Olden Era Patch 12 Changes Explained

July 2026 Updates at a Glance

Patch 12 (v0.80.34) — Every Balance Change

Patch 12 is deliberately small: it exists to stabilize what Patch 11 shipped. Even so, two of its six balance items matter for ranked play — the Sorcery buff is a real power increase for mage builds, and the Arena draft correction changes how the mode's economy feels from the first pick.

The bug-fix side of Patch 12 is short but high value for competitive players: a crash when a player's starting hero was missing at the start of a Jebus Tournament battle is gone, the Heroic Strike hotkey works again, the match timer no longer keeps running for both players while simultaneous turns are stopped, an enemy hero striking under Mirage no longer crashes the game, and an opponent leaving Arena Mode mid-targeting no longer crashes your client either.

Sorcery Spotlight — the Numbers Behind the Buff

Sorcery was a niche pick before July. At +10/20/30% magic damage it lost skill-slot value to almost every alternative, and its hero specialties scaled at a flat 1% per level, which fell behind Might scaling by the mid game. Patch 12 doubles the early value and changes the specialist curve entirely.

• Basic Sorcery now grants +20% magic damage — the old Advanced value, one tier earlier.
• Expert Sorcery grants +40%, a third more than the old cap of +30%.
• A Sorcery specialist at level 6 goes from +16% to +25% magic damage; at level 12, from +22% to +35%; at level 18, from +28% to +45%.
• The trade-off: pure per-level grinding matters less, and milestone levels (every third) are where your power spikes — plan fights around hitting level 9, 12, and 15 before key engagements.

Combined with Patch 11's cheaper Stone Fangs (18 → 11 mana) and Anti-Magic (16 → 12), Primal-flavored damage mages come out of the July updates as the clearest winners in the skill economy. Check the skills overview and spell reference for how the pieces fit into a full build.

Patch 11 Deep Dive — the Necromancy Rework

The headline change of the July cycle is the rebuilt Necromancy. The old system only let you raise a tier of undead if your army already contained that tier, which forced awkward army composition choices. The new system removes that restriction entirely: after any victory, every fallen enemy stack can be raised as the undead of its tier — tier-1 enemies become Skeletons, tier-2 become Wights, and so on up the ladder. If your army does field undead of the matching tier, the raised type follows what you carry: the base version if you field the base creature, the upgraded version (at a higher energy cost) if you only field the upgrade, and the numerically larger stack decides when you field several upgrades. Map tooltips now tell you exactly what a guard stack will raise into before you commit to the fight, and the battle results window lets you cancel the raise and manually recycle corpses into Necromantic Energy instead.

The catch is in the energy math. Maximum energy pools roughly tripled — from 1,000/1,250/1,500 at Basic, Advanced, and Expert to 3,000/4,000/5,000 — but the cost of every single raise went up by a factor of four (3.75 at tier 8). Fewer raises per pool, far more freedom in what those raises can be.

If you play Necropolis, your week-one plan barely changes — skeleton raises are still cheap relative to income — but mid-game decisions flip: hoarding energy for a tier-7 raise now costs 2,000 energy instead of 500, so recycling low-value corpses into energy becomes a real choice rather than an afterthought. Our Necropolis build guide and Necropolis faction page cover the faction's broader game plan.

Battle Magic & Summon Avatar — the Mage Rebalance

Patch 11 walked Battle Magic back to its original scaling after earlier nerfs to Might heroes pushed mages too far ahead: creature Attack and Defense scaling from Spell Power and Knowledge drops from 15/25/35% to 15/20/25%, and the two Authority sub-skills fall from 20% to 15% each. Elsewhere in the skill trees, Luck now grants an 8% Lucky Hit chance per point (up from 6%), Rhythmic Cadence raises the mana cap bonus to 40% (from 30%), and Stargazer doubles daily Astrology Points from 250 to 500.

Summon Avatar was reworked into a build-around rather than a default pick. The summon now survives exactly 3 hits at every skill level, its base damage falls to 10-10, Spell Power scaling drops to 6/8/10 per point, and as a Tier-4 spell it carries a 5-round cooldown. The compensation is real: Avatar of Fury adds +40% damage, Avatar of Celerity adds +2 Speed and Initiative, and the new Summon Destruction sub-skill gives your hero and army +50% damage against summoned creatures. Slotting Effortless Strike and Ancient Scrolls now requires Expert-level parent skills, while Swordcraft and Thaumaturge Brilliance moved down to Advanced — check your saved builds before queueing into ranked.

Creature Balance — Winners and Losers

Patch 11 touched almost every roster. These are the changes with real game impact; faction pages for Grove, Dungeon, and the rest are being updated to match.

Two neutral-creature changes are worth knowing before your next map: Starchild now deals only 50% damage to adjacent targets with its basic attack, and Worldwatcher gained a passive that shields its stack from effects that instantly kill extra units on attack.

Spell Balance Highlights

Web, Fatal Decay, and Early Start also had their base durations doubled to 2 rounds (Early Start now costs 8 mana). Full numbers for every spell live on the spells reference page.

New Templates, Rotations & Timers

Four tournament-format templates joined the map generator: Jebus Tournament for Classic Mode (best-of-5 battles across week 1-2, always fought by your starting hero — a dead hero is an automatic loss), and Outcast Tournament (best-of-3), Mix, and Galaxy for Single Hero Mode. The competitive rotations changed with them:

• Classic Mode pool: Jebus Cross, Universe, Infinity, Last Fortress, Jebus Tournament, Arcade — Sand Clover and Arcade-era Harmony are out, and Jebus Cross plus Jebus Tournament are always in the selection.
• Single Hero pool: Helltide, Sprint, Exodus, Blitz, Outcast Tournament, Vendetta.
• Classic combat timers dropped from 120 to 90 seconds across leagues.
• Single Hero timers now scale by league — 80 seconds from Iron through Silver, down to 60 in Master — with a further 20-second cut on Outcast Tournament and Vendetta, offset by a +15-second daily bonus everywhere.
• Pick-and-ban order is now Player 1 ban, Player 2 ban, Player 1 pick, Player 2 pick, and side assignment is purely random instead of queue-time based.

Shorter timers reward pre-planned openings; the combat guide covers tactics-phase fundamentals that hold up under the 90-second clock.

What the July Updates Mean for the Meta

Expect the faction tier list to shift once ladder data settles; Grove and Dungeon are the factions most likely to climb, and the best builds page has Sorcery-flavored mage setups that benefit directly from Patch 12.

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