This patch went live on 03 May 2021.[1]
- This is the second patch that contains balancing changes. The previous balancing patch was Patch #400022.
General Changes[]
- Changed default achievement filter from "All" to "Not Completed".
General Fixes[]
- Fixed a Russian translation in the achievements filter.
- Fixed the Easter Egg achievement using the wrong year to calculate Easter Sunday.
Card Changes[]
Player Card Change[]
| While the cards zoning potential and capability to punish higher unit and energy density are working well overall, the constant uptime enables an overly strong defense on maps, that hinder multi-pronged attacks. To reduce this, we are increasing the cooldown to no longer offer constant uptime. |
Mischievous Aura:
- Increased the cooldown from 40 to 55 seconds.
| Increasing Blood healing's range should improve its ease of use in mostly XL-armies in T4, where units are often more widely spread due to unit size. |
Soul Sacrifice:
- Increased the radius of the healing aura from 15m to 20m.
| Removing the granted ground presence prevents the crawlers from being used to skip parts of maps by bypassing terrain. |
- Active ability Infused Mob / Tainted Mob:
- Removed ground presence on summoned Lost Crawlers.
| Motivates long duration helps Shadow T1 especially in its match-up versus Fire, were the pressure can easily lead to map control. While map changes will help elevate this, we still think a slight duration reduction is in order. |
- Spur:
- Lowered duration from 20 / 25 / 30 / 30 seconds to 15 / 20 / 25 / 25 seconds.
| Mountaineer is currently dominating several matchups by himself. The M knockback allows him to take out most size-specific counters. The refreshing ice shield creates a very high DPS demand to actually finish a kill. Short term the unit will be weakened by tweaking its stats. Long term the current existent attack canceling bug can hopefully be fixed and the card will receive further changes. One of the factions most impacted by Mountaineer nerfs is pure Fire. All Frost splashes currently have strong match-ups into pure Fire partially due to Mountaineer. With the upcoming changes to Wildfire and Mountaineer, we hope to strengthen pure Fire in its harder match-ups while weakening its strong ones. |
- Autocast ability Bombard:
- Removed knockback against M-sized units.
- Updated the description to now reflect that he actually attacks every 3.5 seconds, and not every 4.
- Passive ability Glacier Shield:
- Decreased the Ice shield's strength from 600 to 440.
| A bugfix targeted at Nether Warp (green) changed the way the port immunity of Nether Warp is applied. As a consequence you can no longer gain Immunity to the Nether Warp (Blue) port by quickly moving units back into the port. This has greatly increased the defensive strength of the card. |
- Blessed Teleport:
- Fixed tooltip on upgrade I (missing name).
- Can now port every unit only once during its runtime. Interactions with cards that enable units to ignore Teleport Immunity still remain in place.
- Gifted Teleport:
- Can now port every unit only once during its runtime. Interactions with cards that enable units to ignore Teleport Immunity remain in place.
- Active ability Sky Scare:
- Reduced activation cost from -- / 80 / 80 / 70 to -- / 70 / 70 / 60.
| Stonekin T2 is on the strong end of the spectrum and the faction is certainly one of the main profiteers of the already implemented changes to T1 balance. With upcoming map changes in mind, the current T1 weakness will be further diminished. Reducing the T2 strength of Stonekin is needed to stop the faction from overperforming. Razorshard Red has an increased amount of splash damage compared to other units (Its green affinity does not share its 150% splash but has the common 50% bonus). The atypical splash bonus leads to very high DPS when targeting well clusters or multiple units. We consider the card to be overperforming when used in those scenarios. While the change could be considered a bug fix, it is a well deserved nerf to the card's strength overall. |
- Toggle ability Infused Bombing Raid:
- Decreased the maximum splash damage from 300 to 180.
| Pure Shadow is performing increasingly well at high level play. Nerfs to other factions will only amplify this and a small reduction in power might be warranted. Shadow Mage is an easy valve to adjust without hurting other Shadow splashes. |
- Increased the card's energy cost from 50 to 55 power.
| Shadow Worm is the only T4 Pure Shadow card in the game and has been an inadequate payoff for giving up support from other factions, especially Nature support in the form of cards like Regrowth. The Lifesteal change should allow Shadow Worm to sustain itself and replenish its life points after using disintegration. Changing its damage to XL will allow it to synergize better with Overlord's L-damage, giving an Overlord/Shadow Worm army better size coverage. Overall, we feel the changes make Shadow Worm a card worth playing, either in mixed decks with Overlord and even on its own in massed Shadow Worm armies. |
- Changed the unit's attack type from L counter to XL counter.
- Added the passive ability Life Stealer:
35% of the damage dealt by the unit will be added to its life points.
Stone Tempest is capable of deflecting most T1 unit compositions regardless of the outcome in early T1 fights. This makes commitments towards aggressive trading in the early game extremely unrewarding and punishable by an early T2. With its ability to knock down multiple M units at once, Stone Tempest also can remove some of his direct counters in T2 skirmishes. This leads to very oppressive gameplay against factions, which lack an effective counter unit. In these scenarios, Tempest can be placed offensively and achieve positive trades with few counter options due to its strong knockback and the Adamant Skin +  Surge of Light synergy. By increasing the bound power of the Stone Tempest the number of available support spells (e.g.  Curse of Oink; Surge of Light) will be reduced.
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- Increased the card's energy cost from 110 to 120 power.
| Strikers recently overperformed especially in the mirror match-up but also versus Shadow due to the additional power they generate through Looter. As already discussed, Looter is an extremely toxic mechanic in PvP. The hidden nature of the energy gained by Looter makes it very hard for either player to understand, how good or bad a trade went while in-game. Overall Looter units heavily reward extended trading almost regardless of their outcome. In the long run this leads to very passive fight aversive approaches when playing against them. Therefore they remove a lot of healthy T1 interactions, that usually exist in the currently problematic match-ups. We will remove Looter with the next patch as we don't want to see such a mechanic in the early stages of PvP. We will try to find an appropriate compensation buff in the future to keep former Looter-units relevant in PvE use cases. |
- Passive ability Looter:
- Removed power gain against units and updated the description accordingly that it only works against buildings now.
| This change aims to make the use of the card more intuitive and to reduce unnecessary additional actions by the player. The removal of the undescribed initial cool-down is intended as a quality of life change. |
- Removed the initial 10-second delay after completion of construction that prevented selection of a mode.
- Active ability The Wrathful Mo:
- The statue now switches back immediately after the duration has run out.
| Wildfire is a core spell in pure Fires arsenal. Its very high burst DPS and zoning potential is a central part of pure Fire gameplay. While Wildfire already only deals reduced damage to buildings, most buildings are unable to move and still take high amounts of damage. This makes Wildfire very efficient when used to support attacking melee units versus defending melee units due to the added well damage. This is only amplified when attacking building clusters. Factions relying on melee troops to deal with medium units were struggling in higher energy t2 situations. When facing non-Frost splashes. even simply besieging a cluster with Wildfire gets efficient quickly. Moving pure Fire away from using Wildfire as a tool to pressure building HP while reducing its most common weakness in Mountaineer should put the faction in a more healthy spot overall. In regards to PvE, we would have preferred to only reduce damage dealt to Wells and Monuments. But due to the hardcoded nature of the card, this was not possible. |
- Rolling Fire:
- Reduced damage against structures from 15 / 16 / 18 / 20 to 8 / 8 / 9 / 10.
| We currently want to bring more diversity into Frost T1's play patterns. We aim to create overall healthier T1 interactions with mixed unit compositions in most match-ups. Currently, Wintertide prevents this approach as it heavily scales with mass Master Archer compositions and attacks its direct counter, Dreadcharger, in the Shadow match-up. The trample reflect mechanic prevents higher amounts of Dreadchargers to be viable. We want to remove this interaction as a first step to bring Frost T1 into a more interesting place. This might be followed by additional changes towards Frost T1 in the future. To keep Wintertide (fire) appealing as a card, a new mechanic will be introduced. It will now amplify damage dealt by melee units and might also see additional changes in the future. |
- Infused Defense:
- Removed the 250 trample revenge damage.
- Affected melee units now deal 30% more damage.
Fire versus Nature T1 was heavily impacted by the recent buffs to Nature T1 and the  Swiftclaw in particular. This has shifted the match-up balance to a point were Fire is lacking behind a bit. Wrecker as a unit is most fitting for the Nature match-up and while his split attack options can be used more broadly, a Wrecker specific buff should mostly impact Nature versus Fire. Buffing Wrecker should hopefully increase Fires dazed fighting capabilities versus Nature.
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- Active ability Rallying Cry:
- Decreased the activation cost from 25 / 25 / 25 / 20 to 15 / 15 / 15 / 10 energy.
- Decreased the duration of the effect from 30 to 25 seconds.
Map Changes[]
Background Information[]
- Introduction
| One of the most important aspects of BattleForge PvP is the structure of the maps we play on. Depending on the map, you can expect match-ups to play out with a lead starting from T1 or be decided somewhere in T3. Varying distances to well and monument spots, cliffing opportunities or even starting energy greatly impacts, how strong different factions are.
The focus for early balance changes was to aim towards a more equal footing for all T1 factions. This leads to the question, which aspects should be adjusted by changing T1 factions themselves and which should be adjusted by changing the conditions maps create. While some progress could be made by altering T1 cards, some problems certainly had to be solved using the map editor. For example, some maps stop Frost T1 from taking any wells or monuments in a position, where Frost T1 can consistently defend against early aggression. Using swift units to abuse long well distances would most likely result in an advantage for the attacking player. When properly executed this could even lead to a near auto-win scenario. To combat this, we will be changing several maps by diminishing early well distances. This should not only help out Frost T1 but also strengthen Nature T1 versus split attacks and weaken some T2 attack patterns for the better. Open space dazed fights currently favor Shadow in multiple match-ups. This results in early map control. Aiming for an even early dazed fight between all T1 factions is unrealistic so the advantage gained has to be reduced. Luckily this coincides with reducing early well distances but Elyon required further changes. Two monuments were added to allow for T3 without early map control. |
- Walls
| One controversial topic in regards to maps is the use of walls to destroy enemy structures using archers protected by the walls damage reduction. This makes the small mistake of not seeing an enemy unit approaching potentially game-ending. While we will keep some of those wall positions in play, most maps will no longer feature walls that can be used offensively. If an offensive use for a wall was left possible, the position that is contested is a purely optional one. To achieve this, multiple walls have been moved. They are either no longer in archer range to the nearest structure or are close enough to the defending player's structure, that the attacker can no longer take the wall. This increases the value of the walls as a defensive tool considering the defender no longer requires a unit to build it. All starting walls will now be set to 50 energy to keep the defensive strength in check.
Furthermore, all starting walls now start destroyed and the starting void has been increased appropriately. Inexperienced players might not be aware of the bound power and would be at a disadvantage immediately. Destroying the wall at the start of the game should be expected anyways considering the wall can no longer be used offensively. |
PvP[]
- Official 1vs1 spectator maps:
- Starting positions (Wells and Monument) were slightly moved towards the map's centre.
- Starting positions of player 1 and 2 were swapped.
- Increased starting wall construction cost from 25 to 50 energy.
- This wall is no longer pre-built at the start of the game.
- Increased all player's starting void power from 400 to 425.
- This results in the same starting void as before if the player destroyed the wall immediately.
- Wells at positions 1 slightly repositioned to reduce cliffing opportunities.
- Monuments added at positions 2 to reduce overall map control gained by center control.
- The Minimap has been updated accordingly.
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- Starting positions (Wells and Monument) were slightly moved towards the map's centre to reduce early well distances.
- Starting positions of player 1 and 2 were swapped.
- The Minimap has been updated accordingly.
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- Walls 1 to 4 energy cost set to 50 energy.
- Walls 1 to 3 moved/changed to prevent offensive walls.
- The Minimap has been updated accordingly.
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- Walls 1 moved to prevent offensive walls.
- Walls 2 removed to prevent offensive walls and 50 m range use-cases.
- Walls 3 moved to only contest the outer well on both sides.
- Walls 4 slightly adjusted to only contest one well on both sides.
- The Minimap has been updated accordingly.
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- Uro:
- Heavily changed by opening up previous existing cliffs and terrain to reduce well distances and cliffing.
- The Minimap has been updated accordingly.
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- Starting positions of players 1 and 2 were swapped.
- Decreased starting wall construction cost from 75 to 50 energy.
- This wall is no longer pre-built at the start of the game.
- Increased all player's starting void power from 400 to 475.
- This results in the same starting void as before if the player destroyed the wall immediately.