My hypothesis is that they will remove the 3x runic/arcane/celestial traitstone drop in explore. This will be replaced with a 1x drop, in line with what we have in pvp.
In place of this, we get the gnomes and the 20k gold drop. I suspect that there will be different gold drop amounts (5k, 10k, 20k) to reflect the different traitstone rarities they are replacing.
Balancing this is that they will be releasing 2 troops. This means 2 arcane traitstones per week you can purchase with glory. For those who remember when 2 troops per week were the norm, this will allow rapid cycling of all arcane traitstones.
Then of course we have orbs. Too little info on these to make any reasonable hypothesis.
They bloody better had. No one should have to use 250 event keys and over 3000 gems to get ONE copy of the new legendary. 50% non event troops only highlight the daylight robbery around event chests. People buy gems, they’re not getting what the text says. ‘event chests contain event kingdom’s troops’. #totalcon
If it is a case that other troops are incorporated to reduce the odds of getting high rarity troops from event keys, there is a better way of doing it. Remove non event troops and lower the percentage of those higher troops dropping, surely that is how it should be?
They could remove the non-Event troops and put in 2x Rare or 3x Common for those pulls. That way 100% of the troops belong to the Kingdom Event and lower rarities can be targeted too.
The original reason for other troops was such a small troop pool. They didnt give an eta or anything, but mentioned looking into event keys as more troops come out
For orbs, I think they will most likely be soul forge items. Based on existing drop rates, their greatest utility will probably to upgrade legenaries to fully traited mythic.
Considering the number of kingdoms and troops i believe they are aimed to speed up progress while they also being valuable for end gamers that would love to instantly ascend new troops ,even some commons depending of some factors.
Instead of “upset” i would use the word “change”. And a change can be welcome to fix some issues. But i agree that some of those orbs will probably be in the forge, maybe requiring some new materials that can be found in the new game modes.
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Growth to level this troop from %1 to %2?
Are you sure you want to use the Major Orb of Growth to level this troop from %1 to %2?
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Ascension to gain %1 Wins for this class, giving it a total of %2 Wins?
Are you sure you want to use the Major Orb of Ascension to ascend this troop from %1 to %2?
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Wisdom to give this troop the %1 trait?
Are you sure you want to use the Major Orb of Wisdom to give this troop the ALL of its traits?
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Clans to gain %1 Seals?
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Chaos to gain another random orb?
Are you sure you want to use the Orb of Power to ascend this troop to Mythic, level it to 20, and unlock all of its traits?
Be careful what you wish for. They could be a lot worse. A LOT worse.
Anyways, its often <10% non kingdom troops for non-kingdom troops. This week, Epics have 3 kingdom troops not from the kingdom able to drop on a table and 4 from the kingdom, but it is weighted heavily toward the kingdom (and even further toward a couple specific ones for some reason, 14:14:6:6:1:1 this week heavily favoring Ifrit and Dragon Cruncher). This week, you have four kingdom ultra-rares weighted equally at 6 times, with the 3 non-kingdom troops being 1 each (6:6:6:6:1:1:1, 3/27 chance for non-kingdom ultra-rares). Event keys are often weighted toward things you can buy in glory packs, but nothing fits that criteria this week, which might be why the epic distribution is a bit off. Last week, for example, if you pulled an ultra-rare, Sister of Shadows was on the drop table 14 times, other 3 kingdom ultra-rares were on there 6 times each, and the 3 non kingdom troop were on there once each (weighted 14:6:6:6:1:1:1, so 3/35 for non-kingdom ultra-rares). Having these non-kingdom troops on the table barely interacts with the ultra-rare and epic rarity drops, and not at all with the legendary and mythic drops which remain the same chance.
If there is anything that is broken about event key drop tables, it is this weighting within the kingdom troops making the one that you can just buy with glory the same ones that drop more from chests, which is totally backward, and then writing off not doing the same with legendaries as “people might want to target old legendaries”. That and the fact that there are even traitstones on there, period. And the traitstones encompass 20% of the total table, way more than the ~5.6% total percentage of off kingdom troops (~7% of the total troops, 5.6% of the total table).
The minute they do this, the chances at getting higher rarties, at least ultra-rare, would also have to go down for it to make any kind of sense to even bother with. Non-kingdom troops encompass a total of about ~7% of the collective troop drop table, which would not be balanced enough for this to be a valid method of acquisition for the relative amount of troops needed, even if they were handed out 10 or 15 at a time. Now, they could do this without impacting drops above ultra-rare, since ultra-rare currently holds an absurd amount of the table, and they could also remove the dang traitstones from event keys to make room for this, which would leave about 25.6% chance to play with on the lower rarities. But since kingdom Ultra-Rares currently take up about 62.4% of the whole table including traitstones, the table would still be too imbalanced having commons and rares both crammed into ~25.6% of it (epics and legendaries being ~9.6% and ~2.4%, respectively, with overall weighting not changing much when a mythic is in town because they are 0.096% total chance). I wouldn’t see any way around this without at least encroaching into Ultra-Rares drops to allow commons and rares to enter at appropriate amounts, even if they are dropping x2 and x3 or more… probably something that looks like ~34% commons, ~29% rares, ~25% ultra-rare, ~9.6% epic and ~2.4% legendary (and 0.096% mythic, keeping all other relative ratios the same if available). And thats being generous, they could easily go with worse ratios, because every other key in the game is heavily skewed to the lowest rarity thing it can drop, and this table still has you at least getting your ultra-rares and epics up to mythic at about the same time, single kingdom legendaries with x2 epics/ultra-rare will have the legendaries hit mythic first and even with multi-drops on commons and rares they would be last.
So, again, be careful what you wish for.
Now, uh, back to explore, which relates to traitstones, which relates to orbs, which is at least tangentially related to the original post…
The only thing I could ever see as a possibility happening to explore is regards to the ability to get traitstones quickly a slowdown-by-proxy. This would include putting things into explore with durability totals that you can’t simply take out with the old “cast empowered generator into probable extra turn into damage dealer into win” strategy, thereby overall slowing down overall acquisition rate by forcing you to take in actual teams either every time at least having to scout every time (if you don’t have VIP 3+) and possibly changing your team part of the time. I don’t even expect this to happen at this time based on the information we have now, but it has always been in the back of my mind as something that is a possibility.