We have been working hard to iron out the process of developing Duelyst II, and now we are trying out a shift to our patch schedule, adding a mid-month patch aimed primarily at adjusting existing cards. Since we just did balancing at the end of last month, and since this is the first one, this one isn’t making particularly big changes. We’ll be looking at how people feel about this change to schedule, and how sustainable it is for us when evaluating continuing this in the future.
You can also read the patch notes on our website (it has pictures!).
Balance Changes
Looking at player feedback and gameplay data, thing are overall in a reasonable spot, so we’re just going to make a few adjustments to nudge things around a little bit for now. There are several more changes we have been discussing making to address long standing problems, we just need to figure out the right changes to make and find a good time to make them.
Nightsorrow Assassin
[Old] Minion | 3 | 3 / 1 | Opening Gambit: Destroy a nearby minion with 3 or less Attack.
[New] Minion | 3 | 3 / 1 | Opening Gambit: Destroy a nearby minion that costs 3 or less.
Aggressive Abyssian decks have been among the best decks of the month so far, but haven’t been that much above the next best decks. We’re taking the opportunity here to make a change to a problematic card that we hope also reigns in the deck a little bit.
Nightsorrow Assassin is a card that shapes what cards are playable in the metagame with its binary Opening Gambit, and pushes out expensive, low attack minions which tend to help slower decks stabilize the board. Effects like this also affect the designs of new cards, killing ideas before they can become cards. We want to keep the role of Nightsorrow Assassin as a strong tempo play, so we are just shifting it to handle low cost cards while developing board state, so it picks up the ability to handle other cost efficient threats in exchange for not invalidating some expensive ones.
Wind Runner
[Old] Minion | 3 | 3 / 3 | After this moves, give nearby allied minions +1/+1.
[New] Minion | 3 | 3 / 3 | After this moves or teleports, give nearby allied minions +1/+1.
Wind Runner is a cool card that has been among the worst performing. We’re opening it up to also trigger on teleport to give it some additional utility, and help it find a home now and in the future.
Eternity Sage
[Old] Minion | 7 | 5 / 7 | Opening Gambit: Equip the Eternity Core. Dying Wish: Destroy a random ally artifact to resummon this on the same space.
[New] Minion | 6 | 5 / 7 | Opening Gambit: Equip an Eternity Core. Dying Wish: Destroy a random allied artifact to summon this on this space.
(some minor cleanup to the wording here)
Eternity Sage has struggled to do much as a late game play, in part due to just having a poor cost to stats ratio. We are looking at diversifying late game play patterns, and feel a sticky threat like Eternity Sage can help do that at a better ratio. There was some consideration to also changing the stats, but we’re just going to start here for now.
Wording Changes
All of these changes are non-functional changes to clear up what cards do.
Fixed some cases where General wasn’t properly capitalized:
- Silverguard Squire
- Timecloak Coiler
- Progenitor
Changed “resummon” to “summon” to be consistent with other cards:
- Soulstone Obelysk
- Eternity Sage
- Deja-Vu Engineer
Temporal Sage, Lily
[Old] Minion | 4 | 4 / 5 | Opening Gambit: Teleport the unit directly in front of this backward 1 space. If another unit occupies that space, deal 2 damage to both instead.
[New] Minion | 4 | 4 / 5 | Opening Gambit: Teleport the unit directly in front of this 1 space in that direction. If a unit is on that space, deal 2 damage to both of them instead.
Mindlathe
[Old] Artifact | 3 | After your General damages a minion, reactivate and take control of it until the end of the turn.
[New] Artifact | 3| After your General damages a minion, reactivate and take control of it until the end of your turn.
Stunned
[Old] Stunned units lose their next action.
[New] Stunned units cannot move or attack until the end of their owner’s next turn.
Bug Fixes
- Fix Echo Mage to work like other cost setting effects
- Fix Embla, Forever not granting additional mana crystals outside of Sandbox.