Hello, I am a new player and had some questions about the game that I hope someone could answer. -No block backstab I remember seeing the text "no block" when I attacked from behind. I assume it means no green cards can be activated in response. I was wondering what would happen with a hybrid card? -PvP decay Does my rating decrease naturally over time? Does the leaderboard ever reset, like seasons? Are there rewards for having a high rating? -Patches How often is the game updated with new content? How often are balance changes made? I'm more interested in the second question as I dislike a stale meta that barely changes. Does the meta heavily limits you into only a few of playstyles to remain competitive (iPvE and PvP)? -Popularity Despite its great ratings on steam, this game seems unpopular. Most posts I found date back a few years. Why do you think that is? Has the game remained largely unchanged?
1. It's indeed impossible to block enemy cards that affect you from behind. This rule goes for all cards, whether they're attack cards, utility cards, hybrid cards or even assist cards. 2. PvP rating doesn't decline over time and isn't ever reset. There's no reward for having a high PvP rating, but there are rewards for joining a guild and performing well in it. More details on that here. 3. There's usually new content in the form of new player-made items and modules every month but those have been on a hiatus recently. There's also new expansions with new items or modules that come out about once a year or so. Balance changes aren't very frequent, I'd say they happen about as often as expansions come out, but you should keep in mind that expansions in themselves are also balance changes. MP board rotations change every month as well which affects the meta, a build that does well in one MP rotation can perform poorly in another. You can play a variety of builds and get to an Elo of ~1500 but to break 1600 or 1700 you really need to use a build that can perform well against any build that gets used a lot which can limit your options. 4. I assume the Steam forum's not active since there's already a better structured forum for the game here with more functionality such as monthly contents (again, on hiatus right now) and way more activity.
Hello, and welcome to the community! We're small, but friendly (for the most part). - No block backstab Blocks are played when a character is attacked by another character from the front or sides. You can see which spaces a character may block from by mousing over the figure. Light squares are blockable, while dark squares are not blockable. 2x2 (large) miniatures, while rare, may have weird interactions with blocking near the edges of vision. To answer your question, any attack, utility, or assist card that affects a creature and is played by an opposing figure will trigger a block, even if it's a hybrid. In some cases, you may want to play a normally helpful card on an enemy, or a normally harmful card on an ally. To do this (if it's disabled by default in your settings), ctrl+click the card in your hand to be able to select abnormal targets. Allies do not block your attacks. Here are a few examples: Spoiler Accelerated thought - is blockable (affects a creature, is a hybrid assist/attack card) Daylight - is NOT blockable (does affect a creature, is a hybrid assist/attack card, but has the Unblockable aspect) Reactive Trip - the attack portion is blockable (does affect a creature, is a hybrid attack/boost card) Side note: Boosts are not blockable. Heal - is blocked by enemies (affects a creature, is an assist card) Ready to Strike - is NOT blockable (affects a creature, is a boost card) Again, boosts cannot be blocked. - PvP Decay Not to my knowledge. I don't play multiplayer very often at all (maybe once every couple months), but my rating has not noticeably dropped, so I'm assuming this is a no. I have like 650 hours of multiplayer campaign though (I need a life) - Patches The game is updated with new content on an irregular schedule. For full blown expansions, it may take roughly a year between major expansions. The most recent full expansion was Castle Mitternacht in mid-June this year. The expansion before that was Acquisitions Incorporated, released in April of 2016. That being said, they released the items for Castle Mitternacht in October of 2016, so there was about a 6 month period between releases of major content. On the topic of small-scale balance changes: I feel like the majority of the playerbase agrees that the game is actually fairly balanced in multiplayer. To my knowledge, there's no firm meta, as every combination of cards has a counter or weakness, and there's enough randomness in the match to make sure there's no guaranteed win 100% of the time. Sure, some items are more reliable than others, but due to the randomness of deck order, blocks, etc, but sometimes luck can be on your side, and you draw all of your good cards, while your opponent draws only mediocre cards. Because of this inherent randomness, balance changes only come in major groupings (for the most part), and generally only once every six months to a year. I feel like the main reason this game does not have very frequent updates is because they have a very small team for such a large playerbase. According to the ranked statistics website, there were around 190,000 people who played multiplayer (i.e. not campaign), while their team consists of only 10 people. I'm amazed at how they manage to not only keep the game running, but also improve and expand it. They used to do monthly contests (see Aloyzo's Arsenal and Mauve Manticore) where they would take player's ideas for items and adventures and actually make them into the game. Recently, though, they've been focusing on a kickstarter game, Laboratory Mayhem, but after that's rolling I'm sure they'll return to the contests as normal (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/821972236/laboratory-mayhem-an-alchemical-strategy-card-game). I can't speak for PvP very well, as I don't play it very often, but the higher level missions are challenging enough that victory is not guaranteed, even with several hundred hours of experience under my belt. The most recent expansion (Castle Mitternacht) is very, VERY difficult. But all that much more satisfying to complete. There are some cards (I'm looking at you, Monstrous Hide) that are very powerful, and in some single player missions can be abused to make it an absolute breeze. In the case of Monstrous Hide, it doesn't protect against silver damage, which is very prevalent in the Castle Mitternacht expansion, but is found nowhere else in the entire campaign. You do always have the choice not to use it, if you want a challenge. That being said, don't go around equipping only Whirlwind. Your friends will hate you, and even though it's funny as hell, it's not very effective in most cases. - Popularity I wouldn't necessarily say the game is "unpopular", it's more like a cult hit. Not a ton of people have heard of it (like, say, Minecraft or League of Legends), but those who do try it out really love the game. And the best thing - it's free! You do have to pay for expansions, but in my opinion they are worth it. Co-op multiplayer is a blast, and even though I usually only game with 2 or 3 friends, I have 6 or 7 that play Card Hunter for the co-op. Since the game's release however many years ago it was, they've added 4 new expansions, and made numerous changes to how the game is played balance-wise. I would definitely not say the game has remain largely unchanged. Due to the small size of the team, it just takes a while between updates. But there's enough content there to keep you entertained for months, if not years. Hope that covered everything. Cheers!
Welcome to Cardhuntria, @AdventureQuest! New Player FAQ doesn't have answers to those specific questions, but includes other topics you might wonder. Wiki's Version history gives you a pretty good picture about how often the game has had patches in the past year or so. New card / items and balance changes happen quite rarely, but the ranked maps rotation change every month and that changes the popularity of builds.
Ratings don't decay, but there is a slow upward creep in overall Elo. When the game began, ratings above 1600 were rare. 1900 Elo has been reached only recently. The leaderboard doesn't reset, but the names of those who haven't played a ranked game in a given number of weeks (don't recall how many) won't display on the board. While it isn't a reset, it does keep the leaderboard current.
Hit escape to bring up the menu and go into your options menu. You'll see a bunch of buttons, but you'll know you're on the right page if you see the changing password boxes on the left side of the menu. From there, look for the "Auto Target:" button. Click it to change between off and on. Off means that you will be able to select abnormal targets (such as an ally with an attack card) just by regular clicking on a card in your hand. If the button is on, regular clicking a card in your hand won't highlight abnormal targets, preventing you from accidentally hacking your wizard. However, on the rare occasion where you might want to hack your wizard or heal an enemy, you will have to ctrl+click the card.
Howdy, AQ, and welcome to Cardhuntria! The guild system is technically unofficial, but it was created by a staff member, and the developers give out rewards based on it. That said, your in-game PvP rating only goes up and down on your wins and losses -- not arbitrary time passing -- but the guild ratings all reset every month when the maps change. Also, since it got brought up, whereas this game used to have a bigger staff, like when it needed the big push of effort to get off the ground (with art, music, etc.), I could be wrong, but: I'm pretty sure there have really only been two people working on it (Jon and Flaxative) for the past couple years, community volunteers (like moderators for example) not included; also, Jon doesn't work on Laboratory Mayhem, just Flaxative (and a bunch of other non-Blue Manchu people). An exception to only-two-working was when Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade contacted Blue Manchu about in-game content, and they wound up creating a new expansion, Acquisitions Inc., which meant new art from Ben Lee the artist (who originally created LOTS of assets, including stuff we still haven't even seen yet), new voice work, a different writer (Mr. Holkins), etc. You can play PvE nearly any way you want and still win. For one example, my signature links to an ongoing series where I play a "party" of only one character, the squishiest race/class combination, through the whole campaign. I've paused for a bit for the new adventures that just came out, followed by some other in-game challenges, but I intend to return. Another couple personal examples: Someone described the new Castle Mitternacht expansion as being so hard and so railroading into using only priests, that one couldn't even imagine how a player could take a wizard in there -- whereas I completed it with my old stock adventuring party of warrior/wizard/priest (and showed my decks, which seemed pretty different from what other people were posting, aside from some standard armors we generally agreed on, lol). Just the other day, I ran co-op with someone who has a very different playstyle from myself, and we played in some of the hardest adventures (because of extra rewards, "Loot Fairy blessings,") where I brought my usual deck that stomps the GM no problem, but my teammate's deck and style wasn't handling this well. (For everyone else's sake: my hpri entered Acquire Within with a player who brought his usual FS+Volc dwiz and upon our losing the first battle started telling me what to bring instead, ho boy.) To keep things smooth, I changed about half my items and adjusted nearly my character's entire purpose for the whole adventure. If my point got lost in all that, I'm saying that I brought a race/class combo with a specific goal in mind (with a year of practice at it), and someone else was used to handling the adventure in an entirely different way which I expect has also worked for him; then, I hodge-podge changed my deck's chief utilities (and likely would've brought a different race in the first place if I'd known that'd be the result), and we still won in the end. ~ EDIT: The point is that even for such a hard adventure, we saw in just that one run, 2.5 very different yet working methods. PvP has some meta issues, but that's going to be pretty much any game. (How many moves in chess don't have a name? ha ha ha ha) Werewolves are super strong with big attacks, 2-8 reliable armor at times, and lots of movement, thus you see a lot of them -- but then sometimes you'll find that squishy elf wizard giving that wolf 8-17 damage per blow. Vengeance is the new nightmare card against wizards, but competitive wizards have always stacked Telekinesis. Likewise, Magic Cold has grown more popular over time due to 1. the Citadel expansion giving us Cooling Laser mid-2015, 2. werewolves and Vengeance creating more reason to use Encumber, and 3. Mauve Manticore #23 guaranteeing us @Fry_The_Guy's Instant Snowman from Aloyzo's Arsenal. There will always be certain popular cards and items as long as they stay relevant, and certain unpopulars as long as they stay awful or easily outclassed, but each expansion brings interesting changes to the table, and people do find different ways to spin their own twists on old ideas -- like, how many ways can a person build a Burning wizard? $:^ P One nice thing about CH's PvP meta is that the devs intend that rarity does not equal power. There are some great must-have legendaries that not everyone has (Asmod's Telekinetic Chain, Vibrant Pain), but there are some equally must-have commons: Bejeweled Shortsword is a Weapon in the Basic Set, and although it lost an overpowered Elf Skill combo last summer in a rebalance, every race of warrior still can consistently devastate with it; Lucky Toughness is a Dwarf Skill from the latest expansion, yet its defensive card advantage is incredible and undebated. Generally speaking, the ranked environment makes it easier to play dwarves and harder to play elves, but you do find all races throughout the Elo ladder -- with elf wizards and dwarf priests being the most rarely seen (because the former have the hardest time holding position (e.g. to camp a Victory Square), and the latter have the hardest time changing position (e.g. to assist allies or to melee a enemies), and positioning is key in this game). This month, builds are skewed toward even more powerful movement (Fly, Teleport, Wild Run, etc.) due to the weird maps housing so much Difficult and Blocking Terrain on two maps and so very much Impassable terrain on the other two maps. Why am I still typing?!?! All right, hopefully this gave you some helpful insight one way or another. $F^ J Btw, I used to love to play AQ and then AQWorlds. $¦^ b Regards,
