Maybe they heard that people “want a new challenge” and decided to go super literal?
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Something extra to do/level up sounds ok to me.
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You’re looking a small snippet of something larger. There’s a reason for the Challenge revamp, as it’s part of something else. I will go out a bit on a limb and say that the Challenge revamp is NOT endgame content, even at higher Tiers of difficulty. Set your expectations on rewards with that in mind, and knowing that there 34(ish?)Overworld kingdoms for Challenges to take place in.
I’ll leave the “why” this is the case to the reveal tomorrow, where Nimhain and Sirrian will reveal the larger picture more clearly. Also, going to defer conjecture about why Challenges before other older systems, in favor of the devs giving a more credible roadmap about future update than me putting my shiny tinfoil hat on and prognosticating on the matter.
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Bleh. Challenges are tedious and unrewarding. I don’t want to have to finish them all twice to meet some larger goal. Especially if the larger goal is tuned for midgame.
Can there be an optional “it unlocks if you idle on the map screen for 800 hours” instead? It’s what, 33 kingoms * ~6 challenges with ~5 difficulties = 990 matches. I’m getting trophies, right? And ingots and Champion XP? Will there at least be a “Next” button instead of fumbling with a clunky UI in between each of the 1,000 matches?
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990 matches… oh no. I don’t want this.
Well based off the ss you get gem keys and event keys so seems worth the time.
But I had to do something other than the thing I wanted to do so it balances out.
Seriously, 99% of the time all I want to do in GoW is play PvP. I don’t want to have to feel like I need to budget that time. When I’m bored with “play PvP” I play another game or a different mode, but that’s almost never the case.
GoW’s fast-approaching the state where when I think of opening it to grind out a few matches I instead think, “Oh, but wait, I should do that other mode or I’ll miss rewards…” but I don’t want to do that other mode so I don’t open it at all.
Isn’t it 34 * 7 * 10 = 2380 matches, 2142 matches for all those who already cleared the current challenges? 
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Seems like it, I wasn’t sure when I did my initial estimate exactly how many groups of challenges each kingdom had.
Are there 3 tiers, though? Why the 10 on the end instead of 5?
Also wasn’t this patch supposed to be “endgamer focused”? Kingdom stuff sure, but the only other feature I know (weekend pet rescue) takes pets away from endgamers to give 1 to less active players. Can we get more give and less take?
I’m going to assume Sirrian said something on the stream about how each challenge would now have ten tiers (I know he said that players would get credit for the first tier if they’d already five-starred a challenge). That’s a weird number to expect you to have known otherwise.
And the end-game focused stuff in 4.5 is kingdom levels >10, associated bonuses, and their effects on scaling content. Plus anything else I didn’t know about.
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As far as I understood the recap you are no longer able to select the difficulty, so it’s now a set of 7 challenges for each kingdom. However, you are able to play that set 10 times for increasing rewards and opponent level, sort of like levels increase with each class event tier. The current 7 * 5 challenges for each kingdom have been replaced with the first tier, so if you already completed those you start with the second (of 10) tiers.
Aha, OK.
I’m grouchy about the sound of it, but not for any constructive reasons. Lately I just want to log in and grind PvP so I’m grouchy about anything that interrupts that haha.
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Setting aside the dev streams yesterday and today, here’s what’s going on in Taran’s World from August 8th and 14th:
Troops:
- Aquaticus’ damage has been buffed quite a bit, to Magic + 8 instead of Magic + 3. With 8 base damage, 10 Magic, and 12 magic from kingdom bonuses, we get 30 splash damage to 3 enemies, up from 25. This results in a total of 90 damage if there is only one target, with a maximum output of (30 + 15) = 135. This is what I hope for in Mythics! Her damage output is now approximately equal to Infernus’ damage output, and with the Explosion attached, this should be a very potent troop now! I’m hoping for it to come out around A-Tier once things settle out.
- The Mirrored Halls troops are Copycat, Doppelganger, Glass Golem
- Dullahan’s spell is revealed; Deal (Magic + 4 + 5 x Ally Deaths + 5 x Enemy Deaths), then have a 50/50 chance to deal lethal damage to the first enemy or the first ally. High risk, high reward, sounds interesting! Wonder if people are just going to try to rush into an early cast with Empowered or go for a summoning strategy with Arachnaean Weaver or Queen Xochi. He summons a troop when an enemy dies, too.
- Droggo (one of the Bounty troops I was looking forward to) now no longer refills itself, and is instead Red/Brown, the most oversaturated color combination out of all the Bounty troops. Frustrating and sad. At least keep the Green, that color is underrepresented in Bounty.
- Gor’Thrum seems like a decent exploder, although it isn’t a guaranteed ability. I’d like to see it gain a guaranteed base explosion, even if it was only 2 Gems or something.
- Gruz the Undefeated got Infernal Armor replaced with Human Slayer. It was a confusing change until I realized it also has the Armored trait, which reduces the Skull damage it takes and thus reflects.
- Upcoming Mythic Tree Wraith has been renamed to King Bloodwood.
- Lamashtu has the flavor text “In the Ancient Daemonic tongue, her name means “Llamas Hate You”.” I wish they still did lore so they’d have to explain this, did she get spit on as a child?
- Mech Gnome has traits and a spell now, but still no art. Might get added in the next update (that’d be nice).
- Moira Cragheart has the flavor text “She’s from the mines of Moria.” Come on, you can do better than that! Her name is literally “More of ya’”, you’ve gotta have a pun here!
- Moonsinger FINALLY adds an Empowered Converter that creates Green gems. Should be a big boost for Doomed Glaive, The Wild Queen, and Yasmine’s Chosen
- Street Thief has been… rebalanced? She now creates up to 16 Gems, but needs to steal 30 gold in order to do it. Should make the Faction battles interesting.
- Stringfiddler: Silence an Enemy. Explode [Magic + 1] Gems of one of their Mana Colors. Gain an Extra Turn. Start battle with a Leafstorm. Prenerf Fizzbang with targeted silence, and only needs to loop 4 times to cripple the enemy team? When will you learn - YouTube
- The Zaejin Godslayer that week either explodes gems or enchants allies on cast. Excellent troop, quite useful.
- The Gray King: Blue/Purple/Brown mythic, Destroy all Gems of a chosen Color. All Enemies of that Color take [Magic + 3] true damage, and are Mana drained, Silenced, and Frozen. All Undead Allies gain 1 Armor and Magic when matching 4 or more Gems. Hope they don’t balance this one any further, it seems like it’s right in that sweet spot where it’s fun and useful while not being overly broken!
- Tomb Robber now creates up to 14 Skulls on cast, with only 40 Gold needed to do it.
- Vlad the Unsated steals life boosted by Life. Cool.
- Volthrenax deals AoE damage with a boost ratio on yellow gems exploded. Seems like one of those great-in-early-game troops!
Weapons:
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New weapons: Forest Crown, Merfolk Shield, Pridelands Mace, Urska Axe, Wildfolk Glavie. Internal-sounding names, spell effects and affixes unknown, all probably “create a mix” weapons.
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A Mist of Scales weapon that creates a mix.
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All the Codex Doomed Weapons got changed! They all "Deal [Magic + 10] scatter damage, +4 per Tempering level. Create a mix of 6 and Skulls for every Enemy. Give 3 Magic to all Allies, if the Enemy has a Doom, give 5 more. [6x] " Seems very good on Guild War Defense and Tower of Doom offense (equivalent to a Mythic when there are 4 matching enemies, and far surpassing that in ToD), pretty sucky otherwise. All of them have the offensive Mana Drain trait btw.
Classes:
- The Invoker is now the Diabolist! It has a Scythe that deals AoE damage, then Curses and Burns all enemies! Pretty cool utility weapon. Its unique trait has a 25% chance to summon a Hellhound when an ally casts. Seems pretty lame though, bad talent trees and no 50% start.
Kingdoms
- Wild Court has a ++Green, +Red, -Blue banner. Finally, a Green/Red banner, perfect for Skeleton Key/Egg Thief!
Summary:
To conclude, we have a couple useful Mythics in the future, a quirky troop that can deal lethal damage to an enemy, “What if we took pre-nerf Fizzbang and made it even more broken?”, and some interesting City of Thieves troops.
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Really? Hyndla can give Giant Allies +2 Life and +2 Magic on 4/5 Gem matches. Is that 3rd trait fine for you?
I’ve always felt Undead legends and mythics tend to get the worst 3rd traits for unknown reasons.
In unrelated news, I happen to like the new Aquaticus change. Would love to try it with Corsair + Blue Storm for some rapid casting…
And Essence of Evil. One of its biggest weakness is an unreliable start.
Um… when I said a guaranteed exploder with guaranteed extra turn might not even be that broken it today’s meta, I didn’t mean to also add targetable silence to it. And a starting storm for a color it uses and is able to explode. And a significantly lower mana cost of other similar exploders. I mean, theres counterplay to silence… but it is generally not really fun. In contrast with the current Mana Drain counters vs the mana drain tools, where you don’t need every relevant component of your team to be immune to effectively counter one troop, Silence has very few ways to cleanse Silence that are also not subject to the effects of Silence, and those that are are generally not very good. At least, none of them are even close to on par with a troop that “just” extra turns and mass explodes, let alone has other effects.
Also, I’m not a fan of the proliferation of troop traits that can create storms when a battle starts. One of the hero’s better tools was the ability to enter the battle with the storm of your choice… unless you are facing another hero, in which case they get the storm. But having them on a bunch of troops means any random PvE battle can have a troop that invalidates this tool.
Man, with the knowledge that once all the kingdoms are covered with a class there won’t be anymore classes, its really sad to see stuff like this get added for the extremely limited class slots that really really need to be timeless, especially this late in the process.
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Anyone have thoughts on King Bloodwood?
Seems like an unstoppable monster in low level fights (64 boost damage + 10 true dmg aoe (life steal)) before magic is taken into account), but I don’t know how it translates to high level gameplay.
It kinda depends on the 3rd trait too, I’d imagine.
i assume it’s in the infernus family and thus all bleed on match 4 for 3rd trait.
Kinda feels like they’re just changing the text files every now and then to get some early feedback on ideas 
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If it did that, that would be powerful. I’m interested lol.
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Any topic with screenshots from live?