Below is a sneak peak at a new feature, Ascendant Gear, which was discussed in @LaikaDream’s Stream. Ascendant Gear is the next evolution of craftable gear within War Dragons and it will further allow players to customize their gear kit before heading into battle.
Like basic craftable Gear, Ascendant Gear is crafted in the Forge. However, while the results of Basic Gear crafting are an unknown rarity, the results of Ascendant Gear are unknown substats. Ascendant Gear crafting will always result in gear of the same rarity, which grows to be even more powerful than Elite gear.
To provide runway to obtain feedback and introduce our community to the new Ascendant Gear, we have decided to give everyone an opportunity to craft Ascendant Boots ahead of our full release! Ascendant Boots will available on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. Afterwards, we will fully launch Ascendant Gear across all gear types. To help facilitate this introduction of Ascendant Gear, we will be gifting every player Ascendant Gear currencies! Be sure to check the store for your gift on Wednesday, March 8!
To access Ascendant Gear, follow the following steps:
Go to the Forge
Tap into the Gear tab
Tap into a Gear set, select the boot
Click the “Ascendant” tab on top, then craft
What’s new?
New max level of 12!
All crafted gear is of the same rarity (rarity is not random)
New buffs unique to Ascendant Gear
Each piece of Ascendant Gear comes with 4 bonus stats (aka “substats”)
One substat grows in value every 3 levels
Introduces two new types of Ascendant Gear currencies, Crafting Gemstones and Crafting Tomes. We will provide ways for Crafting Shards to be exchanged for Crafting Gemstones in a limited time branch.
Additional detail:
Each piece of gear will have 4 substats that are randomly selected from a pool of substats when initially crafted. The pool differs by gear piece (e.g., Boots might have different available substats than Helms).
Each substat will also have randomly assigned values upon crafting within a band. We have designed the band so there is differentiation, but the band will not be too wide.
At levels 3, 6, 9, and 12, one substat will be randomly selected to be increased (along with base stats, similar to Basic Gear).
1 Crafting Gemstone can be obtained by exchanging 1100 Crafting Shards (note that costs will be reduced to reflect the order of magnitude change in value).
Will crafting gemstones and tombs be added to the atlas training camp event for points?
It only mentions exchanging crafting shards for gemstones, will we not be able to exchange crafting scrolls for tombs?
What will be the max stats for the boosts at level 12? During the stream it was said that at lvl 10 it would be comparable to Elite gear but in game and in the stream images it was showing that maxed at the attack/hp was 1% higher than Mythic/Exotic gear
What will the max stat range for each of the skills be? like how much would the rage regen skill increase each time it was upgraded?
Will gemstones and tombs be added to atlas chests and/or atlas seasonal lines? Will they be added to the Spell/Champion rider line or will we just have to exchange the crafting shards from there for the new currency?
In the stream it was mentioned that the likely hood of getting any specific substat would be the same for every skill, is this still true? IE Im just as likely to get Rage Regen or Dragon attack as I am to get damage reduction or dragon xp?
What exactly is the Increased Healing skill? Is that any time the dragon would heal in battle (spells or exotic sword healing) or is that how fast it recovers after a battle without the use of a healing potion?
What is the Damage Reduction skill? Is that reducing the amount of damage the dragon takes or the dragon deals in battle?
Ok so if Im understanding this properly the substats only increase at those levels and only 1 will be. So there’s no way of actually knowing what the final stats of your piece of gear will be after crafting it? Will it be an equal chance of each subskill or are we more likely to have an undesirable skill like Dragon XP increased 4 times while the other 3 skills dont get leveled at all?
So, cost to level a full piece of gear is 1863 primary gemstones and 1317 secondary. That means it costs 3.5m crafting shards and 115 hours, and a full set of gear will cost 28m shards. This is a staggering cost even for the players with the most resources. Were you planning to increase crafting shard supply? (By 2-5x?)
Now we come to the substats. Mixing random stats with high variance in desirability is an inherently problematic part of the design, which can be overcome if and only if the cost of rerolling is low. You’ve set astronomically high costs, so that will not be possible. So projecting this forward, with similar stats for a set, some players will be walking around with +32% attack (or +56% HP) on their dragons, and some will be walking around with the entirely worthless XP buffs. Randomly rewarding and punishing players in the population seems likely to cause an unhappy player base to disengage entirely. If a player works all season to get +12% XP, do you think they’ll stay around for another season? The inherently unfairness of random, permanent, significant rewards that you can’t meaningfully retry is something that will irritate almost everyone.
As a last, exacerbating factor, the existence of differences created in this manner (viz., players who randomly just have significantly higher stats than less lucky players) will make it a lot easier for the speculated-substantial cheating population to avoid detection. Was that Amaruhk hacked to be able to run over a defended maxed base of 157s? Or was he just Calvinistically selected by the RNG God to be rewarded above the rest of us mortals? I guess, going forward, we’ll have no way of knowing.
Edit: Miscalculated the amount of time, updated it. Amount of shards seems correct.
This really is a terrible design, 3 levels of randomness with zero control, and you have to spend 28m shards for the third one to know if you’re lucky or not.
At the very least don’t do the last one; don’t randomly select a stat but just increase each stat once so you’ll have a decent idea what you’ll get before sinking a ton of shards into upgrading.
Maybe you’ll respond to quantity of posts and not quality but the level of randomness coupled with high costs do not make this sounds like a recipe for frustration…
It seems like they are trying to standardize gear in war dragons to be similar to other games I am aware of… The problem not enough available substats for a reasonable pool. So instead they have increased the cost to cover that discrepancy.
Guess I’m going to hop on the no more spend train. I’ve dumped a lot of money into this game since I started playing last year on my accounts.
Your points here are enough for me to see these types of “enhancements” are thoughtless to the community who seems to already be exhausted from the constant open backhanded slaps to the face on these rollouts.
I’ll be unbinding my cards after this post…carry on.
