[img=http://forced2.com/mm/MMUpdate_35.png]
Minion Masters!
We’re excited about how you’ve all been hammering the Team Battle mode with many exciting strategies only possible when you work together.
The event continues for another week, whereupon we will disable 2 vs 2 for a period to make some improvements.
During this final week, you will also get one extra daily quest - the Team Battle Tryout quest.
This week we’ve got a lot of fixes and some balance changes for you, but much more exciting is the fact that the King Puff Cup is running a 2 vs 2 tournament this weekend!
The Dwarves will be watching this with ale in hand, so sign up and show us who the real Minion Masters are!
It’s easy to sign up, just go here
Rules are found in the original forum post
Changelog
Balance
- Spirit Vessel - Damage from 35 to 40 --- Developer comments --- The Spirit Vessel was assumed to provide more value than a Warrior since you could get the Spirit on something that would better utilize it. Unfortunately, the potential of this hasn’t been enough to make Spirit Vessel popular. This slight buff to damage will hopefully make the Spirit Vessel a more viable medium-range tank.
- Warrior and Divine Warrior - Damage from 60 to 70 --- Developer comments --- The Warriors haven’t seen much action since the big Call to Arms rework. While the Warrior is a strong tank with good value, the lack of a special mechanic makes it hard to get value out of at higher levels. Coming back to Call to Arms, it’s also relevant that getting value from that is very hard with the new version, so we increased the reward from getting a good Call to Arms setup. Lastly, the change also helps the Divine Warrior stand alone by accomplishing something while her shield is up, rather than needing backup to gain value from it.
- Stun Blast - Duration from 6 to 5 --- Developer comments --- Stun Blast can be rather frustrating to play against and has been included in a lot of very aggressive decks since the mana reduction. The potential of a good timing is still there with this change, but you’ll have to be slightly more careful about the timing.
- Milloween - Basic attack damage per Arcane Spark up from 8 to 10 --- Developer comments --- Milloween has has a problem with being a Master who could really only do one or two strategies. While she was obviously intended to be focused on Spells, the fact that you had to include Dragon Nest or bet everything on your Arcane Golem made her rather limited. This change helps her defend herself, and makes her able to defend herself rather handily with a full hand of Spells, which should benefit most strategies using her.
- King Puff - Basic attack Attack Speed from 2.25 to 2.5. Range reduced from 10 to 8. --- Developer comments --- We’ve been keeping a close eye on King Puff for a while, and despite his slightly diminishing popularity compared to the previous Season, we believe he is still a little too strong in some aspects. His powerful basic attack allows him to ignore many units, especially once he unlocks the third perk, but his abilities have also started to show a lot of potential at many different levels of play. We’re scaling his basic attack a little so it’s slower, but also finally reintroducing the idea of a Master with a slightly lower range than others. This makes for a few interesting dynamics when King Puff faces off against Stormbringer, or decks including long range units like the Mancers.
- S.T.INT - Health from 85 to 80 --- Developer comments --- The S.T.INT. has still been very popular and feels like a card you often want to include in your deck. While we’re still waiting to see the effects of the previous change, we feels it’s still strong and also wanted to bring it more in line with other interactions. Putting it at 80 health leaves it at a different threshold, as it will now take 1 less hit to kill it from many units, which should weaken it more than such a small change suggests.
Misc
- Introduced pages for the Master Selection GUI and Shop. Temporarily removed the ? entry to avoid a page with nothing but a teaser. Don’t worry, we’re still working on it ;)
- Removed the “Card Play Failed” message when your teammates card failed to play in Team Battle.
- Disabled the ability for non-hosts of a lobby to stop searching for a game
- Moved the Replay GUI back to the lower left.
- Chain Lightning’s placement circle is now blue or red depending on whether a teammate or enemy played it.
- Prepared the shop for something special..
- Added a countdown for the Team Battle event in the menu
- Settsu can no longer be revived by Mordar’s tombstone
- During the final week of the Team Battle event, an extra quest will be granted every day.
- Fixed a number of issues with the July Season Reset causing ranks and rewards to be given multiple times and disappearing.
- Fixed an issue where the shop “Locked until level 7” tooltip would appear far from the cursor
- Fixed the card play/summoning effects playing for both masters in Team Battle when only one player played a card
- Fixed an issue with the pre-placement sound FX playing multiple times on top of each other in Team Battle
- Fixed the Musketeer card art being low resolution at lower settings
- Fixed an issue where you couldn’t change the Master linked to a deck once you’d had a lobby open
- Fixed some issues with the Master being changed to Stormbringer when you exited a menu while looking at locked Masters. It now selects your last selected Master.
- Fixed not being able to rotate arenas with mouse-drag in arena selection
- Fixed Settsu gaining the benefits of Perk 3 at level 2.
- Fixed Xiao Long’s card buffs staying on cards in Team Battle even after Xiao Long died.
- Fixed Stormbringer’s Marksmanship buff stacking when playing with two Stormbringers in Team Battle.
- Fixed an issue with your Teammates hand in a Team Battle replay showing wrongly.
- Fixed an issue where King Puff’s third perk would not make his team properly immune in Team Battle if he was player 3 or 4.
- Fixed an issue with Prowler and Musketeer causing their targets to become untargetable if they died while charging.
- Fixed an issue where you could play with an unowned Master by selecting him during matchmaking
- Corrected Styxi’s description from “miss” to “misses”
- Fixed an issue with some skyboxes causing players that had unselected Bloom to have flipped screens in-game.
- Fixed an issue with Reboomer not causing the Succubus to blink if she survived the explosion
- Fixed Team Battle decks appearing on the Battle leaderboards.
Cheers from BetaDwarf!