Crafting

Inevitably in a loot collection game like Card Hunter, you end up wanting things you don’t have, like powerful epic gear or bizarre legendary items that open up entirely new build avenues. And there are always limited options for acquiring these things. You can grind in the hopes of finding them. You can open chests. You can wait for the items you want to show up in the shops.

To an extent, these methods have always served their purpose, but as Card Hunter has matured and more and more content has been added, it has become harder to find specific items, and harder still to complete a collection. This impedes the experience for completionists, for competitive players, and for folks who just want to try out the cool items they’ve heard about. With Celestial Forge, we will add be adding a new collection mechanic that we hope players will enjoy: crafting.

How It Works

From your Keep, there is now an option to view not only the items you have, but also the items you don’t own yet that you can craft. (You can craft items of a level up to your renown; more recipes become unlocked as you advance through the campaign or win multiplayer matches.)

Every non-Treasure item now has a little hammer button that opens the crafting panel. Here, you’ll be able to select items you exist with cards that appear on the desired item, and sacrifice them—along with a little gold—to make that item.

Say you want to make Vibrant Pain, which has six Nimble Strikes. For each card, you need to sacrifice an item with that card—so in this case, you need to sacrifice six items with Nimble Strike. This is good opportunity to turn all those extra Mark 2 Broadswords, Excellent Rapiers, and Ascendant Dervishes into a truly special legendary!

The gold cost to craft an item depends on the item’s rarity, as well as the rarities of the sacrificed items. Every sacrificed item contributes its sell value to the crafting cost, so you don’t have to choose between sacrificing an item for its cards or selling it for gold. The remaining cost is half the buy cost of the item in question, minus the sacrificed items. In the case of a Vibrant Pain crafted from six rare items, the end cost is 1220—half the cost of buying a Vibrant Pain (2500/2=1250), minus the sell value of six rares (5*6=30).

This new feature will also hopefully make lower rarity drops more interesting and useful. Before crafting, you might scoff at your 10th Excellent Rapier, but now you have fodder for a Vibrant Pain! We’re excited to see what you will make from the extra items in your inventory, and how this change affects your collection strategies. Will you grind different adventures for lower-rarity ingredients, rather than chasing your dream legendary directly? What builds are you excited to make now that specific items you fancy are finally within your grasp?

All this and more, June 7!

In addition to crafting, we have over a hundred new items coming with new cards for players to collect and use in battle. There will also be two new treasure hunts with guaranteed epic loot, new adventurer costumes, plenty of wicked new Celestial monsters, and a variety of bug fixes and improvements coming your way.

Let us know your thoughts on this exciting new development in Cardhuntria, and we can’t wait to share it with you come June 7th!

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:

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 Easy 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!

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 items–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!

The topic today is monsters that respawn when killed. I’m going to go over how this mechanic is already used in the game and then delve into some twists on it that you’ll be seeing in AI.

Respawning Distractions

Respawning monsters as a design element was introduced to the game by Farbs in a 2014 update aimed at giving players more options when creating scenarios. Their first appearance in published content was in Mauve Manticore 5—Kalin’s clever puzzle and Scarponi’s nail-biting survival battle both relied heavily on enemies that respawned periodically. In these scenarios, the respawning of the monsters functioned largely to discourage the player from engaging them; both scenarios featured win conditions separate from slaying monsters.

Respawning Actual Combatants

We then went on to use respawning in our last expansion, Expedition to the Sky Citadel. Remember the battle where you have to hold a victory square from Rumbling Chargers? Killing them accomplishes little, because they keep coming back, but unlike in the aforementioned scenarios, you’re forced into conflict with them. The respawning mechanic discourages wasting resources killing them, but this is still a very interactive fight because you need to play control to keep the Chargers off you. Then there are the egg fights… two scenarios in which we had spawners that could just keep generating grubs and swarms. Here you had to fight through the spawned monsters to kill the eggs; these are very dynamic battles where combat and movement are equally emphasized. To some extent, however, you can see these fights as ‘boss fights’ where you just have to take out the boss (the spawners); technically, killing the spawned monsters isn’t necessary. Spending attacks on them isn’t always the wrong choice, but the smoothest solution to these battles involves Flying over the grubs and delivering Impaling Stab after Impaling Stab to the eggs.

Respawning in AI

In the upcoming scenarios, we are using a number of spawn/respawn mechanics, but I want to focus on two battles in particular that I think are really exciting.

Battle 1: Your party is surrounded by some pretty simple melee beaters. They shuffle in steadily, and deal heavy damage. No fancy defenses, no nasty attacks. The only trick to them is that they respawn every round… and unlike in Sky Citadel with the Rumbling Chargers, there’s no victory terrain! The only way to win is to kill all the monsters—for them to all be dead at once. While the monsters in this battle themselves are simple, this setup produces a very interesting fight that plays radically differently from most of Card Hunter. Normally, you ALWAYS take an opportunity to kill a monster (or enemy character, in PvP)—it gets you that much closer to victory and reduces the total HP and card draws of your opposition. Not here. Killing one of these monsters essentially refills its health. I won’t say more about the strategy in this battle, but suffice to say veteran Card Hunters will need to adapt their play!

Battle 2: There’s a boss monster, with devastating attacks. It can really dish out the pain. And it’s kind of fragile—so your instinct is probably to knock it out fast, yeah? In another twist on respawning, the boss itself respawns every round, and in fact the only way to put it out of action permanently is to win the scenario by getting victory points elsewhere. In a way, this plays a bit like Scarponi’s Trick or Treat scenario, except there’s actually quite a bit of incentive to attack the boss. Killing it is effectively hitting a switch that turns off its attacks for a round. In this battle you’ll have to balance focusing on the objectives with keeping your party alive, and deciding when to attack the boss with which cards is a pretty satisfying tactical consideration.

I hope that this discussion of respawning mechanics has been interesting, and that your appetite is whetted for the upcoming expansion. It shouldn’t be too long before we can tell you more.

I leave you with a sneak peek at some of the new cards in the expansion. I won’t say whether players will get their hands on these—but a Card Hunter can dream!

Till next time!

Introducing the Jeweler.

Jewelers add an entirely new dimension to play—their abilities revolve around loot. A lot of the cards we have in development don’t fit into the classic class divisions; Jewelers have little in the way of damage, and they have no assists to help their teammates. Mostly they function as win conditions in a control-oriented party, but their abilities could be fun in a blitz deck for maximizing loot intake per minute of gameplay.

An example of the latter is the following Trait, slotted for the all-new Finance Skill items.

The most exciting thing about the Jeweler is that a full eight of its item slots are Treasure items. Yes, you read that right. All those ‘useless’ items, normally seen as simple sources of gold pieces? The Jeweler can equip them. As you’ll see, Treasures now have cards associated with them, and are equippable, so long as you have a Jeweler in your party.

Treasure items tend to have cards that interact with victory points. I’ll preview two of my favorite new Treasure item cards here:

Now, you may be wondering what the Jeweler does between manipulating your victory points. Well, the sad fact is the Jeweler is probably getting attacked, because your opponent doesn’t like the idea of you winning without a fight! Jewelers are pretty squishy (their hit points are actually the lowest of any class, 21/17/13), but they have a couple fun tricks up their sleeve on the defense. The following cards can be found on new Business Suit items.

Up next: previews of our new Jeweler costumes.

Also stay tuned for a sneak peek at our new playable race, Trolls.

If you have to go AFK in a multiplayer game, please let your opponent know and try to get back quickly. It’s not nice to make someone sit and wait.

Deliberate stalling in multiplayer is against the spirit of the game and the Terms of Service. We may ban players from further multiplayer on a temporary or permanent basis if they engage in this kind of behavior. To help us find players who deliberately stall, please report anyone who does so.

To report, just click on a player’s name in the score box in the top-left corner of the battle or on the post-game report screen or in the lobby. This should bring up a menu from which you can report that player. Please add a reason for your report.

Ultimately, we think reporting is the best way of dealing with this issue as you, the player, are the best judge of what is bad behavior and what is OK.

In the past, we’ve discussed other options for trying to eliminate or reduce stalling. One of these is options is a per-turn timer, which we’ve discussed extensively. Why haven’t we done this yet? The main reason is that Card Hunter is a turn-based game. Limiting each turn’s time is kind of against the spirit of the game, where you should be able to take time to think through a difficult situation. In addition, having a per-turn timer and a per-game timer is complex and tricky to explain to the player.

That said, we may still implement a turn-timer if we feel that it is needed to manage this situation. However, in the meantime, we’ve added a halfway measure that stops players from just walking away from the game and leaving it – call it a wake-up or keep-alive message. Every two minutes, if you haven’t played a card the game will now prompt you to make sure that you are still present. You have 30 seconds to click this prompt away and remain in game. If you fail to do this, you will auto-forfeit the game.

Will this stop AFK behavior? No. However, hopefully it will reduce the incidence somewhat. We’ll still be relying on you to report bad behavior and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it. Let us know here how often you see this and how much of a problem it is for you.

Snoozi, the keep-alive gnome will start operating once we deploy the next build. In addition, we’ve added a flashing browser tab when a multiplayer battle starts if the game tab doesn’t have focus. Hopefully this will help with situations where you’ve tabbed away while waiting for the queue to place you in a battle.

Welcome to the second episode of “Card Versus”. I’m bitter about losing to Ben Lee so I recruited some help from Lance, who until late last week was the number 1 ranked Card Hunter player. here Lance shows me how to build my characters out to create a ninja party.

Welcome to the first of our “Card Hunter versus” series in which we hoodwink noteworthy games’ industry folk into playing Card Hunter. First up, Ben Lee, Blue Manchu’s Art Director. Ben is highly noteworthy.

We’re kicking off Beta this week with a few invites. As I said in my last post, we’ll be ramping up slowly so don’t worry if you didn’t get an invite yet – your turn will come.

If you are lucky enough to get in, I’ve set up some new forums to discuss your thoughts and report bugs. As an early tester, you’re likely to run into a few rough edges and problems – feel free to let us know about them!

See you in the game and happy Beta testing!

Well, we’re getting close. Here’s what we’ve been working on recently:

• Playing through the first 18 levels of the game that are going to be in the Beta and making sure that they work and are balanced and fun.
• Collating the huge set of items that are obtainable in these levels (around 1000!).
• Finishing up the final cards that are needed for these items.
• Play-testing the multi-player game using this item pool and trying to do some initial balancing so that all the classes and races are all competitive.
• Working on how to load test the game so we can handle an influx of real players.
• Fixing the worst bugs that would stop you from delivering useful feedback when you do get in.
• Creating a figure store where you can buy new skins for your characters.
• Implementing starter parties that you can buy to launch into multi-player without playing the single player adventures (if, for some reason, you don’t want to).
• Setting up “metrics” so that we can gather real data to figure out what parts of the game are broken or require re-balancing.
• Drinking lots of coffee.

Whew! Most or all of that stuff is done now, so you can see that we’re getting very close.

So, how are we going to run the Beta when we do launch? We’ll start small – inviting a few people in every few days or every week so that we can make sure that the game scales properly. We may have to pause that invitation process if we run into scalability issues or serious bugs. Once we’re really confident, we’ll pull in a lot more people and, eventually, we’ll open the Beta up and wait for the hordes to (hopefully) arrive!

If you are selected by our carefully engineered random Beta algorithm, you’ll receive an email with a Beta key that you can use to create an account. Once in, you’ll be able to start playing through the 18 levels of the single-player campaign and playing a whole lot of competitive multi-player.

You’ll find that there’s a great deal of the game still to come – many more levels above 18 and a whole bunch of powerful cards that aren’t available yet. You can also look forward to us adding a lot more story stuff – we have some really cool stuff up our sleeves that we haven’t put in yet. Yes, 2013 is going to be a great year for Card Hunting!

Until then, happy holidays and we’ll see you in game in the new year!