Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board GameThe Hand of Merlin
Dev blog 73 - Milestones
Today we’re releasing our first major patch. It contains the unique Hero passive status effects for the Heroes and a solid rework of a bunch of Skills. Most of this work is purely on the design side, as most of the tech improvements and QoL get released as soon as they’re ready. If you’ve got a feature or improvement you want to see, tell me about it in the comments or on our Discord.
The patch today marks the first milestone of our internal plan. We’re sure we’ll be receiving feedback for the reworks, as it’s very likely the balance is now very different due to a lot of the Skills being upgrades or sidegrades in terms of power and utility. We fully expect to be fixing a bunch of errors on our end for next week as well, since it’s not easy for us to track down all niche issues. We also made some small adjustments to enemies to compensate for that power increase, and we hope to hear from players about how they feel about the game now.
As far as our future plans, we have a total of 5 milestones planned (the first one being today). These aren’t set in stone since the future is unpredictable, so some shifts may happen, but we have an idea of where we’re going and how we’re getting there. As an example, the Hero passive effects (aka character uniqueness) weren’t explicitly planned, but due to player feedback, we prioritized them for the first milestone. Things like this might change our future milestones.
So while I can’t write out the dates (because they might change due to unforeseeable circumstances), I can talk about what we have planned and in what order. We’re open to feedback on this.
For the second milestone, we’re planning three new Heroes. They’re partially done: we’re currently in the process of animating them, after which Mat would take over and design them as a selectable character. They need to get their base attributes defined, the default starting Skill chosen, and passive effect designed (which would be affected by the feedback we receive for the ones in today’s patch).
For the third milestone, we’re planning one new ranged abomination enemy and one new bandit enemy (Mystic equivalent class). The intention is to provide more variety to the early game combat with the bandit and to offset the melee-centric abominations for the later game. On top of that, it would contain gamepad support as well, which I’ve already started working on and have the basics working (can click a button to have something trigger and can move the camera).
The fourth milestone is all about meta-progression and Hard mode. By that time, we hope the players who consider Normal mode too easy will tell us how they feel the game could be made harder. We’re thinking something like run modifiers, where you could pick a set of modifiers that would apply to the game for that run (stuff like faster corruption timers on the world map, or +1 power per turn to enemies). There’s also talk of customizable Hero Prowess as a gateway to even attempt Hard mode, as well as some sort of meta currency (besides Essences since by that point you probably already unlocked all Spells). We have ideas floating, but no hard decisions as of yet. Also, two more Guardian Cores and Dire versions of enemies exclusive to Hard mode.
The final (planned!) milestone is more questline encounters that feature legendary relics, and general improvements and polish.
Each major patch will also have any alternate maps finished by that point, and any extra relics we make. Since new maps increase the patch size, it’s likely better to put them all into one patch than trickle them in every week, just so we can keep the weekly patches smaller.
This is our plan. Tell us what you think about it, what feature you’re waiting for, thoughts on prioritization, etc so we can consider if we have the means to shuffle stuff around.
And as usual, join our Discord server to give and get direct/instant feedback.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 72 - The Skill overhaul
This week we got another design blog post by Mat. It almost seems he’s taking over my job of writing these!
Here’s what Mat wants you to know.
---
Got an opportunity here to share with you all what Mia and myself have been working on for the past couple of weeks. The Unit Ability Overhaul is meant to address quite a number of feedback we received, so here is what it is.
Simply put, we took data from which abilities were less picked or less effective, and buffed or changed most of them, hopefully making them a bit more interesting to pick, or valid in a larger number of builds.
To give you a glimpse of that process, we took a few of the conclusions we made after reading the data and the feedback. In each, I’ll put an example of an ability overhaul.
- Abilities need to not only be thematic, but they also need to provide immediate benefits that justify the cost of a slot. While before we were content in providing different themes and possibilities, we now know we need to compare skills between all available ones, not just the most similar.
Example: Mystic’s Aeolic Elixir (cone buff, granted +3 Move), while it makes thematic and logical sense, it was not worth the slot/AP cost. So we buffed it, aiming to validate more kinds of plays with it: besides its original effect, it now Resets Skill cooldowns to target units. - Upgrades cannot offer downsides at all. All upgrades that did, even if they had a stronger base effect, were hardly picked. I call this “Roadblock design”, and we are not pursuing it any further. All upgrades must be direct benefits.
Example: Warrior’s Reckless Slash, while more powerful than the base version, had an innate miss chance - That was done to validate ways of removing evasion but ended up just feeling bad to use. Instead, the warrior now has Overpowering Slash, which adds the Vulnerable status effects to targets, setting them up for combos later in the turn. A perfect example of our new direction! - Upgrades, in general, must not require actions or resources to be worthwhile. If the upgrade requires resources or conditions to perform its extra effect, there is a set of instances where upgrading the ability in that direction is meaningless. Alternatively, it would be better if the upgrades could be optimized, but were always positive.
Example: An upgrade for the Ranger’s base ability, Far Shot allowed spending an extra AP to increase its range. This additional range is now native to Far Shot, granting the extra effect (more range) at no cost! More targets to shoot is always positive, but a smart player will be able to stay safer due to the increased range, optimizing this effect. - Upgrades cannot change the expected use of the ability. The original design for upgrades often had a “Weird Cousin” in the trio of possibilities, that took the functionality of the ability and changed it to something else with a similar fantasy. This makes some sense, but it turns out it’s not very likely that you would plan your build with this “weird upgrade” in mind, and, in general, they were the least picked.
Example: The Mystic’s Corrosive Concoction ability (cone, deals armor damage only) had an upgrade that inverted its effect, Noxious Concoction (cone, deals health-only damage). While the upgrade was buffed to be more picked, it just made more sense to turn the “cone health-only attack” into its own ability, with its own upgrades! Noxious Fumes now comes into existence, playing with Poisoned and other effects. - More damage was always more effective. This one took my sleep for days. We found out that the most effective way to play the game was to pile up on damage effects and melt the opposition. While this is fun and all, it made the game easy to solve, and after a while, too simple. To combat this, we are making enemies a bit more resilient, but far more powerful, in hopes that if you don't take defensive or evasive actions, you’ll be in dire danger. In addition, we buffed the effects of most defensive/utility skills, making an effort to scale them off the “power” attribute whenever possible.
Example: The Ranger’s Archer’s Vigil, in itself, was not very picked. Its ability to take a clearer shot at a target wasn’t worth the slot. One of its upgrades, Relentless Vigil, also dominated all others, for the simple fact that it allowed a larger damage output. The alternatives, such as gaining an AP to react or receiving less damage, meant little in the current meta. So we took a gamble: now all versions of Archer’s Vigil can now shoot at multiple targets (although at half-power), and its upgrades now offer increased benefits at every shot, preserving the most “fun” aspect of the ability and giving it an overall buff. The rest, however, will depend on us changing the meta, and this is still ongoing!
You can expect to see this overhaul in our first major patch! Changing the meta so drastically can be a bit disruptive, but without a holistic approach, we risked spoiling some effects. We would love to see the same polite feedback we have been receiving so far as we drop this new direction, and the data you provide will make the game even better!
Thank you for reading, and good luck out there in the multiverse!
---
Join our Discord server!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 669742
• Added several new relics: Bronze Bell, Petrosphere, Viking Beads, Charm Stones, Bayard's Bits.
Crash fixes:
• Fixed a crash when double clicking relics to equip/buy that could sometimes happen with a non-full party.
• Fixed a crash when starting a new game after wiping the entire progress.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Added visualization of knock-back and pull-in destination of units.
• Added visualization of covers about to be destroyed by the activated ability.
• Added a toggle to menu options that controls if the game will pause when window loses focus.
• Pathing curves are now rendered with a red opaque color over tiles where the unit using a movement ability would take damage.
• The end turn dialog will now appear closer to the action bar, to minimize required mouse movement.
• In skirmish, the hero and enemy portraits now have nicer and more noticeable selection / hover indicators.
• Removed a half second delay for executing abilities that don't have an animation on use.
• Added support for nested status effects on unit portrait tooltips, i.e. if a status effect can trigger another status effect, the additional one is shown on the tooltip as well.
• Added information about which auras the unit is providing to its portrait tooltip.
• When starting a new run, the roster UI now indicates Hero classes via column header icons and banners.
General fixes:
• Fixed a bug where the achievement "Al-Andalus Tourist" was not correctly tracked across multiple runs. This only applies to newly created profiles, and a fix for existing profiles will be added soon.
• Fixed a bug where double clicking allowed for buying relics with insufficient gold.
• Fixed a bug where the tooltip for a relic shop item could say it's an empty slot even though it's filled, if targeting exactly the slot frame.
• Fixed a bug where units killed with reaction abilities would die in slow motion.
• Fixed a bug where abandoning a run while in a skirmish would show incorrect Warband Level in the Epilogue report.
• Fixed a minor visual glitch where the wobble animation for cards appeared to snap a bit when first starting.
• The game will now correctly ignore the mouse while the cursor is outside the game window's area (such as when running in windowed mode, or in borderless fullscreen with multiple monitors).
• Rana now has female pronouns in her Prowess Unlock description.
• Renamed Notorious Bandit and Dire Thorntoad into Bandit Chief and Dire Toad, respectively. The new names are shorter and fit the UI better.
• Improved the wound animations of The Endless Dreadnought (the final boss).
• Added transition animations to action bar side bars.
• Fixed a few typos in some encounters and ability descriptions.
Gameplay balancing:
• Slight increase to Albion bandits' power to accompany blacksmith buffs.
• Quarry debuff can no longer miss.
• Maim Status Effect now decreases Move and Power in equal amounts, where before, Move was decreased 1 point further.
Dev blog 71 - Design direction
This week we bring you another post from Mat, this time about his direction on designing the passive status effects for heroes.
---
As we discussed in the last blog post, our first major attempt to improve the longevity and complexity of combat is the creation of passive status effects for each character. Today, I want to talk a bit about where we stand on that and some of our ideas.
We want each passive to address two distinct issues: (1) provide another degree of customization to your loadouts, and (2) modify expected gameplay to a meaningful level. More simply, we want passive effects to make your gameplay a bit different depending on your loadout.
We designed and implemented a few, and they are being tested internally to see if they are good enough for us to show you in the following weeks, accompanied by some extra gameplay/balancing changes we mentioned.
The design model had a rather simple directive: each class has at least 2 ways it can “do its job”, and two of the characters spearhead that effort while the other offers an alternate take. Here are some examples
For the Warrior characters, they are all about being able to pursue and disrupt enemies and survive multiple heavy blows. To do this job correctly, survivability is key. Safir aims for consistency: The Paladin passive allows him to react when he loses all armor points, and restores the use of his defensive skills, giving him a second wind in a complicated situation.
The Rangers are always about damage, but they have many tricks up their sleeves. While some builds for them are oriented towards mobility and good use of cover, Salim’s passive, Measured Shooter, increases his damage every round that he doesn’t move - something that will work well with his base ability, that increases his range.
Mystics are varied, but in general, they make sure their allies are doing the best they can, either by healing, increasing power, or making sure enemies aren’t as effective. Morgan Tudd, ever the dedicated healer, sports the Druid Physician passive, allowing his base attack to heal allies adjacent to his target, making even his damage have a defensive use.
Hopefully, you can see what we are going for! Furthermore, we want to entangle the power of each of these passives with the new meta progression cycles we are designing for, but even then, all the numbers are subject to change and balancing. As long as each character feels better suited to a specific gameplay style, or evokes a different feeling, we know we are going in the right path.
---
This is all coming in a “major” patch in a couple of weeks.
Join our Discord server!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 669571
• It is now possible to wipe your entire progress: unlocked Heroes, Spells, etc, via Gameplay Options menu. But beware - this is permanent and cannot be undone!
• Fixed a bug where relics could be duplicated.
• Fixed an issue where players would have to manually reshuffle their Relics to progress in a certain encounter in Al-Andalus.
• Fixed a bug where selling or discarding the grail would end the game with a victory.
• If closed, the legend displayed on the world map (to show what various map icons mean) will now remain closed until opened. (Previously, it would auto-reopen each time you enter the world map.)
• Putting down skill cards without selecting any can now be achieved not just by clicking the Hide Cards button, but also by clicking outside of any card. This makes it consistent with how closing the book itself works.
• Relic UI now recognizes the double click action as a context-driven shortcut for drag-and-drop. In the warband view, it equips or stashes relics, and in the relic shop, it initiates relic selling or buying.
• Fixed an issue where Ranger's Archer's Vigil would not have the same attack area as the basic Shoot attack.
• Fixed a bug with Warrior's Charge skill, where it could deal damage to a single large unit multiple times (once per each tile touched).
• Fixed an issue where summoning a high cover (such as via Mystic's Expurging/Holy Totem skill) would not affect line of sight for already activated enemy zone of control / overwatch-type abilities.
• Status effects gained through an encounter will now indicate their duration on their tooltip.
• Unit tooltips will now also list the Range attribute.
• Enemy portraits can now be double clicked to focus on that unit.
• Unit headers for enemies will now expand when their portraits are hovered. This should make it easier to identify individuals on the skirmish map.
• Fixed a bug where the mini popup dialog for move confirmation was not getting removed when selecting a different ability, selecting a different unit, ending the turn, etc.
• The confirmation dialog can now be confirmed with the Enter key.
• Added a button to the action bar that toggles showing the tile grid (hotkey: X).
• When targeting an enemy with a ranged attack, and the enemy benefits from cover for that attack, there will now be a cover icon displayed along the object (in 3D) that provides the cover.
• Line of sight for revealing heroes to enemies is now blocked by low cover, making it easier to setup ambushes.
• Fixed certain situations in skirmishes where terrain would occlude a tile making it hard to click.
• Improved handling of move areas, to prevent edge cases causing unintended moves due to miss-clicks.
• Hovered tile tooltip in skirmishes is now smoothly animated.
• In the Lobby, an unspent Essence no longer shows a prompt to spend it if all Spells of the selected Core have been unlocked.
• In the Lobby, the tutorial textbox will now linger until dismissed by clicking on it.
• Fixed typos in some encounters.
Gameplay balancing:
• Merlin's Core passive effect no longer prevents attacks from missing when using any Spell. Instead, it reduces all active cooldowns by 1 when using any Spell, allowing base attacks to be used twice in a turn and favoring combos.
• The relic Rabbit's Foot no longer makes you ignore cover bonuses, either when attacking or being attacked. Instead, it now increases your Accuracy every time you miss, resetting when you do hit.
• Removed the AoE aspect of Ranger's Volley skill (upgrade of Quickdraw).
• Revamped the blacksmith gear upgrades by removing negative stats - all upgrades are now a choice between different positive stats.
• Abomination base Power is increased by 1. Minor and Medium Abominations also scale better, increasing in both defensive and offensive stats in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus by larger amounts.
• Boosted the base attributes for all Warrior characters.
• Decreased the base Power of Rangers by 1, as well as shuffle some of their attribute differences.
Dev blog 70 - Upcoming changes
Our designer Mat wanted this week’s blog post to feature some of the design stuff going on in the workshed, and who am I to deny him that?
Here’s what Mat wrote.
---
I’ve been meaning to discuss some of the reviews and feedback that we got so far, and the blogpost channel feels like a good place to start, so let me tell you guys some of our plans.
First of all, gotta say, I’m very pleased by how descriptive and (often) polite our feedback has been. Players have been pointing out some flaws in our design, and after parsing through some of them, we identified 4 major points.
- Characters are not unique enough. Hey, I get that. Having a different biography and starting skill doesn’t really do it - you want each unlock to really mean something. While we want to keep characters of the same class having access to the same pool of skills, we could offer other ways for them to be different.
Our Plan: We have discussed a few ideas, and we are now looking towards Passive Status Effects for each character, that reinforce specific gameplay styles and provide another piece in your loadout. One tank might reset cooldowns as he loses health, a ranger could behave better when away from allies… Things of that nature. We have a few tentative designs and should be ready to implement that this week. More on that at the bottom. - Warriors are being punished too harshly. Melee characters have the short stick! Many of your foes punish being too close to them, like Redcap’s Corrupt or Thorntoad’s Bristleback, and those that don’t, are a pain to pursue. That, coupled with lacking base attributes, makes Warrior characters less desirable!
Our Plan: This is going to be big! The introduction of a new abomination in the “medium” category (with Thorntoad and Cockatrice) that rewards melee strikes will help, but not just that - the entire roster of abilities needs a bit of a tune-up. We are in the middle of the second pass for that, but the Warrior will gain more ways to set up combos, regain AP and reset Cooldowns, and gain more survivability. While these bigger changes will take some time to get right, we can start by fixing a few issues and giving them some attribute boosts, which you’ll see added pretty soon. - Some abilities, plainly, suck. Hey, I get that. The data is pretty clear, and some abilities or upgrades are just not interesting enough! A great example of something that didn’t work well is Raise cover. On top of it being the least picked Mystic ability, its upgrade, Raise Covers, has never been picked by a run that ended up killing the final boss (!!!).
Our Plan: That’s our current effort. We are giving another hard look at the abilities in the game and trying to compare them as a player would. We give a bit more buffing love to those that are the least picked, but try our best to not nerf the ones that are fun to use (Parry and Volley are in my chopping block, though. No promises!). This has led the direction of the game towards a bit more about chaining and stacking effects, the two spheres of gameplay that seem to be having the most traction. We got something solid for the Mystic, and we’ll be looking at the Ranger next. This will take a while since we have to implement them all together, but you should expect to see a major update next month. An example of what we’re doing: we’re removing upgrades that change the feeling of the abilities, such as Concoction -> Noxious Concoction. These will be turned into their own abilities! - Metaprogression is a bit lackluster. No rewards at the end of the run, “boring” prowess unlocks, and lack of a meta-game for the most dedicated and successful players has been on the forums for a while.
Our Plan: This is one of the great things about EA: now that we know more about what our players want, we can start planning for it. We’re still in the early design stages, but we want to offer a more complex and engaging meta progression aspect to the gameplay. One poster, Belgium, mentioned the idea of “Merlin gold” as a currency to spend on persistent buffs to characters. That’s sort of the direction we’re aiming for, lacing that with Hard Mode for you Veterans out there, and more. I’ll have something to show about that real soon, but the other fixes take precedence!
There are other noteworthy things, of course. We’ll be balancing rewards, guardian encounters, enemy attributes, gear upgrades, and all that good stuff that really makes the game as engaging as it can be, but the above ones are going to be our focus. Because these are all so interconnected, we gotta play our hand carefully. We’ll do a lot of internal testing, multiple design passes, and stream these updates for you guys to check out as well, hoping that The Hand of Merlin can be as good as it can.
But even this data collection could not be done without your support, so, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you!
---
I think the whole team would like to thank our community for the support and feedback. We really couldn’t do balancing without people playing the game and sharing their thoughts and experiences, so really, thanks!
Join our Discord server !
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 669476
• Improved the patching system. Future patch download sizes should be five times smaller on average (starting with this one).
• Fixed an issue where certain aura effects would stack against intended design, making the final skirmish scenario in Jerusalem unwinnable in some cases.
• Added move ability confirmation, which can be switched between several modes or disabled entirely via Options menu (disabled by default).
• Party level up notification now appears with an animation in the center of the screen. Hopefully, this should help players notice they have a level up available.
• Fixed a bug where the achievement In the Spirit of Venn could be earned with less than the intended 3 auras affecting one Hero in some circumstances.
• Fixed a bug preventing the Warband achievement from being awarded. In addition, it should also retroactively unlock for players who meet the criteria, but did not have it unlock due to the bug.
• Salim's prowess unlock is now fixed, allowing it to be unlocked through normal means.
• Fixed a bug where the codex would not update the state of unlocked items in some cases.
• Fixed a bug where some skills did not have consistent targeting areas across a character class (such as Ranger's Ensnare versus Shoot).
• Fixed a bug where damage modifiers were not correctly applied in some edge cases.
• Fixed another case where skirmish fast-forward mode could persist into the world map.
• Fixed a few more cases of odd camera placement on ultra-wide screens on some skirmish maps.
• Fixed bestiary entries disappearing after closing the game.
• Fixed an issue where mock translations would unintentionally be shown if the game is run without Steam with a non-English Windows system language.
• Updated Accuracy and Evasion descriptions in the Warband page to better reflect their functionality.
• Updated the description of Quarry effect, granted by Warrior's Condemn (upgrade of Stagger Blow) and Ranger's Hunter's Prize (upgrade of Hunter's Mark). It should now clearly state that Quarry restores Action Points to the player, not the enemies.
• Fixed a number of typos in encounters.
Dev blog 69 - Early access week 1
Our first week of being live in early access! We’re very happy about the reception, which looks to be pretty positive as well!
We’ve gotten a fair number of suggestions and general feedback on both our Discord and on the steam forums. We’ve also received a fairly low amount of technical issues and crash reports, all of which seem to have been fixed, but if you’re still having crashes on the latest version (build 669421 as of Saturday), please send those reports in because I don’t like seeing crashes at all and these always get the highest priority.
In other news, since we’re getting a bit more time away from doing support for users that can’t start the game or are having general issues running it, we’ve been working on some quicker improvements we could do. We’ve mostly had only these past two days to work on stuff, at least on the programmer side, so we’ve done a couple of requested features, like move confirmation, better level-up notifications, and general fixes to some common and obvious bugs, like some aspects of the damage calculation, some stuff with auras and the like.
My fix on Saturday was a bit of a stopgap to prevent crashes related to auras, but it introduced a problem where separate instances of the same aura would stack together. In the case of beneficial auras, the effects were great, but it means that one end game enemy, if left unchecked, would just wreck your run in a most unfair and unsatisfying way, preventing your units from gaining action points at all. This was properly fixed on Monday and is being deployed in the patch today.
We’ve also been fixing any typos, skill bugs, and balance issues that we know about and have a good idea of what the fix is/should be. We also have a large list of items to check, investigate, fix or improve, and all of them will get their turn in time.
Mat came up with some ideas to make the hero characters more unique and has started iterating on that design. The artists proposed a new bandit support enemy and are in general working on new heroes. We’ve also got alternate maps in the works, and all this is planned for a larger content patch in the near future.
Know that we read all your feedback, and I try to be as present on the forums as I humanly can while also writing code and fixing bugs. Since we aren’t a large team, some things will take a bit of time to add or fix, but we will get to them eventually. Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Come join our Discord server and chat with us and report bugs directly, if that’s your jam.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 669421
• Fixed a crash with aura effects.
General fixes & improvements:
• Fixed broken text markup for the status effect granted by Warrior's Rebuke (upgrade of Stand Ready).
Gameplay balancing:
• Increased Faerie reputation gains of certain choices in The Black Tree encounter.
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 669415
• Fixed a memory leak that could cause slowdowns or crashes if playing a single session for several hours continuously.
• Fixed a bug where cone attacks that miss the terrain entirely would cause the game to freeze up in an infinite loop.
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur with Warrior's Thunderous Lunge (upgrade of Lunge).
• Fixed a rare crash where an encounter could grant a relic while inventory is already full.
• Fixed a rare crash when interacting with the in-game Journal.
General fixes & improvements:
• Fixed an issue preventing a certain unlockable Guardian (other than Merlin) from spawning on Arcane Nodes.
• Fixed an issue preventing the Holy Grail story event in Al-Andalus from happening if inventory was full.
• Fixed an issue where Dimensional Restoration would not trigger Merlin's Prophecy.
• Fixed targeting issues with Dimensional Restoration around abyss tiles, making it consistent with other spells.
• Warrior's Charge (upgrade of Lunge) can no longer let your character run into an object (such as a tree or a stone block) and stay inside it.
• Mystic's Noxious Concoction (upgrade of Concoction) should now deal health damage directly, as stated by its description.
• Mystic's Miasmic Desecration (upgrade of Desecration) can now target an area even without any units currently in it.
• Mystic's Sanguine Elixir (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir): the (+) Green upgrade now correctly offers a higher stack count of Quick (the (+) Red upgrade offers twice the charges, which is unchanged).
• Fixed several skirmish map issues where large (2x2) units could be stuck with no path available.
• Fixed missing battle music in certain conditions on the Herbal Shop skirmish map.
• Fixed a bug which allowed The Archmage achievement to be unlocked by spending mana in an encounter, rather than strictly in a single skirmish.
• Fixed a bug causing Butter Fingers achievement to unintentionally be awarded at a certain story event.
• Fixed a bug which allowed Hero Prowess Unlocks to be obtained in Easy mode, rather than Normal only.
• Removed an unintended accuracy penalty in the Bastard Sword blacksmith upgrade line.
• Fixed the wrong card odds in a few encounters.
• Fixed a few cases where special options in encounters would reference the wrong character.
• Fixed an issue where skill card text could sometimes extend past its borders.
• In the Options menu, Music and Sound volume sliders now move in consistent increments.
Gameplay balancing:
• Reduced the amount of Mana granted when the second Guardian is unlocked.
• Slightly reduced the upper difficulty bound of Al-Andalus regular (non-corrupted) skirmishes: maximum enemy count is now 5 (down from 6).
• Ranger's Heavy Shot (upgrade of Shoot) no longer applies the Weak debuff to the caster, but has a longer cooldown instead.
• Ranger's Parthian Sprint (upgrade of Sprint) no longer scales with caster's Power.
• Thorntoad's Bristleback ability now only grants 3 stacks of Thick Skin (down from 5).
• Increased the base armor for all Pylons to 25 (up from 15).
• Increased the cooldown of Translocation to 3 turns (up from 1).