Aether Storm Part 2

What's New?

We are now at the second patch of the Aether Storm update, and this one is a big one!

I'm very excited to introduce the Weather system to the game! This system allows weather events to spawn in maps. Weather events will affect the fights they touch significantly, and they will also add some strong weather cards as rewards for those fights!

The second new addition with this update is the first alternative area! The Battered Ramparts is another area you can choose to face instead of the Mushroom forest. It features brand new enemies, events, and card rewards!

Another big change this patch has to do with card balance. There was a pretty big issue in the balance of the cards in the game. The way I balanced cards, a card that cost 4 would do twice as much as a card that cost 2. With that logic, a card that cost 0 couldn't really do anything without having a downside to compensate. This made it really hard to make cards that had a low cost, and it was annoying that I needed to always give downsides to otherwise simple cards.

The end result was that optimal decks ended up very regularly with 5 or 6 mana cards, because most cheap cards didn't end up doing much of anything. Using less mana cards than that was possible, but always sub-optimal. With the new balance I'm using on cards, it's now possible to run decks that use anywhere from 0 to 6 mana cards in their starting list! It should allow for a lot more variety and should make deckbuilding more fun!

This does mean that almost every card in the game had to be changed: You can see the complete patch notes, including those card changes, here: https://www.baronneriegames.com/aether-storm-update-part-2

Once again, community member Falterfire has been very helpful by creating a Patch Breakdown video for this latest patch!

Watch on YouTube

Patch Notes

- Added the Map Selection Screen
- Added the Battered Ramparts area

- Added the Weather System

- Rebalanced (mostly buffed) every non-mana card in the game. (And several mana cards)
- Changed a lot of cards that were lackluster to be more unique and fun
- Starting decks for all heroes were adjusted accordingly
- Added 11 new Generic cards
- Brittle Shield is now Generic

- Cards are now unlocked in a semi-random order (rather than fully random)
- Changed the list of default cards

- Swapped Raodan and Silan again (Raodan is back at being the first unlocked character)

- Changed Drofis' second passive and several of her cards to reinforce her Poison sub-theme
- Changed several Inna cards to allow her to play more aggressively. She also got a brand new card!

- Card Packs now only cost 400 Aether: your account will receive Aether based on how many packs you had opened
- Reduced the exp requirements for levels 7 to 10

- Reinforced Outfits now also increases Recoverable Health by 1 per rank

- You now start fights at 2 mana
- Burn now deals 6 damage (up from 5)
- Poisoned Blood was changed: it now applies 1 poison per rank whenever you lose life.
- Fatigue's cap no longer changes as you draw more cards: it will remain at 5
- When Frenzied, Fatigue's ranks are only reduced by 1 at end of turn
- Sturdy now grants +1 shield per 6 ranks (max +4)
- Mighty, Adept, Tough, Vulnerable and Weak are now 25% bonuses instead of 30%
- Arcane and Shock bars max values now stop increasing after 20

- Increased enemy health in Depth 2 and 3 (this is to compensate for the buff that almost every card received)
- Slightly increased Frost scaling for enemies in Depth 2 and 3
- Slightly tweaked Beulator to be more of a threat in the second half of the fight

- Resolved several bugs