Across the Obelisk News

Hey everybody!

We are still working on the Obelisk Challenge patch, that we are expecting to upload late September, but we wanted to upload a quick hotfix to address some of the issues that have been reported.

* Fixed a problem with the achievement system that prevented the damage achievements (Giant, Colossus and Behemoth) to fire when the damage was done with a secondary damage type.
* Fixed a bug that granted different set of immunities to named mobs when the combat was reloaded or synchronized.
*Fixed a visual bug in the description of some items (YinYang Badge, Madness Ring, Virulent Ring...) when the effect "For every X charges, apply Y charges" was showing more charges than intended.
* Thuls special card "Cull the weak" from the naga event has been fixed, and now it will hit the enemy correctly.

* Changed the Starfall spell to "Jump" instead of full random, so it doesn't hit the same character twice in a row.
* In Madness levels, we have reduced the monster damage taken (innate mitigation) by half. This way, low damage cards and pets will be more effective at high madness levels. To balance this change the monster life has been increased by 15-20% in the last levels.
* Cornelius "Firestarter" talent has been changed and now also applies 1 burn to a random enemy when it triggers.

* When searching cards with the term "card", it will only show cards that interact with other cards in any way (shuffle, discover, draw, etc...).

* Many effects have been added, to items, talents and corruptions, making it easier to see when they occur.

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

Hello everyone, these are the patch notes for patch 0.6.7.

First of all, we would like to say that some of the changes and improvements of this patch were not planned to be released before the big Obelisk Challenge patch (v0.7), but due to a couple of bugs in the live version (especially the one with the missing texts that affects, overall, Mac M1 users) we think we should upload a patch to address those issues, and while we're at it, put all the improvements we have already done for the game.


Improvements
* Reduced loading times when changing scenes (in/out of combat or to card rewards).
* Increased the overall speed of combat effects (especially cards that repeat the action of the card itself) and gameplay sequence.
* Increased the overall combat speed in multiplayer games.
* Added a new option "VSync" to the settings menu. This is EXPERIMENTAL. We have included it to solve some tearing issues that players have reported. Please, if you use this option, don't forget to give us some feedback about it.
* The game window can now be resized by dragging the window while in windowed mode.
* Items that apply auras or curses, will now show the final quantity value modified by the character perks (when the item is equipped).
* Cards that let you choose a card with reduced cost, will show the energy color in white when the cost of that card is already 0 (it was previously green in all situations).
* Cards with the "Discover" effect will now always bring you different cards to choose (the base card can still be the same).
* The corruption reward that increases the quality of the card rewards will also give you an additional card to choose (for a total of 4 cards).
* Increase the number of cards shown for advanced and premium town divinations to 4 cards.


Balance
* As many of you have suggested before, some of the level 3 talents were too powerful and the increase of a hero's power when reaching level 3 was too steep. e have been thinking along the same lines for a while now, so we decided to tinker a bit with the lvl 3 talents related to energy.

Talents that used to reduce the cost of a card type now only reduce the cost for cards in your hand of that type at the start of the turn, rather than the entire deck. Also, talents that used to return energy when using a card type now have a limit of 3 times per turn, and many of them now give an extra buff to make them more interesting, like bless in Healing surge or regeneration in Healing brew.

* Bless: from now on the bless will increase the healing received instead of the healing done, so that the bless is used more cooperatively and on several characters instead of just stacketed on one of them.

Also thanks to this change bless will now affect the heal done by regeneration, sanctify or Malukah and Ottis talents.

* Cards: Many cards have been tweaked, usually small buffs and changes to some versions of cards to make the 2 upgrades a bit more different from each other. In addition to this there have been other small tweaks to cards that were a little too strong and some cards that the community has been suggesting have been improved a little bit.


It is important to note that some of these balance changes were intended to be made in conjunction with the next patch, and the introduction of a new card type called "enchantment". In a few weeks we will be making another community update explaining this card type and other changes/improvements for the Obelisk challenge patch.


Fixes
*Fixed bug of some in-game texts not appearing and not being readable for multiple players.
* Fixed a bug that prevented to remove an assigned perk, by clicking it, when the character have no available points to spend on perks.
* Fixed a bug that randomized a couple of combats from events, that should be scripted, when the "Random combats" corruptor was active.
* In the main menu, the names of the players will not be shown anymore in the wrong slots when changing from multiplayer to singleplayer games.
* Fixed a bug with secondary damage types not firing "damage/damaged" events when the first damage type was blocked.


Thanks for your support, feedback and understanding.

Hello everyone, we hope you are having a great summer, here is an update on how the Obelisk Challenge is progressing.

The Obelisk Challenge is a new game mode that we will be introducing in the next big patch. The main features of this mode are:

- Maps are randomised
- The fights are random and the events are also randomly placed. All events in this mode are new and made specifically for this mode.
- The duration of the game is about one hour.
- It does not take into account the ranks and perks of the heroes, but even so at the end of the run it gives you points to continue progressing ranks with your heroes.
- At the start of the game there is a card draft for each hero and there are no "towns" on the map.
- It is fully playable in co-op.

The Draft
At the start of the game you will choose which of your unlocked heroes you want to play with, and then the draft will start, which consists of 3 parts.

- Each hero starts with 5 basic cards, specific for the character, already assigned. Then each hero has to choose 1 pack from 3 possible packs. Each pack contains 3 cards (these cards have a chance to appear upgraded, even corrupted) and if you don't like those packs you can reroll the packs. This is repeated in 3 rounds and each time you have a reroll available, also the packs can be repeated between different rounds.

- In the fourth round, you can choose a rare card from 3 available cards, these cards are based on the 3 packs you have previously chosen, making a 15 card total deck for each character.

- Finally, you can choose 4 perks to be able to adapt your character a little bit to the cards you have chosen in that draft.



As you can see in the draft there is a lot of information to make it easier to choose your cards or perks.

Each hero is independent and you can make your choices in different order, so you don't have to complete the draft of one hero to be able to continue with another or, for example, in multiplayer you can see how the other players choose their packs and comment on the play.

At the end of the draft there is a random choice of items, so each hero can choose to start with an item or some extra money.

The map
The maps are chosen randomly and all fights or events are also random. Talking about events, we are doing a lot of new events focused on this game mode. This events can be "direct" events with an instant resolution or "chained" events that will take place in both maps (lower and upper). Also we are working on some new type of rewards. Besides the usual gold and dust, some can modify your stats (+1 speed), increase your aura or curse potential (similar to the character perks), swap your equipment or gain access to new type of "crafting" windows... (anyone looking for rare cards craft?)



Each game of Obelisk Challenge consists of 2 maps.

Weekly Challenge
With the addition of the Obelisk challenge to the game, we will introduce the Weekly Challenge, this will be a game with a fixed seed, fixed heroes (that you can play even if you don't have them unlocked) and a small set of rules.

The weekly challenge will have its own scoreboard, both individual and cooperative, and players will be able to compete for a whole week to see who can do better, discover the best combo in the draft and find the optimal path. Eventually, we'd like to include small rewards (for bragging rights) for those who complete the weekly challenge.


That's all for now, the next content patch will be big and we have more things in the pipeline (and some surprises), but it's still summer and we won't be in full swing until September.

For Mac M1 users who have a problem with the texts in game. We are working on it and we think we have the problem solved but right now it is impossible to upload a fix. If you want you can enter in our discord and we have a Dev branch ready.

Thanks for your support, feedback and understanding, have a great summer!

Hey everybody! This is a quick hotfix to solve a couple of problems.

Furthermore, after detecting a bug with gold and shards in different game modes and in multiplayer, we have analysed and fixed the problem, and we have decided to:

Unified the initial gold and shards to 75 gold/shards in all modes.
* This means that in a normal single player game you will start with 300g/s (instead of 250) and that in multiplayer each player will receive 75g/s. In the previous patch we made it possible to transfer gold and shards between players so the extra bonus in multiplayer was no longer necessary.

* We have also removed the small initial gold/shard bonus we gave in mandness 1 and 2 (500 g/s instead of 250 g/s in single player), we had been carrying this bonus since we made the first version of NG+ and when the characters had no gold and shards perks (also now you can exchange supplies to generate more initial gold/shards), so this bonus was obsolete and made the initial gold/shards confusing depending on the game mode. Now you will get 300g/s like in normal mode.

* In madness 3 and onwards you will get the corresponding initial gold and shard depending on the madness lvl, just as before.

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

Hey everybody!! This is a small patch that comes with a feature that's been requested for a long time, the "Pet slot". This means that pets will no longer share the "Accesory" slot, from now on they will have their own slot. Furthermore a lot of small fixes have been applied here and there.

*Added a separate pet slot, so that pets don't compete with the accessories.
*Added 1 new pet and 2 new pet related events.
* Items with bonus to gold and dust retention will not be available on Madness +2 difficulty.
* Made some improvements adapting the game for high resolution screens.

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