Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board GameThe Hand of Merlin
Dev blog 94 - Meet Will!
One of the areas we want to polish up a bit more is VFX. This includes getting some eye-candy for the cool Guardian Spells, specially for the upcoming ones. To that effect, we are currently onboarding a new member of the Room-C group, straight from Bristol, UK: Will!
I wanted to take the opportunity to follow in MarkoP’s footsteps a bit and give him the round of questions we usually give our newest additions.
Q: Hi, could you introduce yourself?
A: Hello, I’m Will. I am a Real-Time VFX artist hailing from England. I love the natural world and nothing keeps my interest more than watching the forces of nature play out in that landscape. Whether it’s paddling in the powerful surf of the Ocean, catching a sunset looking beautiful or the low glow of a campfire set against a starlit night sky, I am happiest when I find time to spend time in the world. It is also an excellent chance to gather reference for when I try to recreate such effects within the dark sorcery of a game engine's powerful particle editor.
Q: When did you start messing with VFX? What got you into it?
A: I first became interested in VFX when I was in my final year of university. I was initially compelled to try it as I realised there was a high demand for RT-VFX artists in the games industry. I quickly fell in love with the process as making effects requires a lot of creative problem solving and design thinking to best represent important gameplay features to players.
Q: What was your impression of The Hand of Merlin?
A: When I first looked at The Hand of Merlin, I thought it looked like the kind of game I’d normally play. I initially thought it was a unique re-theming of a well trodden genre that I enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game had some very interesting differences to contemporaries I’ve played; while still being easy to pick up for a veteran strategy rogue-like player such as myself.
Q: How do you make a specific VFX to fit a specific ability or spell?
A: The most important job of VFX in my opinion is gameplay. So the first thing and last thing is always to make sure that the effect I am working on shows the player a visual embodiment of their inputs. This is achieved by working closely with design and programming to ensure that the effect is aiding player understanding of mechanics they are interacting with.
Q: Can you tell me more of the challenges of being a VFX artist?
One of the biggest challenges I face often when I am creating VFX for any given project is the number of options available. Often a VFX artist has many different ways to tackle the problem at hand. They must then pick the method that will give the best result within the constraints of the project they are working on. The answer to how to solve any given problem again goes back to strong communication about the gameplay purpose of an effect and understanding which workflow is best suited to tackle it.
Q: What things do you do when not making rad visuals? Any hobbies?
A: I like to try and get outside as much as the weather allows. Camping and hiking are things I highly enjoy. With a job like mine, there’s a lot of sitting at a desk. So to stay active I generally try to do some yoga every day and go climbing 1-3 times a week. I would also say that I often get lost in my guitar and music is a fun hobby I’ve been engaged with and I am always learning something new about.
And there you have it! Will is now present in our Discord server under the handle Badfish, so feel free to drop by and ask him any questions!
Mat
Dev blog 93 - Encounter tech change
Next next patch will bring a tech change that will prevent the remaining cheesing/save scam opportunities that are readily available inside of the game on the world map. I want to take a bit of time to explain how it happened and why we’re only fixing it now.
When we initially added encounters to the game, they were pretty tightly coupled to their presentation within the game. Specifically, the way we presented the encounters (the book) was directly in control of advancing the encounter state forward, and just was the encounter state. We would inspect the encounters for a page, prepare all the UI widgets and show them. Clicking on a button that advances to the next page would look directly into the read-only encounter resource, change the text of the page, change the buttons and that was about it.
Later, when we added randomness to encounters, we had the issue of pages changing something that should be perceived as a “fixed” value, like the amount of gold to grant or the required hero to use an option. This was fixed by finalizing the encounters, which essentially means making a copy of the encounter resource and pre-rolling all random value ranges to fixed values.
After that, we wanted a tool that would make sure the encounters are not busted, like having dead ends, or a page having no clickable options and the like. The encounters are just text files, after all, and it's easy to make mistakes. To make this possible, we had to change how we present the encounters, and it could no longer be tied to the presentation. While the tool is not perfect because the encounters are very complicated, it at least finds most of the issues.
At this point, we pretty much had the capability of driving the encounter state forward without having a UI for it. This was the final piece of the puzzle needed to even be able to make no cheesing possible.
I consider cheesing anything that makes it possible (and easy) to abuse the games’ save system to gain resources infinitely or retry choices. This could be abused by getting resources from an encounter, closing the game or returning to lobby, then continuing the game. The result would be that the previously gained resources were still there and you’d restart from the beginning of the encounter. Not good. This is pretty much the reason why the game was never saved during encounters, and why you could restart them by the quit+continue combo.
My latest change fixes all of these issues. Any time you do anything that one would expect to have a permanent effect (picking new skills, upgrading them, spending resources, advancing through encounters, etc), we save the game, which now contains your current encounter state. This means if you leave the world map for any reason then continue your game, you will be set to the same page you were on when you closed it.
There are two main reasons I wanted to do this.
The first one is the reroll ability cards button we added to hard mode. Until the patch hits, the button is disabled during active encounters because of the aforementioned tech reasons: you could in theory reroll your ability cards, see ones you don’t like and decide you don’t actually want to spend the essence on it. All you’d have to do was leave the game, then continue and you’d be reset back to the start of the encounter with no changes to your resources or your party in case you leveled them and picked skills. This is obviously bad on many levels.
The second reason was the remaining few cheese/scams that were possible. You could advance through an encounter, reach the random card choice (which was always fully randomized to account for the quit+continue cheese), pick one, and if you didn’t like the outcome, quit+continue and you’d be back at the start of the encounter with another chance to get a better outcome.
The change done here solves both issues and will make all of your choices during the world map fully permanent in your current run.
The other improvement I’m making is one that’s been bugging me for a while, and now I have time to devote to fixing it. I’ll likely write another blog post on the topic once the fix is up, but in case I don’t, here’s the short of it: for some player characters, their movement during fights isn’t undoable (Tariq specifically, if not a few others as well). The issue has the same cause as being unable to undo movement for a Mystic character that has the Hallow aura active.
Thanks for reading, I hope you don’t mind the little glimpse in the technology part of the game. If you wanna ask stuff, or suggest stuff, join us on our Discord server or post here on Steam. Till next time!
MarkoP
New Update Available - The End Times
The end is near, Wizards & Warriors!
You've asked for it, and with our latest update, we're thrilled to introduce Hard Mode and new metaprogression features.
Hard Mode
One of the most common requests we receive from you all is to make the game harder. Well, we love a challenge, too, and Hard Mode is the result of our efforts! But what exactly does that mean? It means your runs are about to get a serious dose of abomination wrath!
To distinguish Hard Mode from the current player experience, the first step was to add more complex resource management and, of course, make your enemies tougher. Check!
More specifically, you’ll be introduced to Dire Units, which are super-buffed versions of the abominations you already know and love. Meaner and nastier, expect these baddies to radically increase the challenge thanks to higher HP, more armor, less cooldowns, and unique passive abilities, just to name a few upgrades
Curses & Blessings System
Don’t despair just yet, because we’re also adding new metaprogression features, which will help you grow stronger with each run! As you gain more and more Essence, you’ll need a place to spend it, which is where the new Blessings and Curses system will come in.
In Hard Mode, you’ll spend Essence in exchange for temporary benefits to your run. Blessings are positive benefits, such as increasing your maximum mana level or earning larger gold rewards. But there’s a catch… of course there is.
Spending Essence on only Blessings would make Hard Mode too easy, so to balance it out, you’ll also have to select Curses, which produce negative effects on your run, such as more Bandits or less gold.
Each benefit is assigned a Doom Value, and your Blessings and Curses must balance. Hate math? So do we, so allow us to simplify it: If the Blessings you select equal a Doom Value of 3, then you must also select Curses to go with it that equal a Doom Value of at least 3. MUWAH HA HA HA!
It's Spooky Season
We'd be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that this update is releasing during Halloween week! To celebrate, enjoy explosions of pumpkin guts raining down on the battlefield between October 30 - November 1. Trick-or-Treat!
And more! Here's a full rundown of everything included with this update:
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 675833
New features:
• Added a new Hard Mode, which greatly amps the difficulty and is tuned for Heroes with Prowess unlocks.
• Added Dire Bandits and Dire Abominations - bigger, meaner, uglier versions of enemies which have a chance to spawn in Hard Mode runs.
• Upon beating Hard Mode once, players unlock Hard Mode+, which allows adding Curses and Blessings to add extra challenges to a Hard Mode run.
• Added seasonal destruction effects. Covers and units will explode with pumpkin chunks between October 30th and November 1st, and candy canes between December 24th and January 1st.
General fixes:
• Fixed a crash with gamepad after opening and closing the in-game menu while in portrait tooltip.
• Fixed a potential crash when a unit is killed.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when an enemy unit would be reduced to zero Range.
• Fixed a bug where the difficulty settings in session weren't restored properly when reloading the save game.
• Fixed an issue where the option to recruit Rumayla al-Qirqiyya would sometimes erroneously not be generated in her encounter.
• Fixed an issue on some skirmish maps where Heroes could spawn in invalid locations.
• Fixed a geometry error in the Tavern skirmish map, which allowed enemies to enter tables.
• Units that don't end up moving from a knockback or a pull-in effect will no longer trigger reaction attacks.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Gritting Slash skill where the Grit effect would sometimes not be applied to the Warrior.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Staggering Bash skill (and its upgrades) where it could sometimes fail to impart the Staggered condition to the target if the knockback was interrupted.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) where it could sometimes fail to disrupt prepared actions.
• Added a missing line in Warrior's Bash skill description about its disruption capabilities.
• Alain's passive no longer triggers Mesmerized when an enemy uses a non-damaging ability against a decoy (such as Redcap's Gaze).
• Ranger's Ensnare skill (and its upgrades) can no longer miss.
• Berserk Status effect and its derivatives, associated with the Warrior's Rage ability line, no longer increase damage done to self.
• Alain no longer poisons himself when under the effect of Expurger (from the Mystic's Expurging Totem).
• Thorntoad's Leap skill now correctly triggers reactions like Archer's Vigil and Stand Ready.
• Fixed various typos in encounters and tooltips.
Optimizations:
• Reduced the polygon count of most meshes in the game, greatly improving framerates on low-end PCs, and without noticeable loss in visual quality.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Removed the gamepad controls legend from the game. Instead, individual UI elements have contextual control labels, which takes up less space and should be more intuitive.
• Action bar number hotkeys are now only visible when using mouse and keyboard.
• When using a gamepad, there is now a hover indicator to connect the disabled encounter option with the tooltip explaining why the option is not available.
• All heroes that have their Prowess unlocked will now by default be set to the first unlocked Prowess in the list in the Lobby.
• Tooltips for relics viewed in the Journal will now show formulas, since exact numbers can be inaccurate and uninformative outside of combat.
Gameplay balancing:
• Status effects that reduce damage (Heavy Armor, Resistance, Expurger, Shielded, etc) no longer reduce damage done from Spells. Spells, however, still benefit from damage-increasing effects, such as Vulnerable.
• Increased max stacks of Bleeding effect to 10 (up from 5).
• The Well Rested status effect now stacks.
• The Paladin status effect (Safir's passive) now deals 1*Power damage when using non-offensive abilities, up from 0.5*Power.
• Morgan Tudd's passive (Druid Physician) now also works on himself, rather than strictly other allies.
• Wilfred's passive (Nonchalant) increased to +3 damage (up from +2).
• Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill (upgrade of Parry) no longer costs AP to use, like the base version.
• Ranger's Specialty Arrow skill (and its upgrades) have been buffed. Increased CDs (2->3 in most cases), but increased base damage (0.5x -> 1x), as to not make it so reliable on its conditional effect. Exploding Arrow (one of the upgrades) no longer needs to target unarmored targets to deal its explosive effect.
• Ranger's Archer's Vigil skill (and its upgrades) now deal slightly more damage. Also changed Defensive Vigil upgrade into Sharp Vigil, which grants Guard Down as a debuff.
• Slightly increased AoE of all skills in the Ranger's Volley line (1.5->2, Wide 2.5->3).
• Reduced Ranger's Quick Draw skill line's accuracy penalty to 30% (down from 40%), making the ability more reliable.
• Slightly increased base Health and Armor in most rangers, bringing their average defenses (Health + Armor) to 30, up from 26.
• Recurve Bow blacksmith upgrade line (Balanced Ranger Weapon) now also grants +1 Evasion.
• Roland's Horn relic now has a simpler and stronger design - it debuffs all enemies on the map, reducing their Power.
• Medicinal Bandages relic no longer costs AP to use.
• Added a starting cooldown on Wyvern's Jump skill. This should make getting ambushed less punishing.
Dev blog 92 - Rerolling Ability Cards
Hey! Mat here, once again. Hardmode is just around the corner, so I hope you are as excited as we are!
I wanted to take a moment to explore one of the latest features we are introducing to Hardmode: rerolling ability cards.
It's simple. Whenever your warband gains a rank, you are able to pick a new ability or upgrade an existing skill. If you are in Hardmode, you can now spend Essences to get another roll, with the first card being guaranteed to be a new one when upgrading.
This will allow you to spend the Essence you earned in Hardmode in order to have more control over your build, making the run a bit more likely to succeed. This will come in handy when you engage with Curses and Blessings, as those runs can be quite challenging, even if they give you a lot of Essence.
It’s another reason to bank some Essences before attempting a harder run, for sure. In fact, this whole idea was brought up by MarkoP when considering other uses for Essences, and also a way to address how random the game can be for high-level play. We sat on the idea for a bit, but once the changes to the Essence economy happened in Hardmode, we just felt like it was time to try it out!
Now, we’re looking at the first few days after we launch the End Times update to see how we can improve the experience, but we already have a few plans. MarkoP is working on removing a tech limitation to allow you to reroll ability cards when you are inside an encounter (currently it can only be done when not in an active encounter), and we are investigating ways of improving the UI as well.
The more important part though, is to hear from you guys what you think is the effect of this change! Did it kill the vibe of the game? Did it feel more strategic, or more grindy?
As you play our new update, be sure to let us know on our Discord server!
Best of luck out there!
Mat
Dev blog 91 - Hardmode progress
Hi there!
Preparations are almost done with our Hardmode update, dubbed affectionately as The End Times. Hope you are as excited about it as we are!
Last week, I called for some beta testers to play our initial attempt at Hardmode, to figure out how they felt about the whole thing. We got a few people through Discord, we added our own internal players and some of Versus Evil Heralds - our most vocal supporters in social media.
I’m always pleased to discuss game design and balancing with our players, and this event was quite productive already. Here’s some of our takeaways:
Presentation - Curses and Blessings: we introduced the Curses and Blessings screen when you clicked on the Hardmode banner at difficulty selection. This was deemed a bit odd: “I already selected a difficulty mode, so what’s with these customization tools? How do I just play Hardmode?” was the overall feeling.
We took that as a bad sign and changed how it's presented. Now, when choosing Hardmode, you’ll be presented with a second choice: Regular, or Hardmode+, which DOES feature the Curses and Blessings screen, as seen on our previous blog posts. We hope that clarifies it.
Dire Wyvern’s Ambushes: if you played our game, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Wyvern has this capacity of jumping behind your squishy characters to take a bite out of them. If your encounter started up with the enemies taking the first turn, that means you already have quite a problem on your hands! The issue came when Dire Wyvern did the same thing. The extra damage plus his Opportunist passive meant that he could melt down your characters before you could take a single action! Bad design!
The simplest solution (which we also applied to regular Wyvern) was to add a starting cooldown to the skill, so it only comes into play around the second turn. While this helps, we also took a look at the map and made some adjustments for fairness. With so many maps, not all can be winners, eh? Keep an eye out for unfair situations, and let us know!
Rewards when Abandoning a Run: This one is a bit fuzzy. As you know, Curses and Blessings require Essence to work, and we are going to reward players for playing Hardmode - the more zones you clear, the more Essence you gain.
Now, something happened with one of our Discord players: after beating Behemoth in Albion, he ended up abandoning a run in Marca Hispanica. He was quite surprised to find out that, under our initial rule, you’d only gain Essences after you lost a run! Abandoning, we reasoned, shouldn’t be rewarded. Well, we talked it through a bit and decided to just let it be, for the sake of avoiding frustration: now, you earn the Essences even if you abandoned the run.
Other Tweaks: we still made time to make some tweaks here and there. Roland’s Horn is getting another iteration, Wilfred and Safir got some small buffs, Bleeding now has larger stack sizes, that sort of thing. We’re also investigating some larger changes to the Supplies system, which we’ll focus on after Hardmode is live. Keep an eye out for blog posts on that!
And that’s it for now! As we’re finishing up the biggest systems in the game and approaching a full release, feedback is quite important to polish up abilities and clarify UX. Thank you so much for the support so far. We still want to do another week of testing before we show you the final result, so we appreciate the patience, and if you haven’t, join our Discord server and watch The Hand of Merlin happen before your very eyes!
Mat
Dev blog 90 - A Short Closed Beta
Hello again! Quick one today.
We have Hardmode and Metaprogression ready for testing! Several modifiers, all the Dire Units, and all baseline changes are in the game, and we’ve been testing them for a while now. It’s coming along nicely, but here’s the catch:
We built Hardmode with our most proficient players in mind. You know, you guys who were concerned about the game being too easy - and we could use more of your input before we put the game out to the wider public.
So, we’re looking to conduct a small closed-beta of sorts, where we’ll make a special build available for those interested, featuring Hardmode and its modifiers. After playing it for a bit, the playtesters can provide us with some valuable input and suggestions, and we can do a little bit of extra polish before the Hardmode Update hits the (digital) shelves!
So, if you are into playing the hardest Hand of Merlin can be, drop us a line on the Discord server and we’ll sort it out!
Mat
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 675212
• Fixed the wording and counter for the Full Roster achievement to correctly target unlocking 9 heroes from the base game.
• Fixed a bug with the Exertion achievement where it could track action point usage incorrectly in some cases.
• Combat maps in Al-Andalus and Jerusalem should now spawn the same enemies even after restarting the match, like most other maps.
• Fixed a bug where the Keen Aim status effect would not expire properly at turn start.
• Toad's Bristleback effect no longer triggers Wyvern's Opportune strike, solving some unclear interactions.
• Stasis should no longer end prematurely based on some character passives.
• Redcap's passive should no longer allow pylons to act when it triggers.
• Alain the White's passive should no longer apply after he's killed in battle.
• Fixed a bug where in the final (Jerusalem) fight, kills that happened in the first turn would not grant mana.
• Fixed a rare bug where the encounter option fineprint could get garbled.
• Fixed an issue where the cards on the world map could be obscured by the map legend in Big Picture mode.
Optimizations:
• Loading times on game start should now be faster on some PCs.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Replaced the node models in Jerusalem world map to make it more clear what their encounters are.
Gameplay balancing:
• The Mesmerized debuff, associated with Alain the White, now decreases Range and Accuracy, instead of Range and Evasion.
• Spire, a Tier 3 spell in Morgana's Core, now imparts a higher stack count of the debuffs it applies.
• Reduced the cooldown of Warrior's Parry skill (and its upgrades) from 3 to 2 turns.
• Increased the damage dealt by Warrior's Charge skill (and its upgrades).
• Ranger's Take Aim skill (and its upgrades) no longer cost action points. The Green versions of the Tier 3 upgrades, which were boosted by a reduction of AP cost, now have increased effect strength instead.
• The Raider enemy should now avoid hitting allies with his bombs a bit more, and has less range now (from 6 to 5 tiles).
• Changed Mandrake's Quicken skill. Instead of refreshing cooldowns, it now grants evasion - this is to remove the uncounterable "double-shot" it usually did, in exchange increasing its average survivability.
Dev blog 89 - Fun with Telemetry
Hello again!
As Mia is preparing the modifiers for our extended Hardmode, I had a day or two to focus on some minor balancing. So I wanted to share with you a bit of the telemetry data we’ve been gathering and how we go about noticing what needs a bump or a nerf.
So, one thing I was a bit concerned with was how powerful each enemy was in comparison to each other. Is a Knave as dangerous as a Pillager? Is a Thorntoad comparable to a Basilisk? In the search for that answer, we could look at how much damage each enemy deals overall, but that can be skewed by how many of each unit there is. So, knowing it isn’t a perfect data set either, I wanted to ask "how many kills does each enemy have?", starting with the bandits.
In the latest 720 kills performed by a human bandit, these were the top 5:
Raider: 187
Rascal: 70
Looter: 68
Outlaw: 58
Brigand: 56
Now, besides the subtle prevalence of ranged bandits, I was very surprised to see that the Raider had SO many more kills. Surely, it meant that the Raider enemy was the most powerful of all the bandits!
Well, not quite. After noticing nothing immediately wrong, I saw that he’s a user of the Prepare Bomb skill, one of those delayed AoE effects. And, as intended, this sometimes ends with a friendly-fire kill, especially if the player has some knockback effects, and those are counted in the telemetry! Following that thread, I eventually discovered that the Raider made no attempts at avoiding his friends. Oh boy. A small tweak to the AI, and we’ll see the results in a few weeks!
In the Abomination department, the story was a bit different.
In the latest 3490 kills performed by an Abomination, these were the top 5:
Mandrake: 1308
Thorntoad: 494
Behemoth: 425
Redcap: 384
Wyvern: 325
A similarly scary jump. Now, in this case, it's not so clear cut - Mandrake’s delayed AoE, Barrage, does not do friendly fire, and Mandrake is pretty much as common as a Redcap or Wyvern, even though it has pretty much double their killshots combined. What gives?
Well, this is where you gotta do a bit of a leap of faith. You see, It’s normal to expect a ranged abomination with a decent power stat to be the top killer, but I felt the numbers to be a bit high compared to its allies. Then I remembered that we did a recent change where its Quicken ability enabled Mandrake to shoot twice in a single turn. A bit of a needed power boost, sure, but I don’t think it allowed for much counterplay.
So I took the opportunity to remove that capacity and instead add evasion to the same ability! Still a buff from the previous version, but now less murderous. Again, we’ll see the results in a few weeks, eh?
That sort of stuff happened all over the place. Charge, Parry and Take Aim were hardly picked (especially in builds that ended up winning the game), so they got a bit of a buff. Sieges in zone 1 are pretty lethal, but I didn’t touch them until we have more information on the Mandrake change. And, finally, take a look at the hero picks:
In the latest 5325 Hero picks, these are their rankings, rounded:
Breunor: 1506 (28% of all parties had him)
Merewen: 1427 (26%)
Morgan: 1334 (25%)
Rana: 241 (5%)
Salim: 205 (4%)
Isabel: 147 (3%)
Wilfred: 114 (2%)
Zahra: 94 (2%)
Safir: 86 (2%)
Tariq: 83 (2%)
Rumayla: 70 (1%)
Alain: 18 (<1%)
Now, the biggest input point is, of course, availability. Breunor, Merewen and Morgan are the default heroes, so it’s safe to assume most games feature at least one of them, perhaps with a small indication that Breunor is a bit ahead of the rest of the Warriors. Rumayla and Tariq are a bit harder to gauge, but they are also a bit unorthodox, so that (maybe) explains it. Nothing too scary there, but worth keeping an eye out.
Now, Alain? I know, he’s the hardest character to unlock, requiring you to reach party rank 10. But the size of the jump surprised me a bit. Here’s where internal feedback comes in: when we first submitted Alain, even our dev team felt he was cool, but maybe a bit weak, with an odd triggering mechanism for his passive. With that in mind, I decided to buff his passive a bit, and see what happens with those numbers.
Not an exact science, and you gotta be careful to keep them feeling different, you see.
So, yeah, that’s pretty much the process. A lot of parsing numbers, coming up with hypotheses, and testing them. Sometimes it's as easy as reducing the cooldown of a supporting skill or tweaking the AI of a unit, other times you just gotta go with your gut. Hopefully, the more iteration cycles, the better the result!
My next stop is spells. Did you know that 47% of all spells cast in the game are Restoration? Oof.
Any thoughts on that or any of these changes? Think you noticed something different? Drop us a line on our Discord server and join us in making The Hand of Merlin as good as it can be!
Mat
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 675092
• Added all of the remaining alternate combat maps, across all zones.
General fixes:
• Fixed possible crashes when entering or leaving combat if playing with a gamepad.
• Fixed a possible crash during AI's turn in combat.
• Fixed a bug with being unable to use multi-target abilities with the gamepad.
• Fixed a bug where the score view didn't close when clicking on hero icons.
• The Red version of Doubleshot+ (upgrade of Ranger's Quick Draw) is now called Tripleshot and correctly describes that it indeed shoots 3 times.
• The Green version of Surging Shot no longer explodes units on kill shots.
• Basilisk's Lingering Poison now correctly reduces health healing, instead of increasing it.
• Fixed several typos.
Optimizations:
• Reduced the time AI takes for the Basilisk's turn in combat.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Improved the UX on ultra-widescreen monitors of several more combat maps.
• Improved the UX of Lobby navigation with gamepads.
• Gamepad X/square can now be used to activate notifications on the world map.
• The game no longer waits for the camera to settle before giving control over the Journal or Core on the world map.
• Changed War Horn relic's description, to better describe its self-cast nature.
Gameplay balancing:
• Thunderbolt now deals a flat 15 standard damage, away from reducing all armor OR killing unarmored units.
• Ranger's Decoy skill (and its upgrades) now have limited charges.
• Noble Ruser (Merewen's passive) now only reduces cooldowns by 1 instead of resetting all of them. This still allows her to chain basic attacks.
• Behemoth's Bloodlust passive now increases its speed whenever it takes damage, and Trample is required to be used in its regular turn, costing 2 AP. The intent of this change is to curb non-counterable behavior.
• Cockatrice's aura has fewer stacks of regeneration now.
Dev blog 88 - Alternate maps!
Hello there!
Quick one today - we just wanted to share some of the alternate maps we recently finished, to spice up your combat scenarios as you go back, run after run. We introduced a few of those in Z1 a few months ago, and now we finally finished the rest of the zones. Now, every single map “concept” we have should now have 4 versions: Default, Default Corrupted, Alternate, and Alternate Corrupted.
Here are some screenshots:
That’s a lot of maps! What do you think? Any favorites? Let us know on our Discord server, and good luck out there!
Mat