Hello everyone, finally Act 4 has arrived, here are the patch notes.
First of all we would like to thank you all for your patience and understanding. This patch has taken longer than expected, Christmas, family reunions, adding new features, reworks that were not foreseen and checking that everything went well has taken its time. Besides the simple fact that we are a very small team and there are always unforeseen events, we hope that from now on the following patches will have a faster cadence. Without further ado, here are the patch notes.
Final Act of the game.
Act 4 is the end point of your adventure, the pursuit of Lord Hanshek and the rescue of the princess takes you to a destroyed world. Where the ruins of an ancient civilization float in the void, unimaginable dangers and incredible relics await you.
New enemies, bosses, events and a whole new area to discover.
Act 4 enemies have their own enchantments, just like the players. These enchantments will challenge your gameplay and your knowledge of the game. Our intention is to add more enchantments to other enemies and bosses in the game before Act 4, so that the player is more familiar with them.
Although act 4 is the final act, it does not mean that it is the last map/biome of the game, we will be adding more content and areas you can choose to go to besides the swamp or the volcano.
Nezglekt and Wilbur join the fray.
Two new heroes available for unlocking, each with their own play style and opening up new group combinations.
Nezglekt, the Prophet, is the fourth healer in the game and specializes in card control and mind spells.
Wilbur, the Loremaster, is the third mage in the game and specializes in lightning spells and books.
Cardbacks, Ranks & Perks.
With this patch we introduce cardbacks in the game, at the moment each hero has three cardbacks available that are unlocked with the hero's rank. But this is just the beginning, soon we will add more cardbacks available by completing the main story, a certain madness level, an obelisk challenge or other achievements in the game. Also, we want to add some special cardbacks for completing the new weekly challenges that we will make soon.
Each hero has its own rank, as heroes rank up they will not only unlock cosmetics like skins or cardbacks, now there are also 2 upgrade levels (blue and yellow) for the special cards of each hero (unique card, initial item and enchantemts) that will be unlocked with the hero rank.
The number of perks available for each hero is now based on the highest rank of your heroes, so now you don't need to rank up all heroes one by one to have perks available for them. Why we changed this system? Well, when we design certain aspects of the game we always try to prioritize the fun side of it, and we saw that unlocking a new character and not being able to continue escaling madness levels because new characters were so low compared to your current roster of heroes, wasn't very funny and gave players a bad sense of grinding to play the game, which is something really far from our game perspective. Although the perk system is fine, we feel that once you have unlocked all 36 perks, the system is a bit bland and could be improved making it a bit more customizable for each hero. Our intention is to tweak it so that each hero has something special to choose from, so expect an overhaul of it within the next patches.
Graphical improvements and stability.
We have redone and improved all the combat backgrounds of the game, of all the acts!
We have changed the graphics of the game's knowledge tome and event book. Also, now all menus are more consistent and have the same type of buttons.
New effects, for the cards and enchantments of the enemies in Act 4.
Game performance has been greatly improved, especially in multiplayer.
Auras and Curses.
Removed the "Haste" aura and "Daze" curse from the game to reduce the number of auras and curses in the game.
Now the Fast/Slow aura/curse modifies the speed by 2 per charge, and each charge is nullified between them. Fast/Slow are still unstackable so cards that used to have Haste/Daze have been replaced by high values of Fast/Slow charges.
From now on to facilitate the understanding of auras and curses, auras will always be executed before curses, so auras/curses will always be ordered below the heroes health bar, first the auras and then the curses (Regeneration will now always go before Bleed but also before the Decay, so be careful).
In this sense, we have added a blue background to the auras and a red background to the curses to help new players to identify them. This option is turned on by default but can be disabled in the options menu.
The "Dark" curse now does damage only to single target, but this damage now takes into account the negative resistances and we have added items that modify the number of charges in which it explodes.
"Evasion" and "Shackle" are incompatible with each other and are mutually eliminated when one of them is gained or applied.
The "Doom" curse has been moved in front of the heroes' health bar. This curse can not be prevented or removed in any way.
Gameplay & Other changes.
This patch has changed many fundamental aspects of the game such as the change in the speed system, upgradeable enchantments and balance. So we won't go into particular details of what cards have been changed/modified. Also don't worry, when the game is released we will document every little change we make to the cards, but now that everything is changing and evolving, writing down every little change takes a lot of time and resources that we can't afford.
Balance changes on most cards, increased damage on higher cost cards and also improved damage on overcharge cards.
Overhealing has been removed, when a hero is at 100% hp he is not healed and therefore the items that are triggered when healing are not activated.
The obelisk challenge has been improved, a third floor has been added. When going up a floor you have the option to choose between several random bonuses and also an option to customize your deck a little bit.
50 new items have been added to the game.
4 new warrior cards and a new healer card.
New achivments and achivements icons added to Steam.
Added 8 new Champions that appear in rng mode, and improved some of the old ones with new enchatments.
New heroes mean new responses and interactions throughout the game.
Many QoL features have been added here and there.
The stability of multiplayer games has been greatly improved.
A gazilion bugs and minor issues have been fixed.
Due to the huge amount of changes in this patch, ongoing games from previous versions (v.0.7.52) are not supported. If you want to finish them you can always load the previous version.
What's next?
As we said at the beginning we hope that the patching frequency will return to what it was, here is what we plan to do in continuation:
- New enchantments for Bosses and Champion monsters. Also improvements & balance for Act 4.
- New cardbacks, with game and knowledge tome unlocks.
- Monsterpedia in the tome.
- Heropedia in the tome, with some surprises.
- Improvement of the Weekly Challenges, each challenge will be different from the others and will include modifications that will change the way to play it.
- Perk system overhaul (may take a bit more time).
- Also, there are many more things in the pipeline (heroes and biomes) but they will be coming during the Early Access.
Along with this patch there will be a Weeklong deal of 20% discount, so it's the perfect opportunity if you were still hesitating to buy it or wanted to give it to a friend!
Remember to leave a review on steam if you like the game, it really helps us a lot. As always, thanks to all of you for your support, feedback and understanding.
We really hope you enjoy this patch and Act 4 as much as we enjoyed creating it.
Adam & Javier.