that’s only this week though… Week 1, 2, 4 and 6 were all really bad for the Elite Pass as well.
I actually don’t think the Elite Pass is worth the monetary value outside of the Mythic.
The fun part is that future campaigns will feature book of deeds, which will make people feel obligated to continue participating.
Right, among other things. It should be really obvious to all of us that this initial battlepa$$ was just an experiment. It was a test. They’re gauging how many impulse purchases they can trigger.
This pa$$ was likely targeted at the “holy crap $10 for a Mythic???” crowd. What’s to say future pa$$es are not targeted at the “I’ll fall behind if I don’t buy Books of Deeds” (or other progression-limiting item) crowd?
It’s in the business’s best interest to hook as many player types as possible, so I’d expect the initial several battlepa$$es to have different focus points. The bean counters will be watching how well each type sells and evaluating whether changes can be made to the rest to ensure more consistent purchases.
A few weeks ago I spent $18 for some goodies in another F2P. I didn’t feel pressured to do so and I felt like I got value for my money. I never felt like I was being subjected to a resource drain for participating in the assorted game modes; I simply didn’t get as much bonus stuff as payers did. (Example: There are daily objectives you can complete which reward a bonus chest. You can purchase the ability to get two bonus chests instead of one. The contents of the chests are exactly the same; you just get double if you pay. No penalty for not paying; simply an extra portion of the same goodies if you do pay. No, this isn’t what I bought.)
Back to GoW, though. Still not planning to spend $1 a week here in order to purchase a bandaid for the resource bleed. A bandaid, no matter how cheap, doesn’t eliminate the icky.
I dont know why you are complaining about the dungeon task not being doable on day 1. The challenges are “Weekly” for a reason. Not everyone wants to max their tasks on Monday or has the time to.
Because every other task is gated behind day 1. If I could make some progress on the campaign tasks hidden behind the first of each “colour” I wouldn’t mind so much. In any case, I agree that the campaign tasks are Grindy and boring
I don’t think it would break the game if they allowed the artifact to be used during the Tower of Doom event, and reset it tthe next week for the next campaign.
Some of our lower levels have already stopped grinding, but might try to catch up if it helped with ToD.
The stat buffs are minor to me (I haven’t claimed any yet, waiting until the end), but might help them squeeze out an extra Doom or two.
@ChunkyMono Quiet, peon!! Back to work, zug zug!
By buying T1 in the event today, I was able to get to level 90 - so 2/3. I did CoT at 500 and got the third. Not horrible; just dumb.
And then, followed up with arena run? C’mon man.
Arena is easy:
Just want to add, I bought the Elite Pass… Plus, was it called? Anyway, the more expensive one. Day 1 this week, after getting stuck on dungeons, I had exactly 800 stars, enough to get level 8 of the Artifact.
I don’t know if it was planned that way (probably not), but I do wonder if/how the elite pass plus reckons into the campaign tasks.
You earn an extra 20 points per week, which will give you 200 more points worth of rewards than other players, including the Mythic. Basically 2 weeks ahead.
Exactly. Yes, they are meant to be done over a whole week. That’s mostly for the casual player who can’t play hours every day. Would be nice to have the option to get it done in one day. Or at least, not have Tuesday feel like Campaign chores, day two.
Elite Pass should allow 1 free ‘skip’ per week. Elite Pass + should allow 2.
I checked out on week 3. Y’all be the test runners and i’ll keep watching for next time.
I really hope nobody pays 100 gems to skip the dungeon task. Devs will only see that as meaning we want more multiple day tasks in the future. I realize the devs SHOULD interpret people skipping the task as meaning we hate it but yeah…
Fiend fire has no +10 bonus and does 9 dmg to all enemies in Arena. Boost still applies if you have the allies. And it does curse and burn. But it’s still no dawnbringer.
Curse dispels, which is occasionally useful. But the bigger one is burn, at arena stats, 3 damage/turn can be deadly. Not a bad weapon to use.
i dislike the “use gem key” “use vault key” and especially “use event key” campaign quests…
it feels like a waste to our resources…
i suggest dev increase the free campaign reward if they’re about to do this, this is just like taking away those rewards…
| Category | Fiend Fire | Dawnbringer |
|---|---|---|
| Mana Cost | 14 | 20 |
| Colors | Purple | Red, Blue, Yellow |
| Minimum Damage | 12 | 12 |
| Maximum Damage | 21 | 26 |
| Damage Type | All Enemies | All Enemies |
| Boost Type | Daemon Allies | Yellow Allies+Enemies |
| Additional1 | Curse All Enemies | Barrier All Allies |
| Additional2 | Burn All Enemies | +2 Magic on 13+ Red Gems |
For the minimum damage, I included the Burn damage on the immediate next turn, because it will always do the first 3 damage. On turns after that, it has a chance to fall off. The maximum damage also includes that, and for both weapons, is dependent on how much criteria is met (3 daemon ally troops need to be recruited for Fiend Fire for maximum damage, and for Dawnbringer, 3 yellow ally troops and a staggering 4 enemy yellow troops).
I have no Daemon allies, and 1 yellow ally, and no yellow enemies. Dawnbringer would do 14 damage (10+2+2). I also have no Daemon allies, so Fiend Fire would do 9 damage plus 3 from the burn.
Now I will hastily admit that it’s probably easier to get 20 mana from 3 colors than 14 mana from one color. And the Barrier is nice. That said, the 3 damage per turn on every enemy troop is crazy.
I had already cast Ranger (a very powerful troop in Arena if you cast him when enemies are all alive, because he does 8 single target damage and then 8 scatter damage, boosted by each enemy alive, 4 per, so 24 scatter damage if all 4 enemies are alive. That’s ~14 damage to one target and ~6 damage to all other targets. That was enough to kill the Monkey though.
Fiend Fire hit them all. The dragon died from the first tick of burn. I matched one set of skulls with a doomskull, that brought the enemy hero down to 2 health. Next turn both enemies died to burn damage.
I’ve used Dawnbringer in the past, but I just find Fiend Fire to be more reliable, especially because it doesn’t color block as much.
Experimented with this and I was reminded that I am fighting the board, not the opponents.
Fiend Fire only works when one is actually given purple gems on the board.
Lost 1 battle, won 2 with Fiend Fire, won the other 6 by pure luck.
I’ll run a bunch of test runs with both weapons and see which one is faster for me. I’ll post results in a couple hours 
| Run # | Weapon | Result | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fiend Fire | 8-1 | 12 min 9 sec |
| 2 | Fiend Fire | 8-0 | 6 min 15 sec |
| 3 | Fiend Fire | 8-0 | 7 min 12 sec |
| 4 | Fiend Fire | 8-0 | 8 min 5 sec |
| 5 | Fiend Fire | 8-0 | 7 min 4 sec |
| 6 | Dawnbringer | 8-0 | 8 min 27 sec |
| 7 | Dawnbringer | 8-0 | 5 min 14 sec |
| 8 | Dawnbringer | 8-0 | 7 min 40 sec |
| 9 | Dawnbringer | 8-0 | 5 min 57 sec |
| 10 | Dawnbringer | 8-0 | 4 min 30 sec |
| 11 | Fiend Fire | 8-1 | 8 min 48 sec |
Notes: The first run I did had an exceptionally long fight in it. My Hero got hit with Essence of Evil, and in the 90 battles I did over the course of these runs, it was the only time I fought against EoE. That’s why I did a “bonus” run with Fiend Fire for the 11th run (although it wasn’t impressive either). The same thing would have happened with Dawnbringer, since it completely locks your Hero down (which is in the front).
The longer runs with Dawnbringer are because I got very few or no yellow troops, which required me to cast Dawnbringer twice to finish the match (because all the enemies would be left with 2-4 health). In the last run with Dawnbringer, I pulled 3 yellow troops, so matches went very quickly as I only had to kill the enemy Hero after casting.
It’s very hard to lose troops with Dawnbringer, hence why Fiend Fire is the only one where I had losses. The most difficult part of Fiend Fire is just getting enough mana to cast it. Pharaoh Hound is incredible. It’s not a Daemon, so you lose 3 damage, but it creates 8 Purple and 8 Red Gems and can easily loop itself (only 10 mana) so it helps fill Fiend Fire very quickly since you can focus on red/brown to fill it while looking for purple.
For Dawnbringer, you’re looking for yellow troops, which also means you’re basically color blocking everything, unless it’s Yellow/Green, Yellow/Purple, or Yellow/Brown.
So… the verdict? Dawnbringer is obviously faster and safer (Barrier). No doubt that it’s easier to fill 20 mana with 3 colors than 14 mana with 1 color. That said, Dawnbringer costs 1.3 million souls, 350 gems, and 12 celestial traitstones (and obviously the souls is the hard part there!) Fiend Fire just requires 250 wins with the Diabolist class.
Excluding the 12 min run, because I blame that on Essence of Evil, my average run time with Fiend Fire was 7.48 minutes. Average run time with Dawnbringer was 6.36 minutes.
Verdict: Dawnbringer is an amazing weapon, and I would definitely recommend players craft it (although back in the day, that was the use of stockpiles of souls… now you need stockpiles of souls for troop medals!), but maybe not necessarily craft it for the sole purpose of shaving a minute off of Arena runs. Unless they do an Arena overhaul and it’s suddenly the go to place.
Edit: I’m going to do a few more test runs, and this time I’m going to pick my weapons based on my troops. Before I was strictly taking whatever I could get. Okay, well, that was pointless. I got zero daemon and zero yellow troops on my first run.
I also want to test Summer’s Wonder. It does true scatter damage boosted by feys. So my drafting criteria will essentially be, from first to last priority:
There are 107 common troops in the game, however, I’m pretty certain you can’t draft Dooms, so that brings it down to 101. And I don’t think you can draft Gnomes, so that’s another 7, bringing it down to 94. There’s also 12 guardians which I don’t think you can recruit, so that’s 82 now. And last there are the Arena reward troops (the +5 to all stats troops). I don’t know if those can be recruited or not. If they can’t, that brings the possible common troops down to 76. From those: 11 are yellow, 5 daemons, 4 fey.
For Rare troops… there are 130 troops you can recruit from after excluding Delve troops. There are 50 yellow troops, 8 daemons, and 10 fey.
For Ultra-rare troops, there are 161 after excluding delve troops. There are 52 yellow troops, 11 daemons, and 12 fey.
| Rarity | Common | % | Rare | % | Ultra-Rare | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 76 | 130 | 161 | |||
| Yellow | 50 | 66% | 50 | 38% | 52 | 32% |
| Daemon | 5 | 7% | 8 | 6% | 11 | 7% |
| Fey | 4 | 5% | 10 | 8% | 12 | 7% |
Clearly it’s easier to get boosted damage for Dawnbringer than other weapons.
