[img=http://forced2.com/mm/MMupdate_28.png]
To arms!
The Tri-Team Tourney is running hot, and after seeing Team Brawny take an early lead, we’re wondering where the love for Brainy and Bloody is ;)
Today’s patch changes one of the highly controversial cards of the game; Call to Arms.
Call to Arms has had a large effect on the meta of the game for quite a while, but we haven’t really been happy about the fun gained from playing against it. Thus, we’ve reworked it a bit, and in the process, balanced a few things that were held back by its presence.
Balance
- Call to Arms - Reworked to: Mana: 3 Replaces all your buildings with Warriors. Note: This means the card now destroys all buildings and spawns Warriors in their places. It no longer counts the Master Tower, and there’s a slight delay between the casting and each building being replaced. If the building dies within the delay, no Warrior is spawned. --- Developer comments --- Call to Arms was a card intended to use buildings for an offense. However, with the best version of a Call to Arms deck being wall and turret based, it quickly turned into a game of stalling. While we’re not against playing a defensive strategy, this version lent itself to a decidedly non-interactive way of playing, which didn’t really suit our vision of a Minion Masters match. A lot of players have been giving us feedback that it was unfun or boring to play against, even when they would win, and we feel a large part of this was the strategy of stalling to mana frenzy and then snowballing. The new version puts the onus on the player of the buildings to gain value from them as they convert to Warriors, and - combined with the changes to the Wall and Laser Turret - should enable more interesting decision-making both for the player of Call to Arms and their opponent. We’re looking forward to seeing what you make of it :)
- Wall - Duration decreased from 45 sec to 30 sec. Health increased from 1000 to 1500 --- Developer comments --- The Wall seems an integral part of any stalling strategy, and as mentioned above we’d like to keep stalling to a minimum while allowing defensive playstyles. We don’t believe Call to Arms was the sole component that allowed the stalling decks to work, in fact we found it rather likely that you could make the same types of decks without Call to Arms, it just wouldn’t synergize as well. The Wall change aims to make playing the Wall a more interesting choice. It allows you to defend one large attack, but then expires. This will hopefully lead to more openings in defensive strategies, giving attackers a chance to use timings to break through.
- Laser Turret - Duration decreased from 40 to 30 sec. --- Developer comments --- For the same reasons that the Wall was changed, so did we change the Laser turret. The turret was buffed recently to handle bigger units better, and we’re still seeing the effects of that. One of the things it also does very well however, is board control. The large range and high damage allows it to hold the line very effectively, and for a long time. This duration reduction should again make it more important to play the defensive building at the right time, as it is less likely to last you multiple attacks.
- Mordar - Tombstone card Mana cost reduced from 1 to 0 --- Developer comments --- Mordar hasn’t been performing as well as we’d hoped, in part because of a basic attack that’s hard to supplement with a deck, and in part because his perks are hard to get value out of. Making the Tombstones cost 0 mana will allow him to gain value from resurrecting even small units, and a much larger gain from mid-cost units, while not changing the dynamics of resurrecting the very big units much.
Misc.
- Tweaked Trick swap to avoid Minions at the top and bottom edges not being swapped - Thanks Rea
- Tweaked the in-game shop to have smaller icons and more items per page.
- The currencies in the bottom bar now follow the general flow of Gold - Shards - Rubies, as everywhere else
- The error about being disconnected because of no activity in the game has been clarified.
- Menu arrows now animate when clicked
- Mordar has received a visual update to his model, along with some new animations. [img=http://minionmastersthegame.com/img/beforeAfterMordar.png]
- Stormbringer has received a visual update to his model and a new portrait. [img=http://minionmastersthegame.com/img/beforeAfterStorm.png]
- Fixed an issue where the in-game shop would display $ instead of € for people using € in Steam
- Fixed an issue where the Premium upgrade bonus gold would say +200% when it should say +100% - Thanks markljunggren
- Fixed an issue where using /copydeck with Milloween selected in draft would display her as ArcaneMage in chat.
- Fixed an issue with certain rarities not being translated in Spanish
- Fixed an issue with the Guardian doing his attack animation and then freezing in previews
Cheers from BetaDwarf!