Sneak Peek - New Upgrade Menus

[Sirrian]

Hey Everyone,

While we’re putting the finishing touches on our new in-game events, such as Raid Boss, Bounties, Invasions, and the Vault of Many Gnomes, I thought I’d do a quick sneaky sneak peek at the new Troop Upgrade Menus we’ve been working on for 3.3

The Sister of Shadows has volunteered to be our upgradeable guinea pig, so let’s get right to it, with the first screen:

1 The Troop Card

For those who didn’t notice in our weekly event announcement, we’ve made some changes to the layout of the large troop cards:

• We now display the kingdom of the troop (as a word, not a silly symbol)
• We’ve removed the gradient to improve readability of the troop type
• The level has been moved to a more prominent & readable position
• The pips along the top show rarity, with the little spiky ones remaining spiky to show you the base rarity after the card has ascended!

2 The Upgrade Menu

We’ve upgraded the upgrade menu (!), so you can see, at a glance the progress of level/traits/ascension.
These are all buttons, and selecting any of them will take you to one of the following sub-menus.

3 The Level Up Dialog

Quite a few changes here, with the intention of making things a little easier for everybody. You can choose to either

• Immediately level to max by selecting the top right button
• If you don’t have enough souls for that, it remains there (darkened a little) to show you the souls required for max level, but you instead select the middle button to level as high as you can afford
• If you want to micro things a bit more, you can select a level with the arrows on the left and use the bottom button to level up instead.
• Those stats on the left will change as you play with the arrows, and turn green to show you when things are increasing

Next up is my favorite…

4 The Traits Dialog

We were pretty fed up with having to press a button 3 times if we already had all the stones we required! So now you can select trait 1, 2, or 3 and it will spend the stones to go straight to your desired target - in other words, you can upgrade all three traits in one action.
We’ve also improved the traitstone display based on some feedback. You can now see the sum of ALL traitstones required to reach your chosen target.

Oh, and you can still select an individual traitstone to find what kingdoms give it, and go exploring!

(also please excuse the ridicuous number of traitstones I have for testing )

And finally…

5 The Ascension Dialog

Once again, we’re streamlined it so you can go straight to your desired rarity, and it shows the total cards required.

We’ve added some pretty new effects for when things upgrade too, but you’ll see those when 3.3 lands!

You’ve probably noticed by now that there’s an option in the top bar called ORBS, and I’m sure you’re wondering what they are, so…

6 The Orbs Menu

Orbs are new rewards you can earn in game for doing a variety of tasks. There are some more orb types in addition to the ones shown here, but they all let you shortcut various tasks. We’ll discuss these in more detail (as well as some other cool things you can with Orbs in the Soulforge) later, but for now, we thought we’d show one of their key uses - upgrading troops!

While Disenchanting hasn’t changed too much (apart from todying up the UI a little), the last screen I have to share is…

7 The Skills Menu

We’ve tidied up the display of the skills and popped in some text to more clearly show the Skill calculation (no guild bonuses here, because I haven’t done my tasks on the test server on this account! )

So… That’s it for the quick sneak peek!
I’ve gotta run away and sink my head into spreadsheets now - I’m busy balancing all the rewards for our new events, and it’s a HUGE job! I’m sure you have a bunch of questions, and I’ll try to stop in later and answer a few - apologies if I don’t… Salty, and our awesome community ninjas will be around tomorrow!

[Strat]

Slides

1. I’m still not convinced the extra information should be on the main card… Perhaps rework the 3rd subCard ‘Traits’ and add lots of info there (Traits, Level, Kingdom, pips, etc)
2. Nice.
3. Very Nice.
4. Fantastic.
5. Ok, but It might be nice to know what exact Skills are going to improve with each ascension.
6. Interesting. Looking forward to more info on Orbs ‘soon’ What about players that have already obtained the top upgrades?
7. Fantastic.

Thanks for the mini preview I’m looking forward to 3.3!

[turintuor]

For the new card aspect:

• “Level” on the top right seems useless. If you remove it, you can put up the level number.
• “Kingdom” will be better on the right than below the nametroop, so you can put down the name
• why Magic is not on the front part?

@Sirrian

We’ve upgraded the upgrade menu

Upgradeception

@Sirrian

Bounties, Invasions, and the Vault of Many Gnomes,

cough cough Diablo

[awryan]

@Sirrian

also please excuse the ridicuous number of traitstones I have for testing )

I bet MaybeSirrian (@en9nhcet) has more.

[awryan]

@Sirrian

Orbs are new rewards you can earn in game for doing a variety of tasks.

If these end up in Standard Tasks like Shards did. Please just add and don’t take away existing rewards. Things are sparce as it is. We do 60 LT a week now and I feel like we had more rewards when we did 10-20. But it was before LT were nerfed.

[Smash]

I like the new look of the troop card. It shows all info i need fast and easy.

The new UI changes look great, and will help with stream lining mass upgrades that a lot of mid players go through

Now, Orbs. I want them, i need them, and now I have to wait with expectations

[Taransworld]

Thank you for the spoiler news @Sirrian!!!

[Draprion]

Sorry, I don’t get the orbs.

Does this mean that if you use the orbs you can bypass needing the previously required souls, traitstones and extra copies of the cards?

[Grundulum]

That is certainly what it looked like to me. Sounds like a very difficult balancing problem. Likely one requiring many spreadsheets.

[Mithran]

The troop card layout is so much better, but I’m not crazy about Magic not being displayed with the other stats on the front of the card. I guess it is less relevant because magic doesn’t matter unless you know what the spell does and how it scales, though.

I’m not crazy about each of what was the main function of this menu taking more clicks to get to, but it looks like you overall get more information and need less clicks total.

Level up takes one extra click to get to, but one less click to level to max, but one more click (presumably) again to get out of the menu. Lower levels that don’t have the souls to max even one troop will get more use out of the new layout, which I’m fine with.

Traiting dialog looks like it needs two less clicks total to fully trait, which is nice. And you can see all the traits and the costs, which is huge for newer players still learning how the system works. Individually good, long term and for newer players especially a huge QoL buff that will save hours worth of click wait click wait over traiting an entire collection.

Ascension Dialog is a marked improvement… for me anyways. I never saw value is slowly sacrificing troops as you got them, but some people I’ve heard be vocal about how they do this. In fact, I thought this is why the ascension menu remained arrows where you could sacrifices copies of the troop and get no immediate benefit for it? Either way, good QoL boost here and I might actually ascend stuff I have enough copies to get to legendary without having to click left or right up 50+ times so I’m exactly at legendary.

Skills menu gives me the information I want faster, which I am all for, another good upgrade.

Orbs dialog:
Here is where I get a little worried. New features are great, but we have been blindsided with losing something every time something big is added that my gut reflex has become “okay, whats the catch?”. I’ll try to reserve judgement for when we know more, but…

[Sheba]

@Mithran

Orbs dialog:

Here is where I get a little worried. New features are great, but we have been blindsided with losing something every time something big is added that my gut reflex has become “okay, whats the catch?”. I’ll try to reserve judgement for when we know more, but…

Basically this.
I already voiced concern about another nerf incoming in the thread that showed the 20k gold from Gnomes in explore (since we all know what happened when the 4x speed and with that more gold in the economy happened…) and now I’m downright frightened.

Though it would be very nice to have an orb to bypass the GW troops or guardian collecting. That stuff is very annoying by now because it’s so slow-going.
Also I want to bypass collecting Arcane Bloods. Would pay with my own soul for that. Farming Bloods is the worst.

[Eika]

Im excited for the new menus.

[TheDragonSeoul]

The new menus indeed have a visual appeal about them… but…

I miss the old design… and the old music.

[Blanix]

Hmmm…I wonder if ‘Orbs’ will be purchasable with real money. Would make sense to have new income streams when the China release goes live. Might not even be the devs decision, they have to partner with a Chinese company to release the game there.

[Amadan]

I like the idea here, but I have to point out a presentational problem: when I look at the Traits screenshot, I see nothing that shows me that the traits are serial or the costs are cumulative. Instead, it looks like I can pick any of the three traits, with the first one costing 14/6/6, then the second one costing another 34/6/6/6/6, and the third one costing another 60/6/14/6/6/3.

Also, a general piece of feedback: looking at almost all of those screenshots, there’s no visual distinction between info panes vs clickable areas. Many of the screenshots look like purely informational displays with no interactivity. The Higher and Lower arrows on the bottom of the Level selector are the only clearly interactive elements I see.

I like the idea; I like the sneak peek; I hope to see improvements made before it goes Live!

[Nephilim]

How does it function on console? I hope it’s not as cumbersome as that awful troop search box, that looks hideous and I hope it’s been altered with the update. Am I also right in thinking no 27/30 gw this time, and if not, why?

[Shimrra]

I will once again add my voice to the side saying we need the Magic stat being displayed.

Why? Because it’d be nice to know that their Draakulis actually has 40 magic instead of its usual base amount. Or that Fizzbang just gave an AOE Goblin a hefty magic boost. Oh and we had it before and would like it back.

Otherwise it looks good. There are some things that could be improved but I feel like we’ll just get used to them - such as the Traitstone costs piling up as you look across that screen.

[Sheba]

@Nephilim

Am I also right in thinking no 27/30 gw this time, and if not, why?

While I still don’t know what “27/30” means, it was said in the last Q&A that GW scoring will get an overhaul - in fact, all of GW will get a huge QOL update. However, that will only be done after the new schedule has established (GW only every third week, after two months of testing Bracket jump adjustment) and will be tackled in one, big update instead of small bits here and there.
(It’s written in the summary, go check that again if you have doubts. )

[Amadan]

@Nephilim

Am I also right in thinking no 27/30 gw this time, and if not, why?

Pretty sure they already said they’re not doing that because they’re going to do fundamental changes to GW scoring instead (with the intent of fixing the same concerns).

[Grundulum]

@Shimrra

I will once again add my voice to the side saying we need the Magic stat being displayed.

It is displayed, on the left-hand part of the troops screen, right under the spell image. The number could stand to be a bit more prominent.