In 2016, Blue Manchu released the Castle Mitternacht expansion items, introducing a bunch of new mechanics. And then... that's it. No balance changes or new items, for years. Blue Manchu got busy with their next game. Leaving everything as-is wasn't exactly the plan; luckily for Cardhuntria, The Knights of Unity are here to update the items and cards you've been using unchanged since 2016.
First, the big news: we are aiming to release a new expansion, "Celestial Forge," in the first half of 2022. Some balance changes will accompany the new cards & items. We also have a really exciting new feature slated to release alongside the expansion, but we are not ready to reveal it at this time.
There will be a separate post previewing the expansion cards. This post is primarily about the balance changes. We will be conducting a public playtest of these changes soon (alongside the new items), and this is where we will be describing the changes and providing some developer commentary and context for the playtesting. (Details of the playtest--start and end dates, test server instructions, pizza reward amounts, and survey questions--will be provided elsewhere, likely on the forums, Steam forums, Discord. Stay tuned.)
General Methodology
As much as possible, we don't want to nerf things. Players work hard for their collections, and when your hard-earned legendaries become less powerful, well, that's a bad feeling. Most of the time we'd rather address balance by powering up weaker cards, or by just adding new content. But there comes a time when something in the game is so out of whack that attempting to balance AROUND it will create more problems down the line. With that given, we felt the need to address a few long-dominant cards like Lycanthropic Form, Howl, Vengeance, and Bless. In addition, we've buffed a few things. These changes will debut alongside an entire new set of items, and are explained below, side-by-side with their current versions.
Forms
Most long-time players will agree that one of the current balance issues is that werewolves are a little... too good. They're definitely pushed, and their kit is just far and away the most universally useful out of the forms. Vampires and spirits get good stuff but are far more likely to get a card they don't want in a given situation. Another issue with forms is that the Vampiric Form card was just... less good for vampires than the tried and true Talented Healer. This is somewhat simplified, but anyway--onto the changes: - Lycanthropic Form's armor no longer protects against fire damage - Vampiric Form has a new effect: "Add Penetrating to any Unholy Melee attack you play." - Monstrous Hide no longer protects against fire damage - Howl no longer heals
These changes will go some way to evening the forms, but perhaps even more crucially we are adjusting the card pools to try to bring them more in line with each other:
You'll notice the absence of All Out Attack on the werewolf side, notably, but also that Ethereal Form's kit is more utilitarian now. Vampires get Impaler (shout out to my boy Vlad), which has a cool new interaction with the form itself. We've also removed the form cards themselves from the pools. This change will make it so that no unwanted form has a random chance to prolong itself past its initial duration, and it also means that Howl will no longer have a chance to activate 'free' reliable armor, and that Medium Garb will no longer randomly stop you from drawing cards from your deck.
Vengeance
So, we know Vengeance is really good. But possibly the worst-feeling thing about it is that if you use low rarity wizard control effects against a warrior holding Vengeance--effects like Winds of War or Force Blast--the entire effect is undone by Vengeance. This is a level of control resistance that warriors, with all their mobility tricks, frankly didn't need. The fix we found for Vengeance was to put a damage threshold on the trigger, so it hasn't been nerfed at all in the context of most damage, but it no longer punishes chip damage.
And yes, we decided to bring this change to a couple similar cards. Martyr Blessing should still be quite powerful without being as unfun to play against, now, and the change to Elven Maneuvers actually allows us to 'unnerf' the card a bit! - Vengeance now only triggers if 3 or more damage is dealt - Martyr Blessing now only triggers if 2 or more damage is dealt - Elven Maneuvers now only triggers if 2 or more damage is dealt. Duration increased to 3, filter depth increased to 4. [table] [tr] [th]Old Version[/th] [th]New Version[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table]
The levers introduced here allow us to further refine the balance of these cards as needed without any drastic changes, and we'll be watching them closely during playtesting. The damage thresholds here also introduce some more nuance to the valuation of armor. Sometimes that Reliable Mail will mean that your opponent's Weak Chop doesn't trigger Martyr Blessing when they're checking for blocks ;)
Misc
Finally we have a collection of miscellaneous changes; some buffs, some nerfs. The general goal here was to rein in some situationally obscene base game effects while maintaining general worth, while boosting some underpowered cards from Mitternacht. - Shifting Block now draws a card (after applying the form) - Acid Leak now only places acid under enemies - Boo! now grants a Panic rather than a Dash - Bless now targets up to 3 contiguous tiles (like Wall of Fire) - All Out Attack now removes Penetrating & Unblockable, and adds Hard to Block 3 - Perplexing Ray is now Arcane
Shifting Block's low power compared to similarly costed blocks (especially at its rarity) made Castle Mitternacht shields unappealing. Throw in the extreme uneven nature of the old forms and it just wasn't good. It might still not be top tier, but at least now it replaces itself, and with the form changes it might be quite strong now (we'll see in the playtest).
Acid Leak and Boo! changes are more minor, intended to push the needle just a bit on Castle Mitternacht wizard items.
Bless is possibly the biggest nerf to the strongest card in the game, but mind that it can still accomplish what it used to (12 points of healing and 6 cards drawn over 2 rounds). You'll just need to do a lot more work to get that maximum effect, and possibly make more tactical compromises.
The All Out Attack change may be completely unnecessary now that it's no longer in the werewolf deck. That said, we were interested in a version of All Out Attack that can still do just as much damage as before, while requiring players to do a little more work for those combo kills. I'd say this is the most tentative change in this batch. Let's see how it plays out in testing.
Perplexing Ray simply should have been Arcane this whole time, and that is being fixed now.
Conclusion
Feedback is, as always, welcomed, but more importantly we look forward to your participation in the playtest and accompanying surveys. We intend to iterate, possibly multiple times, over the course of the playtest. We haven't changed PvP balance significantly since 2016, and we want to be very careful. Any of these changes is up for further modification depending on how testing goes.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you're as excited for the upcoming update as I am!
Server Maintenance January 4 2022 10:00 am UTC 0
Greetings Card Hunters!
The server maintenance will take place on Tuesday, January 4, starting at 10:00 am UTC 0. The game will be unavailable for 2 hours.
Local times: [CET]: 11:00 am - 01:00 pm [EST]: 05:00 am - 07:00 am [PST]: 02:00 am - 04:00 am
Server Maintenance December 17 2021 12:30 pm UTC 0
Greetings Card Hunters!
The server maintenance will take place on Friday, December 17, starting at 12:30 pm UTC 0 and should last till 4 pm UTC 0.
Local times:
[CET]: 1:30 pm - 05:00 pm
[EST]: 07:30 am - 11:00 am
[PST]: 04:30 am - 8:00 am
Patch notes 3.280.1
Updates and Improvements
Weighted Loot Drops - more about it on our blog: https://www.cardhunter.com/2021/12/dev-diary-introducing-weighted-loot-drops/
Items price no longer scales with renown level. From now on prices of items are the same as for a renown level 21, regardless of player’s renown level.
Commons always cost 5 gold
Uncommons always cost 25 gold
Rares always cost 100 gold
Epics always cost 500 gold
Legendaries always cost 2500 gold.
Holiday event shop and items are now available!
Game performance improvements.
Bug fixes:
Leaving a team during the fight will no longer cause a black screen.
What about Co-op Auto Skip?
Unfortunately, co-op auto skip will be still disabled. During our testing, we found several issues that could significantly affect the game. We are constantly working on improving this feature so it doesn’t have any bugs on the live server. Once we are done polishing the Auto Skip, we will update the game as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Server Maintenance December 15 2021 9:00 UTC 0
Greetings Card Hunters!
The server maintenance will take place on Wednesday, December 15, starting at 09:00 am UTC 0. The game will be unavailable for 4 hours.
Local times:
[CET]: 10:00 am - 02:00 pm
[EST]: 04:00 am - 08:00 am
[PST]: 01:00 am - 05:00 am
Dev Diary: Introducing Weighted Loot Drops!
Hi Card Hunters!
It’s been a while since I got to talk to you through this medium, but this is Flaxative, back-to-talk Card Hunter design! Today I’m going to discuss a small design change coming in our Holiday 2021 build that will hopefully result in some big improvements for you.
You may have seen in the announcement of our patch that Sir Civil mentioned “Weighted Loot Drops,” and you may have wondered what the heck that means. Wonder no longer!
A Bit of Background
In Card Hunter, until now, any item of the same level and rarity had an equal chance of dropping in chests–be they battle chests or bought chests. This meant that once the game determined you were getting a Level 17 rare non-treasure item, you have had an equal chance of getting any Level 17 rare item–regardless of what kind of item it was. Arcane skills–which a wizard needs 4 of–dropped at the exact same rate as helmets–which a warrior needs only 1 of.
With a perfectly even distribution of items in each slot, you can probably see how this would quickly result in you having way too many helmets, or way too few arcane items. Thankfully, we didn’t have an even distribution of items. We added 4 arcane items to the game for every 1 new helmet. And this… kind of worked.
Lingering Issues
It’s no secret that Card Hunter’s loot grind experience has a few pain points. The Knights of Unity are hard at work addressing these on a number of levels, from small tweaks to our algorithms (weighted loot drops) to whole new features (stay tuned!).
Three problems worth mentioning for our purposes today:
1. It’s almost impossible to grind for specific items you might want for a particular party idea. You can aim for an item level by running specific adventure levels, or you can keep an eye out for specific items appearing in your Daily Deal or Randimar’s Rarities shops, but you ultimately have very little control of these things, and you don’t have many choices to make to try to nudge the odds one way or the other.
2. If you don’t run a ‘balanced’ party of one warrior, one wizard, and one priest, with one character of each race, the item slot distribution mentioned above stops being particularly helpful. If you are running 3 warriors and keep getting arcane items, and have trouble getting the helmets you want, that’s not great!
3. From a design standpoint, we had to design and implement these specific ratios of items in different slots. Adding 4 arcane items for every 1 helmet might preserve the loot drop ratios for the slots, but it actually deepens problem #1. If we’re adding so many arcane items to the game, it becomes that much harder to find the specific arcane items you want!
A Step in the Right Direction
As I said above, we’re working on a number of fronts to improve the Card Hunter economy and grinding experience. The feature we’re releasing this month is only one step in this process, but we think you’ll like it.
What ARE Weighted Loot Drops anyway?
The way this new feature works is like this:
When you get an item from a battle chest (PvE or PvP, but not bought chests), and that item isn’t a treasure, it will now have a 20% chance of being a “weighted” drop. Weighted drops are guaranteed to match an item slot in your current party, and are weighted further based on the density of different item slots in your party.
What this means, in practice, is that if you have, say, 3 warriors, your weighted drops can’t be arcane items, and will have a 3:1 chance of being weapons (of which your party can use 9) to being helmets (of which your party can use 3).
Of course you can still get items that aren’t only for your current party. 80% of non-treasure drops will remain unweighted for now, and items from chests in stores will still be fully random.
This will have the following benefits:
1. If you want to try to grind for specific items, you can now nudge the probabilities in your favor by maximizing that item’s slot in your party. You want a divine item? Run all priests. You want an elf skill? Run all elves.
2. Regardless of the party composition you’re using to play through the campaign, you’re more likely to find items you can use than items you can’t.
3. Starting with our next expansion set, which will come sometime next year–I’m not at liberty to give any more detailed information at this point–we will no longer be printing 4 arcane items for every 1 helmet. New items will be much more balanced in quantity, meaning we won’t need to add tons and tons of nigh-unobtainable items to the game just to preserve slot ratios for loot drops.
As a theoretical bonus, weighted loot drops also free up design space for adding races and classes to the game without breaking item slot drop ratios.
Wrapping Up
You might never notice anything different with this new system as you play the game. But your loot drops will be just a little more to your taste. And hopefully this will tide you over for our bigger planned changes, which I’m looking forward to talking about early next year.
Let us know what you think of this new feature, as well as your opinion on this dev diary. I might get to do more, and your feedback is helpful :)
Happy holidays!
Celebrate holidays in Cardhuntria!
Fellow adventurers!
The time has come when we put our old resentments aside, sit down at the common table, take out cards and eat pizza. We wanted to thank you for another great year and ensure that 2022 will be a significant one for Card Hunter. What have we prepared for you for now?
Get ready for the holidays!
The celebration will start on December 15th and will last until January 4th. During this time, the Holiday Shop will be available where you will find holiday items. If you don't have them yet, this is the perfect opportunity to complete your collection. There will also be 3-holiday figures available in Cuthbert's Costume Shop!
Jump in and get your present!
Log in to Card Hunter from December 15-23 to receive presents with the Daily Log-in event! An epic chest is waiting for you every day, so it's worth it! The holiday multiplayer board will also apply from 15 to 30 December.
And even more improvements!
Alongside our holidays' event, a new update will take place. Co-op auto skip, weighted loot drops, and game performance improvements are coming. You will be able to read more about it in the upcoming changelog, so stay tuned!
Thanks again for the past year. We wish you all the best!
Server Maintenance November 3 2021 10:00 UTC 0
Greetings Card Hunters!
The server maintenance will take place on Wednesday, November 3, starting at 10:00 am UTC 0. The game will be unavailable for 2 hours. You can find short list of changes down below.
Local times:
[CET]: 11:00 am - 01:00 pm
[EDT]: 06:00 am - 08:00 am
[PDT]: 03:00 am - 05:00 am
Patch Notes:
Disabling Halloween store
Fixed a bug in chat input whereby holding shift and clicking M key (to make capital M character) opened game menu
Minor fixes to item stacking
Server Maintenance October 20 2021 01:00 PM UTC 0
Greetings Card Hunters!
In order to deploy a hotfix for the bug preventing items to be changed properly, the game server will be down for about 1 hour on Wednesday, October 20, starting at 01:00 pm UTC 0. Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Local times: [CEST]: 03:00 pm - 04:00 pm [EDT]: 09:00 am - 10:00 am [PDT]: 06:00 am - 07:00 am
Patch notes 3.276.0 Halloween update!
Halloween
Halloween event runs from 18th October to 3rd November.
Special Halloween-only reskinned items are available in normal loot drops as well as for purchase in the Halloween Shop.
Six figures are available for a limited time at Cuthbert’s Costumes--3 returning figures and 3 new Trick-or-Treater figures!
Special Halloween ranked boards are in use.
Three new spooky leagues--Haunted Cabin Quick Draw, Candy Fight constructed, and Trick or Treat fixed deck--will be in rotation throughout the event. You can win the new figures in these leagues, or get bonus chests if you already have them.
Card Changes
Walpurgis Night now only attaches Form cards from set 5 (Castle Mitternacht).
Adapted to Silver is now part of set 2 (Expedition to the Sky Citadel).
New keyword, “Radioactive”, refers to attachable Handicap cards from sets 0 (base game), 1 (Attack of the Artifacts), and 2 (Expedition to the Sky Citadel).
New keyword, “Genetic”, refers to attachable Boost cards from sets 0 (base game), 1 (Attack of the Artifacts), and 2 (Expedition to the Sky Citadel).
Radiation-themed cards now create or attach Radioactive cards instead of any Handicap.
Radioactive Bite
Radioactive Pulse
Radioactive Goo
Radioactive Spray
Radiation Bolt
Radiation Bomb
Destructive Purge
Genetic engineering-themed cards now create or attach Genetic cards instead of any Boost.
Genetic Engineering
Gene Therapy
Genetic Boost
Blight now attaches Radioactive cards instead of any Handicap.
Caverns of Chaos
Adjust structure of COC to the following: shallow1 x2, shallow2 x2, miniboss, shallow3 x2, deep x2, boss.
Adjust structure of COCL to the following: shallow2 x4, miniboss, deep x4, boss.
Guarantee a legendary character for miniboss and boss rooms.
COC miniboss room guarantees an epic item.
COCL miniboss room guarantees a rare item.
Tweak numbers of some monsters.
Remove Boulder from lieutenants.
Add new group (“2x2 & miniboss”) for miniboss room.
Add new Eastpass monsters, but nothing that spawns & no basiliths. Gorgox and Medusa only as lieutenants. Stafford II as boss.
Add blocking terrain on some maps.
Add 8 Eastpass maps to the rotation.
Buff some COC character decks.
Reconfigure Elder Mind lair room.
Castle Mitternacht
Loot Fairy can now visit Castle Mitternacht adventures.
Fix AI use of Disenchant so it actually gets played
Replace 2x Destructive Purge with 2x Purging Strike
Add 2x Holy Presence
Set preferred range to 1
Werewolf
Remove Leathery Hide
Replace 1x All Out Attack with 1x Massive Jaws
Remove 2x Forward Thinking
Reduce card draw from 5->4
HP 42 -> 35
Svitlana’s Inquisition
Changed all spawn locations in CM 2.2.
Changed Werewolf spawn locations in CM 2.4, as well as some blocked/difficult terrain to help the AI.
Captain Teadora
Whole new deck:
Inquisitor’s Badge x2
Creature of the Night x1
Inspiring Armor x2
Lycanthropic Form x1
Spin Around x1
Berserk Spin x4
Impetuous Slash x3
Shifting Block x2
Ill-fitting Armor x2
Howl x1
Panic x1
Run x1
Walk x2
Change default move to Berserk Spin
Reduce HP from 40 -> 36
Reduce card draw from 4 -> 3
Afflicted Guards
Card draw 1.5 -> 1
Remove 1x Potent Stab
Remove 1x Penetrating Stab
Remove 1x Impaling Stab
Remove 1x Missile Block
Add 2x Creature of the Night
Add 1x Spear of Darkness
Shades
Replace 1x Curse of Fragility with 1x Unholy Curse
Remove 1x Roulette
Add 1x Traveling Curse
Add 1x Creature Of The Night
Change Binding Shadows to be Encumber 2 instead of Halt
Change Wail to only discard Melee attacks, and to have a range limit
Add 2x Absorbing Block
Reduced trait #s
Undead Priests
Change Too Horrible to Block Melee
Change 2x Walk & Default Walk to 2x Shuffle & Default Shuffle
HP 30 -> 26
Assault on Castle Mitternacht
Reinforced Door
Create a “Reinforced Doors” monster group, that is identical except:
Create a “Mass Immovable” card based on Immovable with the ‘attach to group’ component from Mass Invisibility and give that to the multi-door group instead of normal Immovable.
Jovana’s racial is now Walpurgis Night. She has a tiny deck of 5 cards, including Arrogant Armor, which she replenishes every turn. Now Walpurgis is a guarantee every round, though she and Yurik are immune by default (unless you get priority and discard her armor, somehow, before she plays Walpurgis). This is definitely gimmicky but it’s more consistently gimmicky than before, and that means counterplay is more consistent. Also the fact that she has a Mandatory Action racial means that EVERY ROUND you’ll have at least 2 actions before any enemy can attack you.
Yurik’s deck is now 4 cards - Arrogant Armor, Nimble Strike, Invigorating Touch, and Vampire’s Kiss. He will always have Arrogant Armor in hand at the beginning of the battle to avoid Walpurgis.
QoL Improvements
There are two new ways of sorting items in inventory and shops:
by item count
by power and rarity at the same time
Timestamps are now shown in chat.
Pings are available. You can now ping/mark the desired tile in co-op by holding CTRL + left mouse.
Added the account edit function. You can now delete your account or reset it at any given time. The “Edit” button is accessible from the “Select An Account” screen.
Added “partydiscordcode” command.
You can now unequip all items from a specified character in deck building by using the “Unequip All Items” button.
Items will be now presented in stacks. The items can still be divided into smaller stacks by holding SHIFT and clicking the left mouse button.
The Windows client has been updated to the 64-bit version.
PvP maps will now change every 15 days.
Purchasing chests for gold requires confirmation.
Bug fixes
Minor text fixes :)
Fixed the Adventure Exhaustion bug that was caused by staying in the Daily Deal shop in and after the server reset.
Fixed a bug where kicking a player from the team was causing a black screen for other team members.
Fixed a bug where destroying a character was causing issues with displaying empty slots icons for other character.
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