Hey folks. We plan on patching to 0.18.4.x on Monday, July 27 PT (pending Apple approval).

One of the more major changes that is coming in this patch is a tweak to how certain combat keywords function:

WARNING - The following is a bit technical. If you're not that worried about the technicalities of the rules, then relying on the combat preview to predict what will happen in combat is a perfectly reasonable alternative.

Focused X - "Increases damage dealt by X while fighting a minion or attacking a player through the opposite lane." This keyword will now apply even if the minion's strength is less than or equal to zero. Note that it doesn't actually increase the minions strength for the purposes of abilities like Revolutionary Totem (minions with strength 4 or greater can't attack). If an attacking minion with Focused also has Overrun, the focus damage will continue to add to the damage dealt to the defending player from overrun. An example of this in action is a 0/1 minion with Focused 10 and Overrun attacking into a 0/1 defender. The defender will take 1 damage and die, and the defending player will take 9 damage from overrun.

Slayer X - "Deal X extra damage to minions in combat." This keyword now only applies to damage dealt to a minion and won't add to Overrun (though it can increase the amount of overrun damage done, as per the example below). Unchanged from the previous version, Slayer doesn't apply if the minion has zero or less strength. An example of the new functionality of Slayer in action is a 3/1 minion with Slayer 10 and Overrun attacking into a 0/1 defender. The defender will take 1 damage (from the Slayer) and die, and the defending player will take 3 damage (from the minion's strength) from overrun. Note that prior to 0.18.4, the defending player would have taken 12 damage from overrun. With the new patch, the extra 9 "slayer" damage doesn't carry over to the damage the attacker deals with overrun. However, also note that because the slayer damage is used "before" the minion's strength, the total overrun damage is increased -- just not as much as it would have been prior to this patch.

Fragile X - "Increases any damage a minion takes by X." Much like Slayer, this keyword no longer contributes directly to Overrun damage. For example, if a 3/1 attacker with Overrun attacks a 0/1 defender with Fragile 10, the defending player will now take 2 damage from overrun. In this case, 1 "point" of damage from the attacker's strength applies to the defender, who takes an additional 2 "points" of damage (enough to kill it) due to Fragile. The remaining 2 "points" of the attacker's strength then carry through to overrun. Note that prior to this patch, the defending player would have taken 12 points of damage from overrun.

editor's note - upon writing this, I realized that there's probably a bug with Fragile in 0.18.4 in that the aforementioned 1 "point" of damage from the attacker's strength is probably not happening, which means in the example above, 3 points of overrun may actually occur.

PS - these changes are occurring in order to enable us to play with larger values of Slayer / Fragile without breaking game balance.