Patch 820 Breakdown

Hello HEXers! Shaggy here, welcoming you to the first ever Patch Breakdown. The goal of this piece is to shed some light into what players can expect from each patch. We have a pretty big one for you this week so let’s dive right in with the patch notes.

GENERAL

• Players can now click on the name of a card within the text of another card to see what the referenced card is

• The Friends list will now tell if a player is online or offline

• Tool tips of cards are no longer active when you have the friends list up

• The “Report Bug” button now correctly opens the bug forum only once

• The response feedback sound for the Sound Effect volume setting now works

• Friends chat is now colored blue

• Inspiration Engine has been renamed to Ingenuity Engine

• Construction Plans: Inspiration Engine has been renamed to Construction Plans: Ingenuity Engine

• Eldritch Shield has been renamed to Arcane Shield

• Shin’hare High Born has been renamed to Shroomshaw. And its trait line has been updated to “Shroomkin”

• Carrion Blob’s trait line has been changed from “Ooze” to “Blob”

NEW CARDS

• Manti Elder Druid

• Droo’s Colossal Walker

• Eurig the Robomancer

• Oakhenge Ceremony

• Lord Benjamin, the Wise

• Ascetic Aspirant//Enlightened Seeker//The Transcended

• Peek

GAMEPLAY

• Construction Plans: War Hulk and Construction Plans: Ingenuity Engine are no longer incorrectly able to exhaust non-troop artifacts

• All cards where a player can actively decline a troop’s ability will no longer cause the game to get stuck

• Selecting a card with Spellshield to discard from Giant Corpse Fly will no longer cause the game to get stuck

• Pact of Life now correctly gives the owner health when Shards of Fate is played

• Judgement now correctly works with cost increasing effects

• Wailing Banshee no longer displays the text twice

• Dwarven Armory now correctly costs one resource to use its ability

• Eternal Guardian no longer incorrectly prevents the damage from pay life cards or effects

• Hellhound’s ability will no longer cause the game to get stuck

• The AI no longer incorrectly wields shared control over troops stolen by Mancubus

• Mancubus no longer incorrectly fires come into play triggers when switching ownership

• Living Totem now follows activated ability rules

• Revert effects will now correctly remove temporary effects and counters

• Ritualist of the Spring Litter now creates the correct number of shin’hare with Shroomtank and Shroomshaw

• Incantations will no longer incorrectly trigger continuous effects from transformed cards outside the warzone

• Incantation now correctly display counters

• Princess Victoria’s opening hand ability now works correctly

• Socket restrictions are now in place. You can only put major gems in major sockets

BALANCE CHANGES

• Secret Lab now costs 4 instead of 3

• Incantation of Fear now costs 4 instead of 2

• Maddening Nightmare now costs 4 instead of 2

• Ozawa, Cosmic Elder now costs 8 instead of 7

• Incantation of Righteousness now costs 2 instead of 1

• Life Siphon now costs 1X instead of X

• Booby Trap now deals 4 damage instead of 5

• Feral Beast’s defense has been changed to 3 instead of 6

• Giant Army Ants’ defense has been changed to 2 instead of 3

• Ruby Enchantress’ defense has been changed to 1 instead of 2

• Legionnaire of Gawaine’s attack has been changed to 4 instead of 3, and its defense has been changed to 4 instead of 3

• Menacing Gralk now has 3 sapphire threshold instead of 2, and its defense has been changed to 2 instead of 3

• Wild Root Dancer now has 2 wild threshold instead of 1

• Boulder Brute now has 1 wild threshold instead of 2

• Murder now has 1 blood threshold and reads: “Destroy target non-artifact troop.”

• Volcannon now reads: “[ACT], Exhaust a Dwarf or Robot you control  Deal 3 damage to each opposing champion. Exhaust two Dwarves and /or Robots you control  Ready this artifact.”

• Giant Corpse Fly now reads: “Flight. When this troop enters play, target champion chooses and discards a card.”

• Devoted Emissary now reads: “When this troop enters play, put target troop you control into its controller’s hand.”

• Elite Battle Tech now reads: “When this troop enters play, create two Worker Bots and put them into play. Sacrifice two Robots you control  Put target opposing troop into its controller’s hand.”

• Curse of Oblivion now reads: “Choose target opposing card on the chain. Void each other card with the same name from its controller’s deck, graveyard, and hand.”

• Bun’jitsu now reads: “[BLOOD][BLOOD]: [BASIC] [5], Void two ready troops you control  Create an Abomination with [ATK] equal to 3 plus their combined [ATK], and [DEF] equal to 3 plus their combined [DEF] and put it into play exhausted.”

KNOWN ISSUES

• Bun’jitsu has had a text change, but is persistently stubborn at working correctly

• The Friends list online/offline status does not update in real time

CARD SPOTLIGHT

For five resources and two Wild threshold, Manti Elder Druid is pretty attractive. His come into play effect can be very handy against opposing troops that have had their Attack and Defense increased. This effect can also be useful if your troops find themselves under the effect of Inner Conflict

An eight attack and defense troop for five resources is already an amazing deal, then throw crush into the mix, and you have a very scary troop. However, Droo’s Colossal Walker doesn’t ready after it attacks, unless you pay eight health at basic speed. I mean we had to give it a downside right? Using effects to ready the Walker without paying his cost can be a terrifying combo for any deck to face.

Eurig has the potential to get out of hand very quickly. He has the ability to upgrade Worker Bots into War Bots, War Bots into War Hulks, and even create Worker Bots on his own. Pairing him with Worker Bot creation effects, will have you swarming the battlefield with an army of War Hulks in no time.

For only one resource and wild threshold, you look at the top five cards of your deck and put a troop into your hand. This is a great way to get a troop for early aggression or finding the correct troop late in the game to deal with your opponent’s threats.

The two cost sapphire lord will be very exciting for any player that enjoys taking humans to the field and rightfully so. Each time Benjamin deals damage to an opposing champion you’re able to look at the top three cards of your deck choose a human and put it in your hand. The fact he has flight means this effect occurs often, which can be very useful in making sure you hit your curve for inspire decks. He also has good synergy with the shuffle effect on Protectorate Defender.

Speaking of humans, our first human transformation card, Ascetic Aspirant, can be exhausted and transformed into Enlightened Seeker . While you control Enlightened Seeker you can’t play cards. However, at the end of your turn you draw a card. If you have seven or more cards in hand, he will Transform into The Transcended , who allows you to search your deck for a card anytime you would normally draw one. Try to wait to transform Ascetic Aspirant on your second main phase so that the card you draw from Enlightened Seeker’s ability will cause it to immediately transform to The Transcended

This two cost sapphire instant has changed some from its original design. Now it allows you to look at cards from the top of your deck equal to your sapphire threshold and put one into your hand. Saving this card until you have a higher sapphire threshold will allow you to look deeper in your deck for the perfect answer to your opponent’s threats. However, using it early to get your third shard is another very good use for this card.

I am excited to see all the new decks our players will build with these new cards. Keep in mind, there are multiple ways to take advantage of these cards and thinking outside the box can lead to some rewarding combinations. For example two of the cards that caught my eye was Lord Benjamin, the Wise and Ascetic Aspirant. I wanted to find a clever way to use these two troops, after a couple of attempts this is the list I came up with.

It’s all about the Benjamins

Champion – Lady Elizabeth

Troops

4 The Ancestor’s Chosen

4 Lord Benjamin, the Wise

4 Protectorate Defender [Prime Sapphire of Mind]

4 Buccaneer

4 Cerulean Mentalist

3 Protectorate Clergyman

3 Ascetic Aspirant//Enlightened Seeker//The Transcended

1 His Majesty, King Gabriel

Constants

2 Incantation of Ascendance //Lighting Armada

Actions

3 Inner Conflict

3 Oracle Song

Resources

13 Diamond

12 Sapphire

The main goal of this deck is to use Lord Benjamin, the Wise and Protectorate Defender socketed with Prime Sapphire of Mind (SS: When this troop deals damage to an opposing champion, draw a card) to keep your hand full throughout the early turns of the game. By running a total of twenty-seven human troops we increase the chance Benjamin will hit. Once we move into turn four with a full hand of cards we can freely play Ascetic Aspirant and transform him immediately on the next turn. This is very important because while Enlightened Seeker is out we wont be able to play cards. To transform him in one turn, we need to have at least 6 cards in hand moving into our second main phase which can be achieved in a couple of ways. Hitting with Benjamin, casting Oracle Song, or even using Lady Elizabeth’s charge power can give us the sixth card we need to transform our Ascetic Aspirant into The Transcended. The Transcended allows us to search our deck for a card anytime we would draw one. By taking advantage of this we can take over the late game in a few ways. One of the funniest ways to do this is searching for Ancestral Specters created by our Ancestors Chosen. Ancestral Specters draw us a card when played, with The Transcended in play we can look through the deck and “chain” multiple ones into play each turn giving us an instant army of flying two attack troops. Another option is picking His Majesty, King Gabriel and letting him and Boldheart take over the game. After we have our game ending threats out we can search for cards like Inner Conflict and Buccaneer to control our opponent’s board and insure our threats get through.

Even if things don’t go as planned we have the ability to simply win by transforming an Incantation of Ascendance into Lighting Armada using the large amount of draw effects we have in the deck. Cerulean Mentalist inspired Buccaneers allow us to keep our opponent’s board clear so our Protectorate Defenders can get through to draw us more cards. Even if one of our Protectorate Defenders is dealt with the fact they shuffle back into our deck coupled with Benjamin’s effect insures they won’t stay gone for long. Keep in mind though, if The Transcended is in play we can no longer get counters on our Incantation of Ascendance. So if you have a lot of counters on an Incantation it may be best to hold off on transforming your Ascetic Aspirant. All in all, this deck was a blast to make. Give it a shot and let me know how it plays for you in the comments!

Our team spent a lot of time over the holidays playing games and working on balance testing. As a result, we have a good amount of balance changes in this week’s patch. I took some time to sit down with Lead Developer Dan Clark and ask him about some of the more interesting changes.

Secret Laboratory is a card that we wanted to give all shards access to a draw outlet to help do whatever cute interaction you wanted to that wasn’t as good at drawing as sapphire or blood (usually in cahoots with escalation). Unfortunately, lab is doing it too well. Each card we have made is shooting to have a role, for this it was trying to promote different decks and new experiences. We discussed upping the cost of the activation but felt that it would take it too far to the opposite end of the spectrum in making it too steep of a cost to still be able to accomplish the goals for Secret Laboratory.



I have noticed a lot of players using Secret Laboratory in their deck, even sapphire and blood based decks. One change that may seem a little out of place is the damage on Booby Trap being reduced by one. Can you shed some light into why this change was made?

So for Booby Trap we weren’t happy with how easy it was to end a game off of only playing a [Sabotage] in a mill deck or Cerebral Fulmination deck. Then if a second Sabotage is played especially in the Fulmination deck, death can follow shortly after. For decks like those, we would prefer to shy away from difficult to interact with win conditions. This change is also keeping in mind some plans we have for the future, but NO SPOILERS!

Aww come on you can’t give them just one! Maybe we can slip a spoiler into the next Friday update on “accident”. One of the biggest balance changes this patch was the addition of the one resource cost to Life Siphon. Can you talk a little about that?

Life Siphon is a change based off of three parts. One is that it is a win condition that is difficult to interact with which can be frustrating. The second isn’t as big of a deal but feeds heavily into the others, in that one of the best ways to fight it is to just play it. To clarify, if there was a card that was a 1 cost troop that was a 10/10 and had when this enters play destroy another target troop with 10 ATK. Not only would you play it because it is good, but it is good vs itself. And the third and probably the biggest issue is that it is promoting a deck that is asking the player to prolong the game and survive long enough to be able to play Life Siphon two turns in a row which is usually a negative play experience for the opponent. We considered upping the threshold of this card, but we still want this card to be accessible to non-mono blood decks. Hopefully the 1 added to the cost will pull back the power level of this card a bit.

A card that has seen a lot of play recently is the Incantation of Savagery. Players have found ways to get the Feral Beast it transforms into play very quickly. Can you explain the changes made to keep this from becoming such a frustrating situation?

For this Incantation, we just wanted to drop the power level a bit. We still want the troop to be difficult to deal with but when you have 6 health and Spellshield it crosses the border of being difficult to handle to downright frustrating. The card should still be strong but now it’s a bit more manageable. The Incantation cycle will continue to be monitored for power level and play pattern reasons.

It looks like even Wild Root Dancer wasn’t safe from the balance changes. Which shouldn’t be too surprising; most players consider it one of the best troops and have been asking for changes. What was your plan with increasing its threshold by one wild?

This card has always been very powerful, and I still believe that it will be. Wild Root Dancer should be promoting a deck that is centered a bit more around wild and large troops, so this was an easy change to make. We closely monitor the forums and always want player feedback and this card was appearing frequently with player concerns.

Speaking of powerful cards, Curse of Oblivion has been a very strong card ever since its release. I know the development team hasn’t been very happy with the way the card has been used. Can you explain the reason it was changed?

Curse of Oblivion has been a problem card for us for quite some time now. Originally, and I don’t believe the players saw this, it was more of a mill oriented card that allowed you to single out opposing problem cards. Then once we saw what decks were arising and becoming popular we wanted a “hate” card to fight against specific cards and decks that were difficult to interact with. The product of that was the Curse of Oblivion, you may have seen where it allows you to search the opponent’s deck and remove all copies of a particular card. Unfortunately if a card is giving you access to information, people are compelled to take full advantage of that and try to figure out what cards are in your hand depending on what they see in your deck. This leads to a long resolution of the card and was not an intended function of giving information of the hand. With this change, we removed that as well as now the player still has a chance to at least enjoy playing a card and getting its effect before it is cursed. We are still looking at this card as something that could be subject to change before the beta launch.

I really appreciate you taking the time to go over some of these changes with the community, Dan.

That’s it for this week’s Patch Breakdown. I hope everyone enjoyed getting a closer look at the patch. Let us know what you think of this article series and what you would like to see in the future. Until next week have a HEXcellent patch!

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