Greetings fellow wizardkin,
Wow, this one took a while! So what have we been up to? Essentially, we've heard two pieces of recurring feedback that we're tried to nip in the bud:
The basic cards are not creative enough to make cool spells.
There's not enough synergy combos to make interesting builds.
We've stuck around with simple shield, card draw and damage spells for a long time and now felt like the right moment to expand that toolkit. However, any mechanic that's in the basic reward pool needs to be easy to explain and very well-balanced. To come up with something that's fun, original and wizardy but also doesn't upset the game design too much was not an simple task! We took some time to experiment and ended up with two new mechanics: Shrink and Magnetize.
Both of them are debuffs you can apply to enemies. Shrink allows you to mitigate damage by temporarily lowering a monster's attack damage. It will give you more control over the battlefield, so you can fish for a powerful combo. If you manage to get the attack damage all the way to 0, your target turns into a flea!
When an enemy is Magnetized and you apply a debuff to another enemy, the magnetized enemy will also receive one stack of the debuff. This will help you to spread debuffs like Poison and Shrink more efficiently. Magnetize only lasts until the end of turn, so this will be more challenging to set up, but combos really nicely with control-oriented builds. Hopefully, this mechanic will scale well with any new debuffs we plan for future updates!
Apart from that, we've also focused on the first-time user experience. There were so many disparate mechanics in the game that you get slapped in the face with the first time you start a run. Icons, tooltips, many monster abilities only come up once, that kind of stuff. So we did a lot of trimming and combining to make combat encounters less complex, but keep them challenging nonetheless.
All of this is just the first step in the long process of streamlining the game design, hence Synergy Update #1. Check out the list of full changes here:
🪄 New Features
Shrink: Reduce monster’s attack damage by shrinking them into harmless fleas.
Magnetize: Spread debuffs like Poison or Shrink faster by magnetizing enemies so that they also get a stack when targeting anyone else.
🃏 Content
9 New Cards in the basic reward pool.
4 New Sigils in the basic reward pool.
⚖️ Balance
Simplified all monster abilities.
More items available in the shop.
Skipping spell card and sigil rewards now removes them from the reward pool for the rest of the run.
Some Quests now take longer to unlock.
Summons now flee when there’s only summons left in combat.
First-time players will always encounter Gremlins as first match.
Shop or events won’t show up until the 3rd encounter.
🍹 Quality of Life
Track quests from the Skymap so you can see your progress during a run.
Prices of items now visible in the shop at all times.
Health loss preview on health bar for player and monsters.
Clearer turn end button feedback.
Clearer feedback for buffs and debuffs like Poison, Shield and Absorb on enemies.
👨🎨 Art
Improved backgrounds.
More card art.
🐞 Major Bugs
Fixed cheese where you could load a run to get start of combat effects additional times.
Fixed some save game inconsistencies.
🌲 Evergreen improvements like rebalancing & bug fixes.
Happy casting!
Jonas & Daan