Yo guys,
Az here once again and today we are talking about some of the new features that came with the late August patch.
Let's get to it.
So, it's been a little while since I made a post.
Plainly, because I wasn't really feeling any hype or excitement to do so.
But the new update looked kind of promising.
So the last two days I have spent checking them out and trying to form an opinion.
I didn't want to deny anything, just because it might look bad at first glance and also don't hype anything up, which looked amazing.
Today I want to talk about 3 main topics.
Dye system
Awakening system
Signature force
I will also lightly brush over the new Mana system, the removed Break system, and touch base with some older systems like Scout or Unleash Potential.
Dye System
Let's start with the Dye system
We all kinda knew before, that this would be a cash grab. Changing your hero's appearance has no impact on your gameplay whatsoever, so they have a feature they can heavily monetize.
And boy did they monetize.
For anybody who doesn't know how it works, here a small explanation.
When you are in town, you have the option to go to the "Tereia Dye Station".
Once open you will be greeted with a simple looking UI.
You can lock or unlock slots and reset them.
There is also a preview button.
It says at several points that "Unlocked slots will get a random color".
You tap on Dye and your slots are filled with a random color.
So that's the system.
However, when I came in I was kind of baffled.
I saw the preview, clicked on it, and selected the color combination I liked.
This seems really cool, but you can't select the colors in any way. You can't lock them, select them as favorite or anything.
So now I'm tapping on all the things and nothing happened.
I thought I did something wrong, so I check the help out, where I missed the part about random colors once again.
Now that might just be the case of impatience and stupidity.
When I finally tapped on Dye, it worked.
As the system describes multiple times, the colors are truly completely random. You have no influence whatsoever.
Resetting a slot cost you another token and you start from the beginning.
If you lock slots, it costs more tokens to reroll the remaining slots, if you didn't know.
The preview button is kind of a trap.
While you can see the options, it kind of doesn't matter.
There are close to 40 "different" colors, or should I say shades, which are selected randomly. If you are lucky, you get good looking one right off the bat, but most likely you will end up with a brown tone, that looks ugly.
Now to add insult to injury, you can get similar brown tones in a row and they could even hop between each other.
Each of those tokens is 20 Xes and most likely you'll have to run it 100 times before you get the desired result.
In the end, we knew that, but it still feels like a bad implementation of a feature that could be awesome.
Adding RNG to literally everything is frustrating and not fun.
Verdict: Many grab extraordinaire.
Awakening sytem
Now to the awakening system.
I will say this right from the start. The feature in itself is not a money grab, however, the implementation is. Let me tell you why.
The feature allows your 6-star, 5 times enhanced heroes to be awakened.
This will use 2 Holy Waters and all their equipment slots as material. The weapon isn't counted towards this.
The set bonuses of your equipment, including your Heroes Guardian stone, will determine, which stats get further enhancement.
Now this sounds great in theory and once done you see a huge spike in Damage, Health, Defense, etc.
However, your stats like Critical Hit, Crit Damage, and so on, are all lost.
This would usually not be a problem if all slots were open and you could at least equip Rare R1 gear.
But for whatever reason, the devs decided it would be great to release this gear in stages.
At the time of writing, only Helmet and Chest slots were unlocked.
And here we come to the trap. For an attacker, you lose all the main important stats like Critical Hit, Crit Damage, Hit Chance, and Speed.
You won't have the ability to increase these stats by any means, simply because there is no gear available. So if you have done it, you are now sitting on a useless unit.
And even for Defenders or Supports, where it might look awesome, because you have two slots available.
Not having set bonuses like Block or gaining the remaining stats from the other gear slots makes your unit unusable.
Let me do some math to drive this home.
We take FC Garff at level 85 as an example.
He usually would rock a full blue set for the additional block or a red set for the reduced damage.
Using anything but a red set to Awaken seems like a waste, so we will use that.
From the set, you will gain 5000HP and the Awakening by itself gives you 1600HP.
This looks really nice, but don't forget that you will lose the set bonus of 1200HP.
Effectively we gain 5400HP.
Now your FC Garff sits at around 13500HP and with Command mark it brings him close to 16000HP.
However, all block got lost and he lost at least 5% of Block Defense Rate as well.
His new defense COULD be at 3000 if you have the 2 R1 pieces at 60.
Until you get your block back to 800, you will sit right around 250-300 Block.
And that is a huge defense loss.
Block reduced the damage you take by 70%, and that will also be mitigated by Defense.
If you suddenly only block 30% of the time, the additional HP won't matter much.
By the way, 3000 defense is roughly 35% mitigation.
Without a block, the maximum Damage you will be able to take is 21600 damage.
Now let's say you block with your old value of 8200HP
You also gain 20% from Command, so for simplicity, we push the number to 10000HP.
Block mitigation on the same hit of 21600 damage will result in
21600 * 0.67 * 0.32 = 4631 Damage.
By this math, your newly awakened unit, which now only blocks 3 out of 10 times dies 7 times. Not a great trade-off, if you ask me.
Now, where is the money grab?
And this might catch you by surprise. You can unawaken your unit. Of course, all materials are lost.
If you release an unfinished feature, people want to revert. And it always costs 500 Xes.
In a finished state, I could see that people would revert, if they really want the bonuses from sets, but aren't R1 pieces also supposed to have guardian stones?
So technically there shouldn't ever be a reason to revert like it is with Blessing, but somehow it made it into the game unfinished and over-hyped.
Verdict: That's why I think it's an attempted money grab, where it prays on the impatience and simplicity of people.
Signature Force
The last one is Signature force and this should be an easy one.
You need copies of Generals to unlock this feature.
There are 6 areas, with 3 unlocked right now.
Not only are Generals super rare, but they also need to be at least Transcended once.
At the minimum, you need to have 2 of the same Generals to unlock this feature.
And from there on it costs you more, if you want to progress.
It's an additional 2 for Level 2 and for Level 3 and 4, you will need 4 Generals each.
This totals to 16 copies of the same General.
To be frank, I haven't even gotten 16 of any of the other fated units. Even for some Legendaries, I haven't had more than 2 copies.
This should make it clear, that this is a pure money grab.
Mana gain system, Break System removal, Scout system, Unleash Potential
And with that, we already come to the last pieces.
I think the new Mana gain system is great. It allows for more diversity, simply because some units were dismissed due to their weak mana gain. This opens doors.
The removal of the Break system is sad. It was what made Exos unique. Now it goes more in line with other games.
I wouldn't be too sad about that, however, there isn't a direct replacement.
Signature force takes TOO much investment to be even considered a replacement.
Basically we lost an amazing feature. Period.
When the scouting system was introduced, I thought it was nice to have a deterministic way of generating A general. As in 1 General.
Of course, it would take long, maybe 5-6 months with a good investment, but it presented an option.
Unfortunately, now that it's clear that we need more than 20 copies of a certain General to fully unlock them, that puts a new perspective on things.
Lastly, we have Unleash potential.
It opened the door for some Legendaries or even Rares to perform at the Fated level.
But in all honesty, most of the time it's not worth it.
As soon as a fated Character comes out they are Boosted to Fated level and get a bonus.
This makes it a risky choice to unleash any given Hero.
The investment is also extremely high for a Legendary hero, taking around 2 months' worth of resources.
All these features had great potential. They could be what lifts the game into another stratosphere in the gacha genre. However sloppy implementation and lack of customer knowledge made these features seem like a slap in the face.
The majority of players who play this game are free to play or low spenders, like in any gacha game.
And these features clearly tell them to step aside.
No reasonable amount of playtime, given the limited entries and resources we can use will allow them to participate.
Even me, who spend a good amount in this game, won't touch the majority of those features in the next couple weeks or even months.
I understand that the game has been out in Korea for 8 months before we got our release. The sad truth however is, that 8 months of playtime can't be easily caught up to.
We are lacking the content as well as the resources for any of those features.
And while you might say, "Well, then don't use them", the question remains. Are they too early and potential money grab?
Let me know in the comments what you think.
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As always, it was a pleasure to have you here and I will see you in the next one.
Until then, enjoy the Grind.
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