1.0.36 Release Notes

[DavidTheDavid (Producer)]

Runestrike v1.0.36 is scheduled for release late this week.

Summary:

1. We staged content for the new season, Darkness Pervades.
2. We prepared a Valentine’s Bundle for the broken hearted and a Morlich-themed Cosmetic bundle to come afterwards.
3. We added Prismatic runes to the game.
   • Prismatic runes are ultra-collectible cards with embellished, animated frames.
   • Prismatic runes can drop for these packs: Core, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Realm packs, Season packs.
   • Prismatic runes differ only in their appearance and do not confer any in-game benefit.
4. We updated Rank rewards for Darkness Pervades and removed the Beta tag from leaderboards.
   • Silver ranks and above now receive Prismatic Packs. Bronze gets Essence.
   • Top ranks receive exclusive badges in addition to the best Prismatic Packs.
   • Win streaks now give 10 Trophies instead of 20.
5. We improved and streamlined the Tutorial.
6. An audible alert now plays when a PVP match is made. The app must be in the foreground for this to work.
7. On mobile, players can rotate their displays.
8. We fixed some localization errors.
9. Players can now view leaderboard rankings for the prior season.
10. The versus matchmaker now measures the 15 minute cooldown between a rematch with the last played opponent from the end of the prior match, instead of the start.
11. Mobile players can now rotate their display to their preference.
12. Various battle and card fixes:
    • Lady of the Mist is now indicated as the source of Evade for adjacent minions.
    • Order of the Aegis’s VFX now layers correctly.
    • Card counters (King Sisyphus, Ma’at) are fixed.
    • Anubis no longer generates extra copies of Backstab.
    • Mercenary now loses health for any summon, not just ones from hand.
    • Soul Spores no longer can drive Power negative.
    • Divine Harvest now layers its VFX correctly.
    • Players now see the hand full indicator for their opponent’s hand.
    • Inferno Dragon’s A1 description is fixed (campaign mission).
    • Zeacon’s A1 Torture spell now has SFX.
    • Divine Harvest has updated FX.
    • We fixed the wording on some cards.
    • We updated art for Iron Bull, Revenant King, and Shadow Magister.
    • Keeper’s A1 no longer kills both the original and resurrected Phoenix.

[DavidTheDavid (Producer)]

Prismatic Runes:
Prismatic runes can drop in Core Packs, all Realm Packs, Epic Core Packs, Legend Core Packs, and all Season Packs. Special Prismatic Packs drop only Prismatic runes; look for these as Leaderboard Rank Rewards.




https://i.imgur.com/n8YLG3G.mp4

[DavidTheDavid (Producer)]

Balance Changes & New Surge Keyword


We made balance changes to 74 cards and abilities. You can see the entire set of changes in this Google sheet.

The most notable balance change is to several minions that utilize the channel mechanic in the game’s engine. Of the 21 cards and abilities that utilize the channel mechanic, 8 minions will use a new keyword, Surge.

• Keyword: Surge
• Description: Whenever you cast a spell, trigger an ability (once per turn).

This change significantly affects the recent Vangelis deck that has dominated PVP, and other decks that rely on spell mills. You can find this info at the link above, but here’s a look at the changes.



We remain committed to a game that provides fast-paced, exciting battles that are fun and strategically satisfying. This particular change definitely slows mill decks, but these decks were one-sided affairs where one player simply served as a spectator to the other’s play. That’s not a game we want to make or that people want to play.

We considered a number of factors when making this change. Most important, these particular channel cards have appeared in a number of problematic decks that lack meaningful counters. Leaving them unchanged would continue to create fertile ground for new, overpowered decks that make for a decidedly unfun experience when on the receiving end. Doing nothing with these routinely problematic cards shifts the burden of correction and rebalance onto newly introduced cards, much like a physician treating the symptoms and not the cause. Our intent here is to address the cause, and now we can look for more impactful moments with Surge designs instead of death by a thousand cuts.

While our goal is to reduce the number of large balance patches like this one, we are already looking at buffs to these 8 minions as the once per turn limit has made their current abilities less impactful than we want. At the moment, several of these cards need more oomph and value in their Surge ability. Right now, it’s most important to disrupt these mill decks that are simply overpowered and generally unfun, so we will return to these promptly and give the Surge Mages their proper due.

Many of the other changes, most of which went live a few weeks ago, buff underutilized runes with a low PVP win-rate, though a few runes with exceptionally high win-rates did see a nerf. We will continue watching metrics, listening to the community, and playing with these runes to monitor how the raft of changes impacts win rates for individual runes, champion performance, deck archetypes, and overall meta.