Ahoy, adventurers! Announcing a medium-sized update to Puzzle Quest 3, Update 0.38.

Update 0.38 introduces reworks to Events and Challenges, changing the way Spells work in battle and adding new types of packs to the Shop. We hope these changes improve the existing features by reducing the length of Events and giving Dungeons and Skirmishes more enticing rewards.

Read on for a full list of changes or skip to the bottom for quality of life improvements and bug fixes.

Changes in Update 0.38

There are a number of changes in this update, and we have outlined the major ones below. Where possible we have included the reasoning and intention behind these changes.

Events were taking too long and didn’t feel distinctly different from other game modes. We’ve reviewed the rewards and score structure for events. Battles should now feel shorter and progress will carry over between battles.

• Access Events from the new World Menu
• Battles now have 2 Enemies; Mini-Boss and Bosses
  • Look out – these Enemies will be more difficult as they are Bosses and Mini-bosses rather than 2 new Enemies!
• Progress (Life) carries between battles. Access potions in the Rest menu between battles to heal your Hero
• We’ve changed the way your Tier is calculated in Events
  • Your Tier in Daily Siege and Event Dungeons is now based upon your highest Hero’s level and will lock in when you gain any score in the Event
  • Your Tier will increase every 5 Hero levels after Level 5, up to Tier X at Level 50
• Event Difficulty doesn’t correspond with other Difficulty in the game
• • It is based on 80% of your Hero’s Level

Rewards and scoring

• Rewards are now earned based on the Tier that you are part of. Increase your score to unlock more Chests
• Individual monsters now give both Gold and Marks. Further Loot rewards have been moved to the Shop and are purchasable with the Marks earned
• Medals have been removed from Events to offset the new rewards structure
• In preparation for future changes, Horns are now awarded for winning Event battles rather than from the competitive Score rewards.

Changes to Marks and Dungeons. To give Events more unique rewards and a greater purpose to playing we’ve taken Marks from Dungeons and added them to the broader game currency system. 

• Dungeon Marks are now called “Marks” and have been removed from Dungeons
• Marks are now used across the game as another resource that can be earned as a Reward from Events or spent in the Shop
• The ability to Empower Dungeons for extra rewards has therefore also been removed
• Your existing Marks will carry over and can be used to purchase items from the Event Shop.

Changes to Challenges, Dungeons, and Skirmishes. To continue our quest to help differentiate game modes we’ve improved the rewards for Dungeons and Skirmishes and split their rewards. This distinguishes Dungeons from Skirmishes so that there is a clearer purpose to return to both. We have updated Challenges as well.

• Custom Skirmishes and Dungeons have been moved from the Daily Challenges menu to the Battles tab and updated to suit the new UI
• Skirmish Chests give extra Shards and more Ore
  • Food Drop-rates have been decreased to balance this out
  • We found lots of Food was being given and not much Ore and it was difficult to upgrade items across the economy
• Dungeon Chests no longer give Shards
  • To balance this, they now have a higher chance to give Relics – Especially Higher rarities
  • More Armor and Accessories will be available
• Challenges are now picked based on your Hero with the highest level, with better rewards at higher levels
• Changed Difficulties for Skirmish and Dungeons to include Easy, Medium, and Hard options.
  • Easy Mode has changed to 60% Hero’s level, and Hard is 100% of your Hero’s Level
  • Medium/Normal Difficulty remains at 80% of the Hero’s Level
  • Win a battle within a Skirmish or Dungeon to unlock its difficulty level to play again in the future
• Loot Dungeons and Skirmishes based on the Highest Difficulty completed in your account.

New Flash Offers have been added to give items that are more meaningful. There have been a number of small changes to the existing packs to give them more value. After taking Marks from Dungeons, we’ve returned them to the overall game system to give them more uses; for example, to purchase packs without real money for items.

• Special “Flash Offer” packs can appear as a pop-up based on the situation they are needed for; for example, upgrading Weapons from Rare to Epic
• Improvements to the interface; including interstitial pop-ups for new packs and displaying Chapter Packs in the main menu
• All Chapter packs excluding Chapter 14 and 15 now give 5 (rather than 4) resources of their type
• Various packs now offer better-randomized rewards, giving multiple types of items across Accessories, Spells, and Armor
• Multiple amounts of the same item can be purchased within packs in the Shop (e.g. purchasing 3x Superior Shards Bundle at once.)
• Marks can be spent in the Shop to purchase new packs including new items, such as Shards, Keys, Spells, Relics, or Gear (Armor, Weapons, and Accessories) Shards, Glyphs or Accessories 
  • These items will change depending on the day and time.

We’ve removed the ability for Mana to be shared between Spells of the same Mastery, and to balance this, introduced Spell Set Bonuses. Spell Set bonuses are much like the Gear Set bonuses that were introduced in the last update, Update 0.37. 

• Spells of the same color now share Gem Mana collected during your turn (rather than earning Mana towards each Spell at once)
  • Now the game will prioritize Gem collection in order of Spells Left to Right
  • For example, rather than 10 Yellow Gems going to each Yellow Spell, Gems are now split Left to right with Gems of 3, 3, 2, and 2 Gems across the 4 Light Spells equipped
• Set Bonuses are gained with each additional Spell of the same Mastery Color that is equipped; earning an increase in Mana gained and Mana damage from those spells.
  
  • 2 Spells of the same Mastery Color:- 
    • +25% <Color> Mastery in battle. 
    • First spell of that color gains +75% Mana, and +100% Mana Damage.
    • Second spell of that color gains +25% Mana.
  • 3 Spells of the same Mastery Color: 
    • +50% <Color> Mastery in battle.
    • First spell of that color gains +150% Mana and +200% Mana Damage
    • Second spell of that color gains +100% Mana, and +100% Mana Damage
    • Third spell of that color gains +50% Mana
  • 4 Spells of the same Mastery Color
    • +100% <Color> Mastery in battle.
    • First spell of that color gains +225% Mana and +400% Mana Damage
    • Second spell of that color gains +175% Mana and +300% Mana Damage
    • Third spell of that color gains +125% Mana and +200% Mana Damage
    • Fourth spell of that color gains +75% Mana
  • Unlike Gear Set bonuses, Spell Set bonuses won’t stack with each Mastery Element of that Spell collected 
    • For example, either between Ice I or Ice II set bonuses only one will be active at once
• Spells provide a bonus to Mastery, increasing as they level.

Why is mana no longer shared between Spells in battle?

We noticed that some Classes were being favored when using them with the same Spell Mastery color builds, making them too powerful! To help more Classes feel useful and encourage diversity of gameplay we’ve removed the ability for Mana to be shared with Spells of the same color. To balance this change we’ve introduced Spell Set Bonuses. 

With the change to the way mana is shared across spells, the new bonuses on single-color Spell builds for battles, as well as the addition of Mastery bonuses to spells, this has had a net positive effect on your Hero’s ability to give Damage (mainly from Spell damage and Mana damage). In fact, it was quite strong. Correspondingly, we’ve increased enemy damage to keep things in balance. We’ve also made a few other balance changes across the puzzle gameplay:

• Big Gems can only go past Level V (5) using Spells, Items, or abilities
  • Gems Level V (5) or above will now give a Gold bonus at the end of the battle (1% Gold Bonus Per Gem)
• Hero Damage has been increased, and also Enemy damage to balance this out
  • Players level 25+ will notice a stronger Damage increase
  • We made this change to make it easier to do damage after removing the ability for Mana to be shared between Spells
• Enemy Bosses and Mini-Bosses now receive the Stun Barrier status for a turn after recovering from Stun. Much like Barrier, this will block the next Stun and then disappear. A “Stun Resisted” effect will appear when the Stun is resisted
• Ultimate Spells are longer affected by the Freeze or Haste status effects.

As always, we value your feedback and keep an eye out for things we can change. Here are some, just to name a few:

• Gear Storage capacity has been increased from 25 slots to 50!
• Purchasing packs with real money would not exceed the capacity within the Battle Pass
• Gear Set bonuses now show the possible Rarity upgrades
• Select or Tap the screen during the Chest Opening sequence to speed up the animation
• Various menus updated to suit the new in-game interface style
• Multiple chests can be salvaged, opened, and Missions with Minions completed from the same menu after battles
• Added new loading screen tips
• Notifications (e.g. “Turn Ended”) now decrease in size if there is less text, reducing the likelihood of them appearing over the board
• Spell Slot numbers are indicated in the menus
• Improved the Battle Summary to differentiate between Block and Critical Hit chances 
• Unity Upgrade – This update introduces an engine upgrade to a newer version. This allows us to work on new and exciting upcoming features, and should fix some smaller issues, but may introduce some other bugs or issues
• Game Progress can be reset within Account > Settings. This will permanently erase your progress – Be very careful!

New information and content

A new style of News pop-up will appear for new content in the game, helping surface future content like Seasons, Updates, News or Events. Seasons – sorry, what was that?

Leaderboard improvements

• PVP Leaderboard Ranking – 
  • If you tie with other players in Points you will now display as the same Rank as other players with the same Point score
  • For subsequent ranks that are not tied, ranking continues as normal (e.g. Two ties for Rank 1, with a non-tie for the third player will result in Rank 3)
  • The correct rewards were still previously earned
• Select players within the Tourney or Event leaderboards to see more options and see your position on the leaderboard at the bottom of the menu.

Citadel Bonuses can be reset

• The Citadel Bonuses can be reset after gaining them at Level 50+
• The first reset is free, subsequent resets cost 300 Gems and may be free after a certain time
• We would like to continue working on the quality of life of Citadel Bonuses in future updates.

• Big Gems have effects when they are matched and idle on the game board
• Improvements to the texture of a number of Heroes.

We have fixed a number of issues where:

• Web-pages (such as in-game helped) were not showing on Android devices
• An incorrect mana bonus was being displayed when upgrading Esgaard Pauldrons. Was displaying 750% instead of 75%
• A displayed issue caused the Poison Spray Spell to not carry over
• The Paladin Shield had conflicting descriptions. It now shows in battle and in the Spell vault screen to list as “…destroy all Gems in a column and grant Barrier.” 
• Gear and Minions disappear from the Inventory after entering Restricted and Elite Tourneys
• Gear unequipped in Restricted Tourneys disappears from the Gear Vault until the game was relaunched
• Some Minions were displaying 6 decimal places in their stats, instead of one. For example ‘Mission Time: -8.400001%’ was being displayed instead of ‘Mission Time: -8.4.’
• The Royal III set of Gear was not displaying an increase in Heros power until the first turn was made
• When repeatedly tapping on the screen, predominantly during Dungeons, between matching and next enemy animations was causing an “RE” Error message 
• The Dungeon Reward tutorial was appearing multiple times between Chapter 1 and Chapter 9
• Eveline did not display the Crafted “Item Ready” icon when she had finished trading a Relic
• A graphical issue caused some numbers for Hero stats (Armor, Resistance, Block) to not be displayed correctly. 
• You can become locked inside the Kingdom Tab when accessing it via the Dungeons > Chat > Go to Kingdom. A graphical issue causing the UI at the bottom of the screen to disappear
• Grim Scythe was dealing Fire damage instead of Dark damage
• Minion ‘Equip’ text was overlapping ‘Complete Rest’ on the Minion resting screen. 

• When opening the Marks bundles in the Shop the incorrect amount of Marks will show (for example, 94, 300/3 rather than 10/3) every time the Shop is reopened
  • We are preparing a new technical update hotfix for this issue and a fix has been found
• Some graphics in the Shop appear at lower image quality. Legendary Items will not show the correct rewards
• Selecting Materials from Followers when done crafting may not link to other parts of the game
• In Events; the overview menu shows both the “Tier” of players you are competing against as well as the “Tier” of rewards
• Some Chests cannot be opened if the exact amount of Gems/Keys is owned
  • Fixed in the next Update, 0.39. Try earning another Gem or Key to fix this issue

Here are some areas of the game we’re considering focusing on in the future:

• Improvements to the Battle Pass
• Continuing to convert the game to the new UI menu style
• Introducing Russian and some Asian languages to the game
• Continuous quality of life improvements
• Changes to make the timing going between battles more succinct.

Puzzle Quest 3 is in active development, so these areas are open to change.

May your swords stay sharp!