EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

September 29, 2026

When one bug is fixed, more will take its place. When I fixed Lotus Petal, I added extra measures to make sure cooldowns were more strictly enforced. Because some robots like Gamma Bot and Mini Rex have variations that reuse data from other bots, an unforseen consequence of this fix was that cooldowns would fail to trigger for those bots. For example, when you click a skill for Infernal Android PxE, the game thinks a skill for Infernal Android P should be in cooldown. Since that button isn't in your inferface due to you not currently using that bot, the cooldown cannot trigger.

I've combed through the hundreds of robot skill entries and I believe I've fixed all the problematic bots. I'm sorry this happened, but this is simply and inevitability with such a broad change to an integral system like cooldowns, and there is simply no way to test all 200+ robots in the game at a pace quick enough to surface these bugs before an update.

Additional Fixes

• Tactical Reload / Tactical Reload (Auxiliary): Expected behavior restored. This was broken for the same reason the bots were broken. These skills are exceptions to normal cooldown rules so they had to be accounted for.
• Brace: Cooldown removed. This cooldown appeared as part of the broad cooldown change. Again, this was because Brace was always an exception to rules and standardization "broke" it's normal behavior.
• Retrain/Level Up UI: The + and - buttons have been realigned with the corresponding stats. When I rearranged the UI, I didn't account for the necessary scale change to the buttons. Generally, the game's UI just needs more breathing room, but that's a broader change for another time.

Added to Kraggor

When testing the robots, I noticed that the Pyro Fly and variants were not sold anywhere due to being seasonal. Since robots have direct impact on balance, they should not be so restricted. Therefore, I added non-rare versions of the Pyro Fly bots to Kraggor, following the same precedent set with the Yeti bots.

• Pyro Fly
• Plasma Fly
• Infernal Fly
• Magma Fly

Tags: Nightwraith

September 28, 2026

Balance Change

Tremor Blast/Techstalker Tremor/Telekinesis/Saevussax Evisceration/SteamTech Grenade:

• Descriptions updated for displayed duration to match actual duration.
• These skills will reduce the chances of the afflicted player to block incoming attacks to 0%, and the chance that they will be blocked by anyone they attack to 30%.

These skill were granting 100% chance the person debuffed by them would be blocked. This was found to be too powerful, but these skills have worked this way for quite some time. Often we'll change a skill as a bullet point in a balance update, but because the skill isn't in the current meta, it will be ignored until someone finally tries it out and learns it's actually the most OP thing ever. That seems to be the case here, but I didn't want to update without a better solution to a larger problem with similar skills.

We've always faced a challenge with probability-altering skills as the impact is hard to *feel* over the course of a duel unless they're incredibly strong. Probability being what it is, even a large boost might not yield the expected results due to repeated bad rolls. Also, multiplicative passives tend to be much less impactful for evenly-matched players. If your block chance is 2%, then a 50% multiplicative boost is only +1. Additive boosts can be more impactful across all matchups, but risk being overpowered.

To finally address this, after 17+ years, I've added Block/Deflection/Stun chances to the stats page.

Probability Display

I've added the ability to finally see probabilities in the stats page. Block/Deflection/Crit/Stun will display the offensive values (i.e. chance that your target will block you).

Stats page now display's the player's Block chance for each opponent.

Stats page now display's the player's Deflection chance for each opponent.

Stats page now display's the player's Critical chance for each opponent.

Stats page now display's the player's base Stun chance for each opponent.

To view your own chance to block an attack, deflect, etc... view the stats page of your opponent(s).

I'm not 100% happy with the current implementation, but I wanted to get this feature in to enable transparency as quickly as possible. The current presentation will likely change once I settle on a more intuitive solution.

Other Changes

Tired of tracking cooldowns of everyone in battle in your own head? Well, you can put that scrap paper away and relax a little bit because cooldowns and warmups are now visible on the stats page of all human characters in battle.

Finally, Azrael's Borg Heart Attack and other skills that diminish buffs now affects Lotus Petal.

Tags: Nightwraith

September 25, 2026

This week the seas were rougher than usual on Delta V as we battled and finally defeated the pesky Lotus Petal bug! It turns out, this bug didn't have much to do with the skill at all! In fact, the cooldown error was due to viewing an NPC's, or another player's stats page. That caused the game to mistakenly target one the NPC's skill buttons for cooldown instead of yours so the skill put into cooldown by Lotus Petal would never go into cooldown. The self-correction would also fail because the game was trying to correct a button you didn't have. With this bug fixed, we'll leave traces in for another week to make sure the bug is 100% fixed (sometimes fixing a bug creates another one...or 2...or 20).

Even with all that, we were still able to release some fresh content for ye land lubbers!

Thalyssa's Bounty

Visit Thalyssa in the West Naval Yard for the latest Talk Like a Pirate Day gear!

• SteamTech Tank
• SteamTech Tank CC
• SteamTech Airship
• SteamTech Airship CC
• SteamTech Sword P
• SteamTech Sword E
• SteamTech Blaster P
• SteamTech Blaster E
• SteamTech Grenade P x25: Grenade that confuses target, lowering Crit, Block, and Deflection chance for 4 turns.
• SteamTech Grenade E x25: Grenade that confuses target, lowering Crit, Block, and Deflection chance for 4 turns.

Next week will be the grand finale of our Talk Like a Pirate gear, and we saved the best for last!

Added to The Challenger

Missed the Battlepass? You're in luck, because The Challenger has added Anubis to his collection. You have another chance to get one of the best anti-NPC bots available! 

• Anubis Incarnation P
• Anubis Incarnation E

Bug Fixes/Changes

• Skills set into cooldown by Lotus Petal would sometimes not enter cooldown state.
• PMs no longer hidden behind the NPC boss leaderboard
• NPC skill buttons still showing in your Inventory after you die
• NPC skill tooltips no longer use your stats and buffs to reflect skill values.
• Not a bug, but we added a message whenever you equip a core to an item notifying you that equipping a core removes its sellback value. This should clear up confusion when people try to sell back a core after equipping it and notice it has no sellback value.

Tags: Nightwraith

September 21, 2026

Lotus Petal Debugging

This is a persistent one, isn't it? The interesting thing about this particular bug is that it may have been present for awhile in other skills that force a random skill into cooldown, but because they're not often used, the bug rarely has a change to occur.

We've added more tracking to get to the bottom of the rare but persistent Lotus Petal bug. Now, if you get the dreaded Cooldown Validation bug after using Lotus Petal, you should see a debug trace in your battle log. That should provide important information that can help us determine exactly what is going wrong in the code and where to look for it. There's also a change some of my changes have fixed the bug fully, but we'll keep the debug messages in for now until we're 100% confident in bug resolution.

Please use the Artix Bug Tracker to report issues so we can fully document and fix them. Social media and Discord or the "pass along to NW" method are decentralized and inefficient as critical information is often lost along the way.

Personal High Score Boards

We've completed the process of adding Personal High Scores to the Fame, Code Redeems, Rating, and Rank leaderboards. We've also added a bit more room to the rank fields that were being cutoff.

Report

One weakness of our in-game reporting system is that you must be in the same room as the person you're reporting. This means it's very difficult to report someone in a crowded room or if you miss your chance in battle. You can now report players using slash commands. Type "/report character name" to open the popup to file a report.

Tags: Nightwraith

September 18, 2026

Personal Best

The biggest change of this update is that most leaderboards will now display your own personal best score depending on category. Your name will show on the leaderboard highlighted in gold, even if you're not in the top 20. Places below 20 will show your actual rank relative to all other players. This change covers all Boss Breaker Boards, War Boards, and most of the all-time and daily boards. The rest will be completed next week.

One quirk to be aware of is because the all-time boards are on a delay and your personal high score is displayed live, the information may be desynchronized until the all-time boards update.

Ishmael Resupplied

The following items have been added to Ishmael! Since the Gamma Pirate gear is no longer available as a promo, the cores and robots have been added for purchase! We wouldn't want people to miss out on the awesome mimic special of the Gamma Pirate Parrot!

• Gamma Pirate Parrot Morph
• Gamma Pirate Parrot Morph CC
• Gamma Pirate Parrot 2026 P
• Gamma Pirate Parrot 2026 E
• Gamma Guts
• Gamma Brand
• Gamma Rage (Sidearm)
• Gamma Rage (Auxiliary)
• Gamma Rage (Primary)

Balance Changes

• Static Charge: Now usable even when you have full Energy
• Overload: Cooldown 2 → 1
• Frenzy: 0 Energy across augments
• Charon's Obol: When spared and you survive with 1 HP and reflect any excess damage from the attack that triggered the spare buff back to opponent. For example, if you have 100 HP, and your attacker hits you for 800 damage, you will be spared, but your attacker will take a reflected 700 damage! This damage is not fatal to the attacker (leaves them with 1 HP, consistent with other damage-reflecting abilities), but can really turn the tide of battle. 
• Shade Snare: Strike for 100% dmg; draining 25% energy for all attacks for 2 turns.(Every attack drains energy and not just melee attacks with the above change). Reduced snare energy cost from 80 → 50
• Infernal Binding: Reduced Energy cost from 100 → 60
• Bug Fixes:
  • Gamma Parrot's special copies Permafrost debuff
  • Permafrost and Tentacle Prison now labelled as Debuffs.
  • Charon's Obol no longer blocks Energy Parasite as Energy Parasite is not classified as a debuff.
  • We're still investigating a cooldown validation bug linked to Lotus Petal. While we gather more info, cooldown desynchs are now able to be corrected after 1 failed attempt.

Tags: Nightwraith

September 15, 2026

The Dead Speak

Over the weekend there were several reports of players with 0 HP who were still able to attack. "Zombie players" is not new to EpicDuel. Similar bugs have been popping up since the early days, but they've been extremely rare to nonexistent for awhile. It may be that alterations to the dead/alive checks made to accomodate skills that produce a killing poison or cheat death opened up some potential failure points. This patch adds additional safeguards to make sure that dead players stay dead.

If you notice something like this happen to yourself or someone else in battle, please report the bug, including as many specifics as you can recall (i.e. skills used, stuns, turn order, etc...). Even if you're not cheating by using 3rd party tools, abusing an exploit to gain an unfair advantage can still earn you a ban, especially if you do so repeatedly.

Critical Damage Adjustment

This bug was first uncovered through reports that Boss NPC Guard cores were not being factored in when the boss scored a crit against you. Further investigation led to discover a larger problem with critical damage calculations.

The Bug: When you land a critical hit, part of the damage math was being recalculated "from scratch" instead of building on top of the hit that was already happening. This meant that certain damage-reducing effects like the defensive Nightmare Boss Guard cores were getting wiped out the moment a crit landed. Those defensive bonuses worked fine on regular hits, but were ignored whenever the NPC enemy crit you. This was probably affecting other defense-boosting cores/skills but due to the relatively rare occurrence and complexity of calculation, no bug was ever reported. This bug was introduced when we made changes to the critical damage calculations months ago.

The Fix: Since the bug was introduced by the critical damage calculation changes, specifically separating the damage percent modifiers from critical damage, the best way to fix this was to revert most of the changes to the formula. Crits now correctly build on top of your normal (non-crit) damage calculation, adding only the extra damage a crit is supposed to add (from partially ignoring Defense/Resistance), instead of throwing away everything else that was already factored in. Any Defense bonuses, damage reductions, or skill-specific damage adjustments that applied to the hit will now still be there even if it crits.

Formulas

Old:

crit rebuilt from Gross Damage, dropping any adjustment made to damage along the way:
Damage Post Crit = Gross Damage − Crit Adjusted Defense
Crit Bonus = Damage Post Crit − Damage
Final = (Crit Bonus < Crit Min Increase) ? Damage + Crit Min Increase : Damage Post Crit

New:

crit builds on the fully-resolved damage, adding only the extra defense the crit ignores:
Defense Ignored = Defense − Crit Adjusted Defense
Damage Post Crit = Damage + Defense Ignored
Final = (Defense Ignored < Crit Min Increase) ? Damage + Crit Min Increase : Damage Post Crit

Examples:

Gross Damage = 1000, Defense = 500, Crit Ignores 30% Defense (default, under the 50% cap) → Crit Adjusted Defense = (0.70 × 500) = 350,
Defense Ignored = 150. Crit Min Increase = 56 (level 40).

Scenario A: Damage Percent = 100

damage = 1000 − 500 = 500

Old Formula:

Damage Post Crit: 1000 − 350 = 650
Final Crit Damage: 650

New Formula:

Damage Post Crit: 500 + 150 = 650
Final Crit Damage: 650 

Result: Identical. With 100% Damage, both formulas have the same result.

Scenario B: Damage Percent = 130

Damage = (1.30 × 1000) − 500 = 800

Old Formula:

Damage Post Crit: 1000 − 350 = 650
vs. damage(800): 650 − 800 = −150 → below floor
Final Crit Damage: floor kicks in: 800 + 56 = 856

New Formula:

Damage Post Crit: 800 + 150 = 950
vs. damage(800): 950 ≥ floor
Final Crit Damage: 950

Under the new formula, the skill's 130% bonus now fully and consistently carries into its crit damage (950 vs. the old 856). A skill's own Damage Percent is active across normal and crit hits, and scaling risk is controlled separately via the CRIT_TOTAL_IGNORE_MAX cap rather than by selectively dropping modifiers on crit which create needless complexity. This change does making critical hits more powerful for skills with increased Damage Percent, which is why we changed the formula in the first place, but excluding those values had unintended consequences that needed to be resolved.

Tags: Nightwraith