Update v15.1 - Improved New Player Experience and Balance Adjustments

The goal of this update is to improve the new player onboarding experience with more starter tasks, better rewards, rebalanced costs and mechanics, and several UI adjustments to reduce clutter during the early-game.

New Content:

• Extended the new player "Starter Tasks" and increased their rewards. This should guide new players through a few more mechanics than the tutorial previously covered, as well as give them a stronger start with more resources and upgrades.

Changes:

• Added a max stack limit to several mastery skill bonuses.

• Kill enemy tasks/missions/challenges/etc. now include ALL enemies, including bosses and ultra bosses (it previously only counted normal mob kills).

• Automation is now unlocked at wave 1k, rather than 2k. Only a few functions are available at wave 1k, and their energy costs to unlock and upgrade have been reduced to be more affordable at these lower wave requirements.

• The auto-level heroes function cooldown has decreased by about 50%, so it activates much more often. It also has a new upgrade to increase the amount of gold spent when activating this function (it previously always spent all of your gold, but now it only spends 50% until you upgrade it). This is a minor change that is meant to balance the new reduced cooldown.

• Added "Max Game Speed" into the video ad pool (active play bonus) for new players. It is removed from the reward pool when you already have max game speed from upgrades/premiums.

• Buffed several early-game Combat Styles and made the downsides much less punishing.

• Increased the max level of the rare range Rune from 10 to 15.

• Improved several early-game Rank Exp and Energy Income upgrades to ease this bottleneck:

  • Buffed a few early-game rank exp and energy income Synergies, Milestones, and Challenge rewards.

  • Reduced the cost of rank exp in the Research and Prestige menus (only for the first few early-game levels, late-game players will be unaffected).

  • Increased the max level of energy income in the Prestige menu.

  • Increased the max level of rank exp and energy income in the Runes menu.

  • Reduced the wave requirements for progressive exp in the Gems menu.

  • Increased energy income from +1 to +2 per level in the Gems menu.

• Adjusted the "Land Mines" spell formula to use the correct average damage of all heroes. It now displays the actual damage amount in the spell description.

• Increased the bonus gems given from purchasing the Premium Bundles in the Store.

• Your offline time will not be capped when counting towards your Automation Upgrade times, even without the Infinite Offline premium.

QoL Improvements:

• When the auto wave perk function triggers, it will display which perk was chosen in the notification.

• Added x1000 and x10000 buttons to the Tech Tree upgrade menu.

• Added a x10000 button to the Ultimus upgrade menu.

• Upgrades that are far out of reach (locked behind a very distant wave or rank requirement) are now hidden to reduce menu clutter and scrolling. They will be revealed over time as you get closer to the required wave/rank. There is an "advanced setting" to change this and always display all upgrades, regardless of the requirements. This is mainly meant to reduce scrolling and the overwhelming feeling new players might get when seeing huge lists of things that they can't even access for many months.

• Rearranged the new Runes pop-up to display the rarer runes at the top.

• Improved the Boss Rush info pop-up when clicking it before it is unlocked at wave 800.

• Added an info pop-up to explain multiplicative upgrades to new players.

Bug Fixes:

• Improved the anti-cheat detection and auto-ban logic.