Version 1.12

Minion Masters!

Wild Cards Rework

For the duration of Version 1.12, we’re testing a Wild Cards rework that attempts to put the power level of the mechanic in line with decks that do not use the feature. We have a full, in-detail write up of what we felt needed improving, and the reasoning behind the solution we chose, here.

Here’s the change we’re going with:

• Wild Cards are now added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
• You must have 10 unique cards in your deck to start a match.

We’ll regularly be doing surveys throughout this patch, featured in the in-game news. Make sure your opinion is heard and express your honest opinions as the meta around this rework develops!

Balance

Note: Attack Speed is now being referred to as “Attack Cooldown”. Attack Speed usually has a connotation that would indicate - the higher a unit’s Attack Speed is, the faster an attack is. However, in our game it is the opposite. As such, we have decided to rename it to Attack Cooldown to better reflect what is actually going on.

Ardent Aegis

• Duration 5 > 4
• Developer Comments
• Ardent Aegis was proving a little too difficult to use due to the lengthy timer.

Caber Tosser

• Caber Attack Range 4 > 6
• Caber Width 3 > 4
• Developer Comments
• Caber Tosser often ended up missing large parts of a horde of minions you attempted to counter with him due to the narrow size of his Caber, making him feel frustrating to play in those circumstances.

Disruptor Puff

• First Teleport Cooldown 2 > 5 seconds
• Teleport Cooldown 6 > 5 seconds
• Developer Comments
• ”Teleport Cooldown” refers to how long it takes for the Disruptor Puff’s teleport to occur. We felt the shorter initial teleport wait was too strong for its job, being able to quickly take both bridges before your opponent could respond, but subsequent teleport times left it a little too vulnerable to pose much of a threat beyond that.

Dragon Ball

• Activation Mana Cost 6+ > 5+
• Developer Comments
• Dragon Ball has been seeing very little use due to the high requirement of mana expenditure in order to get value from the card. We feel this buff will make it much easier to fit into decks, but not as powerful as it was during its dominant era.

High-Inquisitor Ardera

• Damage 25 > 27

Jade Flingers

• Damage 16 > 20
• Attack Cooldown 1.8 > 2

Jahun, Keeper of Jadespark

• Sunder Mana Cost 1 > 0
• Now has Mythic
• Developer Comments
• Jahun was underperforming at higher levels, yet we felt the unit itself was for the most part at a decent power level. As such we’ve opted to improve his utility via Sunder, as well as letting him live with a small portion of health when targeted with a card such as Lightning Bolt.

Living Statue

• No longer has Call Slitherbound
• Developer Comments
• Living Statue was proving to be a strong card in Call Slitherbound decks, able to help generate an exceptional amount of value with the extra Slitherbound that we felt was ultimately unnecessary.

Morgrul the Swarmer King

• Mana Cost 4 >5
• Swarmer Count 2 > 3
• Developer Comments
• The Swarmer Count will affect both his on-play and on-death roars. Morgrul has been a very powerful Legendary card ever since his changes in Update 60. While we recently touched the card to align his stats better with Elite Swarmer, he still performs exceptionally well in all ranks, across all modes, providing a ton of value for the 4 Mana Cost slot that often enables a free trade with lower cost cards while putting a decent threat on the board. We felt that efficiency was too much for the 4 Mana Slot, and at the same time we saw an opportunity to reinforce the characteristic of being the Swarmer King. He should still be sufficiently useful at the 5 Mana slot, and the extra swarmers should help to keep him as a relevant threat with the strong DPS if left unanswered.

Snake Druid

• Speed 2 > 3
• Developer Comments
• Snake Druid often seemed to have stayed on your side of the field far too long for your opponent to effectively deal with him due to his low speed. By giving him a speed increase in this way, we want to maintain his current strengths but allow your opponent to simply wait him out, or push other lanes, more effectively.

Soul Stealer

• Speed 5 > 6
• Developer Comments
• Soul Stealer was able to hide behind defensive walls such as Living Statue a little too effectively, often making him difficult to answer with direct Minion combat.

Stormy

• Attack Delay 1.5 > 2.0
• Attack Cooldown 3.5 > 4.0
• Developer Comments
• Stormy was proving to still be too large of a threat in the context of 2v2 gameplay, being able to get out attacks a bit too quickly we felt. By increasing his overall Attack Cooldown, we hope that it’ll become easier to put damage onto it before it can attack again.

Sun Burn

• Radius 3 > 4

Ting Teng & Tung

• Damage 99 > 90
• [FIX]Projectiles cannot bounce off of dead minions
• Developer Comments
• Projectiles bouncing off of minions that were already dead was somewhat of an unintended behaviour, so half of this change can be classified as a bug fix, but we're listing it here as it's a significant change to the balance of the card.

Troubadour

• Health 1700 > 1800

Zealots of the Burning Fist

• Mana Cost 7 > 6
• Developer Comments
• Despite being able to output some serious damage in the right circumstances, the mana cost for Zealots of the Burning Fist was too high to justify playing it in most scenarios. Hopefully a simple mana reduction can help out the card a lot.

Zeppelin Bomber

• Attack Delay 2.0 > 3.0

Misc

• Expeditions have been retired for the time being. A new Weekly Quest to earn tokens by playing Premade 2v2 has been added to compensate.
• Attack Speed has been renamed to Attack Cooldown.
• Stormbringer has received new animations.
• Guardian, Dragon Ball and Shen’s Storm Staff have been removed from the Random Card pool.
• Minor improvements to the new way buffs are applied to the Healthbar.
• Defensive Spells are now categorised as such in the card view.

Bugs

• Fixed Leiliel not reflecting AtG Drone x8’s attacks - Thanks Lazur!
• Fixed Leiliel receiving only half the expected health from Spirit buffs, and blocking healing - Thanks saytin!
• Fixed being able to permanently steal minions with two copies of Hypnotize - Thanks Broken!
• Fixed the Barrel Shield buff’s health not consistently being 60 - Thanks to everyone that reported this!
• Updated the Bridge Buddies tooltip - Thanks EricIsFreaker!
• Fixed Mountainshaper Volco saying he can attack Air units - Thanks BadAsAFish80!
• Fixed issues with Ting Teng & Tung’s weight - Thanks KestreL!
• Fixed Stealthed units being targetable upon spawning - Thanks Jimi D Night!
• Fixed Keywords not being searchable - Thanks everyone!
• Fixed Blaze Volco’s skin using the default by mistake.
• Fixed Gor’Rakk Gate tooltips being broken (Was fixed via a stealth patch)
• Fixed Sewer Scrat preview still being a normal Sewer Scrat.
• Fixed Agate Milloween not appearing in the Master selection.
• Fixed Brother of the Burning Fist appearing in the Sixes bucket for Adventures.
• Fixed a rare occurrence where Legendary Find would not reduce the mana cost of a card by 1 in Adventures.
• Fixed King Puff signs being mistakenly set to the bottom of the bridge when reconnecting.
• Fixed the global chat covering the News board when opening the game.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Balance Changes in Version 1.12

Minion Masters!

New Expansion Reveal coming on the 1st of May - Don't Miss it!

Upcoming Balance Changes

While we have the upcoming Wild Cards Test, we've still got a host of balance changes we'll be releasing alongside it. Here's just a few of the changes coming soon:

Ting, Teng & Tung

• Damage 100 -> 90
• Projectiles cannot bounce off of dead minions
• Developer Comments
• Projectiles bouncing off of minions that were already dead was somewhat of an unintended behaviour, so half of this change can be classified as a bug fix, but we're listing it here as it's a significant change to the balance of the card.

Snake Druid

• Speed 2 -> 3
• Developer Comments
• Snake Druid often seemed to have stayed on your side of the field far too long for your opponent to effectively deal with him due to his low speed. By giving him a speed increase in this way, we want to maintain his current strengths but allow your opponent to simply wait him out, or push other lanes, more effectively.

Zealots of the Burning Fist

• Mana Cost 7 -> 6
• Developer Comments
• Despite being able to output some serious damage in the right circumstances, the mana cost for Zealots of the Burning Fist was too high to justify playing it in most scenarios. Hopefully a simple mana reduction can help out the card a lot.

Dragon Ball

• Activation Mana Cost 6+ -> 5+
• Developer Comments
• Dragon Ball's activation cost was making the card significantly difficult to fit into decks, and we believe the meta has developed to a state where it's a good opportunity to ease up on the restrictive nature of the card's condition.

As always, there's more balance changes to come - Look forward to reading the rest with the release of the 1.12 Patch Notes!

BadAsAFish80's 2v2 Tournament #6

BadAsAFish is back again with another installment of his excellent tournament series! Featuring a $100 Prize Pool provided by BetaDwarf, this multi-day event is a great way to team up with your friend and engage in some competitive Minion Masters if you're stuck at home during the quarantine.

Check out the Toornament page here: https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298882341728886784/information

Awesome Fanart

We're always on the lookout for great displays of creativity from the Minion Masters playerbase, and our eyes this week were drawn to some amazing fanart of Succubus by nekochelle!

We fully recommend checking out the original linked above - The resolution on this is massive! We fell in love with this piece the moment we saw it, and so did our users on Reddit. Check out nekochelle's Instagram accounts - nekochelle and miqchips for more of their great work.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

New Stormbringer Animations

Minion Masters!

New Stormbringer Animations in Version 1.12

Those that have been paying dutiful attention to our Road Map know that Stormbringer is getting a shiny animation overhaul. His current animation set has been with us since the very beginning of Minion Masters, and we think it's time to give him an upgrade. Our animator has been hard at work creating these great new visuals that we think better represent Stormbringer's acrobatic and showboating personality. Check them out and let us know what you think:

Stormbringer's new style will be arriving in Version 1.12, due for release on the 30th of April.

Staying together, no matter the distance

With the continued duration of the Covid-19 quarantine, it's important to all of us that we stay in contact in this period of isolation. We've already talked about how we're still working from home on the next Minion Masters update, but the BetaDwarf team have also taken to special remote gaming nights. We've been up to everything - Playtesting new (and secret!) things, or getting together and hitting public game servers with the might of the Dwarves. There's even been word of setting up a private BetaDwarf Minecraft server... Perhaps we'll have things to show you from that if the idea takes off ;)

But we also want to hear about you all - What have you been up to during the quarantine, productive or recreational? Everyone at BetaDwarf wishes you the best, and we want to hear from you!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Expeditions on hiatus in Version 1.12

Minion Masters!

Expeditions going on Hiatus in Version 1.12

We've made the difficult decision to put Expeditions on Hiatus from the game in our upcoming update. Our stats and survey indicated to us that only a small portion of the Minion Masters playbase actively engage with the mode, yet putting Season Tokens behind it that were significant to new players meant people would have to play through a mode they don't enjoy, and found confusing. We think it's time to retire the game mode for the time being as maintaining it was becoming a difficulty on our end without revisiting the mode, and we want to take the opportunity to have time to focus and improve the experience of the remaining game modes.

We'll replacing the weekly expeditions with a weekly quest that will grant tokens for winning 5 matches in Premade 2v2 Battles, as to not simply be removing earnable rewards. We'd like to thank everyone that's enjoyed Expeditions since its inception.

BadAsAFish80 Charity Stream

We're always on the lookout for inspiring tales of awesomeness from our community. With the recent Covid-19 pandemic, there's never been a better time for the Minion Masters community to come together, and nowhere has there been a better example of this than BadAsAFish80's week long charity stream!

Started as an endeavour to fundraise for the UK's National Health Service, BadAsAFish undertook the event spanning from the 6th to the 10th of April, with any and all proceeds from his Twitch stream being donated towards this great cause. As of writing (Wednesday the 8th), he's already raised a phenomenal $1350!

Make sure to check him out over this Easter period and give him our best wishes - Everyone at BetaDwarf is proud of what he's achieved!

And while you're at it - Why not consider signing up to his upcoming 1v1 Tournament? There's a $100 prize pool with a generous amount of time to complete your matches - Perfect for this period! https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298863485632135168/information

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Wild Cards Rework Public Test in Version 1.12

Minion Masters!

Upcoming Wild Cards Rework Test

Wild Cards is a topic that's been at the forefront of Minion Masters discussion for a long time. It's been a divisive issue that proved difficult to gain a consensus upon - Today, we'll be talking at depth about our plans with the mechanic going forward.

The Aim

For those not familiar with the subject of Wild Cards, the main issue that we're attempting to solve is the usage of the mechanic for "cheese" strategies - Where decks would simply take one strong card that was usually perfectly acceptable on their own, and simply add extra copies of it in order to require more direct answers from the opponent lest a severe mana advantage be gained.

At the same time, we acknowledge that there are more innocent uses of Wild Cards - Users that make creative decks from them or simply use them to have fun with their favourite card even if the strategy isn't viable. Because of this we opted early on to not simply remove the mechanic, as we felt it would have been a significant loss to the game to outright remove a feature a sizeable portion of the playerbase enjoys.

As such, the direction we're trying with Wild Cards is to balance them as a mechanic and make them an alternative strategy - So that they can still be appreciated by those that liked Wild Cards before, but also making them more of a considered choice than a straight upgrade to most competitive decks.

What we're doing

This is the solution we're trying:

• Wild Cards are now added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
• You must have 10 unique cards in your deck to start a match.

This comes about as a result of a long period of theorycrafting, testing and design behind the scenes at BetaDwarf. We considered many, many solutions to Wild Cards and will go into more detail about why we didn't opt for specific solutions below. 

The main idea with this is to create a significant drawback to the addition of Wild Cards in your deck - Having to cycle extra cards makes decks function much slower than those without, allowing non-Wild Card decks to be able to ideally reach their core cards or responses faster in comparison.

Regarding the Balance Changes we made in 1.11, we felt it was necessary that for this concept to work, significant changes would need to be made to the 1 drop Mana Cost slot to avoid a scenario where users simply included powerful 1 Mana Cards to offset the cycling disadvantage this would provide.

With Version 1.12, we intend to implement this change on the live server for the duration of the patch (Until Version 1.13) as a public test of the Wild Cards rework. While this change was tested with our PTR groups, it was determined that we would need a much larger sample size of games to get a comprehensive and accurate conclusion as to how effective these changes would be. To this end, we're trying out if a full Ranked season can provide the data we'd need.

As such, Version 1.12 can be considered as a "Wild Cards Rework Beta", and we will frequently be polling the community throughout the month to get your feedback as the meta develops.

Other solutions we considered (And why we didn't do them)

Separate Queues with no Wild Cards

Our main concern with this solution was that it would significantly shrink the populations of ranked queues regardless of which modes we implemented this in, and we had no intention of making this a solution purely for 1v1 modes - Wild Cards were problematic in every queue, and ignoring one or the other for the sake of what we saw as a potential bandaid fix wasn't justifiable to us. We also did not want to accelerate an elitist stigma within the Minion Masters Community - Be it "Casual vs Serious" queues, or "2v2 isn't a serious mode, because they still have Wild Cards". We wanted to fix the problem for all of our playerbase, and not to leave major parts of it behind.

Make Wild Cards cost more Mana

This was probably one of our most frequently discussed options. Ultimately there were three elements that made us not go forward with this solution:

1. It would also significantly hurt the "fun" uses of Wild Cards

2. What about 10 mana cards - Would we implement Mana Freeze? Would that be too confusing to newer players? Would we have to instead make it Mana Freeze for all Wild Cards - At which point, would that have much of an impact?

3. Higher cost Wild Cards are affected significantly less by this change - I.E. 3x Lord-Sentinel Thelec

Make Wild Cards unlock with experience/perks (with them being the 11th and 12th cards, but no changes to 1 drops)

This change was tested behind the scenes at BetaDwarf, but we quickly found that it opened up a lot of opportunities for combo decks, both on certain masters (Ravager in particular) or with decks in general that wouldn't have much use for the combo pieces earlier in the game. It allowed you to create a very defensive strategy early game and then transition with game swinging power cards later on.

Remove one Wild Card / Make it so you can't Wild Card the same card twice

This was quite a popular suggestion, but ultimately we felt it wouldn't do enough - Removing one of the two wild cards felt like we were simply dodging the issue, while removing the triple wild carding didn't affect Combo decks at all. We're also committed to the idea that Wild Cards can offer something fun and interesting to the game, and this felt like a step backwards.

If you have other questions about this solution, please feel free to get in contact with us about the matter. Reworking Wild Cards has been a consideration for a long time at BetaDwarf, and we're very much looking forward to the results of our public test of the solution.

We're looking for Translators!

We have applications open for fan translators of Minion Masters - We're looking to improve the current state of localisation in Minion Masters, as well as create better translations for upcoming content in the future. You can sign up here - Thanks in advance!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!