Minion Masters!
Today we have some exciting changes for everyone.
We’ve received so much interesting feedback about Expeditions and are ready for another iteration on the feature as well as some long awaited balance changes.
The nomad and the general
Once I walked the world. I saw people with contorted faces grasping at the gold dug from the earth. I fled and fled until my legs could barely carry me anymore.
As I stumbled through the desert my memory fading, I met a man who called himself the General. And he said: “Nerf ragepoison”
As I pulled myself from the ocean, exhausted and weak, I met the General and he said: “Nerf ragepoison”.
As I crawled through the blistering cold of the mountains, I met the General and he said: “Nerf ragepoison”.
Now I sit here before you, at the warm campfire with my body rested and supplies aplenty, and I say; “Nerf Rage Potion”.
Card Design Contest
Yes, you’ve heard us right – YOU can now become a Minion in Minion Masters! BetaDwarf presents the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor... and the best thing is, your card may actually get implemented into the game!
Here’s how it works:
- From today onwards, you’ll have 2 weeks for you to think and carefully design your card
- To submit your ideas, please check the related posts on the Steam forums and Reddit
- After that, every card goes into one big poll that lasts for 1 week
- After all that, we begin the final voting period in which we pit against each other the best 3 cards from each category and this final voting process (5 days duration) will determine our grand winner that gets to join us in the great pan galactic warfare. Please note: BetaDwarf has the final say and provided card information is subject to change.
You’re basically only limited by your own imagination, but in order to not have this contest run forever, we decided to limit submissions to the following categories:
- Melee
- Ranged
- Flying
We’re looking forward to your ideas, creations and submissions!
Changelog for Update 51
Balance
- Rampage - Rage buff decreased from +100% damage to +50% damage. Also affects Volco perk 3, Raging Reinforcements --- Developer comments --- There were a couple of problems with the Rampage card and the Rage buff in general. The Rage buff could completely swing the interaction for certain minions, and in some cases even turn counters on their heads. Most of all we were not fond of strategies that relied on a single rampaged push to win the game with a specific counter required to survive. While we would still like large Raged pushes to be effective, they should no longer be able to completely obliterate you for one misstep.
- Volco
- Perk 1 - Afterburner changed to: When Volco holds the Marked bridge and plays a card, he fires a firebolt at the enemy Master dealing 60 damage. --- Developer comments --- Volco’s first perk has been a piece of the game we wanted to look at for some time. While we had expected a larger rework to be required, we found a different version of the original that didn’t change too much and maintained a lot of the upsides of the design without the major downside; suppression. While the perk had a clear counterplay - taking the bridges - opponents of Volco felt unable to do anything when Volco was playing multiple cards to activate the afterburner. Only hitting the Master maintains the synergies of the perk but removes that frustration. Volco players will also be forced to reconsider their deck choices somewhat. Since the perk can no longer feed in on itself by holding the bridges and can neither help Volco answer air attacks, bridge control and anti-air will need inclusion to make more rounded decks. It’s an obvious downside to the perk to not hit Minions, so we reduced the requirement for activating it by only making it one bridge, which is randomly selected and Marked when he gains the perk.
- Perk 3 - Tempers flaring affected by Rage buff change, no further changes. --- Developer comments --- Volco’s third perk was also part of the reason we changed the Rage buff. The game changed massively when he gained the third perk, and interactions swung a little too heavily in his favor.
- Raging Reinforcements
- Affected by Rage buff change
- The card now shows a card buff in hand detailing what Minion(s) will spawn on play.
--- Developer comments ---
Raging Reinforcements was not too good before we changed Rampage, so it obviously needed some kind of balancing to account for the change.
We believe a Mana reduction would be much too powerful despite the random nature of the card, so we opted for a different direction that might address some of the other critique the card has had; randomness.
The card now decides the spawned Minion(s) as soon as you draw it, and the result is indicated as a card buff, allowing you to make informed decisions based on a hopefully more fun kind of random on the card. - Dragon Nest
- Changed to: Summons a Flightless Dragon Whelp whenever its Master plays a Spell. Because dragons love magic.
- Lifetime up from 30 to 45 seconds.
- Health up from 250 to 300.
--- Developer comments ---
Dragon Nest was another card that required very specific answers to handle, and despite the changes we made some time ago, we didn’t feel the card was really in a good place yet.
The root of the issue has always been the fact that the Dragon Whelps spawned were high damage flying units, thus requiring a specific response to battle.
We love the basic interaction of spawning Minions when you play spells, but decided to use the relatively new Flightless Dragon Whelps as the card to spawn instead, as that will allow many decks to handle the swarm of dragons.
This also let us do away with the mana requirement, which wasn’t performing quite as well as we had hoped. A few stat changes were also necessary, as the building is now more of a long term production building based on Spells rather than a quick burst of dragons. - Morgrul, the Swarmer King - Mana cost reduced from 5 to 4.
--- Developer comments ---
We believed Morgrul had a lot of potential in the hands of skilled players, as the versatility the card offered through instant damage and knockback could be used quite well. However, the card has not seen as much playtime as we had hoped, and that is most likely because 5 mana is the point where things have to be really impactful to include in your deck or they will slow you down too much.
Join our players Sinilil, Eazotop, Dipshit, Shadyhobos, Videogamer77 and developer UncleOwnage for a roundtable at 15 CET discussing the changes on The King Puff Cup stream.
Quality of Life
- Bridge Marks are now placed according to player position in Team Battle. Two similar Masters’ Marks are combined into one.
- When reaching the max global supply cap at 20,000 supplies, excess Supplies are now sold very cheaply for gold - Thanks Grey Wolf.
- The move animation in Expeditions is now faster.
- Team Battle now downprioritizes forming the same team multiple times in a row.
- Team Battle further downprioritizes matching Premade vs non-Premade.
- Team Battle further downprioritizes matching teams with a large rank difference.
- Currency and free spin token tooltips updated to reflect the supply changes - Thanks StevenEven
- Expedition grass tile colours revisited and homogenized.
- Expedition Map now starts centered and zoomed out.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where you could start a ranked battle from Expeditions using a Draft deck and be flagged for cheating - Thanks KestreL.
- Fixed an issue where King Puff’s Mark sometimes would not swap with Trick Swap when he was player 2 on a team in Team Battle - Thanks StevenEven.
- Fixed a few issues with Expedition Maps having holes and errors.
- Reworked some loading flow to reduce crashes on computers with low VRAM (this should fix many of the issue people have had loading into 2 vs 2)
- Fixed a bug where the Card tooltip box would stay on the UI if you selected the card while you had were hovering over the buff.
- Fixed a bug where you would receive a “you left the game” message and lose after winning an Expedition match - Thanks Jan-Niklas.
- Reduced a number of texture sizes that did not have to be as large. This should further reduce crashes.
- Fixed Daggerfall daggers being covered by snow.
Cheers from Betadwarf!