20m. Volcano: - Reduced life points from 5000 to 3500. - Reduced the size by 10%. New Building: Flame Crystal - Spawns in Level 4 and Level 5 camps* and will periodically remove debuffs and cc effects from allied units Fire can be extremely strong, but due to its high attack and low defense, it is extra vulnerable to Crowd Control spells. We want to counter this weakness with a brand-new building, while some major enemy damage dealers have been rebalanced * Level 3 camps are usually right behind the T3/T4 camp; Level 4 camps are the row behind Level 3; Level 5 is always the last row. Map Editor Changes Increased maximum allowed file size of community maps from 64 to 512 megabytes. Added optional verbose logging for LUA. This is relevant for mapmakers and can be enabled in the debug section of the configuration file at `/Battleforge/config.json` using the `lua` configuration. The logs can be found in the `/Battleforge/Diag` folder. Increased max brush size in the map editor. Fixed crashes for the height map generation for Random PvE in the map editor in certain cases. Allowed selection of the fire Random PvE preset in the map editor. Bugfixes Fixed issue related to character names becoming too long with the added `{GM}` prefix and not being able to be whispered. Fixed issue with deleting community maps while they are being downloaded by another player. Fixed incorrect ordering for all time rankings in the leaderboards. Fixed ability to add 21 cards or 21 boosters to trade, instead of 20. Fixed too large scroll step size for upgrade view when trying to scroll through the upgrades. It now scrolls with the same steps as the cards scroll view. Fixed inconsistencies in the Amii card frames. Card descriptions will no longer overflow into the card artwork. Fixed walk speed mismatch between respawned squad members and existing ones, causing the group as a whole to move at an unfavorable speed. This could be noticed for example with Werebeasts and Strikers. Fixed wrong displayed remaining card charges for Offering in rare cases Fixed incorrect handling of overkill stampede damage when destroying buildings. In general, this has a nerfing effect on stampede. Improved error handling and logging for issues related to starting BattleForge with DirectX10. and many more!

Card Balance Changes Global Balance Changes Each unit size has a defined limit of how many melee units of a given category can attack it at once. This limit directly affects the viability of melee units in a way that is not true for ranged units. As part of how balancing efforts, we have decided to increase the amount of melee units which can attack a given unit at a time. This should prove especially helpful for early strategies utilizing S-units or when fighting against boss units in RPvE with a primarily melee army. Numbers of melee attackers for creatures of different sizes: A single S creature can be attacked by at most 4 Normal, 6 Reach and 2 Huge attackers ➜ at most 6 Normal, 9 Reach and 4 Huge attackers A single M creature can be attacked by at most 6 Normal, 10 Reach and 2 Huge attackers ➜ at most 9 Normal, 15 Reach and 4 Huge attackers A single L creature can be attacked by at most 8 Normal, 12 Reach and 4 Huge attackers ➜ at most 12 Normal, 18 Reach and 6 Huge attackers A single XL creature can be attacked by at most 12 Normal, 14 Reach and 6 Huge attackers ➜ at most 18 Normal, 21 Reach and 8 Huge attackers Normal = S & M-units. Reach = Units with extended range. Ghostspears is a good example. Huge = L and XL-units. S-units count as 1 normal (or reach) attacker. M-units count as 2 normal (or reach) attackers. L-units count as 1 Huge attacker. XL-units count as 2 Huge attackers. Fortification walls: increased the gate's toggle cooldown from 1.4 seconds to 3.4 seconds. Some units were unable to attack or pass through a gate when it was rapidly toggled between closed and open. Twilight's Transformation ability: added scaling to the transformation cost based on tier. Tier 2 units remain at 85% Tier 3 units from 85% ➜ 80% Tier 4 units from 85% ➜ 75% Twilight Transformation is now as efficient as Breeding Grounds at T4. Changed all cone-attacker splash radii to 38m (ie. Frost Mage). This would reduce out-of-range issues faced by cards of this type. PvE Balance Changes The focus this patch for both PvE and PvP has been on the Nature faction. For more information on our vision for Nature, check out our Nature Deep Dive. While changes are split here between PvE and PvP sections, many of the changes, such as Parasite, Shrine of Memory, and Spikeroot, 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 ] Amazon (Nature): - Wildlife Protection radius increase: 20m ➜ 30m Quality of life change to make it easier to use Amazon(g) with Werebeasts in T1. Fountain of Rebirth - Ritual of Rebirth healing: 15 / 18 / 21 / 25 life points regenerated ➜ 20 / 23 / 26 / 30 life points regenerated globally A small buff to enable the Fountain to be used in more scenarios, particularly when supporting non-Nature players in multiplayer. Treespirit: - Unit cost decrease: 60p ➜ 50p - Life points reduction: 680 / 720 / 800 / 880 ➜ 560 / 600 / 660 / 730 - Thorns damage reduction: 100, up to 150 total ➜ 75, up to 115 total These changes to Treespirit were initially intended to turn the unit solely into a Root Network battery, but testing has shown increased viability in all game modes due to the ability to spam them out quickly, a trait that Nature T1 otherwise lacks. The cost reduction means a net benefit for Root Network decks, allowing them to set-up more quickly while binding significantly less power. [ Tier 2 ] Healing Well: - Water of Life: - Added initial healing capacity of 1500 life points. - Recharge rate increase: 20 life points per second ➜ 50 life points per second Purely support buildings typically need to provide a lot of benefit to be considered for inclusion in a player's deck. Currently, Healing Well takes 2 minutes and 30 seconds, or 150 seconds total, to fill its healing capacity of 3000. This is a recharge rate of 20 life points per second. Given that the building starts with 0 initial capacity, this means that the player must not only wait for the building to construct, but also well over a minute before the building becomes usable, and then only for a few seconds before they will need to wait again. In some sense, this mimics an initial and recurring ability cooldown timer, but we do not think this state of affairs is proper to this card. These changes should allow Healing Well to fulfill its purpose as a stable source of sustain in a localized area. Sunken Temple: - Orb requirements changed: 2 Nature ➜ 1 Nature, 1 Neutral - Building cost reduction: 120p ➜ 110p - Swapped Shadow and Nature affinities of the card. - Plague: - Changed from active ability to passive auto-cast ability with a cooldown of 30 seconds. - Now displays a respawn status bar indicator. - Summoned Pest Creepers: - Unit now dies after 40 / 60 / 60 / 60 seconds. - Added immunity against reviving effects. - Can no longer be infected with the Twilight Curse. - No longer grants ground presence. - Green affinity poison duration increase: 4 ➜ 5 seconds Sunken Temple is a spawner building with has a high upfront cost of 120 bound power and a continually high cost of 80p for each ability activation. Given that the units it spawns are unbound units, the building will eventually pay itself off. This payoff comes in the form of melee S-units, which already begin to struggle in T2, particularly in PvE. Additionally, while the building eventually pays itself off, the time it takes for this to occur is quite long, both in terms of power cost and in-game time. This is not helped by Nature's newfound lack of void manipulation in T2. In nearly all scenarios, it would be better to push for T3 with a different strategy than using Sunken Temples. One of the holes that currently exists in Nature's T2 is the lack of a splashable defensive tower. Even Pure Nature's tower, Living Tower, is often lacking when not supported by other root network entities. The idea with this change is to turn Sunken Temple into a shrine which continually spawns short-lived defensive units. These units can then be paired with cards like Infected Tower to create permanent Twilight bugs or Furnace of Flesh for some minor void manipulation. [ Tier 3 ] Northland Drake: - Unit cost increase: 240p ➜ 300p - Life points increase: 2435 / 2560 / 2820 / 3100 ➜ 3235 / 3360 / 3620 / 3900 - Frost Breath (auto-cast) damage increase: 265, up to 398 total (2370 dp20) ➜ 400, up to 600 total (3570 dp20) - Active ability Blizzard: - Duration increase: 10 seconds ➜ 15 seconds - Ability cost increase: 60p ➜ 70p - Infused(r) Blizzard's flat damage bonus to frozen units is now consistently dealt against all frozen targets damaged by the storm. We have done a lot to buff Pure Frost, but have thus far neglected Northland Drake. We wanted to give the card a substantial buff, but needed to sharply increase its power cost to avoid any potential issues with PvP. Overall, this constitutes a 20% total increase in stat efficiency and a much improved ability. Oracle Mask: - Mysticism: - Increased duration of the internal buff from 8 / 8 / 10 / 10 seconds ➜ 12 / 15 / 15 /15 seconds to match the external buff. - Changed the buff effect of the aura around friendly buildings from granting units invisibility ➜ units take 100% less damage. - The granted buff of the aura will now reapply to existing units in range. - Changed the displayed status bar icon on affected units and buildings from the card artwork icon to the ability's activation icon. - Added a proper global status bar description. - The visual effect of the activation no longer lasts an unlimited time on Oracle Mask. The old Oracle Mask was incredibly bugged and allowed the player to unbind their entire army and generate free units. This is a stopgap measure while we work on redesigning Oracle Mask entirely. Shrine of Martyrs: - Power cost increase: 125p ➜ 220p - Blessing of the Martyr: Now a permanent, passive effect. Only one Blessing of the Martyr can be active at a time per team. We have envisioned Pure Frost as a macro-based faction oriented around good preparation and diverse unit compositions. The recent changes have given Frost players a lot to do in terms of micromanagement, and the newly buffed Shrine of Martyrs has only added to that by requiring the player to check back every 30 seconds. Given Frost's nature as a faction, which we discussed at length in our Deep Dive into Pure Frost, we would like to test out a version of Shrine of Martyrs which applies a permanent global buff. By doing so, we hope to cut out some of the micromanagement we have added to Frost in recent patches. Shrine of Memory: - Orb requirements increased: 2 Nature (T2) ➜ 2 Nature, 1 Neutral (T3) - Power cost increased: 100p ➜ 120p - Echoes of the Past: - Void return percentage increase: 100% / 150% / 200% / 200% ➜ 150% / 175% / 225% / 300% - Maximum void return increased: 20 power per 2 seconds ➜ 80 power per 2 seconds - Also affects allies now, also only one Echoes of the Past can be active per team. - Decreased duration: 30 / 30 / 30 / 35 seconds ➜ 30 seconds on all upgrades. As a T2 building, Shrine of Memory sees play in PvP scenarios regularly, but falls behind in PvE compared to other void return mechanics. Its current effect is most efficient with medium amounts of void power, but actually loses efficiency beyond a certain threshold (333) and only works for the player which owns the structure. This means that Pure Nature as a faction has very poor void return tools, which is a major reason it is currently so weak. Turning SoM into a tier 3 buildings opens up significant space for buffs. Shrine of Memory now affects allies again, an ability which was originally taken away due to its strength in 2v2 PvP. Additionally, we have increased the void return percentage and allowed it to overcome the natural void return cap to allow it to compete with other void return options in T3. The goal is that after this change, all four factions will have competitive void return options which are thematically appropriate to the faction itself. Stone Warrior: - Damage increase: 1700 dp20 ➜ 1850 dp20 - Life points reduction: 1950 / 2020 / 2170 / 2360 ➜ 1750 / 1820 / 1970 / 2160 - Shatter Lance activation cost reduction: 100p ➜ 80p - Gifted(g) Shatter Lance: Can now target structures. Deals 50% damage against structures. The blue affinity was recently given the ability to damage frozen buildings. The green affinity's description suggests it can do the same, and we don't see anything wrong with the interaction, so we have modified them to be consistent. We also reduced the ability cost to buff both affinities slightly. Stat realignment is for PvP viability which leaves unit with identical stat efficiency, which is the same as Mutating Maniac, better than Mutating Frenzy, and slightly worse than Fathom Lord. Sylvan Gate: - Power cost reduction: 110p ➜ 80p - Add "Accelerated Construction" - Construction time is reduced by 50%. - Change Linked Fire ➜ Repeater - Range: 25m ➜ 100m - Sylvan Gate no longer provides support itself - Move affinities to their own passive: - Change Blessed(b) affinity to Tainted(p) affinity - Friendly entities connected to the root network within a 25m radius around Sylvan Gate will deal piercing damage - Infused(r) affinity - Friendly entities connected to the root network within a 25m radius around Sylvan Gate will deal 25% more damage. Sylvan Gate is in a prime place for a redesign. We would like to turn Sylvan Gate into a long-distance Root Network repeater, a role that fits perfectly with its existing tunnel ability. With these changes, a single Sylvan Gate will cover 200m and be able to connect support from every root entity within 100m in every direction. This means that Sylvan Gate can bridge massive distances, allowing the player to easily move their frontline root network unit while leaving their root network battery far away from the battlefield. Thornbark: - Linked Fire, out-of-combat support provided increase: 1 ➜ 3. One of the aspects of root networks that has always been a little weird is the fact that every unit provides the same amount of support. There is no scaling, so it is always best to use the cheapest option in terms of power and population limit. With this change, Thornbarks used as root network batteries will provide significantly more support. Now only 2 Thornbarks will be needed to max-out another root network unit with full support. [ Tier 4 ] Banzai Lord: - Counter added: Banzai Lord now has an S-counter - Bird Calling summon amount: 3 birds ➜ 2 birds summoned in total - Banzai Birds: - Damage (p): 1000, up to 3000 ➜ 1500, up to 4500 - Healing (g): 1000 life points ➜ 3000 life points restored - Life points increased: 800 ➜ 1200 - Explosion radius decreased: 25m ➜ 20m Banzai Lord has causing performance issues by spawning massive amounts of birds at once. To mitigate this issue, we reduced the birds from 3 to 2, but increased the damage and health of each bird proportionally. This means that Banzai Lord (p) will continue to deal the same total damage. At the same time, we reduced the explosion radius slightly to give the purple affinity a minor nerf. The green affinity was severely underperforming and each green affinity Bird now provides 3000 life points worth of healing, which should allow it to properly fulfill its healing role. Fire Sphere & Shatter Ice - Fixed incorrect handling of overkill damage. This is the first instance of us changing the way overkill damage works. It should provide a substantial buff for both cards by allowing them to always deal their full potential damage when a sufficient number of enemies are present. Forest Elder: - Flower Power / Pest Plants aura radius: 20m ➜ 30m. - New passive Ability, "Magic Link": Unit is surrounded by a magical zone of 30m radius where summoning friendly units requires 30% less of the usual power costs. Forest Elder is meant to be the apex Pure Nature unit, but currently is a walking Regrowth on steroids and a slightly improved Wheel of Gifts. Pure Nature is a unit-centric deck, and a major part of being a unit-centric deck is needing to summon units. Many players who splash Nature want to summon units in base, next to a Breeding Grounds. It thus feels unsatisfying when you have to summon a unit in the field and miss out on the major cost refund. We wanted to let Nature players stay in the field without waiting for other units to catch-up, as well as decrease the faction's bound power cost. As such, we thought it fitting to give Forest Elder a slightly improved mobile Breeding Grounds effect. More changes will be coming to Forest Elder in the future. Lifestream: - Life Link: - Damage absorption limit increased: 10000 ➜ 20000 damage - Removed maximum ability duration. - Range increased: 200m ➜ 300m - Implemented a new visual effect to prevent confusion with Regrowth. Lifestream is Nature's superweapon equivalent and is a sustain option in a faction overflowing with sustain. In order to be used, it needs to either out compete Regrowth and Forest Elder or possess its own niche use. We have striven for the second option. To do so, we doubled the absorption limit and made the effect last permanently until the limit is reached. This will both increase Lifestream's strength in existing situations, as well as allow it to be used with less active input required from the player's end. Overall, it should fit in better as a part of a fixed defense and compliment Nature's healing in more offensive scenarios. To achieve this second aspect, we also decided to increase its range to 300m to match our recent buff to Comet Catcher. Necrofury: - Unit's default attack: Melee ➜ Ranged. - Damage: 1100 dp20 ➜ 4160 dp20 - Range: 40m attack range - Needs to face enemies in order to target them. - Only affects ground units - Movement speed increase: 4.8 m/s ➜ 6.4 m/s - Nether Bomb is unchanged when switched into this mode. Necrofury is a card with a good concept that doesn't see play outside using its powerful Bone Shards ability to one-shot bosses with Unholy Hero and Fallen Skyelf. We are wanting to leave its current boss killing identity intact while opening it up for general usage. The goal is to allow Necrofury to function as a backline archer without the need to constantly micromanage her. Given Necrofury requires only 1 Shadow orb, it will be flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of decks and provide a reason to single splash a Shadow orb. Overlord: - Blood Share: - Effect radius increase: 15m ➜ 20m - Healing increase: 1000 ➜ 1500 life points - Self-inflicted damage remains at 1000 The ability is currently very thematic and fitting for Overlord but also quite lackluster, so we are giving it a small boost. Primeval Watcher: - Stasis Field targeting: Self-targeting ➜ Targeted area within a 30m radius Primeval Watcher is the primary backline damage dealer for Pure Nature. We want to increase its overall strength and the flexibility of Primeval Watcher's paralyze ability to allow for more offensive application. More changes will be coming to Primeval Watcher in the future. Promise of Life: - Orb requirements changed: 3 Nature, 1 Neutral (T4) ➜ 3 Nature orbs (T3) Allows Promise of Life to combo with Abyssal Warder and Pure Nature in T3, but otherwise has the same restriction for other decks, given it will still require 3 Nature orbs. This combo has proven to be quite powerful in testing and opens up a unique style of play, though one that can feel foreign to Nature. The idea is to attack a location with Abyssal Warder, purposefully allow it to die, and cast Promise of Life just before its death. This causes both a fully restored XL-warder and 2 L-warders to spawn, both of which are unbound. Promise of Life and Abyssal Warder will allow the player to quickly accumulate a large army of unbound units, while the new Shrine of Memory will grant fast void return, resulting into quicker transitions into T4. PvP Balance Changes [ New Card Design Spotlight - Burning Spears ] Burning Spears were designed as a new tool to increase deck building options in pure Fire. The faction currently has a limited pool of pure cards in PvP leading to a very M-unit centric deck design with a limited amount of deck building options and balancing levers to change specific matchup behaviors. The addition of Burning Spears will add a versatile small sized unit into the faction, that is supposed to help with some of the factions counter issues against L and XL units in T2, while demanding a deck slot investment in return. The passive ability enables very high back loaded damage potential to punish players that try to ignore them, whereas the slow and steadfast ability allows Burning Spears to stick to their priority targets while enabling further spell synergies with cards like Wildfire. [ Nature Rework ] Pure Nature has been struggling to find its place in PvP for a long time. The faction features some tools prone to snowballing games once a lead is established. This can be frustrating to play against. While these tools offer great snowball potential, the faction lacks ways to actually get ahead through more conventional means. At higher levels of play the deck could be considered the weakest, since it was possible to shut down the strenght points it has while abusing its weaknesses. To address these issues, we want to increase Nature’s pool of options in open field trades while increasing its capacities of defending structures more consistently. At the same time, we are toning down the snowball mechanics to avoid creating an overly strong faction, which can’t be dealt with at some point in the game. This should lead to a more enjoyable experience for all players involved. Considering some of these changes are quite drastic, follow-up tweaks might be necessary to reach the desired goal. Burrowing Ritual: - Cost reduction: 50p ➜ 40p Our previous plan of slightly buffing Tunnel in PvP didn’t work out for various reasons. As a result, we decided to add a bit of power to one of its combo pieces, making slot investments for Tunneling strategies a little bit more worthwhile. Creeping Paralysis: - Cost reduction: 60p ➜ 50p - Paralyze duration increase: 15s ➜ 20s - Target limit increase: 7 ➜ 10 total targets Adding more crowd control and open field trading options for pure Nature allows the deck to compete with nature splash factions. The listed buffs are supposed to enable its role at defending power wells against melee units by preventing them from focusing down power wells. The spell also excels at disrupting immobile army stacking strategies. Deep One: - Life points reduction: 1650 ➜ 1450 - Catch ability cost reduction: 25p ➜ 10p Deep One happened to be the most stat efficient T2 L-unit. Combined with Surge of Light, this led to very powerful snowball potential, allowing straight focus onto power wells ignoring any counter units. We reduce the overall health ratio to impact the effectiveness of Surge of Light support. On the other hand, we want to maintain Deep One’s ability during more defensive trades and are reducing its ability cost as a result. Deep One’s performance will be highly impacted by the upcoming Nightguard nerf as well. Energy Parasite: - Counter type change: S-counter ➜ M-counter - Power Drain: added 30s initial cooldown Any tool capable of generating maximum energy leads can snowball out of control very quickly. Therefore, preventing Energy Parasites from connecting to power wells at any given state is an absolute must if you want to beat pure Nature consistently. This necessary zoning of Energy Parasites often lead to a tempo loss by default, leading to heavily restricted gameplay options when playing against them. While this power level was necessary to keep pure Nature viable in the past, it did not leave a lot of room to buff the faction. This change is supposed to bring up more counter play options to Energy Parasites while keeping the unit strong and viable. The initial power investment can’t provide fast payoff, as counter unit spawns can be delayed. As nature often struggles with attacks based on M units, we also change the counter type from S to M. This might allow Energy Parasites to be utilized in combat before the initial cooldown goes off. Ghostspears: - Orb requirements changed: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral ➜ 2 Nature orbs - Weapon Change ability cost removed: 10p ➜ 0p - Damage increase: 900 dp20 -> 990 dp20 With the introduction of Amii Paladins, every nature splash has its own melee S-sized M counter nowadays. By moving Ghostspears to pure Nature, we can tweak each of these units to specifically balance them towards each faction's needs. This change opens up room to buff pure Nature’s overall trading capabilities. Parasite: - Orb requirements changed: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral ➜ 2 Nature orbs - Cost reduction: 100p -> 80p - Damage per second increase: 60 / 60 / 60 / 66 dmg/s -> 70 / 70 / 70 / 80 dmg/s - Max targets increase: 4 / 5 / 6 / 6 -> 8 / 9 / 10 / 10 total targets - Fixed damage interval from 0.9 to 1 sec without increasing total damage Pure Nature had little room to interact with air units in the past. Spirit Hunter poison gets countered by strong sustain tools (Ravage, Crystal Fiend healing etc.) and Parasite Swarm is too expensive and too susceptible to cc in order to work consistently. Parasite is supposed to be a strong support tool addressing this issue. Additionally, the card synergizes well with crowd control options to deal with stacked unit setups. We will move orb requirements towards pure nature to avoid interactions with splash factions, creating space for such a strong buff. Parasite Swarm: - Splash damage removed - Total damage increase: 16, up to 24 total damage (800 dp20) ➜ 24 damage (960 dp20) - Counter type change: M-counter ➜ XL-counter - Mind Control: added 10s initial ability cooldown Parasite Swarm is mostly reliant on using its active ability to generate value. This makes using the card rather inconsistent, especially in early T2 stages. The upcoming change increases single target damage by 50% vs L, S and buildings, while increasing damage by 125% against XL units (M remains unchanged). On top of that, its counter type is getting shifted from M to XL in order to provide a new option of dealing with XL units. This should make Rogan Kayle less mandatory in pure Nature. In return, we add a small initial cooldown on the ability to prevent undazed spawn into instant swap plays. Rogan Kayle: - Damage increase: 990 dp20 ➜ 1075 dp20 - It’s the Shoes range increase: 15m ➜ 20m While not a pure Nature card in the first place, Rogan Kayle often gets used in combination with crowd control spells to produce permanent cc-chains. Outside of that, the card is rarely used and has large drawbacks due to rather underwhelming stat cost ratios. We increase its power a bit to open up more situations where the Lyrish leader can actually lead to victory. Shrine of Memory: Shrine of Memory will be shifted away from a meta pure Nature card and redesigned as a T3 tool. The card used to be a catch-up mechanic to compensate for nature’s weak early T2 complementing its spell spam heavy snowball tools. With the upcoming buffs, a back loaded hyperscaling mechanic is no longer necessary. Considering gameplay with SoM point and click hard counters like Suppression or Matter Mastery would naturally get more popular if Nature would increase in popularity, we decided to rework the card entirely. For more information, head towards the PvE section, where SoMs new powerful role will be further discussed. Spikeroot: - Unit cost reduction: 120p ➜ 110p Root Network decks were kept in a rather weak state in PvP considering static siege setups are rarely fun to play against. That said, we think it’s safe to increase Spikeroots power level a bit considering the card can complement Nature decks in various ways and is not reliant on root network support to be functional in the first place. It can be used as another tool to address nature’s M-counter issues. [ Shadow L-counter Adjustments ] Nightguard has been dominant across Shadow splashes by shutting down a lot of L-unit centric strategies entirely across multiple matchups. The advantages of getting unbound units through mind control effects are more substantial than just removing units from the map. When kept alive, even a single unbound L-unit would lead to a huge long term advantage. Her omnipresence is preventing options to diversify faction identities, but also leads to numerous unhealthy interactions like shutting down L-unit centric factions entirely. We haven’t been able to touch Nightguard so far as a few L-units were at risk of getting out of hand without her (i.e. old Mountaineer). But since these outliers have received nerfs, we want to attempt to redesign the L-Counter role in Shadow splashes to enable more proactive skirmishing. Nightguard: - Unit cost increase: 65p ➜ 90p - Swap ability cost reduction: 75p ➜ 50p As the central change here, Nightguard unit cost will be increased by 25 energy, rewarding energy investments to prevent the swap from going through in the first place. On the other hand, her ability cost will go down by the same amount, so total swap costs remain unchanged. This will weaken Nightguard’s preemptive zoning power before the swap goes through and also strengthen any re-swap scenarios. Therefore, taking down the Nightguard after a swap goes through needs to be prioritized even more than before. As the total cost per swap remains unchanged PvE impact is minimized considering it is way more likely to be able to keep her safe compared to PvP. Executor: - Counter type change: M-counter ➜ L-counter - New passive ability, "Piercing Death" - Unit deals 60% piercing damage Executor has been redundant so far given that Shadow already has exceptional M counter options. To bring up a combat based alternative to Nightguard his counter type will be changed from M to L. In addition he will receive piercing damage to be able to help against buffed L units. This should help against early T2 or in 2vs2 matches. Knight of Chaos: - Chaos ability cost reduction: 50p ➜ 40p Pure Shadow was quite reliant on Nightguard to sufficiently counter L units. This buff should help compensate for the loss of power, and will also open up more opportunities for the less reliable purple affinity to finally cause real chaos. [ Miscellaneous Changes ] Dreadcharger: - Charge increase: 12 ➜ 16 Small change as a response to recent design changes in the Shadow vs Frost matchup. This should enable more extended T1’s given that Frost also receives Ice Guardian buffs in this patch. Eliminator: - Taming ability radius increase: 20m ➜ 30m - Added radius preview - Buff increase, fire(r) affinity only: 30% ➜ 50% - Fixed affinities not working together without allowing it to stack infinitely Helping Eliminator to reward very specific strategies in decks that are built around him. Ice Guardian: - Increased range from structures before Ice Shield decays: 25m ➜ 30m - Added a visual indicator when the Ice Shield is not decaying. After acquiring more data from the Master Archer change, the previous spam scenarios are less effective in PvP as predicted. That said, Frost often ends up being confined to its own structures. We are giving Ice Guardian a bit more room to chase units and add a little bit more power into close well combat, where Frost is supposed to excel. This is needed to avoid map cutoffs early into the game. We also added a visual indicator when the ice shield is not decaying. This should lead to more comfortable unit micro options. Mountain Rowdy: - Ice Block ability cooldown increase: 30 / 25 / 20 / 20s ➜ 40 / 35 / 30 / 30s While we are satisfied with the overall position Mountain Rowdy took in pure Frost, he currently has the potential to keep his ability active constantly. With the increased range, this is a very potent zoning tool and sometimes slows down the game a bit too much. Therefore, we want to provide a proper window for players to attack after the ability runs out. Phalanx: - Damage increase: 570 / 600 / 660 / 750 dp20 ➜ 600 / 630 / 690 / 780 dp20 Phalanx recently saw a bit more play in PvP. We think they still are on the weak side, therefore a small buff, which doesn’t impact their combo potential with Nasty Surprise should help them take a more consistent L counter role in Frost splashes. Slaver: - Cost reduction: 80p ➜ 75p Small buff to bring stat efficiency more into the line of other T2 L counters. Shouldn’t affect the unit performance too much. Stoneshards: - Life points reduction: 840 ➜ 810 Small tweak for Stoneshards considering Stonekin is slightly overperforming and will benefit a lot from upcoming Nightguard changes. Strikers: - Movement speed increase: 6.4 m/s ➜ 8 m/s While Strikers are underperforming as a unit, we do want to keep them in a niche role rather than buffing them back into a meta position. Increased movement speed should help to seperate the great Striker players from the good ones without inflating their power level. This should make it easier for them to isolate and pick off units more often. Twilight Brute: - Damage increase: 940 dp20 ➜ 970 dp20 Even though Twilight Brute is a strong tool in a few matchups, deck slot limitations are quite restrictive in Fire Nature decks, so the card doesn’t see too much play all in all. Increasing the attack should provide a small extra reward for selecting them. Twilight Minions - Damage increase: 900 dp20 ➜ 930 dp20 - Life points increase: 780 ➜ 840 Considering Fire Nature loses Ghostspears as small sized M counter, Twilight Minions need to step in and take their role. Despite their superior stat efficiency, they were rarely played due to ranged disadvantages compared to Ghostspears and a less flexible ability. As a result, we will increase stat efficiency a little further to compensate for this patch and also look to add a lot more value for Twilight oriented deck builds in Fire Nature in the near future. Virtuoso: - Damage increase: 1790 / 1890 / 2075 / 2265 dp20 ➜ 2025 / 2125 / 2310 / 2500 dp20 Even after the recent ability buffs, Virtuoso remained underplayed due to his inferior stat efficiency compared to most other L sized melee units. As a result, we decided to increase his damage output to help him at countering L units and sieging. Warden Sigil (Frost): - Blessed(b)Sigil ability: Can no longer be attached to structures that are still under construction. We are working on Wardens Sigil buffs to add more defensive tools in Frost T1. Unfortunately, the testing process isn't finished entirely, therefore only some technical preparations will be included this patch. We will follow up on this one soon. Warlock: - Cost increase: 45p ➜ 50p - Damage increase: 430 dp20 ➜ 600 dp20 - Blaze Bolt: 60, up to 90 total damage (430 dp20) ➜ 72, up to 108 total damage (600 dp20) - Attack speed: 3,5s ➜ 3s - Witchcraft ability now allows self-targeting After testing the Warlock sufficiently, we do think it’s safe to enable a little more combat power rather than keeping the unit just as a cheap supportive tool. Warlock still should remain as a part of growing armies, but once he can deal a bit of meaningful damage himself, the required amount of set-up to make him work is reduced. This should help Warlock become more valuable in earlier T2 stages. White Rangers: - Increased ability damage against non-Amii buildings from 50% ➜ 100% (orbs and power wells still do not receive any damage) White Rangers already perform well in PvP, but given there is a distinction between normal and Amii structures (orbs and power wells), we can remove their reduced damage output against buildings to open up more use cases in PvE without inflating their PvP power level.

Greetings Skylords! We are very excited to tell you about our newest patch. Welcome to this special Community Update! • Patch Release We are currently hard at work finalizing the upcoming patch, which is planned for release later this weekend. We do not have a specific time yet, but we expect the patch to hit the live servers this Sunday. We have also created a special video for this patch, be sure to check it out! In this community update, we will show some of the changes that will be included in this patch. For a full list of changes, please check out the patch notes, as there are many changes not mentioned here. If you start the game after the patch has released, you will be greeted by a new loading screen. This is a combination of the wallpapers drawn by our former artist Nano, and additions and alterations by Tweeto. We hope you notice all the attention to detail and love they poured into it! • New Cards We are excited that you will finally get your hands on the cards we have been working on for the past months. With this patch, three new cards will be added to the game: Wasteland Terror Wasteland Terror is finally here! This awesome Bandit-take on the dragon model fires streams of sand that will lay waste to your enemies. This card has been long in the making, check out the original announcement for an overview of its abilities. Transcendence Transcendence is our first Amii spell, and provides a powerful buff or debuff as long as you keep its target alive, rewarding careful management of the fight. Check out the original announcement for more information. Burning Spears Burning Spears joins the Fire faction to battle an age-old weakness of its pure deck: L and XL units in the early game. Check out the original announcement, for more information and an artwork spotlight. • New Promo Card: Mana Wing Alongside our new cards, we have also added a new promo card to the game. Every player will be able to get a promo Mana Wing by completing the new achievement "A Force of Nature". The promo will not be available in boosters, but it will be trade-able. • New Achievements This patch will add 18 new achievements into the game. Those are aimed at improving the new player experience, while also giving our more veteran players something to work towards. Please note that if you have beaten specific maps previously, they do not count towards these new achievements. [ Infinitely Scaling Achievement ] Reborn in Fire [1 Mini-booster] Reforge Cards (Unlocks every 20 reforges, scales infinitely) [ Beginner Achievements ] Just a Story [1 Twilight booster] Complete Viridya and Brannoc's story on standard difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Soultree, Crusade, Sunbridge, King of the Giants, Titans, Ascension) The Most Dangerous Game [1 Bandits booster] Complete Mo's story on standard difficulty or higher {Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, Blight, Raven's End, Empire) A Debt Unpaid [20,000 gold] Complete the story related to the Treasure Fleet on advanced difficulty or higher. (Bad Harvest, Treasure Fleet, Mo, Blight, Slave Master, Convoy) A Mile in His Shoes [2 Stonekin boosters] Complete Rogan's story on advanced difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Crusade, King of the Giants, Titans, Dwarven Riddle, Guns of Lyr, Empire) A Wrinkle in Time [250 bfp] Win the 4-player map Empire spawning at least 5 different Lost Souls cards from a deck containing only frost, shadow, and Lost Souls cards. Godslayer [250 bfp] Win the 2-player maps Sunbridge and Insane God on any difficulty. Apprentice [1 booster] Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 5 or higher. [ Veteran PvE Achievements ] The Road Not Taken [3 boosters] Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 9 or higher. Turn Back All Ye Who Enter Here [6 boosters] Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 10. Nevermore [2 Bandit boosters] Complete Blight's story on expert difficulty (Blight, Raven's End, Slave Master, Ocean, and Oracle) Make it Double [2 Amii boosters] Complete all 2-player maps on expert difficulty. (Crusade, Sunbridge, Nightmare Shard, Nightmare's End, The Insane God, Slave Master and Convoy) Never Thought of Him [100,000 gold] Complete the story of Mo becoming the new king of the fire tribes on expert difficulty with all players in the map using decks containing only Fire cards. (Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, and Raven's End) The Long Journey Home [2 Frost boosters] Complete the story re-establishing the Kingdom of Lyr on expert difficulty using decks containing only frost cards. (Encounters with Twilight, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Bad Harvest, Dwarven Riddle, and Guns of Lyr) Not Even My Final Form [Rogan Kayle Card] Win the 1-player map Encounters with Twilight on expert difficulty without using T3 or T4 cards. Forest for the Tree [Viridya Card] Complete the 1-player map The Soultree on expert difficulty using only Nature cards from T1 and T2. A City Strongly Compact [Stronghold Card] Win the 1-player map Defending Hope on expert difficulty with a deck containing only spell and building cards. A Force of Nature [Promo Mana Wing] Complete all 1-player and 2-player scenarios on expert difficulty with all players in your team using decks containing only Nature cards. • Map Changes Campaign Maps We have made adjustments to a couple of campaign maps. These changes include standardizing gold chests (adding or removing them on maps that break the standard) and adding extra power wells or additional capacity of current wells to improve the early game of maps like Nightmare Shard and The Dwarven Riddle. For a full list of changes, please reference the patch notes. Rebalanced 2vs2 Maps The rebalanced 2vs2 maps can now be played on the live server. Changes include removal (or adjustments) of walls, wells, slight changes to the layout, and making certain areas immovable for flying units. This should result in a better play experience and more balanced maps. These maps also have observer versions, and we have updated the minimaps to be accurate. • PvP changes We have implemented multiple changes that should make playing PvP easier and more rewarding. If you need any help to get started, remember that you have access to free and fully upgraded PvP decks, and we have a great guide available, written by top players. The following changes have been made: New Player Protection To protect new players from facing top players when they are just getting started in ranked play, it is no longer possible to get matched with players with a base ELO above 135.000, if your own base ELO is below 102.000. Made Player Names Anonymous To prevent players from dodging bad match-ups, player names have been anonymized in the ranked lobby. This does not affect the sparring lobbies. Losses Are Now Hidden It has been proven in other competitive games that showing losses on the ranked ladder results in demotivation and higher entry barriers. We have therefore removed losses from the ladder. The information is still accessible on your profile if you so desire. Updates To The Free PvP Decks We have made some changes to the cards contained in the free PvP decks to compete with the new meta. If we made updates to the free PvP decks you have currently selected, you will now have the option to either swap to the new cards, or keep your current set up. Changes have been made to Pure Nature (Parasite over Shrine of Memory), Twilight (Twilight Minions over Ghost Spears), Pure Shadow (Executor over Nightguard) and Pure Fire (Burning Spears over Scorched Earth). Improved Rewards We have removed the gold penalty that was currently active for playing sparring games. Quests that require you to play 2vs2 games, now also count 3vs3 games for completion. We have also allowed you to drain the reserve while looking for a match. If you queue for at least 5 minutes, even if you don't find an opponent, you will earn BFP as if you were ingame, meaning you get BFP not just for playing, but also while searching for matches. Happy Hours Happy Hours are specific time periods where players will receive additional gold and BFP for playing PvP. During Happy Hours, there will be an in-game announcement and the icon on the world map will indicate Happy Hours are active. Happy Hours will take place during the following times: - 1vs1 happy hours: 7pm-9pm CET - 2vs2 happy hours: 9pm-10pm CET - 1vs1 happy hours: 4am-5am CET By clustering players together during certain time frames, players will have an easier time finding matches more frequently. • rPvE Fire Balance Changes We have rolled out some balance adjustments to the fire faction for rPvE. The Fire faction in rPvE can be extremely strong, but due to its high attack and low defense, it is extra vulnerable to Crowd Control spells. We tried to counter this weakness with a brand-new building that removes Crowd Control effects from nearby units. Some major enemy damage dealers have been rebalanced, which should result in an improved experience for all skill levels. For more information on exactly what was changed, please reference the patch notes. We have also expanded the wiki to contain information regarding the various bosses you might encounter. • Balance Changes This patch also contains rebalancing of over 40 cards, with a large focus on Nature cards. These changes follow the mindset written out in our Nature Deep Dive. While already a great step forward, our work on (Pure) Nature is not yet finished, with some of the more complicated changes (f.e. Abyssal Warder and Grove Spirit) still being worked on. Regardless, these changes should have a positive impact on the faction. Players will enjoy seeing a Forest Elder on the battlefield, since the card now has a mobile Breeding Grounds effect, reducing the cost of friendly units spawned by its side. Promise of Life has gone down a tier, now requiring only 3 Nature orbs, while Shrine of Memory has gone up a tier, now costing 2 Nature + 1 Neutral orb but increasing its effect greatly. These are just a couple of examples from the many changes that will be included. You will be able to check out all the details in the patch notes soon. • Tournaments / Events • NEW - Official PvE Contest #6: The Soultree Faction Battle - Until 19.06.2022 In this event, you can show off how much you like your favorite faction. Beat the single player map 'The Soultree' on advanced difficulty using only mixed-colored units and buildings! The event will start after the new patch is live. More information. • NEW - Skylords Battleship Kahoot Quiz - June 12th 2022 16:00 CEST Dallarian and Volin are hosting a Skylords Reborn knowledge quiz! The quiz will be streamed on Twitch and use Kahoot, which is easy to access by phone or PC. There are a ton of prizes up for grabs, so the majority of players should win something. More information. • NEW - The Skylords Open #15 - June 19th 2022 - 14:00 CEST The new balance changes and addition of Burning Spears should shake up the PvP meta, so what better time to host another Skylords Open? This 1vs1 tournament is open for all players, and will be streamed live on Twitch. If possible, please sign-up in advance. More Information. • FINISHED - CCC #5 - Prophecy, Prophecy, PROPHECYYY! Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest© on an altered Oracle map. Players had access to 16 orbs and 10.000 power to beat the map as fast as possible. As with all CCC, the more players attend, the better the prizes are, resulting in a free booster for the whole community. View the event and the code. • FINISHED - Skylords Bounty: Spring Forge A Skylords Bounty is an open-source task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. For this Bounty, we asked the community to help us create a spring-themed Forge. We got multiple submissions, and will now work together with the most promising candidate. Every serious attempt will also be rewarded with a Nature booster. If you participated, you will hear from us in the coming week. • Host your own tournament / event Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers Hiko and/or Metagross to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. • Team Changes Hirooo has joined our team as Faction Designer / Balance Developer. He has already been helping us a lot with testing and balancing PvP, so we are happy to welcome him to our team! Sadly, MarcoMaar (UI Developer) and RookieN (Map Designer) will leave the team due to long inactivity. We do want to thank them for their contribution to the project! • Contribute To Skylords Reborn We are currently looking for more people to help us create new content. Many upcoming features are on hold or take a long time due to a lack of volunteers, so we encourage you to take a look at our open positions. For example, we are looking for a Map Artist to help us with Defense rPvE, and a Map Designer to work on creating new Campaign Maps. And we could always use more developers to improve the game in general. If you want to help with creating new cards, we encourage you to consider our Artist and Balance Developer roles. We can always use more people in those departments to speed up progress. Adding voice lines to our new cards is currently on hold due to us missing an Audio Editor. We would also like to improve our marketing; you can help out as a Marketeer, but also a Video Editor, creating short card reveal videos and exciting trailers would be greatly appreciated. If you don't want to join the staff, you can still help with proofreading, testing our maps or creating a community event. • In Conclusion We really hope you will enjoy our latest patch "Force of Nature"! To celebrate the release, and to help you out with your Nature decks, we have a special scratch code for you. This code will reward you with two Nature boosters! SOIL-ROOT-TREE-LEAF Feel free to share this code, but please do so by pointing players towards the Community Update instead of sharing the code itself. The code is valid until July 1st, when we will bring you our next Community Update. Going forward, we will bring you these Community Updates monthly, on the first day of every month. What changes are you most excited for? What decks will you build around the new cards? We would love to hear in the comments! Archive • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide) • Overview Community Updates • Community Update #23

Welcome Skylords and Cute Beings! *80 boosters is a sum of all rewards, a single player can win maximum of 6 boosters. Quiz may last for around 20 minutes, however, it may take longer to deal with technical and organizational issues. Summer is coming, and so is Skylords Battleship Kahoot Quiz! Join us for 25 minutes on 12th June 2022 at 16:00, have fun, win boosters and face other Skylords in a knowledge quiz! What to expect? No registration, just type your name 15-20 ABCD questions with one correct answer Topics include Campaign Maps, Cards familiarity, Lore knowledge There are both easy and difficult questions Can be completed with phone on a train, no audio required Quiz will be streamed by me and @Volin on his Twitch account. How to join? How Kahoot quiz works like? Rewards 2 Amii Boosters for each player in top 25 1 Frost Booster for each player in top 15 as well as all previous rewards 1 Bandits, Fire and Nature Booster for each player in top 5 as well as all previous rewards A few Battleships will be randomly distributed among players who have not received another reward Question categories Campaign Maps PvE Cards Lore Rules Your quiz name must match your in-game name or you will be disqualified from receiving rewards. Only 50 slots available - you can enter lobby on first comes first served basis. You cannot change once selected answer. You have 20 seconds to select your answer. Only one answer is correct. You can participate only once. We reserve right to delete people from lobby with almost identical nicknames to make space for actual unique players. We reserve right to delete people from lobby who's nickname does not match Skylords in-game name. Vulgar names will be deleted from lobby and banned. If some question or answers are incorrectly formed, they will not be changed and the results will remain the same. No appeals will be accepted. Clarifications First question doesn't give any points and is used as an example. Answer for it does not matter. If a question asks about a card, always fully upgraded card U3 is concerned. If a question asks about effect, assume only one target was affected. May be updated before the quiz if there are any extra questions. Schedule 15:55 lobby opens 16:00 rules overview 16:05 start of quiz ~16:25 end of questions 16:30 end of stream Sponsors 25 boosters and 8 Battleships have been sponsored by Skylords Reborn Event Managers Remaining rewards have been sponsored by: The Old God of Battleships and Cult of Battleships GmbH Thank you To: Metagross31, Hiko and Majora, for helping me with organization of the event and sponsoring. To: Everyone who supported me with the questions. Have fun and and may the be with you, Dallarian Future events If you are interested in helping with these (or better) kinds of events for the community, or want to host one yourself, don't be afraid and simply reach out! Contact our beloved Event Managers Minashigo Hiko and Metagross31 on the forums or discord. They are happy to assist you with upcoming events and with sponsoring your prize pool!

Welcome to this guide on how to construct and pilot the Batariel deck. This guide will go over all the ins and outs of the deck, what to do in certain situations, and general tips and tricks for both beginning and more advanced Batariel players. Let’s open the Gates of Purgatory and jump in. What does Batariel do? Batariel is a Tier 4 card. It is a rare card and got two affinities. Its first ability is Gates of Hell. ACTIVE: Activate to smash Batariel's giant mace onto the ground, dealing damage to enemies in a 10m radius. The impact will crack open the ground, allowing an enormous cleft to emerge that will erupt fountains of red-hot lava after 5 seconds. Reusable every 30 seconds. Affects ground targets only. The second ability is Infused/Tainted Purgatory. PASSIVE: Unit enters stages of rage in battle depending on how much damage it has recently dealt. Either it does more AoE damage around himself, or he shreds the enemy’s armor, depending on the affinity. But if there is no damage dealt for 4 seconds, the flames will abate again. For this deck we will only be using the fire affinity, and all future references, unless explicitly stated, will refer to the fire affinity Batariel. The fire affinity is used because his passive does more damage, and the shadow affinity reduces the armor of the enemies. Reducing the armor is only relevant if you have other units to do damage as well, in a pure fire deck for example. How is the Batariel summoned if you do not have four Fire orbs? Enlightenment. Enlightenment is three orbs, two of which nature, and it allows you to use any card for the next 20 seconds without orb restriction. You do still have to pay the cost, 300 power in this case. The Deck Let’s start with the Tier 1 options this deck has. When playing a Batariel deck, you have three factions to choose from. Either you start with fire, nature, or shadow. Frost is by all means the worst faction to start with, as a general Batariel deck does not contain a single frost orb. Fire start With fire, most of the time you want to start with 3 Nomads (Nature affinity). An alternative could be Sunderer in some cases where you try to speedrun certain maps, but Nomads are recommended over Sunderer as they heal themselves and can hit air with their ability and are in general more flexible. The second card you want is Mine. Mine is an excellent card to take out the enemy units at your t2 camp. In bandits and Twilight maps, often one Mine should be enough. If you are fighting Fire you could use only one Mine, but if you are less experienced or are not as comfortable with a fire start, you can use two mines. When you encounter Lost Souls, you always place one mine and wait with engaging the camp until a second mine is off cooldown. The reason for this is that you may encounter Tier 3 units like Mana Beasts, one mine if often not enough. If there are also units that give shields, then two Mines might not be enough, and you need to place a third one. The third card you want to bring is Eruption. This card is excellent in taking out pesky (flying) units or to help out your opponents when they are in trouble. Eruption has one other very important use, which is to take our crucial spawn camps. One eruption does 300 damage for 75 power. All small spawning camps have 1200 health, so four eruptions will take out the camp and will set you back 300 power. This tactic is the mostly used in RPvE difficulty 10, but can also be utilized, and encouraged, in RPvE difficulty 9 when you try to clear the Tier 3 camp. In difficulty 9 and below, one to two Eruptions are often enough as you have your Nomads hitting the camp as well. Blaster Cannon an optional card. This card is not necessary in RPvE difficulty 9 and below, but is almost a must-have in difficulty 10. The reason for this is that there can be flying enemy units on your Tier 2 location, which does not happen in difficulty 9 and below. Blaster cannon fire affinity does insane damage versus flying units and because of that it is preferred over the shadow affinity. The shadow affinity also hits air, but traded extra damage against flying units for extra damage to ground units, but that damage is negligible. Sunstriders can be a nice addition too as they could replace blaster Cannon, they are inferior, but more versatile. Shadow start Shadow starts are very straight forward. The first card you want to bring are Forsaken. Forsaken do insane damage and have an awesome ability to do even more ridiculous damage at the cost of dying after the ability wears off. Nox Trooper is a decent alternative to Forsaken, and is far superior against Crystal Fiend camps, where Forsaken get destroyed. Also, they have a better trapping capability as they shoot each unit in a squad one by one. And base damage output is higher than Forsaken, even when they lose overall to frenzied Forsaken especially when getting rid of the spawner. Dreadcharger also a decent alternative, but very situation. Motivate is a card shadow can not go without. This card gives a near-dying unit a new purpose by allowing the same units to do more damage for the next 30 seconds. For Soul Splicer, we want to have the Nature affinity. You want to build this shrine outside the enemies range, as it takes some time to construct it. When constructed, it can collect corpses around itself and a select area. These corpses can be used to heal your Forsaken when they are within the range of the Soul Splicer. A general tactic when approaching the Tier 2 orb is to construct your Soul Splicer and wait until you have 6-8 Forsaken, depending on how comfortable you are. With the Forsaken you want to lure the enemy towards the Soul Splicer, so it can collect their corpses whenever they die. When fighting the enemy, use motivate on one of your Forsaken to allow the others to do more damage, and to have your first corpses inside the Soul Splicer. You want to bring an Embalmer’s Shrine if you bring Shadow Phoenix as your Tier 2 unit. You want to construct two Embalmer’s Shrines before doing anything else. If you play a shadow start in RPVE difficulty 10, then it is recommended to bring 9-11 forsaken, Lost Souls can require more, 3-4 squads gets frenzied and immediately attack the spawner. The remaining units clear the units with the help of a Soul Splicer and Motivate. Nature Start Nature t1 is relatively effective, in some cases better than fire, especially in solo. Basic composition is Windweavers + Dryad (Blue affinity) + Ensnaring Roots, for difficulty 10 Hurricane and Mark of the Keeper are very strong as well, and may be essential. Root is preferred over Hurricane is because it also helps vs non-S-units up to Tier 4. The edge that nature has over fire is solely not having to build a fire orb until an orb switch, with access to cultists + furnace and breeding grounds (especially useful with Shadow Phoenix against stronger t3-t4 camps) Windweavers is the go-to damage dealer for Nature Tier 1. They are versatile and can shoot multiple enemies at once, which makes them excellent in clearing early camps. Dryad provides the units around her with a damage reduction buff. One Dryad is often enough, but keep in mind that she does not buff herself. Having a damage reduction buff on your units allows you to use less heals. Surge of Light is great. It is super good to heal your low health Windweavers, and it scales super good into the later stages of the game as you can still use it to heal your Batariel. Ensnaring Roots is a must have. This spell can create distance between the enemy and your Windweavers. This card is also very effective when you need to take out a spawner in difficulty 10. Mark of the keeper is a must have in difficulty 10, but in difficulty 9 or lower it is not needed. No Shaman? Yes, Shaman is not used in Batariel decks. Shaman is a unit that rarely attacks, and it binds power. For every Shaman you have, you have one Windweaver less. There are only 20 deck slots, and Shaman should not be in there. Tier 2 options On Tier 2, there are a couple options to choose from. When you start with Fire, you are generally safe to use your Nomads + Mine and use Eruptions on the spawning camp. In difficulty 10, you can bring Gladiatrix (Nature affinity) with Curse of Oink, or you can bring Shadow Phoenix with Embalmer’s Shrine. If you start with Shadow, your best option is to bring Shadow Phoenix. You need three Shadow Phoenix to kill a small spawning camp. or When you are playing difficulty 10, if you start with fire and want to use Phoenix, you will need to do an additional orb swap for your Batariel. This sets you back some power, but might be required sometimes. Less optimal, but alternative options are Bandit Minefield and Lavafield. Core of a Batariel deck The core of a Batariel deck are Life Weaving and Unholy Hero. Life Weaving keeps Batariel alive, and Unholy hero allows the Batariel to do insane amounts of damage. Heals are important in every deck, Batariel decks are no exceptions. You should bring at least one heal spell, such as Regrowth. It is recommended to bring a backup heal in case you run out of Regrowth charges or the card is on cooldown. Two options are Surge of Light and Equilibrium (Frost affinity). It is totally fine to bring all three heal spells, as even some veteran players do. Very important spells to bring are both Frenetic Assault’s (one is mandatory, the other is quality of life), Infect (mainly quality of life, you can do without) and Disenchant (depending on the enemy faction). Frenetic Assault makes sure the enemies are not attacking your Batariel, but each other, which gives Batariel more survivability. Both Frenetic Assaults are recommended as they have a long cooldown between casts, and you might need more than one in a difficult camp. Infect serves a similar purpose and cleans up remains. After the enemies kill each other with the Frenetic Assault effect, two Nightcrawlers will spawn from each corpse, up to 10 corpses. 20 extra units to soak up damage and to do more incremental damage. Batariel needs to have his burning passive ability active as soon as possible. He does this be damaging enemy units or buildings. If Batariel is not able to attack, due to a paralyze effect, the chances are the Batariel will die. To solve this, Disenchant is a must-have when you fight enemies like Bandits and Twilight. Those otherwise annoying Willzappers and Windhunters are now useless when you bring Disenchant. Bandits have one boss that permanently reduces the attack by 50% when it does damage: the Equestrian Twins. This debuff can also be nullified with Disenchant. There are two more must have cards in every Batariel deck, which are Curse of Oink and Nether Warp. Curse of Oink was mentioned earlier as well in the Tier 2 section, but it is also an all-star when Batariel is out already. Curse of Oink is an instant CC (crowd control) spell. Whenever Disenchant is on cooldown, or whenever there are scary enemy units, Curse of Oink can keep incoming damage to a minimum. Keep in mind, this has no synergy with Frenetic Assault. When entering an enemy camp, you want to position your burning Batariel in a location where it can either hit as many enemies as possible, or where it can take out a spawner. Nether Warp is the solution for this. After you Batariels AoE burning is active, you can warp him further into the camp. Keep in mind, all the enemies will be able to target him, so make sure you have some heals ready and Life Weaving active. Recommended is the Nature affinity Nether Warp because the Frost affinity debuffs your Batariel with a slow effect. Yes, the Nature affinity heals your opponents units too, but that heal is insignificant compared to the damage output of the Batariel. When you have your core, there are one, two or three spots left for other cards. Thunderstorm is the one that is most recommended bringing as it is such a versatile damage spell. The second card is Soulshatter, as it can decimate smaller camps on its own, but you need to be careful as the damage also damages friendly units. The third option is Earthshaker. This card can take out crucial enemy buildings. This is optional, as Batariel should not have any problem taking out buildings on its own, but can be a quality of life. Void return Because spells are cycled non-stop in this deck, void return is of utmost importance. There are two options available for a Batariel deck. Either Shrine of War, or Cultist Master + Furnace of Flesh. Shrine of War is the best void return card in the game for multiplayer maps. You use spells whenever you want to kill enemy units, and whenever enemy units die, the Shrine of War gives back void power. It is the perfect synergy, there is however a big downside. Shrine of War costs 150 power and has no continuous upkeep. You will need two to be able to keep it running constantly. You will need to invest 300 power, which delays your Batariel immensely. Shine of War is recommended in fire starts. Shrine of War has been nerfed and now require 2 fire orbs, which forces you to play either the alternative option with Furnace of Flesh and Cultist Masters, or rely on a teammate. The ability of the Cultist Master is free, and it summons three Nightcrawlers that die after 20 seconds. When they die near a Furnace of Flesh, it gives back void power. Similar to Shrine of War, you will need to maintain the upkeep of this. It is recommended to have around three Cultist Masters to give reliable void return. If you have more than four, then consider building a second Furnace of Flesh or to alternate between the activations, but this requires way more micro. This option is preferred in Batariel decks that start with Shadow or in solo RPvE maps. If a teammate has a Shrine of War, you can kill the Cultist Masters and the Furnace of Flesh, as Shrine of War is superior to them. Fallen Skyelf Fallen Skyelf can play a critical role in certain scenarios, vs bosses like Twilight Hulk or Abaddon, which have very high damage output, or Hellhound who will eat all your units if you don’t kill him quick enough. And helps overall vs bosses. Plague Double Shadow starters sometimes gravitate towards triple shadow instead of switching to fire. These decks require more precise play due to the lack of cards like Disenchant or Earthshaker, but end up being significantly faster upon being executed well, given how strong Plague is. The spell speeds up camp clears in general and sometimes even allows very powerful pathing advantages as a spell combo around Plague + Infect (+ Frenetic) sometimes removes T4 camps on its own (ideally this even works against small boss camps i.e. Umbabwe/Bandit Lancer). Sometimes Disenchant cannot be removed upon facing factions like Twilight, but whenever there is an angle to cut the fire orb Plague should be your go-to choice when considering the orb swap with a double Shadow start. How to kill a camp When entering a camp best to attack a unit, preferably flying, because Batariel doesn’t dance around those, like he may sometimes when trying to attack ground entities. Also, because Batariel does more damage per hit with his normal attacks against flying units. If power levels/refund permits, then Batariels ability is a great way to enter, use it on a building cluster or a boss. Best to warp after front buildings are destroyed or nearly destroyed (possibly finished by infect). Infect should also be used when entering the camp to maximize the crawlers spawned, after the buffs with frenetic, not necessary, but can be useful, plays an especially important role vs Lost Souls and Twilight bugfest. When playing vs Lost Souls always have at least two Batariels for later camps, keep one in front to tank all the debuffs and for ground presence to cast cc spells against spellbreakers, and teleport second Batariel in the back line, who will take care of the camp. Preferably, use infect to soak up the damage and all the debuffs as well. In case of 2 Lost Bane presence, drag the camp out use spells (with infect) and try to either use Batariels ability on Lost Bane closest to the spawner, and then warp, or if possible just warp in. Can also try to power through after dragging the camp after getting rid of Lost Banes and having crawlers, enemies won’t pose as much threat even if they respawn, just keep eyes on Spellbreakers. Against Twilight Infect is crucial, especially against difficulty 10, where Twilight gazers are bugged and reflect huge damage back to Batariel if not careful, crawlers soak up that damage. Best wait to approach them is to use Batariels ability and maybe even port them together in a bunch, then frenetic/oink and use Batariels ability. But be careful as you won’t have nether warp available to get close to the camp. Bosses Against Bosses, either focus them with Skyelf support, if they can be killed within the ability right away, or warp in the backline and deal with a boss after taking out the majority of the camp. Raven ship is very tricky to kill with a Skyelf, she most likely will get focused, must use infect and possible defensive spells on her, or be on a safe side and deal with the boss without, it’s not too dangerous to Batariel, just have to oink gunner when it spawns. Twilight Dragon boss also takes a while to kill, and Skyelf will heal it if used too early, so it’s better to used when more than half hp is depleted. Nyxia debuff can be disenchanted, which means that the Batariel can freely attack her. Hellhound is best if approached with at least two Batariels like all late game LS camps, and infect must be used. Try to get rid of him asap, before your Nightcrawlers die and he starts eating Batariels. Killing him is not a problem, surviving is. Due to the Lost Spellbreakers Disenchant, engaging with Frenetic Assault (both work here) or Curse of Oink may save you a lot of trouble. Can be tricky, especially in non-motm maps where you don't know exactly where they're located. Against higher tier Souls camps with Banestones: 1 Banestone: Try to disable the Lost Spellbreakers as mentioned above, engage with Batariel ability onto the Banestone and port into the camp. Can be hard with Lost Dragons and such where the Batariels ability couldn’t be used, in that case Disenchant (G) works well. 2 Banestones: From my experience it's best to just wait for the camp wave to spawn into your direction, use Infect on it and engage the camp with the Nightcrawlers before Batariel to distract the Lost Spellbreakers. Try to get one Banestone down as fast as possible and use Frenetic Assault + Nether Warp into the camp (hoping that Bata burns at this point) Fire Bosses: Abaddon, you must avoid his ability at all costs, either send a unit in front to take it, or just dodge/warp in the backline and deal with Abaddon when you have taken care of the camp. Golem should be attacked with ability for the majority of HP, auto-attacking is dangerous. Magma Fiend boss is the most difficult to deal with as a Batariel deck. Must have at least 2 units, if only playing Batariel in t4, have 1 or 2 extra when approaching it, go in with a single Batariel without any buffs and instantly warp in the back line and cc the camp, infect will help as well, then buff Batariel and take care of the camp. After the majority of the camp is gone, send in other Batariels to tank debuff, and buff the one not being attacked. For all these bosses Skyelf is crucial, may not be mandatory. Keep Fallen Skyelf in a distance from Abaddon, she will die very quickly if she is close. General tips You might be asking, but what about Unholy Power? That increases the damage of Batariel too, right? Simple answer, no. Unholy Power is basically a dead card in your deck, as it does not stack with the burning of Batariel. When you fight Lost Souls or Fire, Disenchant is not needed, as these enemies has no way of stopping your Batariel via cc. When you start with Shadow, you can stay and you do not have to switch an orb to fire. If you spawn your Batariel at Tier 3, it is recommended not to build the two wells at your Tier 4 orb location. This will set you back 200 power, and will only pay off when you are floating in power anyway. Batariel does more damage with an attack than against non-flying: XL Ground: 481 L Flying: 697 XL Flying: 1045 This is due to the longer animation when attacking flying units and as the damage per 20 seconds is fixed, attack types with different execution durations deal different damage. @Volin has a in-depth Twitch Stream about Buffed Batariels, where you can see some gameplay: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1423615481?t=00h06m39s Special thanks to the following people for helping out with this guide! @arabikaa @Damo @Donaar @Kapo @Mocaak @RadicalX @Volin

@Donaar You didn't list the point that it makes the game look like a mess if such blatantly unbalanced and upon further scrutiny unfinished/broken mechanics are just left unaddressed while they proliferate throughout general play. Handwaving issues away with "Just don't use it!" isn't design. It isn't a vision to go forward with and it isn't a guideline to base meaningful decisions on. And it also disregards the underlying psychology that is at work when humans engage with content like video games. There are plenty of resources out there that examine these processes and how the state of a games content influences and guides people. It's a fundamental pillar. A common narrative is that taking away options is bad. And more options is always better. Let us test this assertion with a hypothetical. Imagine all cards in the game are neutral T1. You can play all cards in the game right out of the gate. You can also combine all cards in the game however you please. The only limiting factors are now energy and deck slots. Ultimate freedom. No restrictions. Everyone can play what they want. Maximum options, apparently the best thing for an RTS. What would really happen though? Would cards which are T1-3 currently still remain attractive? A few would because they scale throughout tiers. But would the deck building remain an interesting and meaningful aspect of the games design? After all, you can just put anything in your deck, no limitations anymore. So many more options that wouldn't be possible with restrictive tiers and colors. Yet almost all cards would vanish into obscurity. What would you have to do to get all the cards up to speed in order for them to compete with the best? Even within the (current) T4 roster, what would manifest is a very narrow pool of cards that are "the best" and everything else is just a handicap. You could still play them, of course. Nobody is forcing you to play a 5000/5000 unit instead of a 500/500. It's all just options. Yet how meaningful are any choices one could make in this environment? The bottom line is more options does not equal better. It's deliberate restrictions and limitations that make for intrigue and creativity. Because those actually incentivize exploring what is out there instead of just having "Gun!" to throw against Rock-Paper-Scissors. The amount of options is of course important but equally so is the relative quality of the options. Because options that are too good will naturally suffocate others. Worse still if that is the case because they are simply broken. It offers the illusion of more choices but in reality it just warps the game and its power levels. Untouched options may remain at their current strength but their relative power changes with the top. If you have option A being worth 100, B 50 and C 40 there is a huge difference. But if you take the A down to 60 then suddenly you are looking at A being at 100% power but B jumping from 50% to 83% and even C going from 40% to 66%. Without touching them their relative power increased drastically. Ripping the band aid off always stings but what's below festered for too long.

I am delighted to hear how those changes would influence both PvP and PvE scenes. I am not sure if I am content with the effect being global, though. It had that personal touch before, and now it seems to be perhaps a bit too easy? Shrine of Martyrs requires freeze on enemies; FoF needs 2 deck slots, more power investment and some attention to work (if you want to get power immediately); and Shrine of War requires a player to be in a successful engangement. I found Shrine of Memory to be useful even before the change, but now without cap and even more efficiency, a global powerful void power return button seem to promote meta lazy approach even more. If it is supposed to be global I would suggest it as a less powerful (but uncapped) passive effect, to fit supporting role similarly to WoG (Nature has already plenty of "press to support" structures in my view) Or as a personal effect, more of a burst void return for extended amount of time.

As part of our upcoming Nature balance changes, Spore Launcher will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Remove slow (normal XL speed, 6.4 m/s) 2. Linked Fire support: 6 max --> 8 max 3. New Active, "Sprout Spore:" A. Cost: 80p B. Summon 2 Treespirits which take 50% less damage. Treespirits have shadow affinity. C. *Description:* "Activate to sprout 2 Treespirits. They will have the same upgrade level as Spore Launcher. Summoned Treespirits take 50% less damage. Reusable every 60 seconds." Iteration 1 Goals As regards Spore Launcher, we must wonder why the original developers gave the unit Siege. Was the card actually intended to be an offensive unit? If so, what would that even look like, and could we somehow achieve it ourselves? It is in pursuit of such a goal that we will be making the following changes to Spore Launcher. First, we are removing the unit’s slow and increasing its speed to that of a normal XL-unit. Next, we will be increasing its support capacity, that is the number of units that it can be supported by, from 6 to 8. This should allow Spore Launcher to outscale its T3 counterpart in Razorleaf. Finally, we are introducing a new active called Sprout Spore which spawns 2 Treespirits in like manner as Satanael spawns Snapjaws. This should allow Spore Launcher to create a semi-mobile unbound power root support battery which when combined with Sylvan Gate should give the unit the ability to function as an attacker while it utilizes its long range of 50m.

As we announced in our recent Nature Deep Dive, our faction design team has been working on performing a balance pass on Nature cards. Some of these changes are relatively minor, while other changes are more substantial. This thread will function as the main thread for all Nature based discussion. Minor changes are included here, while major changes have their own threads linked to below. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such are subject to change. Substantial Reworks and Balance Changes The following cards/topics have significant enough changes to warrant their own threads. Abyssal Warder Colossus Forest Elder Grove Spirit Mind Control Primeval Watcher Shrine of Memory Spore Launcher Sylvan Gate Minor Changes Tier 1: Fountain of Rebirth: 1. Healing: Regenerate 15 / 18 / 21 / 25 life points --> 20 / 23 / 26 / 30 life points every 3 seconds Treespirit: 1. Reduce power cost: 60p --> 50p 2. Reduce Gifted/Tainted Thorns damage: 100 up to 150 damage total --> 78 up to 117 damage total 3. Reduce life points: 880 health --> 730 health 4. Green Affinity: Fix poison bug, increasing total poison ticks from 4 --> 5. Tier 2: Healing Well: 1. Initial Capacity: 0 --> 1500 (50%) healing capacity 2. Recharge Rate: 20/sec --> 50/sec Sunken Temple: 1. Orb cost: 2 Nature --> 1 Nature, 1 Neutral Spikeroot: 1. Power cost: 120p --> 110p Parasite: 1. Orb cost: 1 Nature, 1 Neutral --> 2 Nature 2. Reduce power cost: 100 --> 80 3. Increase Damage: 60 / 60 / 60 / 66 per second --> 70/70/70/80 per second 4. Increase max targets: 4/5/6/6 --> 8/9/10/10 Tier 3: Promise of Life: 1. Reduce Tier: 3 Nature, 1 Neutral --> 3 Nature Thornbark: 1. New Passive, "Strong Supporter" - Unit counts as 3 connected entities for the sake of determining root network supports while out of combat. Wheel of Gifts: 1. Change effect to aura to allow it to reapply if disenchanted. Tier 4: Lifestream: 1. Life Link: A. Absorption limit: 10000 --> 20000 damage B. Duration: 35 seconds --> infinite (until 20000 damage has been absorbed) C. Range: 200m --> 300m Noxious Cloud: 1. Changes Pending

I think most players who have played the game for a while will all have this issue, I like Dutchy's idea using gold/BFP to buy more deck slots. I just upgraded from a 10yo iMac and it worked fine, definitely never took 10mins to load a game.

I can only make a guess, but with a Werebeast/Treespirit start you might want to cut Swiftclaw/Spearmen. In T2 Burrower/Deep One also end up being less relevant as you apply siege pressure through Spikeroot. Since root network strategies require to accumulate advantages by slowly building up pressure the 100 energy downtime through building Shrine of Memory also grants less value in this set up. This should open up enough slots to play the full root setup without cutting down T3 which would be another option of opening up the deck slots. Attached a root network deck, that I like to play from time to time. I don't use living tower as it is way to static for my liking (root nexus + living tower can be a good response to aura of corruption though) and kept Deep One due to its overwhelming stat efficiency. Razorleaf is more for style points, Brannoc/Mo usually are more powerful XL options in T3.

As part of our upcoming tower rebalance, Lost Launcher will be receiving the following proposed changes. Please note that all changes proposed here are provisional and as such as subject to change: Iteration 1 1. Lost Launcher (r), Infused Rage A. Number of attacks required per stage of rage: 4 attacks --> 3 attacks 2. Lost Launcher (b), Blessed Ice Shield A. Ice Shield now refreshes every 40 seconds B. Ice Shield strength: 600 life points --> 500 life points C. New Description - "Every 40 seconds, tower is endowed with an Ice Shield that absorbs up to 500 damage and may restore its absorption capacity by 5 every second." Iteration 1 Goal A minor buff to Lost Launcher. As-is Lost Launcher(r) takes a very long time of 26.67 seconds to reach its maximum damage output. With this change, Lost Launcher(r) will reach its first rage stage of +25% in 10 seconds and its maximum rage buff of +50% (2025 dp20) after 20 seconds. Overall, this should allow Lost Launcher(r) to better fulfill its role as the damage affinity. Lost Launcher (b) spawns with an Ice Shield but if it is lost it never returns. We have slightly reduced the total strength of the Ice Shield in exchange for allowing the Ice Shield to refresh itself every 40 seconds. While this is a long cooldown, towers are not always in combat. The result of this change should be to make Lost Launcher (b) slightly weaker if used for a single engagement but much stronger when used to defend a location over a long period of time.