I'm pleased to announce the release of our second content expansion patch: "Enter the Ring"! This expansion adds a new progression system to the arena, a new rotating "rules" system to make Tavern Brawls more interesting, a new creature race (10 creatures in total), 25 new spells, dozens of quality-of-life changes, and more! A list of features, as well as additional patch notes, can be found below. __________________________ NEW FEATURE: Arena Progression System Most players enjoy the unique style of gameplay that the Arena offers. Unfortunately, these players still don't like to participate in the Arena because there wasn't a major sense of progression outside of earning Arena Points with which to buy items. To solve this problem, I've introduced a new "Fame" system to the Arena. When you win an Arena battle, you'll earn some Fame (in addition to Arena Points, as usual). After you earn enough Fame, you'll gain a Fame Rank. Each Fame Rank you earn from 1 to 50 will unlock the right to purchase a new item from the Arena Shop. After Fame Rank 50, you'll be given a random surprise that can include all kinds of rare and exclusive treasure. NEW FEATURE: Tavern Brawl Rules Tavern Brawl Rules change the way you'll approach Tavern Brawls. Every Friday, a new rule will be initiated that affect these battles in some way. One week, everyone's creatures might reflect damage back to their attackers. The next week, everyone's creatures might be afflicted with Blight - and they'll be immune to all non-Blight damage! There are currently 14 possible Tavern Brawl rules in the game, and players will see a new one each week. In addition, we've made several major adjustments to Tavern Brawls in the patch that accompanies this expansion. Please see the patch notes below for details. NEW CREATURE RACE: Constructs As you gain Fame Ranks in the Arena, you'll unlock the right to purchase a new type of creature called "Constructs". There are 10 of these creatures in total; 2 for each class in the game. These creatures' traits are unique because they interact with an all-new type of spell that we're also introducing in this patch: Artifact Spells. NEW SPELL TYPE: Artifact Spells As you gain Fame Ranks in the Arena, you'll unlock the right to purchase a new type of spells called "Artifact Spells". There are 25 in total. Artifact Spells work just like any other spell in the game, except they also interact with traits from the new "Construct" creature race. These spells are all modeled after a type of in-game artifact. Some of these spells include "Living Sword", "Living Gauntlet", and "Living Armor". In addition, we've made a lot of major improvements to the game. This is the largest quality-of-life update the game has ever had, and we hope you'll enjoy it! Here are all the changes: - ADD: New arena progression system: Fame! - ADD: Tavern Rules. There's a new rule available every Friday, and they should make Tavern Brawls more interesting! - ADD: 10 new creatures that belong to an all-new Construct race. - ADD: 25 new spells. - ADD: 10 new wardrobe costumes. - ADD: 15 new achievements. - ADD: 1 new accolade. - ADD: You can now cast Alteration spells that last for up to 99 realms. You can remove an active Alteration spell for free. In addition, Alteration spells are now saved/loaded between game sessions. - ADD: New guide to the library: "God Rewards". This book lists all the rewards you can unlock from each of the gods. It also indicates which of these rewards you've unlocked or have yet to unlock. - ADD: You can now choose to hatch an egg and force the creature to have no Heredities. - ADD: When your character approaches a tavern brawler, all the brawlers' win/loss ratios will now display on top of their sprites. This text is also color-coded to give you a quick idea about how difficult the player might be based on this ratio. - ADD: New macro conditions "Core Count > X" and "Core Count < X". - ADD: You can now select Tomes in your inventory and "Use them all". - ADD: Knowledge Ranks are now displayed in the sacrifice interface. - ADD: Card icons are now displayed in the "Creature Knowledge" interface if you own that creature's card. - ADD: You can now "Squelch" cards and talismans to disable their effects. Similarly, you can "Unsquelch" them to re-enable their effects. - ADD: Option to use as many Cloth Scraps as possible to upgrade your Cloth Abomination. - ADD: Artifact trait descriptions are now displayed in the items menu. The context menu option to a view a trait's description has been removed since this addition made the option obsolete. - ADD: An icon will now appear next to enemies in battle if you need to extract a core from them to complete a prophecy. - ADD: Super secret wall shortcut to travel from the Blacksmith to the Enchanter. - ADD: The first time your party is wiped out, a new tutorial popup will appear that explains to the player how to view the last battle history. - ADD: Nemesis and Itherian affix names are now always displayed in the battle interface below the battle menu. - ADD: Very small delay to the item use menu to prevent players from accidentally discarding items. - CHANGE: The Tavern Brawl ban list no longer prevents you from battling with banned traits. Instead, these traits will simply be ignored. A warning will now be displayed in each brawler's dialog if you're using one or more banned traits. - CHANGE: The Tavern Brawl ban list no longer updates each week. Instead, there is now a permanent ban list for certain traits. The previous iteration of the ban list wasn't working out for a number of reasons, so we'll see how this new version goes. - CHANGE: Increased the number of tavern brawlers that spawn at a time from 4 to 8. - CHANGE: Rank S knowledge perk has been changed. It now increases your chance to find that creature's Card and Singular variant. - CHANGE: Enemies now have a chance to drop their Core, Spell Gems, Artifact, and random loot after battle regardless of your knowledge rank. In addition, the chances of these items dropping has been drastically increased compared to when they only dropped if you had Rank S knowledge. - CHANGE: Reduced the number of Nether Crucible Guardians from 5 to 3. Guardians also spawn much closer to the player now. - CHANGE: "Diamond Attunement" trait has been changed: Artifacts are never decayed, and Spell Gems are never sealed. - CHANGE: You can now Extract from creatures in more types of battles, including Nemesis Creatures. This change is particularly interesting because it gives new players access to more creatures early on. - CHANGE: Artifact and Spell Gem properties are no longer weighted toward lower-end values. This should make reforging a little less frustrating, and should give artifacts that are found in the wild a greater opportunity to be useful. - CHANGE: Death Mage "Necromancy" perk no longer resurrects your creatures as random Death creatures. Instead, it simply resurrects the creature. - CHANGE: When you re-roll Prophecies, any Prophecies that you've already completed will no longer be re-rolled. - CHANGE: Decreased the number of kills required for Saia to gain stats by roughly 35%. - CHANGE: Greatly increased the rate at which you'll encounter new creatures as your highest realm depth increases. - CHANGE: Damage that is inflicted by creatures other than attacks and spells is now mitigated by a very small amount of the defending creature's Defense. Examples of damage affected by this change include the "Splash" buff and the "Piercing Dragon Claws" trait. Previously, this type of damage was not mitigated by anything at all which resulted in higher-than-intended damage. Note that this change does not affect damage that is NOT inflicted directly by creatures, such as Poison and Burn. Let me know what you think about this change - the goal isn't to make these effects useless, but to make them a little less ridiculous. - CHANGE: All interfaces that allow you to rename something in the game (such as artifact branding or item set renaming) now allow you to type out the name. - CHANGE: Decreased cost of Gate of the Gods from 696969 of each resource to 100000 of each resource. - CHANGE: Rebalanced the number of achievement points granted by each achievement. The goals of this balance pass were to lower all the numbers to make them feel more approachable, and also to make early-game achievements more impactful. - CHANGE: Bosses are no longer immune to the "Confused" and "Sleep" debuffs. - CHANGE: After defeating a god in battle, that god's altar will appear. - CHANGE: Maps of Farsight are now automatically consumed at the start of each realm and can no longer be used manually. - CHANGE: Increased the base spawn rate of Nether Crucibles. - CHANGE: Increased the chance to find the exact Nemesis affix required to complete the prophecy that requires you to hunt down a specific Nemesis Creature. - CHANGE: Enemies will no longer respawn after you complete the Realm Quest in that realm. - CHANGE: "Misery" Nemesis and Itherian affixes no longer prevent healing and resurrection; just buffs and stat gains. - CHANGE: "Hex" Nemesis affix now increases the cost of your creatures' spells by 50%. "Hex" Itherian affix now increases the cost of your creatures' spells by 100%. - CHANGE: Rebalanced boss levels, especially early-game bosses. Their levels were far higher than other creatures at that realm depth, and it forced players to grind to level up too early in the game. - CHANGE: Slightly increased the chance to encounter Itherian Creatures. - CHANGE: "Pandemonium Ultimatum" talisman's rank 100 power has been changed since the old one was nearly useless. - CHANGE: When you breed your creatures, the level of the offspring is now equal to the highest level of the two parents. Previously, the offspring inherited 50% of each parents' experience points. - CHANGE: Increased the minimum possible chance to find Spell Gems by 40%. You won't notice this increase if you're already pretty far into the game, but this should help out new players quite a bit. - CHANGE: Decreased the frequency that you'll find class-based Shield and Lance artifacts. The drop rates of these artifacts should now be more in line with all the other types of artifacts. - CHANGE: Doubled effectiveness of "Increased Chance to Find Itherian Creatures" property for Sigils. - CHANGE: Made some adjustments to how fatigue damage is calculated. The goal of this change was to resolve "stalemate" battles more quickly. - CHANGE: Creatures will now become "Primed" about 30% faster on average. - CHANGE: Arena is now unlocked at "Honored" instead of "Revered" favor with Gonfurian. - CHANGE: Maximum character limit in all names is now 20, up from 16. - CHANGE: Enemies will no longer spawn with certain spells that they wouldn't be able to normally use anyway, such as Summon spells. - CHANGE: Cost to re-roll Prophecies now increases by a flat 5000 Power per re-roll, rather than doubling each time. - CHANGE: Nemesis Creatures and Itherian Realm bosses now have randomly generated names. - CHANGE: The size of the arena crowd is now based on your fame rank. - CHANGE: Lord Zantai card has a new, unique effect. - CHANGE: Enemies now respawn more frequently if your Heart of Darkness is activated and you can instantly kill enemies. - CHANGE: If a realm is too small to contain all the necessary objects, the game will continuously try to generate new realms until it creates one that works. - CHANGE: If you have the realm quest that requires you to collect an enemy's corpse, the corpse can now also be found on enemies defeated by the Heart of Darkness. - CHANGE: Macro condition that checks to see if a creature has NOT been extracted will now return "false" if the extraction chance is 0%. - CHANGE: There were two "the Collector" titles, so one has been changed to "the Archivist". - CHANGE: Removed option to discard cards since you can just squelch them now. - CHANGE: Made several minor improvements to most of the wardrobe costumes added in the last patch. - CHANGE: "Unbroken Mirror" talisman now has a maximum rank of 400. - CHANGE: Improved formatting of achievement category interface. - CHANGE: Scylla and Charybdis' and Judgment and Mercy's battle intro text have been changed to include their names. - CHANGE: God boss battles now have different intro text. - CHANGE: Moved the location of the "Guide: Macros" bookshelf to be located consistently with other guides. - CHANGE: Removed enlarged artifact icons from the artifacts menu to make room for trait descriptions. - FIX: Donating to Torun too many times reset the donation counter for this particular god. He's not sorry at all. - FIX: Undead Army boss fight was summoning too many enemies in the story fight, and too few in the Nether Boss fight. - FIX: Several keys were named incorrectly in the key rebinding interface. - FIX: Item sets and stable teams could sometimes be overwritten with the wrong items/creatures. - FIX: 'Deified (X) by [God]' achievements unlocked 1 level later than their descriptions claimed. - FIX: You can no longer cancel out of the riddle dwarf's dialog using the back button. - FIX: Invaders for certain Realm Quests will now continuously respawn until you complete the quest to ensure that you never run out of enemies to kill. All invaders will be erased after you complete the quest. This change will also make these quests a little faster to complete. - FIX: There was an Itherian Artifact that was bugged and couldn't be obtained. - FIX: Horde-style fights (including the final story battle) could sometimes skip summoning extra creatures. - FIX: Torun didn't always offer the Gate of the Gods quest at the correct time. - FIX: Itherian affix "Horde" didn't spawn creatures with Itherian boss stat bonuses in waves past the first one. - FIX: New features such as the arena were unlocked at the wrong times, or never at all. - FIX: Rune descriptions in the tavern tickets shop were wrong. - FIX: "Artifacts Awakened" accolade could sometimes count twice per awakening. - FIX: Tavern spells couldn't be awakened on artifacts. - FIX: "Assassin's Specialty" trait didn't work. - FIX: "Sacrifice to the Light" could be awakened on artifacts which was useless since it only works if the spell is cast by a gem. - FIX: Some wardrobe costumes had strange visual issues, such as Zeus' crown falling off to the side of his head sometimes. - FIX: Rare case where spell gems could be unequipped from your creatures after a tavern brawl. - FIX: "Hate and Other Triumphs" had a misleading description. Also fixed a bug related to this trait that prevented enemies' buffs/debuffs from clearing on death. - FIX: Talismans were supposed to unlock in god shops at Deified (5), but they unlocked at Deified (6) instead. - FIX: Tavern Brawler win/loss records will now immediately update client-side after you win or lose against them. - FIX: Fortune Teller achievements referred to Prophecies as "tasks", which is antiquated from Siralim 2. - FIX: Potential freeze under very specific circumstances when randomizing a sigil's properties. - FIX: Winning 4 or 5 arena battles in a row wasn't rewarding quite as many Arena Points as intended. - FIX: Enemies weren't respawning. - NOTE: New Tavern Brawl teams will not be uploaded to the server until the patch is approved and released by Apple for iOS. This should happen in less than a day from now.