Dear community,

We've released another PvP balance patch, possibly the most consequential one among the last 3 patches. Not every change of Betas 6-8 may make it into the campaign version, but overall we hope we are close to finalizing this important process.

Spells

• Summon creatures spell is renamed 'Creature Portal' and now costs 0 movement (hero chaining RIP)
• lowered requirement of Town Portal to level 10 and Creature Portal to level 5, summon boat cost increased to 5 mana.
• Dark ritual now cost 1 road tile worth of movement for every 10 mana recovered. Heroes with mystic spec do it a bit cheaper.
• Summoned Phoenix and spectral dragon spec have new ability: Primordeal - grants immunity to Cold Death/Harm Touch/Vorbal Blade and Deadeye Shot
• removed elemental balance skill from game, increased mana cost of Phoenix to 48.
• slightly decreased dmg of meteor shower from 30*Sp to 28*SP (is still better than it was)
• earthquake spell cost increased to 12 mana and improved visuals.
• increased base duration of vampirism to 2 and reduced duration scaling to 0.05 (greatly benefits cyrus and ash)
• increased base duration of decay to 2.5 and reduced duration scaling to 0.05
• increased base duration of firewall to 1.5 and reduced duration scaling to 0.05
• decreased cost of fireball to 18, set ice bolt back to 9
• lowered talisman cost for creature portal and clarified talisman functionality desc
• fixed missing or incorrect info in all adventure spell descriptions.

• removed gating skill from demon lords and sorcerers, so only gatekeepers can now use gating. This is to end endless AI abuse with gating+last stand and gating+summoning magic while your human opponent has to wait forever for a turn to end. Hopefully this will end Infernos impopularity in PvP as the pace of the inferno game is now more equal with the other factions. Gatekeepers themselves are less abusive and have more weaknesses without gating. Campaign/scenario heroes are not affected as they are mostly gatekeepers, which is a class kept very similar to demon lords in original game.
• swapped dark exaltation with Pariah perk, added +5 mana regen and raise death spell to Pariah, removed L30 bonus
• secrets of destruction to give +2SP and +4 mana regen and chain lightning spell and put it behind master of storms.
• removed +2 Defense bonus from last stand
• reduced attack penalty on preparation to -1
• reduced attack bonus on leadership for necropolis to 3,5,7
• fixed arcane renewal being triggered on arcane crystal, blade barrier and summon hive.
• reduced ballista dmg at expert level from 4-6*A+K to 4-5*A+K
• mechanical creatures (war machines and golems) are now immune to cold death (Ballista dmg is nerfed slightly, but overall all WM are far more reliable)
• catapult initiative increased to 12 and dmg scaled down accordingly, dmg of untrained catapult wasn't lowered (this benefits both untrained and siege masters as you can only target one wall segment per turn)
• nerfed gremlin repair to 2x stack size
• energy channel reduces mana cost by 5% instead of 10% (has strong round down effect)
• changed engineer starting primary skills from 0-3-1-1 to 1-2-1-1
• changed renegade starting primary skills from 3-0-1-1 to 2-1-1-1
• rolf spec changes 1D in 1A, instead of 3D in 3A
• Harkenraz start with adv Combat, Agreal with basic destructive, Svea with Occultism
• Changed resurrection artifacts back to working per stack and added minor stats to all of them.
• pocket resurrection artifacts have effectiveness increased to 20% + 1% per K
• removed knowledge penalty from ring of sar issus and nerfed effect to -25%
• mercury pendant now gives +2 Sp instead of +1 SP
• orc artifact descriptions now explain why they are not so bad

ARMG

• Ladder-Mu: tier4 in zone 1, tier 6 in zone 3, moved res mines to zone 2, ore+wood in zone 3, improved zone guard strength
• Ladder-L: now there is only one such template, improved zone guard strength in later zones
• Ladder-M: tier6 in zone1
• Cut dwelling conversion cost for T4-7 in half, and adjusted the other tiers towards it

Other

• fixed mixed neutral generation, generating invalid black knight ID
• fixed missing namefile of watering hole adv object
• fixed xerxon not getting enough dragonblood crystals
• fixed scenario hero veyer spec desc
• desc of enlightenment now says primary skills are random
• flattened terrain on taiga battlefield colliding with battle grid
• prevented AI going in 'victim' mode by enforcing 'warrior' mode on all default multiplayer maps.
• possibly fixed issue of summoning 2 stacks with vayshan et all in LAN battle
• possibly fixed issue in LAN duel mode of double growth in towns
• updated installer texts

• added function to mapmixer to force 'warrior' mode on any processed map, to optimize its behaviour
• added option to auto-balance mentors and hillforts for PvP ARMG maps
• added option to disable town conversion and mine control on map level