Patch 0.2.6 will go live at around 9PM ET
The Gauntlet is finally here! Draft a deck with the new bucket system and test your skills against the competition over four games. 0.2.6 also introduces five new skins, four card reworks, and fifteen other card changes to shake things up.
General:
- Added the ability to purchase gift codes for items in the shop, useful for event rewards and sharing Duelyst II goodies with friends. 🙂
- Added links to News and Events to the Main Menu
- Request for and upvote new features and suggestions at https://duelyst2.canny.io/feature-requests. We’ll be using this to track popular requests and work some of them into our roadmap over time. Be sure to watch this space to keep an eye on some of what we’re working on!
- Our experimental MMR system and its usage in Duelyst II is the subject of a new research paper, which you can read here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14857
The Gauntlet (New Game Mode):
- Our own Blatm has written up a detailed rundown on The Gauntlet, which you can find here.
- Here’s a summary of the new mode, described in more detail in the devlog:
- RUN STRUCTURE: You draft a deck and then play 4 matches with that deck, win or lose.
- REWARDS: Gauntlet runs cost 20 gold. You get some random rewards that don’t depend on your record, 5 gold per win, and a Gauntlet ticket for 3+ wins.
- DRAFTING: Building a deck consists of choosing between 3 “buckets” of cards 17 times, and then deleting up to 4 of those buckets. Each bucket is a group of 2 or 3 cards, size chosen at random, and each individual card is generated independently at random.
- WEIGHTS: Some cards appear during the draft more often than others. Before this was determined by rarity, but now I hand picked weights for each card instead.
- CROSS-FACTION: occasionally cards from other factions appear during the draft. Each card has a hand-picked chance of appearing in a different faction, and any card can appear.
Card Changes:
All changed cards can be disenchanted for full Spirit from when this post goes live to one week after the patch goes live.
Songhai:
- Mask of Shadows: Your General has Backstab: 3. ➝ Your General has +1/+0 and Backstab: 2.
- Cyclone Mask: 3 Mana ➝ 4 Mana
Without giving a baseline attack bonus, Mask Of Shadows has struggled to find a niche. Rather than reliving the reason the attack was removed in the first place, Cyclone Mask has been made more expensive to hit this specific combination pre-emptively.
Vetruvian:
- Imperial Mechanyst: (Rework) 2 Mana 2/3 | Opening Gambit: Give a nearby minion -2/-0 until your next turn.
- Renamed to Imperial Saboteur
One challenge Vetruvian has faced is that many of their minions are archetype-specific or otherwise niche. We hope Imperial Saboteur’s new career choice allows it to fit into a variety of Vetruvian decks, and promotes more faction representation in their 2 drop slot.
- Cosmic Flesh: (Rework) 4 Mana | Give an allied minion +3/+0, another +0/+3, and another Blast this turn.
- Common ➝ Epic
- Renamed to Syzygy
- Blindscorch: Rare ➝ Common
- Aurora’s Tears: Epic ➝ Rare
Most Vetruvian archetypes struggle with converting their board advantage into a win or bigger lead. Syzygy looks to address this by providing more burst, reach, and line AoE in a Vetruvian-y way. Syzygy is taking up the Cosmic Flesh slot as the later was played relatively infrequently and is somewhat similar to Syzygy in that they’re both buff cards that allow smaller minions to become serious threats. Syzygy doesn’t “feel” like a common to us, so we’re shuffling some rarities around.
Abyssian:
- Spectral Blade: Your General has +2/+0. When your General destroys a minion, heal your General for 2 ➝ Your General has +2/+0. When your General destroys a minion, heal your General for 1.
Spectral Blade could single-handedly stonewall certain decks in the early game, and allow aggression with minimal fear of retaliation. The card still does this, but not quite so well.
- Nightsorrow Assassin: 3/1 ➝ 3/3 | Opening Gambit: Destroy a nearby minion with 3 or less Attack. ➝ Opening Gambit: Destroy a nearby damaged minion.
The previous version of Nightsorrow Assassin was inconsistent in what it could target, e.g. being able to destroy minions like Purgatos, Ironcliffe Guardian, and Pandora, but not many minions which were less expensive and overall more powerful. This had a major and largely haphazard impact on which minions were competitively viable. With this rework, we’re aiming to reduce the variance caused by Nightsorrow’s inconsistent effectiveness while preserving its overall power level and its role as a reactive early game card.
- Dark Terminus: 5 Mana ➝ 4 Mana | Destroy a minion and summon a Wraithling on that space. ➝ Destroy a minion and summon a Wraithling for its owner on that space.
Dark Terminus previously didn’t feel great to use even on high value targets. Reducing its cost should alleviate this, and while the summoned Wraithling having the same owner as the targeted minion is often a disadvantage, it can also open up some combos with Grasp Of Agony.
Magmar:
- Twin Fang: 3 Mana ➝ 2 Mana | Your General has an additional +2/+0 each time an ally takes damage. ➝ Your General has an additional +1/+0 for each time an ally takes damage.
We’d like Twin Fang to be lower variance and more value oriented. This change aims to make Twin Fang a card that substantially influences how players play while it’s equipped, rather than ending the game immediately as part of a burst combo.
- Phalanxar: (Rework) 2 Mana 4/4 | This moves 1 less space.
Phalanxar’s main purpose in life was to be the friend Vindicator called when everyone else was busy, so he’s trying something new.
Vanar:
- Mesmerize: (Rework) 2 Mana | Deal 2 damage to enemy minions on a row and Stun them.
Mesmerize’s niche wasn’t an especially fun one, so it’s been repurposed into a more competitively costed throwback to the earlier days of Duelyst 1’s beta.
- Glacial Elemental: Effect is now Infiltrate.
Glacial Elemental is a huge force in the competitive meta right now, and this change is motivated by specific considerations:
– Due to being very draw dependent and often having essentially no counterplay, turn 2 was too early for the Glacial Elemental Bonechill Barrier combo to be possible. When Glacial Elemental + Bonechill Barrier is played on turn 2, Glacial Elemental is almost always played on the top or bottom mana tile, so requiring Glacial Elemental to be Infiltrated makes this play impossible.
– Unanswered Glacial Elementals can be very frustrating, making it feel pointless to play minions since they’ll be easily removed again. With the infiltrate requirement, the opponent can reasonably reach Glacial Elemental, provided that they’re willing to stay on their starting side of the battlefield. This reduces the frequency with which a Glacial Elemental goes unanswered, and also gives Vanar players another way to incentivize their opponent to stay in Infiltrate.
– This change impacts Glacial Elemental’s natural home – Vespyr/Wall decks – less than other Vanar archetypes that could splash in this card and Bonechill Barrier to reap the benefits with no reliable way of getting Infiltrate.
- Wolfraven: 2/4 ➝ 2/3 | Effect is no longer Infiltrate.
Wolfraven had Infiltrate mostly due to Vanar needing a critical mass of Infiltrate cards. Now that Glacial Elemental has Infiltrate, Wolfraven no longer needs it. Removing the infiltrate condition isn’t a small buff, so we’ve stripped him of 1 Health due to the effect’s potential to snowball games.
- Ancient Grove: Opening Gambit: Give allied minions “Dying Wish: Summon a Treant on this space”. ➝ Opening Gambit: Give other allied minions “Dying Wish: Summon a Treant on this space”.
The ability for Ancient Grove to affect itself with its Opening Gambit made playing it with no other allied minions a strong offensive and defensive play in many situations. Given how powerful it is with two or more allied minions already in play, we’ve weakened the baseline so that playing Ancient Grove on an empty board is less appealing.
Neutral:
- Prophet of the White Palm: 1/3 ➝ 2/2 | Opening Gambit: Prevent damage dealt by spells until your next turn ➝ Opening Gambit: Give all units “This takes no damage from spells.” until your next turn.
Prophet was changed in two ways:
– His effect no longer applies to minions played after it, and is now a dispellable modifier placed on individual units.
– At 1/3, Prophet could be included in decks at relatively little cost, and was very strong in some situations while being relatively weak in others. Moreover, when it was strong, there was often no counterplay available to the opponent. As a 2/2, we’re hoping that Prophet continues to support specific small minion or swarm-y decks that are willing to build around it, but is seen less often when not a deliberate inclusion.
- Komodo Scavenger: 2/2 ➝ 1/3 | This gains Health equal to the cost of the next artifact you equip. ➝ This gains Attack equal to the cost of the next artifact you equip.
With Prophet moving to a 2/2, we thought it’d be nice to have a 1 mana 1/3 in neutral elsewhere. Additionally, it was often correct to play a 2/2 Komodo and pass the turn without equipping an artifact, which led to lots of variance depending on whether or not the opponent could access the easily-clearable 2/2. With a 1/3 statline, we hope the card will feel a bit more consistent gameplay wise and lead to fewer blowouts.
- Silhouette Tracer: Teleport your General up to 4 spaces. ➝ Teleport your General up to 3 spaces.
The four space teleportation range made this difficult to meaningfully play around for many decks, and with the Mask of Shadows change this patch, now seemed like a good time to address this.
- Ghost Lynx: (Rework) 2 Mana 1/3 | Opening Gambit: Draw a card at the end of your turn.
Ghost Lynx has been reworked to allow lower curve decks to sacrifice some tempo in exchange for more options in the following turns, and to play more cards per turn without running out of steam. For your future RNG teleporting needs, please call Paddo.
- Archon Spellbinder: 5/6 ➝ 6/6
Archon has seen a small amount of play since its changes a couple of months ago, but is difficult to justify including in most decks at 5/6. Allowing it to trade better into cards like Spectral Revenant and Dancing Blades, as well as making it generally more threatening should make it more appealing for decks that want this effect.
- Rook: 7 Mana ➝ 6 Mana
Looking to give the big guy a boost.
Fun fact: This card came to be when one of the devs made a new system for creating cards, and, as an example to demonstrate how it worked, made Rook and called it “Snek”. We thought it was hilarious and kept it in.
Shop:
- New Skins:
- Spirit Harvester – Stormcaller
- Bloodtear Alchemist – Stormcaller
- Grailmaster – Stormcaller
- Ghost Lynx – Stormcaller
- Grandmaster Z’ir – Stormcaller
These new skins will be available for 200 Shards each.