4.6 Update Patch Notes

Not only this, the Tokens could simply be included in the post-battle Rewards screen, in the same way the ‘Mini-Boss Battle Unlocked’ and Gnome rewards, etc. show up, without needing the chest panel and animation. I’m probably okay with Evolving.

In much the same way, the ‘Mini-Boss Unlocked’ reward card should be enough of a notification without needing the pop-up, as mentioned previously.

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It’s all just ways of slowing down the grind :confused:

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I may very well agree – on the whole, though, I’d prefer a smoother and more enjoyable experience with slightly rebalanced rewards (not in our favor), if that’s what was required (and the same for several other aspects of the game, e.g. Delve Chest upgrades).

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While I dislike the changes to explore I do really love the cedric medal and I think this is one of the best updates ever just because of that one medal.

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Am loving the new explore set-up, the souls earned need to be increased though as explore was the best place for farming them. Great work dev team other than that :wink:

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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.

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Iirc, and it may(?) have been changed at some point to be different to how it originally functioned, but immediately prior to 4.6, I’m pretty sure the bonus Souls from Challenges were unaffected by Necromancy traits, etc., and solely affected by difficulty. I don’t have a source for this atm aside from my memory of testing it at one point, maybe with buried screenshots somewhere/scrawls on an envelope…

I do know that I started recommending people/newer players to not be too regimented about only doing Challenges with a Soul-farming team, though, especially (but not only) since they had become required for Kingdom Power levels :man_shrugging:.

I think medals could be set up like a banners.

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Immediately prior to 4.5 (the challenge revamp), bonus souls from challenges were still affected by armor bonuses and the difficulty you played the battle at, allowing for up to +100% armor +50% guild +125% difficulty (x3.75 reachable by a lot of people, so 375 for a single 5 star challenge from just the one-time challenge souls) in addition to any VIP bonuses and a pet. I tested this on an alt immediately before I patched 4.5 to confirm it was still like that. After 4.5, the bonus souls from a challenge were always a fixed amount, 50, no matter what your bonuses were, and the kingdom bonus was 500, also no matter what. They were never affected by in-battle traits in any version. 4.6 (this update) didn’t change anything for either of those.

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That’s the one! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes::man_facepalming:

My main issue with the new Explore is that we don’t feel rewarded when successfully finishing a Mythic battle even at Difficulty 12…

2-3 tokens in D12 is a joke. It should be 10-12 tokens. No like we need 40k tokens…

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I agree with @turintuor . And the fact that you only get 1 champion xp for explore fights while these battles are harder than challenges or PVP (for which you get 2 xp) feels like a slap in the face as well…

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I’m not sure if this question has been asked: can a higher-rarity medal upgrade more than one level at a time on a lower rarity troop? For example, since a Cedric medal provides a 3x bonus to rare and a 6x bonus to common troops (based on my understanding) will using one ultra-rare medal complete a common troop from bronze to gold (6 common medals worth)? Will using a Cedric medal boost a rare troop from bronze to silver (3 rare medals worth)?

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No.
I used one Cedric medal on Humility (common troop) and it only went one medal-level up (bronze).

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The devs don’t base Champion XP awards on the difficulty of the fight. Rather, they base it on the whether the activity in question is unlimited in activity for free or not.

– Challenge XP gets 2 per match because those matches are never repeatable, once cleared.
– Events that require sigils (Weekly Events/Dungeons/Delves/etc.) to run get 2 per match because they are limited in number, by either free and/or paid sigils purchases.
– Explores do NOT get 2 per match because they can be run infinitely for free.

– PvP modes get 2 per match… but those modes haven’t been revamped yet. I’d put the 2 per match in PvP on the endangered species list, personally. I’m looking right at you, 4.7 or 5.0.

The devs have said on a Q/A stream that of all the newer-style events, the Class events are the worst performing of them all. Slowly, but surely, the devs are correcting their design error. They want to push players to buy Champion XP from the Thursday event shop every week. They aren’t going to achieve that goal, if players are still allowed to farm Champion XP at reasonable rates infinitely for free.

Because they have the :poop:-tiest rewards and aren’t adjusted between 1 and 3 day events. Not because people are getting too much XP in other places.

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Overall new explore system has a good premise, but it could use some streamlining, most notably that extra clicking on boss chest must absolutely go - boss chest contents should’ve been added to mythic battle rewards screen from the get-go.
A little correction in the patch notes - instead of “…arcande drop rates slightly lowered to compensate for guaranteed arcane in mythic battle…” it should read “…mythic battles must be your primary and main income of arcanes and we have made it sure as hell death and taxes that you get the message by reducing arcane drop rate in non-mythic explore from six percent to - and I’m being generous here based on next to 2000 explores (level 2) over the weekend - two percent.”

It would’ve been good to make it so that medals are assigned to a team slot…I’m sure that we’ll soon get to the same dancing in circles as it was with hero class issue.

On a positive note - we have a clear candidate for The-stupidestest-of-stupid-things-to-happen-this-year award that, of course, goes to Medal of Cedric.
Axing great deal of team building strategy, neutering all troops that either inflict status effects, get their abilities boosted by status effects or use status effects as conditional triggers for parts of their spells, making troops, that perform cleanse, basically obsolete all in one go…congratulations!
But you could’ve taken that final step, though, and made it so that equipping 3 Medals of Cedric gives 95 percent chance to win automatically after making one gem match. It might’ve made nerf squad ecstatic instead of just satisfied.

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Is this a bad time to ask if 3 Medals of Cedric Stack to give 80% cleanse rate every turn?
10% base + 40% + 20% + 10%
(I think I did the percentages of the percentages correctly).
On the screen it just shows 40% 3 seperate times.

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You’re right. 3 Medals of Cedric plus the usual 10% base cleanse gives you an 81% chance of cleanse firing at least once.

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It rolls for each of your troops too. Sometimes I get two cleanses, sometimes I get four … it’s the consistent kind of RNG that’s very very generous to the wielder.