Jan 27, 2022

Card Hunter - sir.civil

Hi ho Card Hunters!
In our last post (Celestial Forge Rebalance Info), we announced that we have a new expansion coming in the first half of 2022: Celestial Forge! That other post was focused on the accompanying balance changes we're playtesting. This one will focus on actual new stuff!

Some General Expansion Info

Celestial Forge will include campaign content, new figures, and new monsters, but, maybe most excitingly for some of you, it will include new cards and items for the first time since 2016's Castle Mitternacht update. Celestial Forge is steeped in the aesthetics of our Celestial figures and "zen" tileset board rotation. We are also hoping to release an exciting new feature alongside the update that we cannot reveal quite yet.

I am not revealing story details today--the new singleplayer content will be revealed at a later date--but we are going to be playtesting the new items in a PvP context alongside the aforementioned balance changes. To that end, this post will just serve as a complete 'visual spoiler' of the new cards in Celestial Forge, as a reference during testing.

Please note the following:
- new card names, art, and effects subject to change.
- these new cards do not have flavor text yet. This is not an omission; it will be added before release.

New Celestial Forge Cards

Awful Flames (staves)

Brain Freeze (arcane items)

Curse Attraction (human skills)

Curse-Hardened (martial skills)

Curse of Amnesia (all)

Curse of Exhaustion (all)

Curse of Hunger (all)

Dark Pulse (divine weapons)

Drown (arcane items)

Empty Body (divine armors, heavy armors)

Empty Fist (divine weapons, weapons)

Empty Mind (divine weapons, divine items, divine armors)

Empty Palm (shields, divine weapons)

Empty Tracks (boots)

Frozen Core (staves, arcane items)

Grinding Aura (robes)

Honorable Attack (weapons, divine weapons)

Honorable Block (dwarf skills)

Hot Spring (divine items)

Hungry Plate (heavy armors, divine armors)

Iai Strike (weapons)

Icy Apparition (staves)

Lunging Drain (divine weapons, divine items)

Mempo (helms)

Restless Seal (shields)

Restless Talisman (all)

Stoic's Blade (weapons)

Subtle Arts (elf skills)

Vow of Poverty (divine skills)

Winter's Embrace (arcane skills)

Jan 27, 2022

Celestial Forge Rebalance Info

Card Hunter - sir.civil

Hark, Card Hunters!

In 2016, Blue Manchu released the Castle Mitternacht expansion items, introducing a bunch of new mechanics. And then... that's it. No balance changes or new items, for years. Blue Manchu got busy with their next game. Leaving everything as-is wasn't exactly the plan; luckily for Cardhuntria, The Knights of Unity are here to update the items and cards you've been using unchanged since 2016.

First, the big news: we are aiming to release a new expansion, "Celestial Forge," in the first half of 2022. Some balance changes will accompany the new cards & items. We also have a really exciting new feature slated to release alongside the expansion, but we are not ready to reveal it at this time.

There will be a separate post previewing the expansion cards. This post is primarily about the balance changes. We will be conducting a public playtest of these changes soon (alongside the new items), and this is where we will be describing the changes and providing some developer commentary and context for the playtesting. (Details of the playtest--start and end dates, test server instructions, pizza reward amounts, and survey questions--will be provided elsewhere, likely on the forums, Steam forums, Discord. Stay tuned.)

General Methodology

As much as possible, we don't want to nerf things. Players work hard for their collections, and when your hard-earned legendaries become less powerful, well, that's a bad feeling. Most of the time we'd rather address balance by powering up weaker cards, or by just adding new content. But there comes a time when something in the game is so out of whack that attempting to balance AROUND it will create more problems down the line. With that given, we felt the need to address a few long-dominant cards like Lycanthropic Form, Howl, Vengeance, and Bless. In addition, we've buffed a few things. These changes will debut alongside an entire new set of items, and are explained below, side-by-side with their current versions.

Forms

Most long-time players will agree that one of the current balance issues is that werewolves are a little... too good. They're definitely pushed, and their kit is just far and away the most universally useful out of the forms. Vampires and spirits get good stuff but are far more likely to get a card they don't want in a given situation. Another issue with forms is that the Vampiric Form card was just... less good for vampires than the tried and true Talented Healer. This is somewhat simplified, but anyway--onto the changes:
- Lycanthropic Form's armor no longer protects against fire damage
- Vampiric Form has a new effect: "Add Penetrating to any Unholy Melee attack you play."
- Monstrous Hide no longer protects against fire damage
- Howl no longer heals

Old Version

New Version

These changes will go some way to evening the forms, but perhaps even more crucially we are adjusting the card pools to try to bring them more in line with each other:

Vampiric Form

Ethereal Form

Lycanthropic Form

i. Invigorating Touch
ii. Impaler
iii. Spear of Darkness
iv. Enervating Touch
v. Sneaky Bloodsuck
vi. Consuming Touch
vii. Swarm of Bats
viii. Creature of the Night
ix. Prowl
x. Vampire's Kiss

i. Dastardly Curse
ii. Unholy Curse
iii. Teleport Self
iv. Acid Jet
v. Telekinesis
vi. Hover
vii. Beam of Hate
viii. Repulsive Cone
ix. Boo!
x. Creature of the Night

i. Frenzy Aura
ii. Bite
iii. Lunging Bite
iv. Vicious Bite
v. Vicious Thrust
vi. Mighty Charge
vii. Mad Dog
viii. Monstrous Hide
ix. Creature of the Night
x. Prowl

You'll notice the absence of All Out Attack on the werewolf side, notably, but also that Ethereal Form's kit is more utilitarian now. Vampires get Impaler (shout out to my boy Vlad), which has a cool new interaction with the form itself. We've also removed the form cards themselves from the pools. This change will make it so that no unwanted form has a random chance to prolong itself past its initial duration, and it also means that Howl will no longer have a chance to activate 'free' reliable armor, and that Medium Garb will no longer randomly stop you from drawing cards from your deck.

Vengeance

So, we know Vengeance is really good. But possibly the worst-feeling thing about it is that if you use low rarity wizard control effects against a warrior holding Vengeance--effects like Winds of War or Force Blast--the entire effect is undone by Vengeance. This is a level of control resistance that warriors, with all their mobility tricks, frankly didn't need. The fix we found for Vengeance was to put a damage threshold on the trigger, so it hasn't been nerfed at all in the context of most damage, but it no longer punishes chip damage.

And yes, we decided to bring this change to a couple similar cards. Martyr Blessing should still be quite powerful without being as unfun to play against, now, and the change to Elven Maneuvers actually allows us to 'unnerf' the card a bit!
- Vengeance now only triggers if 3 or more damage is dealt
- Martyr Blessing now only triggers if 2 or more damage is dealt
- Elven Maneuvers now only triggers if 2 or more damage is dealt. Duration increased to 3, filter depth increased to 4.

Old Version

New Version

The levers introduced here allow us to further refine the balance of these cards as needed without any drastic changes, and we'll be watching them closely during playtesting. The damage thresholds here also introduce some more nuance to the valuation of armor. Sometimes that Reliable Mail will mean that your opponent's Weak Chop doesn't trigger Martyr Blessing when they're checking for blocks ;)

Misc

Finally we have a collection of miscellaneous changes; some buffs, some nerfs. The general goal here was to rein in some situationally obscene base game effects while maintaining general worth, while boosting some underpowered cards from Mitternacht.
- Shifting Block now draws a card (after applying the form)
- Acid Leak now only places acid under enemies
- Boo! now grants a Panic rather than a Dash
- Bless now targets up to 3 contiguous tiles (like Wall of Fire)
- All Out Attack now removes Penetrating & Unblockable, and adds Hard to Block 3
- Perplexing Ray is now Arcane

Old Version

New Version

Shifting Block's low power compared to similarly costed blocks (especially at its rarity) made Castle Mitternacht shields unappealing. Throw in the extreme uneven nature of the old forms and it just wasn't good. It might still not be top tier, but at least now it replaces itself, and with the form changes it might be quite strong now (we'll see in the playtest).

Acid Leak and Boo! changes are more minor, intended to push the needle just a bit on Castle Mitternacht wizard items.

Bless is possibly the biggest nerf to the strongest card in the game, but mind that it can still accomplish what it used to (12 points of healing and 6 cards drawn over 2 rounds). You'll just need to do a lot more work to get that maximum effect, and possibly make more tactical compromises.

The All Out Attack change may be completely unnecessary now that it's no longer in the werewolf deck. That said, we were interested in a version of All Out Attack that can still do just as much damage as before, while requiring players to do a little more work for those combo kills. I'd say this is the most tentative change in this batch. Let's see how it plays out in testing.

Perplexing Ray simply should have been Arcane this whole time, and that is being fixed now.

Conclusion

Feedback is, as always, welcomed, but more importantly we look forward to your participation in the playtest and accompanying surveys. We intend to iterate, possibly multiple times, over the course of the playtest. We haven't changed PvP balance significantly since 2016, and we want to be very careful. Any of these changes is up for further modification depending on how testing goes.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you're as excited for the upcoming update as I am!

Dec 14, 2021

Dev Diary: Introducing Weighted Loot Drops!

Card Hunter - sir.civil

Hi Card Hunters!

It’s been a while since I got to talk to you through this medium, but this is Flaxative, back-to-talk Card Hunter design! Today I’m going to discuss a small design change coming in our Holiday 2021 build that will hopefully result in some big improvements for you.

You may have seen in the announcement of our patch that Sir Civil mentioned “Weighted Loot Drops,” and you may have wondered what the heck that means. Wonder no longer!

A Bit of Background

In Card Hunter, until now, any item of the same level and rarity had an equal chance of dropping in chests–be they battle chests or bought chests. This meant that once the game determined you were getting a Level 17 rare non-treasure item, you have had an equal chance of getting any Level 17 rare item–regardless of what kind of item it was. Arcane skills–which a wizard needs 4 of–dropped at the exact same rate as helmets–which a warrior needs only 1 of.

With a perfectly even distribution of items in each slot, you can probably see how this would quickly result in you having way too many helmets, or way too few arcane items. Thankfully, we didn’t have an even distribution of items. We added 4 arcane items to the game for every 1 new helmet. And this… kind of worked.

Lingering Issues

It’s no secret that Card Hunter’s loot grind experience has a few pain points. The Knights of Unity are hard at work addressing these on a number of levels, from small tweaks to our algorithms (weighted loot drops) to whole new features (stay tuned!).

Three problems worth mentioning for our purposes today:

1. It’s almost impossible to grind for specific items you might want for a particular party idea. You can aim for an item level by running specific adventure levels, or you can keep an eye out for specific items appearing in your Daily Deal or Randimar’s Rarities shops, but you ultimately have very little control of these things, and you don’t have many choices to make to try to nudge the odds one way or the other.

2. If you don’t run a ‘balanced’ party of one warrior, one wizard, and one priest, with one character of each race, the item slot distribution mentioned above stops being particularly helpful. If you are running 3 warriors and keep getting arcane items, and have trouble getting the helmets you want, that’s not great!

3. From a design standpoint, we had to design and implement these specific ratios of items in different slots. Adding 4 arcane items for every 1 helmet might preserve the loot drop ratios for the slots, but it actually deepens problem #1. If we’re adding so many arcane items to the game, it becomes that much harder to find the specific arcane items you want!

A Step in the Right Direction

As I said above, we’re working on a number of fronts to improve the Card Hunter economy and grinding experience. The feature we’re releasing this month is only one step in this process, but we think you’ll like it.

What ARE Weighted Loot Drops anyway?

The way this new feature works is like this:

When you get an item from a battle chest (PvE or PvP, but not bought chests), and that item isn’t a treasure, it will now have a 20% chance of being a “weighted” drop. Weighted drops are guaranteed to match an item slot in your current party, and are weighted further based on the density of different item slots in your party.

What this means, in practice, is that if you have, say, 3 warriors, your weighted drops can’t be arcane items, and will have a 3:1 chance of being weapons (of which your party can use 9) to being helmets (of which your party can use 3).

Of course you can still get items that aren’t only for your current party. 80% of non-treasure drops will remain unweighted for now, and items from chests in stores will still be fully random.

This will have the following benefits:

1. If you want to try to grind for specific items, you can now nudge the probabilities in your favor by maximizing that item’s slot in your party. You want a divine item? Run all priests. You want an elf skill? Run all elves.

2. Regardless of the party composition you’re using to play through the campaign, you’re more likely to find items you can use than items you can’t.

3. Starting with our next expansion set, which will come sometime next year–I’m not at liberty to give any more detailed information at this point–we will no longer be printing 4 arcane items for every 1 helmet. New items will be much more balanced in quantity, meaning we won’t need to add tons and tons of nigh-unobtainable items to the game just to preserve slot ratios for loot drops.

As a theoretical bonus, weighted loot drops also free up design space for adding races and classes to the game without breaking item slot drop ratios.

Wrapping Up

You might never notice anything different with this new system as you play the game. But your loot drops will be just a little more to your taste. And hopefully this will tide you over for our bigger planned changes, which I’m looking forward to talking about early next year.

Let us know what you think of this new feature, as well as your opinion on this dev diary. I might get to do more, and your feedback is helpful :)

Happy holidays!