Patch 0.28.0: Where You Actually Stand

Position decides who takes the hits, so the Assemble Your Team briefing now shows you how to move a Fighter once it is in your lineup: drag it left or right, or select a filled slot and nudge it with the arrow keys. Learning to set your front line before you commit is part of learning the game. The lock-in prompt is clearer too: nothing is final until you press BATTLE.

Every word the replay layer paints over a battle, the damage and heal numbers, the ability call-outs, the status tags, was hardcoded English, so a German player watched every replay in English. All of it is translated now. Three replay surfaces that were showing no labels at all, including the ability and ruleset demo arenas in the docs, show them too.

A ranged Fighter that started in the back and slid up to the front line as its allies fell could get stuck. Under Point-Blank Protocol it would only heal and never swing again, because the rule was checking the slot it was drafted into instead of the slot it was actually standing in. A player hit this in a real match: a lone survivor left holding the front line and unable to fight back.
The engine now reads where a Fighter really stands, everywhere it matters. Point-Blank Protocol checks the true front line, Battlefield Promotion can trigger more than once as your front rank keeps falling, and splash attacks hit the Fighters that are actually beside their target.

When a Fighter returned through Phoenix Return, it kept whatever was wrong with it when it died. A Fighter stunned just before it fell would revive still stunned and skip its turn, even though the replay showed it standing there fresh. Revives now clear the lingering combat state, the stun, the poison, and the rest, so a returning Fighter acts the way it looks.

Turn order used to be decided once at the start of a round and never revisited. So if an enemy that was slowing your Fighter died partway through the round and your Fighter's speed snapped back, it still acted late, stuck in the slow slot the debuff had put it in. The order is now re-checked after every action, so a Fighter whose speed is restored mid-round takes its turn where its real speed says it should.

A pass over the guided tutorial. The coach panel no longer covers the card grid while you are choosing your team. The Flying lesson now points at the Fighter that actually has Flying and explains it correctly, as evasion against ground and ranged attackers. Abilities are shown by their proper names instead of internal labels. And the finale button that collects your pilot honors now scrolls into view instead of hiding below the result.

On a combat board, hovering a Fighter to read its full details could show numbers that disagreed with the tile you were hovering over. The hover panel now reads the same live values the board does, so the two always agree at a glance.

A signed-in player following an ordinary link back to the waitlist page could land on a server error instead of the page. A leftover check was rejecting a perfectly normal request. It is gone, and the link loads the way it should.

Time Dilation already reversed initiative, so the slowest Fighter acts first. Now it also flips the hit chance that speed feeds into: under this ruleset the slower Fighter is the harder one to hit, not the easier one. Speed reads backwards across the whole board, the way the ruleset's name promises, so a slow, heavy team is genuinely favoured when Time Dilation is in play.

When a Fighter's attack got reflected back at it, its own shield used to sit there and do nothing. An Aegis Bubble now blocks a reflected hit the same way it blocks a direct one, and a reflect that still gets through is softened by the attacker's armor class. Bringing a shielded attacker into a reflect matchup finally means something.
Alongside that, two rulesets that quietly cancelled each other out can no longer appear in the same match. When both were active, every melee Fighter on both teams burned its shield on the first reflected scratch, and the match's shield rule did nothing at all.