Some more good troops coming the next few weeks, nice to see the devs step it up a bit to close out the year. Idle covered the basics (here and here), so just a few more thoughts:
Baphomet - I’m not quite as high on him as others in the thread. Like Wrath, he’s a high-risk first slot troop, except he doesn’t control the board like Wrath, meaning he needs better board control behind him. He takes purple and has no path to 50% mana start, so he effectively blocks Reflection of Good, one of the best options to protect glass cannons (of course, Monk class mitigates this to an extent). Fantastic spell though, and that third trait guarantees a Webspinner-type role for him if nothing else. I’m not saying he won’t have effective setups (and he’ll be a terror on defense), but I also don’t see him as being a top-tier Legendary either.
Herald of Damnation - brown empowered troop? yes please
Night Spider - looks like an awesome troop for board control on rogue teams, one of the more underdeveloped typings in the game. Look forward to the Corsair teams it will enable.
Its a very flexible Legendary. It can do double damage to 3 enemies, like Pan without the 3rd trait (which is very high damage), or act as an alternate to Fireblade, which anyone who uses Sunspear is familiar with not protecting the first slot and still making it work. That frees up the hero slot to do anything else, including being a Frostmage or a Monk getting free mana with 4/5 matches. That alone is worth its weight in gold.
I never use Reflection of Good for anything.
Its definitely top tier (in my opinion) if you have access to Infernus.
So this doesn’t get lost if my thread gets removed.
The 5.3 update was pushed out on Amazon Kindle devices and below are the notes on the Amazon App page
What’s new in this version
NEW RECRUITS, MORE GOLD AND PRESENTS, FA-LA-LA-LA-LA…
WHAT’S NEW:
WARBANDS, ASSEMBLE! - Warbands are powerful premade teams ready to be recruited and taken into battle. Gather War Coins to acquire and upgrade them.
YOUR VAULTS WILL GLIMMER WITH GOLD… AND CHAOS - Shrines are a new way to earn extra resources: they will fill up with Gold or other earnings from each of your battles. Once half full, they will open up for you to purchase accumulated gold up to a maximum, plus a bonus reward.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! - The season of joy invades Krystara! Log in daily for free rewards, holiday-themed challenges and Season Offers during our event later in December.
Improvements in new user experience, VIP chests, the Arena, and various bug fixes round up this update. For more details, please visit Patch Notes – Gems of War
This to me reads like a piggy bank I know from another game. For everything you earn, a portion of the earnings (on top of what you earned) are added to the piggy bank and at some point, you can “open the piggy bank” with premium currency and collect what was accumulated.
Could be useful for early game when you still need ALL the souls. Depending on the price they come with of course.
I was thinking the same. A player could buy out the shrine early and gets rewarded with a bonus for doing so as an incentive/sweetener, versus waiting the shrine to naturally fill up which would yield whatever the normal reward is.
Not really that unexpected, given past offer trends.
The daily deal system handles gems → resource transactions.
From the other thread about the update, the initial offers being given by the shrine are requiring cash to buy out early. With sweetener, it looks like that this is another variation of a flash offer, which require are cash-only purchases outside of the last-day advent calendar freebies.
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but it appears that January does not have a mythic scheduled for release on the first Friday. Although, first Friday does fall on Jan 1st, so maybe that’s the reason?
From blue: Moon Rabbit, First Mate Axelubber, Herald of Damnation (3)
From green: Gimlet Stormbrew, Grave Seer, Scurvy (3)
From purple: Mercy, Moonsinger (2)
From yellow: Drowned Sailor, Lamashtu (2)
From red: Daughter of Ice (1)
From brown: Tai Pan, Child of Summer (2)
