No sooner did I line up a news post about Das Tal’s now-penultimate patch than the Fairytale Distillery team pushed another patch out for the game. This update, among other things, added twenty-nine new combat abilities to Das Tal.

All of them were designed to give more “interesting choices” to players. Some require you to really think about who to cast them on (Banish), some will allow you to set up crazy combos (Delayed Teleport), some will allow you to interrupt the enmy and protect your squishies better (Dampening Field) and others are just plain cool (Smoke Screen and Sneak Attack).

We’ve also made a couple seemingly small changes to existing abilities that will drastically change the current meta game. With the introduction of a cooldown on spammable abilities and an increase in base health fights will now take a good bit longer and spiking tactics will be harder to pull off (but not impossible for good players and teams). We’ve also fixed a couple of easily exploitable abilities that were just a bit too OP (I’m looking at you, Freedom and Stasis!).

Fairytale Distillery have also spun up a new European server:

Fertility is back! Today at 10 PM CEST we will turn off Harvest (our US server) and turn on the switch for Fertility which is based in Europe. It’ll come with the new patch applied and should give us a lot more of that Khans-versus-the-World fun that we had last week. See you on the battlefield!

As per usual, click on through to read the complete set of patch notes.

Additionally, the team have announced a new contest that will be held in the July alpha test of Das Tal:

Members of the clans that finish with the highest ‘Respect’ scores will be selected at random to receive Nomad level developer support packs. These packs include full access to Das Tal post-launch, so start recruiting your clan members now!

This will be open to any in-game clan. To make sure that everyone has a fair shot, anyone registering (at www.das-tal-game.com) for the Alpha prior to June 15 will be guaranteed a spot in the Alpha test. We will likely also include people who sign up between June 15 and the start of the Alpha test period, but can’t guarantee it.

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Each clan will only be awarded the prize that includes the greatest number of Nomad packs. For example, if a clan has the 2nd highest Respect score and the 3rd highest Elegance score, they will receive 3 Nomad packs (given to randomly selected members of the clan) and the Nomad pack for the 3rd place Elegance score will instead be given to whichever clan finished with the 4th highest Elegance score.

More contest details can be found here.