Progression & Balance Overhaul

Hi Necromancers!

A lot of your recent feedback has pointed to the same problem: progression in Codex Mortis could feel wildly uneven. Some of you unlocked too much too quickly, while others hit a wall on the second map. Bosses could take far too long to kill, then become trivial after enough farming. Companions struggled to survive, and level-up choices didn't always feel meaningful. So instead of patching these one at a time, we worked through all of these systems together, from your first few runs all the way to Mortis endgame. Thank you for every report, build and piece of playtest feedback you sent us. They directly shaped this balance pass. Heads-up: rewards you have already claimed stay yours. Your Mortis Mastery level no longer decides how hard your next run is, because you now pick the challenge yourself before starting. Fundamentals can also be reset for free, so if the new cost curve changes your plans, you can get your points back. You'll find the details below.

Packs & Rewards

• Card pack prices: packs now start at a lower price that rises gradually with each paid purchase, up to a fixed cap. Free packs don't advance that price increase. Progression starts more affordably and becomes a longer-term investment.
• Achievement rewards: early rewards have been adjusted to reduce the chain reaction where a single run could unlock a huge part of the collection. First map clears and new hero unlocks still provide important rewards.
• New heroes: unlocking a hero now awards school-pack rewards to help you equip them.
• Necromancer: the default hero no longer grants an achievement reward simply for being available at the start. Rewards you have already claimed remain yours.

Fundamentals

• Free reset: you can now reset your Fundamentals for free and recover your spent points. The confirmation clearly shows what will be refunded.
• Cost curve: costs now increase more substantially as you invest. The first upgrades stay accessible, while the rush through permanent bonuses slows down.

Mortis Mastery

• School specializations: each of the ten schools now has two development paths, with milestones at 5, 20 and 50 invested points. They affect the mechanics that matter to the school, such as range, attack speed, summon durability, healing, control and damage over time. Support spells receive bonuses to the mechanics they actually use, too.
• Saved setups: you can redistribute points and change specializations between runs, with three saved setups per character.
• Growth past 50: school bonuses keep growing beyond 50 points. Reaching the final specialization milestone doesn't reset or reduce your progress.
• Mastery and challenge are separate: buying another Mastery level no longer silently makes your next run harder. You choose the challenge level yourself and can see its enemy and soul multipliers before starting.
• Late progression curve: fixed the curve that made further Mastery levels require fewer kills.

Level-Up Choices

• One skill per card: level-up choices now focus on individual skills. Each regular upgrade improves one skill, and a higher rarity makes that upgrade stronger.
• Three choices at every rarity: including Legendary and Mythic, whenever enough valid options are available. Regular cards within an offer share the same rarity.
• Offers adapt to your build: they consider your recent choices, spell mechanics and mutations. Continued investment and complementary improvements get more weight, while other directions stay available.
• Less repetition: recently shown upgrades are less likely to repeat, and overlooked skills get more chances to appear.
• Legendary and Mythic: these rewards prioritize meaningful gains and take stat limits into account.
• Diminishing returns: repeated percentage upgrades now fall off more gently.

Spell Growth & XP

• Upgrade strength: individual upgrades have more impact than in the earlier, heavily reduced balance pass.
• XP pacing: collected XP is set to 75% of its original rate. Spell growth and XP pacing were adjusted together.
• Spell fixes: fixed cases where progression didn't properly reach a spell's actual effect, including Soul Burn and Amplify Damage.

Companions

• Artifacts and defensive effects: artifact progression and defensive effects now apply correctly in cases where they previously failed.
• Survival tools: companions now have protection against sudden bursts and repeated hits, avoid large attack zones better and have improved retreat behaviour.
• Defensive abilities: fixes to shields, phasing and projectile dodges address defensive abilities that weren't consistently protecting their users.

Hordes & Maps

• Early enemies: retuned to put more pressure on opening builds.
• Wave transitions: heavier enemies now enter through more gradual transitions, both within and between maps.
• Sand Tomb: the regular horde has been brought closer to a 1.5× step above Graveyard, with reduced early spikes.
• Later maps: adjusted around their actual demands. Blood Bath's large boss attacks, Cathedral's dark corridors and Void Sanctum's boss pursuit all contribute to difficulty beyond enemy health.

Bosses

• Scaling at encounter start: selected Story bosses scale with your level and elapsed run time when the encounter begins, then keep that scaling for the rest of the fight.
• Long fights: later growth tapers off to limit excessively long battles.
• Special encounters: encounters built around fighting or pursuing a boss from the opening, including Dead God and the Necromancer's Echo, keep their own rules.
• Enemy health: health multipliers across difficulty settings have been reduced to address overly durable enemies.

Runic Stones & Minibosses

• Drops: ordinary minibosses now drop four Runic Stones.
• Roaming minibosses: random appearances now share a minimum interval. Together with the new drop count, this cuts down the late-run flood of upgrades that could make farming overwhelmingly powerful, so stones now give a steadier supporting boost.
• Missing appearances: filled in missing miniboss appearances where suitable local enemies already exist.
• Rune and ritual bonuses: health and pickup improvements now apply properly, and repeated cast-speed rewards stack consistently.

Run Pacing

• Survivor completion times: Survivor no longer aims at a universal 15-minute target. Completion times now increase with the arena and difficulty.
• Time-based pressure: both Story and Survivor build enemy pressure over time from the very beginning, with gentler escalation.
• Per-mode tuning: Survivor maps have their own progression tuning, while Story accounts for each map's objectives and environment.

Interface

• Mortis Mastery: a connected school tree, clearly marked locked milestones and previews that highlight the spells affected by a specialization.
• Challenge selection: shows its consequences before you start a run.
• Character Hub: empty school categories stay visible with a zero count, so the available schools of a newly unlocked hero remain clear.

In Internal Testing

Two more additions are in internal testing and aren't part of regular runs yet:

• Scroll selection: checks whether your build can actually support a spell's required mechanics, while still leaving opportunities to branch into other schools.
• Horde events: a library of 30 horde-event prototypes. We're testing them in the Devroom, including in local co-op, before any of them become part of regular runs.

We're continuing to test how all of this feels in actual play, and you can follow the ongoing balance work on the beta branch. If something still feels too easy, too punishing or simply tedious, let us know on the Steam forum or on our Discord. Your map, difficulty, build and approximate run time are especially useful, because those details have already led to several of the changes above. Thanks for playing, The Codex Mortis Team