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!

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)

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!

Our sincere apologies to anyone who who will be affected by this change, but things are out of our hands as the browser makers have decided that they no longer wish to support Flash.

Steam access to Card Hunter will be unaffected by this change. If you want to keep playing and you don’t have the Steam client, you can easily obtain it here (for free). You can login using any existing Card Hunter accounts and your progress/collection/etc will be unaffected.

In order to prepare for the pending discontinuation of web access, we will no longer be selling any pizza or bundles through the web client as of October 1st 2020. You will still be able to purchase these items through the Steam client using Steam Wallet but direct Paypal purchases (in the web client) will no longer be directly supported.

Once again, we’re very sorry that this change is happening. If you have any concerns or issues with any of this, ask in this thread or contact us via support@cardhunter.com.

Void Bastards ia a return to our roots in first-person shooters (like BioShock and System Shock 2) but it’s got a whole new strategic layer that really shakes things up. We won’t be posting a lot about VB here but you can find out a lot more at voidbastards.com.

You’ll get daily chest rewards just for logging in and the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

The Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Friday the 14th and wrap up three days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Thursday 13 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Thursday 13 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Friday 14 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Friday 14 Sep, 10am

We hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our sixth year!

Card Hunter is four years old! As always, we’re throwing a party in-game, and you’re invited. Once again we’ll be offering free leagues which are your once a year opportunity to acquire the special cat costume prizes. You’ll get daily chest rewards just for logging in and the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

Special promotional leagues will be running all weekend. These leagues will be free to enter and winners will walk off with the hard to collect Kee-Tenh figures. This year all three are available: the cuddly Marroo, the not-so friendly Growler, and the wise Meowquith. The leagues in which you can win them will be Monkey Magic, Lost City Quick Draw, and Triple Duel. Kee-Tenh figures are not available in the costume store and have only ever been offered in our birthday leagues.

The Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Saturday the 16th and wrap up two days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Friday 15 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Friday 15 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Saturday 16 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Saturday 16 Sep, 10am

We hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our fifth year!

On Halloween, the blight began to issue forth from Castle Mitternacht. Now it threatens to consume all of Cardhuntria! The Baron of Shieldhaven entreats you to take action. Travel to the distant reaches of the land, protect the townsfolk, and stop Countess Jovana!

Three new high-level adventures are coming soon. Beginning with “The Spreading Blight,” a free adventure for all players, you’ll embark on a perilous journey through the lands of the late Lord Makhail. Over the course of your adventures, you’ll encounter dastardly new foes and overcome treacherous obstacles… and, of course, find priceless loot!

The new adventures are level 21, and will show up on your campaign map automatically once you’ve beaten any one of these other high-level modules: The Metallic Monstrosity, The Troll Tyrant, or Return to the Caverns of Chaos. Note that these are serious challenges: you’ll need every hit point and power token you can get, especially if you’re planning on completing all the quests for these adventures!

Figure Sale!

In conjunction with the release of this content, we will also be putting all our foil figures on 50% off sale. Deck out your inquisitors for the low price of 80 pizza each!

New Starter Packs

Finally, we are refreshing our starter party shop with the addition of the all-new Inquisition pack! Play as three inquisitors with a variety of silver attacks, bringing werewolves and vampires to their knees! We’ve also redesigned our Veindrinkers pack to include many Castle Mitternacht items. This unholy trio has never been so deadly! Each party includes 3 powerful epic items.

All this great stuff will be available after our new build is released. The deployment is scheduled for Wednesday the 21st of June at 1am GMT (click here for some local times). Things will be back up and running an hour or two after that.

We’ve been previewing and playtesting the Castle Mitternacht set for over a month now and we’re super excited to release it!

The new content brings fun new mechanics like transformations—Form trait cards that turn your character into a powerful creature of the night—silver damage attacks, and fun new toys for acid mages, melee priests, human warriors, elf wizards, and more! With 35 cards and 290 new items, we know the set is going to shake things up!

The new content will go live around midnight GMT on Friday, October 28. You can check the time in different time zones on our forums.

At the same time as we release Castle Mitternacht into the wild, we’ll be launching our annual Halloween festivities.

• Spooky ranked boards!
• Creepy limited release costumes in Cuthbert’s shop!
• A Halloween Shop full of cool trick-or-treat props!
• The five winning items from the Aloyzo’s Arsenal #14 competition will also be in the Halloween Shop!

Halloween content will run through mid November.

This release also includes a new Mauve Manticore (#20) with challenging player-made scenarios. If you beat them, you’ll win two player-made items, including the epic 3-Stage Rocket Boots!

For more information on Castle Mitternacht, including a full visual spoiler of the new cards, check this page.