The Hand of Merlin News

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hi there!

Preparations are almost done with our Hardmode update, dubbed affectionately as The End Times. Hope you are as excited about it as we are!

Last week, I called for some beta testers to play our initial attempt at Hardmode, to figure out how they felt about the whole thing. We got a few people through Discord, we added our own internal players and some of Versus Evil Heralds - our most vocal supporters in social media.

I’m always pleased to discuss game design and balancing with our players, and this event was quite productive already. Here’s some of our takeaways:

Presentation - Curses and Blessings: we introduced the Curses and Blessings screen when you clicked on the Hardmode banner at difficulty selection. This was deemed a bit odd: “I already selected a difficulty mode, so what’s with these customization tools? How do I just play Hardmode?” was the overall feeling.

We took that as a bad sign and changed how it's presented. Now, when choosing Hardmode, you’ll be presented with a second choice: Regular, or Hardmode+, which DOES feature the Curses and Blessings screen, as seen on our previous blog posts. We hope that clarifies it.

Dire Wyvern’s Ambushes: if you played our game, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Wyvern has this capacity of jumping behind your squishy characters to take a bite out of them. If your encounter started up with the enemies taking the first turn, that means you already have quite a problem on your hands! The issue came when Dire Wyvern did the same thing. The extra damage plus his Opportunist passive meant that he could melt down your characters before you could take a single action! Bad design!

The simplest solution (which we also applied to regular Wyvern) was to add a starting cooldown to the skill, so it only comes into play around the second turn. While this helps, we also took a look at the map and made some adjustments for fairness. With so many maps, not all can be winners, eh? Keep an eye out for unfair situations, and let us know!

Rewards when Abandoning a Run: This one is a bit fuzzy. As you know, Curses and Blessings require Essence to work, and we are going to reward players for playing Hardmode - the more zones you clear, the more Essence you gain.

Now, something happened with one of our Discord players: after beating Behemoth in Albion, he ended up abandoning a run in Marca Hispanica. He was quite surprised to find out that, under our initial rule, you’d only gain Essences after you lost a run! Abandoning, we reasoned, shouldn’t be rewarded. Well, we talked it through a bit and decided to just let it be, for the sake of avoiding frustration: now, you earn the Essences even if you abandoned the run.

Other Tweaks: we still made time to make some tweaks here and there. Roland’s Horn is getting another iteration, Wilfred and Safir got some small buffs, Bleeding now has larger stack sizes, that sort of thing. We’re also investigating some larger changes to the Supplies system, which we’ll focus on after Hardmode is live. Keep an eye out for blog posts on that!

And that’s it for now! As we’re finishing up the biggest systems in the game and approaching a full release, feedback is quite important to polish up abilities and clarify UX. Thank you so much for the support so far. We still want to do another week of testing before we show you the final result, so we appreciate the patience, and if you haven’t, join our Discord server and watch The Hand of Merlin happen before your very eyes!

Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello again! Quick one today.

We have Hardmode and Metaprogression ready for testing! Several modifiers, all the Dire Units, and all baseline changes are in the game, and we’ve been testing them for a while now. It’s coming along nicely, but here’s the catch:

We built Hardmode with our most proficient players in mind. You know, you guys who were concerned about the game being too easy - and we could use more of your input before we put the game out to the wider public.

So, we’re looking to conduct a small closed-beta of sorts, where we’ll make a special build available for those interested, featuring Hardmode and its modifiers. After playing it for a bit, the playtesters can provide us with some valuable input and suggestions, and we can do a little bit of extra polish before the Hardmode Update hits the (digital) shelves!

So, if you are into playing the hardest Hand of Merlin can be, drop us a line on the Discord server and we’ll sort it out!

Mat

General fixes:
• Fixed the wording and counter for the Full Roster achievement to correctly target unlocking 9 heroes from the base game.
• Fixed a bug with the Exertion achievement where it could track action point usage incorrectly in some cases.
• Combat maps in Al-Andalus and Jerusalem should now spawn the same enemies even after restarting the match, like most other maps.
• Fixed a bug where the Keen Aim status effect would not expire properly at turn start.
• Toad's Bristleback effect no longer triggers Wyvern's Opportune strike, solving some unclear interactions.
• Stasis should no longer end prematurely based on some character passives.
• Redcap's passive should no longer allow pylons to act when it triggers.
• Alain the White's passive should no longer apply after he's killed in battle.
• Fixed a bug where in the final (Jerusalem) fight, kills that happened in the first turn would not grant mana.
• Fixed a rare bug where the encounter option fineprint could get garbled.
• Fixed an issue where the cards on the world map could be obscured by the map legend in Big Picture mode.

Optimizations:
• Loading times on game start should now be faster on some PCs.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Replaced the node models in Jerusalem world map to make it more clear what their encounters are.

Gameplay balancing:
• The Mesmerized debuff, associated with Alain the White, now decreases Range and Accuracy, instead of Range and Evasion.
• Spire, a Tier 3 spell in Morgana's Core, now imparts a higher stack count of the debuffs it applies.
• Reduced the cooldown of Warrior's Parry skill (and its upgrades) from 3 to 2 turns.
• Increased the damage dealt by Warrior's Charge skill (and its upgrades).
• Ranger's Take Aim skill (and its upgrades) no longer cost action points. The Green versions of the Tier 3 upgrades, which were boosted by a reduction of AP cost, now have increased effect strength instead.
• The Raider enemy should now avoid hitting allies with his bombs a bit more, and has less range now (from 6 to 5 tiles).
• Changed Mandrake's Quicken skill. Instead of refreshing cooldowns, it now grants evasion - this is to remove the uncounterable "double-shot" it usually did, in exchange increasing its average survivability.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello again!

As Mia is preparing the modifiers for our extended Hardmode, I had a day or two to focus on some minor balancing. So I wanted to share with you a bit of the telemetry data we’ve been gathering and how we go about noticing what needs a bump or a nerf.

So, one thing I was a bit concerned with was how powerful each enemy was in comparison to each other. Is a Knave as dangerous as a Pillager? Is a Thorntoad comparable to a Basilisk? In the search for that answer, we could look at how much damage each enemy deals overall, but that can be skewed by how many of each unit there is. So, knowing it isn’t a perfect data set either, I wanted to ask "how many kills does each enemy have?", starting with the bandits.

In the latest 720 kills performed by a human bandit, these were the top 5:
Raider: 187
Rascal: 70
Looter: 68
Outlaw: 58
Brigand: 56

Now, besides the subtle prevalence of ranged bandits, I was very surprised to see that the Raider had SO many more kills. Surely, it meant that the Raider enemy was the most powerful of all the bandits!

Well, not quite. After noticing nothing immediately wrong, I saw that he’s a user of the Prepare Bomb skill, one of those delayed AoE effects. And, as intended, this sometimes ends with a friendly-fire kill, especially if the player has some knockback effects, and those are counted in the telemetry! Following that thread, I eventually discovered that the Raider made no attempts at avoiding his friends. Oh boy. A small tweak to the AI, and we’ll see the results in a few weeks!

In the Abomination department, the story was a bit different.

In the latest 3490 kills performed by an Abomination, these were the top 5:
Mandrake: 1308
Thorntoad: 494
Behemoth: 425
Redcap: 384
Wyvern: 325

A similarly scary jump. Now, in this case, it's not so clear cut - Mandrake’s delayed AoE, Barrage, does not do friendly fire, and Mandrake is pretty much as common as a Redcap or Wyvern, even though it has pretty much double their killshots combined. What gives?

Well, this is where you gotta do a bit of a leap of faith. You see, It’s normal to expect a ranged abomination with a decent power stat to be the top killer, but I felt the numbers to be a bit high compared to its allies. Then I remembered that we did a recent change where its Quicken ability enabled Mandrake to shoot twice in a single turn. A bit of a needed power boost, sure, but I don’t think it allowed for much counterplay.
So I took the opportunity to remove that capacity and instead add evasion to the same ability! Still a buff from the previous version, but now less murderous. Again, we’ll see the results in a few weeks, eh?

That sort of stuff happened all over the place. Charge, Parry and Take Aim were hardly picked (especially in builds that ended up winning the game), so they got a bit of a buff. Sieges in zone 1 are pretty lethal, but I didn’t touch them until we have more information on the Mandrake change. And, finally, take a look at the hero picks:

In the latest 5325 Hero picks, these are their rankings, rounded:
Breunor: 1506 (28% of all parties had him)
Merewen: 1427 (26%)
Morgan: 1334 (25%)
Rana: 241 (5%)
Salim: 205 (4%)
Isabel: 147 (3%)
Wilfred: 114 (2%)
Zahra: 94 (2%)
Safir: 86 (2%)
Tariq: 83 (2%)
Rumayla: 70 (1%)
Alain: 18 (
Now, the biggest input point is, of course, availability. Breunor, Merewen and Morgan are the default heroes, so it’s safe to assume most games feature at least one of them, perhaps with a small indication that Breunor is a bit ahead of the rest of the Warriors. Rumayla and Tariq are a bit harder to gauge, but they are also a bit unorthodox, so that (maybe) explains it. Nothing too scary there, but worth keeping an eye out.

Now, Alain? I know, he’s the hardest character to unlock, requiring you to reach party rank 10. But the size of the jump surprised me a bit. Here’s where internal feedback comes in: when we first submitted Alain, even our dev team felt he was cool, but maybe a bit weak, with an odd triggering mechanism for his passive. With that in mind, I decided to buff his passive a bit, and see what happens with those numbers.

Not an exact science, and you gotta be careful to keep them feeling different, you see.

So, yeah, that’s pretty much the process. A lot of parsing numbers, coming up with hypotheses, and testing them. Sometimes it's as easy as reducing the cooldown of a supporting skill or tweaking the AI of a unit, other times you just gotta go with your gut. Hopefully, the more iteration cycles, the better the result!

My next stop is spells. Did you know that 47% of all spells cast in the game are Restoration? Oof.

Any thoughts on that or any of these changes? Think you noticed something different? Drop us a line on our Discord server and join us in making The Hand of Merlin as good as it can be!

Mat

New content:
• Added all of the remaining alternate combat maps, across all zones.

General fixes:
• Fixed possible crashes when entering or leaving combat if playing with a gamepad.
• Fixed a possible crash during AI's turn in combat.
• Fixed a bug with being unable to use multi-target abilities with the gamepad.
• Fixed a bug where the score view didn't close when clicking on hero icons.
• The Red version of Doubleshot+ (upgrade of Ranger's Quick Draw) is now called Tripleshot and correctly describes that it indeed shoots 3 times.
• The Green version of Surging Shot no longer explodes units on kill shots.
• Basilisk's Lingering Poison now correctly reduces health healing, instead of increasing it.
• Fixed several typos.

Optimizations:
• Reduced the time AI takes for the Basilisk's turn in combat.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Improved the UX on ultra-widescreen monitors of several more combat maps.
• Improved the UX of Lobby navigation with gamepads.
• Gamepad X/square can now be used to activate notifications on the world map.
• The game no longer waits for the camera to settle before giving control over the Journal or Core on the world map.
• Changed War Horn relic's description, to better describe its self-cast nature.

Gameplay balancing:
• Thunderbolt now deals a flat 15 standard damage, away from reducing all armor OR killing unarmored units.
• Ranger's Decoy skill (and its upgrades) now have limited charges.
• Noble Ruser (Merewen's passive) now only reduces cooldowns by 1 instead of resetting all of them. This still allows her to chain basic attacks.
• Behemoth's Bloodlust passive now increases its speed whenever it takes damage, and Trample is required to be used in its regular turn, costing 2 AP. The intent of this change is to curb non-counterable behavior.
• Cockatrice's aura has fewer stacks of regeneration now.