The Hand of Merlin News

General fixes & improvements:
• It is now possible to wipe your entire progress: unlocked Heroes, Spells, etc, via Gameplay Options menu. But beware - this is permanent and cannot be undone!
• Fixed a bug where relics could be duplicated.
• Fixed an issue where players would have to manually reshuffle their Relics to progress in a certain encounter in Al-Andalus.
• Fixed a bug where selling or discarding the grail would end the game with a victory.
• If closed, the legend displayed on the world map (to show what various map icons mean) will now remain closed until opened. (Previously, it would auto-reopen each time you enter the world map.)
• Putting down skill cards without selecting any can now be achieved not just by clicking the Hide Cards button, but also by clicking outside of any card. This makes it consistent with how closing the book itself works.
• Relic UI now recognizes the double click action as a context-driven shortcut for drag-and-drop. In the warband view, it equips or stashes relics, and in the relic shop, it initiates relic selling or buying.
• Fixed an issue where Ranger's Archer's Vigil would not have the same attack area as the basic Shoot attack.
• Fixed a bug with Warrior's Charge skill, where it could deal damage to a single large unit multiple times (once per each tile touched).
• Fixed an issue where summoning a high cover (such as via Mystic's Expurging/Holy Totem skill) would not affect line of sight for already activated enemy zone of control / overwatch-type abilities.
• Status effects gained through an encounter will now indicate their duration on their tooltip.
• Unit tooltips will now also list the Range attribute.
• Enemy portraits can now be double clicked to focus on that unit.
• Unit headers for enemies will now expand when their portraits are hovered. This should make it easier to identify individuals on the skirmish map.
• Fixed a bug where the mini popup dialog for move confirmation was not getting removed when selecting a different ability, selecting a different unit, ending the turn, etc.
• The confirmation dialog can now be confirmed with the Enter key.
• Added a button to the action bar that toggles showing the tile grid (hotkey: X).
• When targeting an enemy with a ranged attack, and the enemy benefits from cover for that attack, there will now be a cover icon displayed along the object (in 3D) that provides the cover.
• Line of sight for revealing heroes to enemies is now blocked by low cover, making it easier to setup ambushes.
• Fixed certain situations in skirmishes where terrain would occlude a tile making it hard to click.
• Improved handling of move areas, to prevent edge cases causing unintended moves due to miss-clicks.
• Hovered tile tooltip in skirmishes is now smoothly animated.
• In the Lobby, an unspent Essence no longer shows a prompt to spend it if all Spells of the selected Core have been unlocked.
• In the Lobby, the tutorial textbox will now linger until dismissed by clicking on it.
• Fixed typos in some encounters.

Gameplay balancing:
• Merlin's Core passive effect no longer prevents attacks from missing when using any Spell. Instead, it reduces all active cooldowns by 1 when using any Spell, allowing base attacks to be used twice in a turn and favoring combos.
• The relic Rabbit's Foot no longer makes you ignore cover bonuses, either when attacking or being attacked. Instead, it now increases your Accuracy every time you miss, resetting when you do hit.
• Removed the AoE aspect of Ranger's Volley skill (upgrade of Quickdraw).
• Revamped the blacksmith gear upgrades by removing negative stats - all upgrades are now a choice between different positive stats.
• Abomination base Power is increased by 1. Minor and Medium Abominations also scale better, increasing in both defensive and offensive stats in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus by larger amounts.
• Boosted the base attributes for all Warrior characters.
• Decreased the base Power of Rangers by 1, as well as shuffle some of their attribute differences.

Hey there folks!

Our designer Mat wanted this week’s blog post to feature some of the design stuff going on in the workshed, and who am I to deny him that?
Here’s what Mat wrote.

---

I’ve been meaning to discuss some of the reviews and feedback that we got so far, and the blogpost channel feels like a good place to start, so let me tell you guys some of our plans.

First of all, gotta say, I’m very pleased by how descriptive and (often) polite our feedback has been. Players have been pointing out some flaws in our design, and after parsing through some of them, we identified 4 major points.

1. Characters are not unique enough. Hey, I get that. Having a different biography and starting skill doesn’t really do it - you want each unlock to really mean something. While we want to keep characters of the same class having access to the same pool of skills, we could offer other ways for them to be different.
   
   Our Plan: We have discussed a few ideas, and we are now looking towards Passive Status Effects for each character, that reinforce specific gameplay styles and provide another piece in your loadout. One tank might reset cooldowns as he loses health, a ranger could behave better when away from allies… Things of that nature. We have a few tentative designs and should be ready to implement that this week. More on that at the bottom.
   
   
2. Warriors are being punished too harshly. Melee characters have the short stick! Many of your foes punish being too close to them, like Redcap’s Corrupt or Thorntoad’s Bristleback, and those that don’t, are a pain to pursue. That, coupled with lacking base attributes, makes Warrior characters less desirable!
   
   Our Plan: This is going to be big! The introduction of a new abomination in the “medium” category (with Thorntoad and Cockatrice) that rewards melee strikes will help, but not just that - the entire roster of abilities needs a bit of a tune-up. We are in the middle of the second pass for that, but the Warrior will gain more ways to set up combos, regain AP and reset Cooldowns, and gain more survivability. While these bigger changes will take some time to get right, we can start by fixing a few issues and giving them some attribute boosts, which you’ll see added pretty soon.
   
   
3. Some abilities, plainly, suck. Hey, I get that. The data is pretty clear, and some abilities or upgrades are just not interesting enough! A great example of something that didn’t work well is Raise cover. On top of it being the least picked Mystic ability, its upgrade, Raise Covers, has never been picked by a run that ended up killing the final boss (!!!).
   
   Our Plan: That’s our current effort. We are giving another hard look at the abilities in the game and trying to compare them as a player would. We give a bit more buffing love to those that are the least picked, but try our best to not nerf the ones that are fun to use (Parry and Volley are in my chopping block, though. No promises!). This has led the direction of the game towards a bit more about chaining and stacking effects, the two spheres of gameplay that seem to be having the most traction. We got something solid for the Mystic, and we’ll be looking at the Ranger next. This will take a while since we have to implement them all together, but you should expect to see a major update next month. An example of what we’re doing: we’re removing upgrades that change the feeling of the abilities, such as Concoction -> Noxious Concoction. These will be turned into their own abilities!
   
   
4. Metaprogression is a bit lackluster. No rewards at the end of the run, “boring” prowess unlocks, and lack of a meta-game for the most dedicated and successful players has been on the forums for a while.
   
   Our Plan: This is one of the great things about EA: now that we know more about what our players want, we can start planning for it. We’re still in the early design stages, but we want to offer a more complex and engaging meta progression aspect to the gameplay. One poster, Belgium, mentioned the idea of “Merlin gold” as a currency to spend on persistent buffs to characters. That’s sort of the direction we’re aiming for, lacing that with Hard Mode for you Veterans out there, and more. I’ll have something to show about that real soon, but the other fixes take precedence!
   

There are other noteworthy things, of course. We’ll be balancing rewards, guardian encounters, enemy attributes, gear upgrades, and all that good stuff that really makes the game as engaging as it can be, but the above ones are going to be our focus. Because these are all so interconnected, we gotta play our hand carefully. We’ll do a lot of internal testing, multiple design passes, and stream these updates for you guys to check out as well, hoping that The Hand of Merlin can be as good as it can.

But even this data collection could not be done without your support, so, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you!

---

I think the whole team would like to thank our community for the support and feedback. We really couldn’t do balancing without people playing the game and sharing their thoughts and experiences, so really, thanks!

Join our Discord server !

MarkoP

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

General fixes & improvements:
• Improved the patching system. Future patch download sizes should be five times smaller on average (starting with this one).
• Fixed an issue where certain aura effects would stack against intended design, making the final skirmish scenario in Jerusalem unwinnable in some cases.
• Added move ability confirmation, which can be switched between several modes or disabled entirely via Options menu (disabled by default).
• Party level up notification now appears with an animation in the center of the screen. Hopefully, this should help players notice they have a level up available.
• Fixed a bug where the achievement In the Spirit of Venn could be earned with less than the intended 3 auras affecting one Hero in some circumstances.
• Fixed a bug preventing the Warband achievement from being awarded. In addition, it should also retroactively unlock for players who meet the criteria, but did not have it unlock due to the bug.
• Salim's prowess unlock is now fixed, allowing it to be unlocked through normal means.
• Fixed a bug where the codex would not update the state of unlocked items in some cases.
• Fixed a bug where some skills did not have consistent targeting areas across a character class (such as Ranger's Ensnare versus Shoot).
• Fixed a bug where damage modifiers were not correctly applied in some edge cases.
• Fixed another case where skirmish fast-forward mode could persist into the world map.
• Fixed a few more cases of odd camera placement on ultra-wide screens on some skirmish maps.
• Fixed bestiary entries disappearing after closing the game.
• Fixed an issue where mock translations would unintentionally be shown if the game is run without Steam with a non-English Windows system language.
• Updated Accuracy and Evasion descriptions in the Warband page to better reflect their functionality.
• Updated the description of Quarry effect, granted by Warrior's Condemn (upgrade of Stagger Blow) and Ranger's Hunter's Prize (upgrade of Hunter's Mark). It should now clearly state that Quarry restores Action Points to the player, not the enemies.
• Fixed a number of typos in encounters.

Hi!

Our first week of being live in early access! We’re very happy about the reception, which looks to be pretty positive as well!

We’ve gotten a fair number of suggestions and general feedback on both our Discord and on the steam forums. We’ve also received a fairly low amount of technical issues and crash reports, all of which seem to have been fixed, but if you’re still having crashes on the latest version (build 669421 as of Saturday), please send those reports in because I don’t like seeing crashes at all and these always get the highest priority.

In other news, since we’re getting a bit more time away from doing support for users that can’t start the game or are having general issues running it, we’ve been working on some quicker improvements we could do. We’ve mostly had only these past two days to work on stuff, at least on the programmer side, so we’ve done a couple of requested features, like move confirmation, better level-up notifications, and general fixes to some common and obvious bugs, like some aspects of the damage calculation, some stuff with auras and the like.
My fix on Saturday was a bit of a stopgap to prevent crashes related to auras, but it introduced a problem where separate instances of the same aura would stack together. In the case of beneficial auras, the effects were great, but it means that one end game enemy, if left unchecked, would just wreck your run in a most unfair and unsatisfying way, preventing your units from gaining action points at all. This was properly fixed on Monday and is being deployed in the patch today.
We’ve also been fixing any typos, skill bugs, and balance issues that we know about and have a good idea of what the fix is/should be. We also have a large list of items to check, investigate, fix or improve, and all of them will get their turn in time.

Mat came up with some ideas to make the hero characters more unique and has started iterating on that design. The artists proposed a new bandit support enemy and are in general working on new heroes. We’ve also got alternate maps in the works, and all this is planned for a larger content patch in the near future.

Know that we read all your feedback, and I try to be as present on the forums as I humanly can while also writing code and fixing bugs. Since we aren’t a large team, some things will take a bit of time to add or fix, but we will get to them eventually. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Come join our Discord server and chat with us and report bugs directly, if that’s your jam.

MarkoP

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Crash fixes:
• Fixed a crash with aura effects.

General fixes & improvements:
• Fixed broken text markup for the status effect granted by Warrior's Rebuke (upgrade of Stand Ready).

Gameplay balancing:
• Increased Faerie reputation gains of certain choices in The Black Tree encounter.