I really like the explore reamp. Biggest complaints so far seem to be the tons of unnecessary interfacing.
Lets streamline it with some suggestions I’ve seen all over the board:
- Difficulty selection should be available at any time. Changing difficulty abandons the current run. If you attempt to change the difficulty and you aren’t on battle 0, it should give you a prompt that you are going to abandon the current run.
- Winning an explore battle should always just take you to the prep next battle. No need to dump you back at the interface. 99% or more of the time this is what you want to do anyways, and you can simply back out of the battle if you didn’t want to that other <1% of the time. If it is necessary for you to enter the mythic battle through the interface because of mythstones, that is the only battle that should require you to do so. If you really want the option to go back to the interface after you finish a battle, separate the bottom buttons into “back” and “next battle” (or something similar), with “next battle” on the lower right where “play again” was before.
- “Boss chest” loot can just be on the mythic battle. If this is not possible due to the current implementation, see below
- Finishing a run that doesn’t require going back to the interface (eg., a mythic boss or boss chest, if we can’t streamline those) should have the bottom buttons separated into “continue” and “play again” (or something that better conveys these options). “Continue” kicks you back to the interface, “play again” puts you back on the battle prep screen for your first explore battle at your last selected difficulty.
- Losing a general explore battle, other than maybe the very first time, should not prompt you if you want to abandon the run, because you now can just manually cancel it at any time
- No pop up prompts for mini-boss and mythic-boss unlocks, you are already given this information on the previous battle rewards screen. But this shouldn’t matter anyways if you aren’t kicked back to the interface in the first place.
So much to like about this update, I really dislike that there is this “interface” and you can only ever click one thing, the one thing is in different places, and you have to do a bunch of clicks to get through. I get you probably want to convey a sense of progress throughout, but its been like two days and already it feels like it is like this to intentionally waste my time rather than enhance the overall experience.
If rewards have to be rebalanced to make this happen… it means that these things really were just put in to slow us down, which is a terrible design practice, as dragging out interfacing is one of the last things you want to do to slow down progress because it makes for an unpleasant experience (much like the “bad play pattern” that was brought up when discussing 50 gem class change fees). “Theatrics” or “presentation” such as animations and stuff sometimes can be forgiven as it is part of the overall experience and generally only grates long term (and then most devs tend to offer a way around it when they recognize nothing is impressive the 1000th time you’ve seen it, and things that stop you for even seconds for said theatrics start getting viewed as time wasters), but adding unnecessary interfacing, no, thats bad from the start. I think the former is what they were going for by separating out all the fights and the boss chest, but they have to realize that unlike orb reveal theatrics, which happen at most a few times a week for events, and rarely when hammering through vault keys, you get comparatively a lot of boss chests and even that is going to get old very quickly. Even discounting boss chests, for any given run, its just too many clicks/taps on too many different areas of the screen for things that shouldn’t require input at all.
Speaking of interfaces, just going to repeat earlier feedback that badges should be probably connected to a team slot (or possibly even a hero class, which can then easily be applied to any team slot so you don’t have to redo badges for event teams). Again, having them all the way back on the map is a really bad place for them if you want to tweak anything for battle prep, and given the power of cedrics medals as counterplay tools, it makes the desire to tweak for counterplay all the greater. This is, again, exactly the kind of “bad play pattern” that was trying to be safeguarded against by having a 50 gem class change fee when class changes could only be done through the hero menu. If they won’t ever be connected to a class or team slot, there needs to be a shortcut to them in any battle prep screen, which would be sufficient for most cases (just not the whole GW/defense thing). Like here, maybe:
Soul farming has also been brought up multiple times. On one of the last few dev Q&A streams, it was stated that there were plans to make souls a bit easier to get, particularly at early game. The last two patches were rather big nerfs to the ability to farm souls, as well as a huge nerf of the amount of souls from the one-time challenge rewards (850 for clearing all relevant challenges now per kingdom, 1050 times total soul bonus before, usually between 3-4k per kingdom for most people when done right, plus more very trivial battles to run soul farm teams in at max difficulty). I think explore difficulties should have some kind of soul modifier, but I’m curious as to what this “plan” is and how long before we see any hint of it and if that will solve the problem in a better way than, or at least given an alternate option to, farming with generators.