Across the Obelisk News

Hey everybody! This is a patch with some fixes, improvements and some minor changes. On the other hand, we just wanted you to know that we are focused right now in bringing you Act IV as soon as possible and, as a reminder, big thank you for all your feedback with the game, its mechanics and everything! We really appreciate it.

Fixes and changes

• Improved the damage stats screen! Including all the dots individually for each hero. This will only work for new games.
  
• Added a score bonus for completing a run in all the game modes, so that it will always be more profitable to finish it than to let you die in the final boss.
  
• Added experience gained in the "last games" recap in the tome of knowledge.
  
• In the Obelisk/Weekly gamemode, coop players will no longer be able to modify the selected perks for characters that they dont own
  
• Corruption windows now have a show/hide button to check the different paths when choosing a corruption

Balance:

• Lowered the difficulty curve of madness in adventure mode, especially in madness 1, the enemies will have a little less life and will not hit as hard (note that the change from madness 0 to 1 will still be complex because the enemies are more random and earn better cards).
  
• Unlucky has been added in Obelisk 4 madness and Energized heroes have been removed in 8, even so, you will still get +1 starting energy for lvl 9 and 10 in madness (we think the level 9 difficulty increase is big and so we will still give the +1 energy, plus with the act 4 patch and all the changes we will be keeping an eye on the new difficulty of the obelisk challenge).
  
• Love Enhancer, cost increased to de 2 (from 1)
  
• Sanctuary, lowered vitality and added vanish to the yellow version (The AoE vitality is too strong right now, compared to the other heals and ways to heal, we still want the vitality to be strong, but more focused in single target or that you have to dedicate some extra items and not just cycle/spam 1 card. As it makes it mandatory/imperative in any run/build at higher difficulties, besides making it difficult to balance the damage that the enemies would have to do (it is not the same not having vitality, that all the heroes have 10-15 vitality in round 2-3).

As usual, thank you so much for your help, reports and suggestions!

Hello everyone, here is a brief update on how the game is progressing after the major update v.0.7

We are very happy with the latest patch and we are reading all the feedback and suggestions you are giving us, so here are a few things we are working on and will do to improve the overall game and prepare it for Act 4.

Hero ranks, class ranks and perks
In an effort to improve the meta-progression of the game and make it easier to change heroes when you unlock them (or swap heroes in madness levels in a more natural way) without the player feeling penalized for it, we have decided that we will make several changes to the system.

We still think that hero ranks and perks are not a necessary requirement to pass the game in normal mode, and that what matters most is the knowledge of the game (how the cards work, what the enemies do, mechanics and combos of the game). However with the arrival of Act 4 (with 2 new heroes) and thinking about the release version when there will be 16 heroes available, we believe that we can improve how the perks and each hero rank interact, so we will divide the Hero Rank in two, Hero ranks and Class Ranks.

Class Ranks, will be shared between all heroes of the same class and the perks will be given based on this rank. This way you will be able to switch between heroes without feeling that they lose "efficiency" and, when you unlock a new hero, you can try it directly in the next run (because that character will have the same perk points as the other characters of the same class).

Hero Ranks, will be the level of each hero individually and will serve among other things to see how much you have played a hero, for bragging rights and for different cosmetic unlocks such as skins and cardbacks.

New Card Design & Cardbacks
As we did in the last patch with the improvement of Senenthia's combat backgrounds and character skins, our intention is to improve the art of the game little by little, and that also includes a revamp to the current card design.

We have redesigned the card to be more in line with the style of our game (front and back). While the front is always the same for a card, you will be able to choose the cardback for each character (it will be shown on different screens of the game) and for this, you will be able to unlock some new cardbacks as you upgrade your heroes. Furthermore we are planning to introduce more cool cardbacks that will be awarded through the completion of various objectives (such as the weekly challenges).



Improvements
After reading your feeback we have decided to extend the Obelisk Challenge a little, so with the arrival of Act 4, the Obelisk Challenge will have three floors (instead of the current two floors) and in this last one you will fight with the new enemies and the final boss.

In addition, in each floor up (2) you will be given one of the following options: Upgrade up to 2 cards per hero, Remove 2 cards, or Craft 1 card (up to Rare or Epic depending on the floor).

We still think that the Obelisk mode is the fastest (1-2 hours) and most random mode of the game, but after the feedback received we think we can make it a bit longer and give some more options to customize the decks.

We want to improve the weekly challenge, not only in making it a bit more different with some more unusual modifiers, but we also want to give you weekly objectives to complete, with possible unlocks of cardbacks if you complete several of them.

Next patch/hotfix
- We will add a score bonus for completing a run in all the bonuses, so that it will always be more profitable to finish it than to let you die in the final boss.
- We will lower the difficulty curve of madness in adventure mode, especially in madness 1, the enemies will have a little less life and will not hit as hard (note that the change from madness 0 to 1 will still be complex because the enemies are more random and earn better cards).
- We will remove the +1 energy bonus from the Obelisk challenge madness 8, so the level 9 and 10 madness will be a bit harder (we will be watching to see if it is necessary to reverse the change).
- Several fixes.

- Last but not least, we will improve the damage stats screen! Including all the dots individually for each hero.



Act 4
We know you are looking forward to act 4 and we wanted to let you know that we are already working on it, the enemies are already designed and have new attacks/cards assigned. In Act 4 concept are some ruins where the enemies are constructs with their variants Holy and Shadow, here are some of them.



That's all for now, as always we will continue working on the game improving it in every possible way and we thank you for all the feeback and support you give us. If you like the game and you haven't done it yet, remember to give us a little review on steam.

In the following weeks when we have them ready we will show you the design of the next 2 heroes, the Prophet and the Loremaster.

As usual, thank you for your support, feedback and understanding!

Hey everybody! This is a quick hotfix to solve the execution of some character traits (and other small things).

Fixes

- Traits that reduce the energy cost of cards in your hand, at the start of a turn, are now working as expected
- Vanished cards that have been created in the middle of a combat will now display their correct value while checking the vanish pile
- Cards generated by items (f.e. Wolfskin Cloak or Searing Dagger) will not lost their attribute modifications when a game desyncs

Balance and adjustments

Thanks to the feedback that we are getting since the launch of the Obelisk Challenge patch, we will begin to adjust some values here and there, improve some things, etc. One of the first changes have to be with the card rewards (and random card generation, f.e. cards like Ammunitions). We have increased the chance to get the upgraded version (blue, yellow or purple) of a card with each Madness level, so the higher the level the higher the chances to get a "rare" card.

As usual, thank you so much for your help, reports and suggestions!

Hey everybody! Week 2 is about to begin so we wanted to fix some things before it:

- Fixed a bug that disabled the activation of items at the end of the combat (f.e. Reginald's Combat Bandages)
- The last team composition used in an Obelisk Challenge game, single player mode, will now be saved and pre assigned on your next game
- Fixed a bug when right clicking a card in the "Overcharge" window that made it go back to the hand
- Fixed a bug in cooperative mode where cards gained at the beginning of the turn (f.e. fishing rod -> carp) not prevented the autoend turn functionality
- Modified the text over characters when a trait -with maximum charges- is activated to reflect its current status
- Items that modify the damage type of a character (f.e. Volcanic Axe or Charged Trident) are now working as expected

As usual, thank you so much for your help, reports and suggestions!

Hey everybody! These are the fixes and changes within this hotfix.

- Fixed a bug in coop that appeared when the group travels to a node with some kind of card reward. One of the clients never joins the reward screen and instead it is stucked on a black screen with the "loading" message. This should be fixed now.
- Fixed a bug in coop where "combat performance" was not being shared among the players leading to different final scores. We are still looking at this issue, so if you find that your scores are different at the end of a game, please try to report it to us.
- Cost of Enchant Weapons reduced to 0(from 1) cost of the fire/cold/lightning enchant increased to 1(from 0)
- Also improved some help texts, fixed some graphical glitches and fixed some text typos here and there!

As usual, thank you so much for your help, reports and suggestions!