Rune Gate update for 28 September 2023

This is a fairly big update. The goal of this update is to improve the experience of early to mid game, make each weapon more unique and adjust the balance of certain runes.

Synergy Runes, and Changes to the Talent System

Synergy Runes can be gained after you upgrade your character, they can only be equipped by your teammates. They are a bit over-tuned due to their rarity. They serve two main purpose: 1. Improve interactions between characters; 2. make certain builds more viable in the early game.

In addition, all its runes will be unlocked after you recruit a champion from now on, so that you can have more runes to choose from in the early game.

Changes to the Weapon Moves

In order to make each weapon more unique, I've made certain changes to Sword, Bow and Staff cards. You can check them out in the Compendium Menu:

Sword - Attack type weapon, with a strong focus on areal attacks.
Bow - Attack type weapon, with a focus on single target and piercing attacks.
Staff - Assist type weapon, its attack/block values are low but can affect more targets.
Shield - Defense type weapon, with a strong focus on blocks.

Changes to Runes

Before this update, in order to have a sense of progression, all runes have 4 levels. But this has caused three major issues:

1. Some runes are just not suited to have 4 levels. In order to make each level meaningful, they are either too weak in the early game or too strong in the late game, or both. They are extremely hard / impossible to balance.
2. You can't get enough runes to upgrade them to level 4. To compensate, I had to give tier 3 runes after Wave 2, which kind of making the level system meaningless.
3. Due to issue 2, the runes you get in the early game are just placeholders to be replaced, which makes getting new runes not that exciting and affects the early game experience.

That's why I made the following changes:

1. Half of the runes no longer have levels. They will now only have "1 level" (1 effect), which can be used from start to finish. This change will certainly make the early game easier and late harder, which is a good thing considering the game difficulty at the moment;
2. Since some runes still have levels, in order to make them more meaningful, now the game will only give you level 1 runes (with a small chance to get level 2s).
3. Runes are now separated into normal and rare category, they have a slightly different background. Rare runes can be gained in the elite battles and have a chance to appear after normal battles.

Other Changes:

1. Saves now have a date displayed;
2. Added a Compendium Menu, you can check all the cards and augments in there;
3. Added Assist Runes that let your teammate play a card free of cost.
4. Fixed a few bugs.

Thanks for the feedback!