v5.04: Chained Fist, Oathbreaker

Sign-up for the Masters Cup VI is now open! You may sign up as a team or individually. The first 80 players to sign up will be guaranteed a spot; the rest will be on a waitlist. $500 prize pool and badges for winners, and mystery cards for all participants. See the official tournament thread for details.

[h3]5.04f Patch[/h3]
- Major chat code refactor
- Legion Spells are now shown in tab scoreboard
- Client logs automatically upload after bugged matchmaking to help us debug issues
- Improved estimated queue time

Mastermind Rolls
- Significantly improved roll variety
- Peewee: No longer satisfies pierce guarantee
- Bone Warrior: No longer satisfies impact and magic guarantees
- Great Boar: No longer satisfies pierce guarantee

Chained Fist
- Health: 270 -> 250
- Attack speed: 0.9 -> 0.83
- Unchained Rage: No longer reduces its own damage

Oathbreaker
- Health: 1220 -> 1150
- Attack speed: 0.9 -> 0.83
- Unchained Rage: No longer reduces its own damage

Stronger early game and when kept alive

Proton
- Health: 190 -> 200

Atom
- Damage: 30 -> 31

Seraphin
- Attack speed: 1 -> 1.03

Fire Archer
- Damage: 27 -> 28
- Attack speed: 0.91 -> 89

Now last hits wave 3 better

Masked Spirit, False Maiden, Hell Raiser
- Reverted back to v5.03 (no longer considered flying)

Butcher
- Health: 1370 -> 1350

Head Chef
- Health: 3300 -> 3200

Berserker
- Health: 2080 ->2100

Fatalizer
- Health 5700 -> 5790
- Damage: 90 -> 91

Great Boar
- Damage: 57 -> 60
- Stampede: Damage reduced by 10%

Red Eyes
- Damage: 144 -> 151
- Thunderous Charge: Damage reduced by 10%

[h3]5.04c Balance Hotfix[/h3]
Bone Crusher
- Health: 1130 -> 1140
- Attack speed: 0.69 -> 0.7

Masked Spirit
- DPS: Unchanged
-- Damage: 7 -> 9
-- Attack speed: 1.03 -> 0.8

False Maiden
- DPS: Unchanged
-- Damage: 24 -> 31
-- Attack speed: 1.03 -> 0.8

Hell Raiser
- DPS: Unchanged
-- Damage: 48 -> 62
-- Attack speed: 1.03 -> 0.8

Not as hard-countered by Safety Mole, but nerfed synergy with APS and Leviathan

New Features
- Tower icons on the TAB scoreboard now turn gray during the wave when the corresponding fighter dies
- News Popups now have a "don't show this again" checkbox

Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where Hydra would accidentally mess up your Value statistic
- Fixed Ogre tooltip
- Fixed Oathbreaker card image & tooltip
- Fixed a server scalability bug with Custom Game Rooms
- Fixed a bug with the sell button being missing on a downgraded tower
- Fixed a bug with Ready button text not updating properly sometimes
- Fixed a bug with Match History that would sometimes cut off older matches (fixed byte encoding to be UTF8 instead of mixing Unicode/UTF8)
- Fixed a bug where Custom Game rooms from other branches (PTR, developer) would show up on live Custom Game room listings (and vice versa)
- Fixed more misc scalability bugs
- Added more monitoring for long queue times in Matchmaking to help us debug further

NEW! Divine Tier 1

Chained Fist
- Cost: 20 gold
- Health: 270 (Fortified)
- Damage: 8 (Impact)
- Attack speed: 0.9
- Range: Melee


Unchained Rage
Once it reaches 50% life, it attacks 125% faster, but deals 50% less damage and hits random targets



Oathbreaker
- Upgrade cost: 75 gold
- Health: 1220 (Fortified)
- Damage: 36 (Impact)
- Attack speed: 0.9
- Range: Melee


Unchained Rage
Once it reaches 50% life, it attacks 125% faster, but deals 50% less damage and hits random targets

NEW! Emojis 2.0
- Typing in emojis using colon now shows autocomplete suggestions
- New emojis

NEW! Chat Room Groups

- Chat rooms now groups players into categories: Developers, Party, Friends, In-Chat, In-Game, Muted. This allows you to more easily find people and message and invite friends
- Developers are now highlighted in chat

Cosmetic Improvements

VFX
- Game: Unit selection circles (cleaned up some noise), super effective attack type (new FX + also shows up on ranged attacks)
- Equips: Eggsack, Eternal Wanderer/Samurai Soul.
- Buffs: Fixed a bug where many VFX attached to models were 25% too small (the global scale multiplier was being factored twice)
- Auras: Council, Protector, Vampirism, Magician, Leadership, Heroism, Wintry Touch & Frozen Veil, Sorcery, Safety Aura, Healing Aura, Mythium Core
- Abilities/Buffs: Poison Tipped Pole, Stampede, Anaphylaxis & Paraphylaxis, Gaia Shield, Dimensional Rift & Dimensional Chasm, Shallow Grave, Guardian Angel, Deflection,
- Missiles: Banana Haven, Kobra, Flying Chicken, Millennium & Doomsday Machine, Shaman, Blood Rush, Giant Quadrapus, Tempest & Leviathan, False Maiden & Hell Raiser, Nightcrawler & Elite Nightcrawler

Icons
- Units: Blob
- Abilities: Accuracy & Precision, Anaphylaxis & Paraphylaxis, Ancient Power, Junior Fisherman & Commercial Fisherman & Master Fisherman, Council, Deflection, Devour, Eggsplosion, Energize & Mythium Core, Fragrance & Noxious Scent, Insatiable Hunger, Sprint, Stampede & Thunderous Charge

Game Improvements

Gameplay
- Shift+clicked (queued) mercenaries are now more consistent about being hired the instant before income is given
- Fixed a rare bug where some units would sneak through the mythium gate while it was still closed

Matchmaking
- New players are now seeded at a lower Classic rating to make matches fairer and make it less likely for new players to get stomped
- Fixed a rare bug where a player would be stuck on 'match found'
- Fixed a rare bug where a player wouldn't find a match when they should have (after a lobby server restart)
- Fixed a rare bug where a player would find a match with much lower or much higher rated players (after a lobby server restart)
- Fixed a rare matchmaking bug when hitting “play again” while the lobby server restarted

Reconnecting
- Fixed a bug where reconnecting froze the HUD if Giant Snail was used
- Fixed a bug where a dropped connection in-game wouldn't properly reconnect you
- Fixed a bug where the (Q) wouldn't show up sometimes
- Fixed a bug where notifications and the (Q) would show up during loading screen instead of after being done loading
- Fixed a bug where bot wouldn't build for you if you were not connected but in the loading screen
- Fixed a bug where the reconnect popup wouldn't show up if the game in progress was over 30 minutes old
- Fixed a bug where the reconnect popup wouldn't show up if you recently joined the game and quit

Player Profiles
- Playstyle chat display formula tweaked to have more contrast between highs & lows
- Fixed a bug where viewing a player's profile would load old data
- Overview: Fixed a bug where upgraded towers were showing up in Favorite Rolls
- Wave Stats: Fixed a bug in where tooltips for Workers On Wave & Income On Wave were accidentally multiplied by 100
- Match History: Now shows MVP (or 2nd, 3rd, etc. if you weren't MVP)
- Match History: Now shows Workers after wave 10 (gives you an idea of how fed the game was, as well as how well your opening went)

Bots
- Now save on the first wave of Wave 21, then send every wave after that (instead of just doing some weird stuff)
- Slightly stronger preference for upgrades after wave 10
- In Play vs. AI, bots now "ready up" after they build (instead of being "instantly" ready before they actually built)

FairPlay
- Fixed some cases in Classic queue that weren't being handled properly (false negatives)
- Fixed a false positive case where a player would be given punishment points if their party member caused the match to be canceled
- Reduced punishment if you disconnect and then rejoin the game

Stability and Performance
- Fixed most cases of changing options causing crashes. If you still experience crashes, please let us know.
- Disabled x2 mode because it was causing too much server-wide lag (affecting other games too). In the future after optimizations, we'd like to re-enable this and may still include x2 in featured game mode weekends.
- Single-player custom games now have a hidden supply cap of 100 (standard fighters use 1 supply and summoners use 2-3 supply) to reduce server-wide lag
- Single-player custom games will automatically shutdown if there are over 300+ unit on the map to reduce server-wide lag
- Disabled Alt+Enter hotkey (fullscreen switch) since it often causes the game to crash
- Improved client performance for fetching profiles (implemented caching system to prevent duplicate parallel backend requests)
- Fixed a bug where the server would fail to start up properly (Upgraded PlayFabSDK with concurrency fix for GameserverSDK)
- Fixed some rare multithreading issues with logging
- Games with an extreme amount of units now run at lower tick rates (this eases some of the load on the servers. It only affects games with 1,000+ units)
- Added dashboard for average server CPU/memory metrics, which will help figure out optimal server configurations
- Improved performance for storing/fetching profiles (compressed memory & redis footprints by about 600%, using mini-profile pattern)
- Improved global chat scaling (now separated chat per lobby server. now prunes non-cached graynames when under heavy load)
- Fixed scaling bugs with custom game rooms created on multiple lobby servers
- Fixed scaling bugs with queueing for matchmade games when party is split across multiple lobby servers

Quality of Life
- Added a "Confirm No Build" Warning: if you attempt to train 6 workers on wave 1 in a matchmade game, you'll now receive a confirmation popup saying "Not building requires permission from your allies" before allowing you to proceed
- Global Chat should now load faster
- Recommended value is now higher on wave 11 if offensive legion spells exist (primarily to help new players)
- Added a unit abilities column to the Wave info window
- Added number of players indicator to the Ready button text, so you can see how many people are ready before pressing the button
- Added an "X" over your income icon on Wave 21 to show you no longer get income
- Fixed a bug where you could still select towers when the Confirm Sell popup was shown, resulting in selling towers you didn't mean to sell
- Fixed Power Score tooltip window size
- Fixed a bug where the "Don't sell all your towers" warning popup was showing with selling a Grarl on wave 2 (and other similar cases where you would legitimately sell a tower)
- Fixed a bug where pings would accidentally fire twice
- Fixed Legion Spell window glow graphics clipping
- Featured game mode queue now shows # of players in queue
- Muting a player now blocks party invites from them
- Fixed a bug with multiple party updates where the client would render outdated party info

Other Fixes
- Fixed /spectate (experimental feature only available to game masters). Should work now and no longer crashes the lobby server
- Fixed a bug with Hydra gold value (based on stacks) not displaying properly when added to your value as well as the Undeploy tooltip
- Fixed a bug where in Chaos mode, when playing alone, the rolls window would accidentally be displayed
- Fixed a bug where No T1s mode would still allow for T1s if you used Reroll
- Fixed a bug where in No Saving mode, the game would crash if you had extra mythium to spend, but no mercenaries available to spend them on
- Fixed a rare bug where units would cast abilities after they were dead, which caused some unstable side effects
- Fixed a rare bug where a player would appear to have bought extra king upgrades
- Fixed a bug where Shrine Wins, Losses, XP weren't being recorded properly. Unfortunately, there's no way to recover lost stats. Sorry about that.
- Fixed a bug where some players had their tutorial progress reset by mistake (no way to restore progress)

Game Balance

Pathing and Targeting
- Fixed a bug where Eternal Wanderer, Lost Samurai, Sea Serpent, Deepcoiler, Hydraling, and units with Guardian Angel were not being properly prioritized by ranged units

4v4
- Leak bounty scaling from 70% --> 60%
- Dual building: Haste: 50 movement speed and 5 + 0.1% health regeneration -> 50 movement speed, 5% attack speed, and 25% damage reduction from AOE
-- This change buffs dual building early game, nerfs it late game, and makes it viable to have small amounts of AOE
- Hybrid Builder: Gold costs reduced by 3%
-- Tier 2: 44 -> 43
-- Tier 3: 85 -> 82
-- Tier 4: 132 -> 128
-- Tier 5: 182 -> 177
-- Tier 6: 260 -> 252

King
- Immolation buffed slightly on waves 3-9

[h2]Legion Spells[/h2]

Giant Snail
- Health: 540 -> 530

Villain
- Damage amplification: 25% (15% for ranged) -> 27% (15% for ranged)

[h2]Fighters[/h2]

Bone Crusher
- Health: 1120 -> 1130
- Attack speed: 0.676 -> 0.69

Angler
- Attack speed: 0.83 -> 0.86

Masked Spirit, False Maiden, Hell Raiser
- Now considered flying units


Violet
- Attack speed: 0.95 -> 0.925


Butcher
- Health: 1400 -> 1370


Head Chef
- Damage: 105 -> 101


Yozora
- Wintry Touch: Attack speed slow: 2% (1% to bosses) -> 1.5%


Arctaire
- Frozen Veil: Damage: 10 -> 8
- Frozen Veil: Attack speed slow: 3% (1.5% to bosses) -> 2.5%


Fatalizer
- Health: 5740 -> 5700
- Damage: 85 -> 90
- Attack speed: 1.33 -> 1.27
- Duelist: Damage ramp per attack: 20 -> 25


Fire Lord
- Attack speed: 1 -> 1.03


Fenix
- Health: 4000 -> 4050


Millennium
- Health: 2250 -> 2270
- Damage: 340 -> 344


Hades
- Maximum mana: 60 -> 35
- Raise Imp: Mana cost: 40 -> 33
- Imp: Health: 1500 -> 1700
- Imp: Damage: 80 -> 95

Great Boar, Red Eyes
- Stampede and Thunderous Charge: Mana gain per second of moving increased; exponential factor removed. Damage is higher on its own but lower with Starcaller and Magician


Soul Gate
- Hellion: Damage: 49 -> 53
- Nightcrawler: Damage: 49 -> 53
- Blood Price: Self-damage per cast: 17% -> 20%
- Ocean Templar’s Resonance: Now has 50% reduced effectiveness on Soul Gate and Hell Gate


Hell Gate
- Elite Hellion: Damage: 98 -> 106
- Elite Nightcrawler: Damage: 98 -> 106
- Blood Price: Self-damage per cast: 17% -> 20%
- Ocean Templar’s Resonance: Now has 50% reduced effectiveness on Soul Gate and Hell Gate

Gates cause lag in 4v4 games, delay battles too long, and are too snowbally when ahead and with Starcaller and Ocean Templar. These changes buff Soul Gate and Hell Gate on their own and when lower value but nerf their scaling potential.

[h2]Mercenaries[/h2]
Brute, Safety Mole, Mimic, Pack Leader
- Range: 150 -> 100
- Now more likely to be prioritized after other melee units if same % health (improved consistency)

This is a slight nerf for Brute and Mimic, especially late game, and a roughly neutral change for Safety Mole and Pack Leader

Ogre
- Health: 2350 -> 2700
- Damage: 240 -> 100
- Attack speed: 0.625 -> 1.25
- Range: 150 -> 100
- Now prioritized after other melee units if same % health
- Knock Out: Reworked: Deals 125 bonus Impact damage every third attack. Refreshes on kill.

Ogre is now stronger, less RNG, and no longer countered by cheap units


Witch
- Advanced Necromancy: Mana gain per unit: 2 -> 3
- Summon Froggo: Mana cost: 55 -> 65

Stronger against unit spam


Four Eyes
- Attack speed: 2 -> 2.04


Centaur
- Attack speed: 0.87 -> 0.89


Shaman
- Blood Rush: No longer increases movement speed


Kraken
- Health: 6700 -> 6600

[h2]Waves[/h2]

(8) Kobras
- Attack speed: 1.06 -> 1.08


(12) Mantises
- Attack speed: 1.02 -> 1

The following waves are now stronger against tier 1 fighters:


(13) Drill Golems
- DPS: 160 -> 156
- Damage: 200 -> 100
- Attack speed: 0.8 -> 1.59


(14) Killer Slugs
- DPS: Unchanged
- Damage: 90 -> 80
- Attack speed: 1.12 -> 1.27


(15) Quadrapuses
- DPS: Unchanged
- Giant Quadrapus: 448 -> 440
- Damage: 112 -> 110
- Attack speed: 1.12 -> 1.14


(17) Metal Dragons b]
- DPS: Unchanged
- Damage: 120 -> 110
- Attack speed: 1.54 -> 1.68


(18) Wale Chiefs
- Attack speed: 1.25 -> 1.33
- Poison-Tipped Pole: Damage: 200 -> 150
- Poison-Tripped Pole: Refreshes when the ability gets a kill -> Refreshes on any kill


(19) Dire Toads
- DPS: 247 -> 248
- Damage: 75x3 -> 95x3
- Attack speed: 1.1 -> 0.87


(20) Maccabeus
- Insatiable Hunger: Heal on kill: 100 -> 125


(21) Legion Lords
- DPS: Unchanged
- Legion King: Damage: 550 -> 500
- Legion Lord: Damage: 110 -> 100
- Attack speed: 2 -> 2.22