11/27/19 Patch Notes Walkthrough - Equipment Conversion and World Boss Edition

Happy pre-turkey day for those of you that celebrate it!

This week’s patch brings some new content, though the implementation of it leaves me Faithless that Smilegate knows how to give players things worth Thanksgiving. More on that later when I do my ‘State-of-the-Game’ synopsis.

You can bet that I ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ when Smilegate announces new stuff, due to their shoddy (or downright stingy) implementation.

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Equipment conversion is finally here! ….annnnnnd it’s gated behind yet another new currency that uses 15 Silver Transmit Stones - bad news for everyone who’s running low on the things and not doing a copious number of pulls. Even worse, the guarantee is gated behind, you guessed it! ...another random drop box, one of which may randomly drop from the random World Boss reward drops.

“Yo dawg, we heard you hated RNG, so we put these RNG boxes in your boxes so you can RNG while you RNG” - what it feels like.

“Surprise Mechanics! Hurray!” screamed nobody ever.

And of course, like everything else in the Alchemist’s Steeple, the ‘Guaranteed’ equipment craft also costs gold and other gear to make a single piece of gear. 

This all makes sense if you’re willing to invest for better chances, but it also ends up being unhelpful for those who were saving all their flat-stat gear for this long-anticipated update. The process of farming gear produces a lot of excess equipment, so paying gold to salvage it all becomes difficult to impossible. For most of us, selling gear remains the best option.

Lastly, you still run a high chance of rolling flat subs and/or low rolls.

World Boss Mode was finally added, but in a manner that makes me choke a bit inside. We didn’t get anything really new, though - the mode doesn’t encourage innovation, further enlarges the gold sink  black hole, and worst of all, the rewards are… not great for the trouble.

Here’s the rundown:

• World boss mode is automatically played (our first genuinely auto content) - therefore, Heroes that require Soulburn or manual management are unfit for this mode

• It heavily incentivizes/requires you to use the “BONUS” hero formations and to gear them accordingly

• You need a minimum of twenty-four geared heroes (likely many more to meet formation requirements) to do any appreciable contribution - while you can get by with 8, that gives you only the bare minimum reward, and you can’t use the same hero in the next run unless you have a duplicate

• The boss is null-elemental, but you are highly encouraged to use the matching elemental bonus on each day, following a weekly rotation

• Guilds are ranked, but it doesn’t appear that you get anything but a sense of personal accomplishment and satisfaction as a result

• You get rewards based on your damage dealt and other factors that scale from your team bonuses - unfortunately, the rewards are terrible.

The new Arena season brings with it the standard reward reset. In addition, it brings new Arena gear… from the Hit Set.

REAL TALK, SG.

We get that you want to introduce a rotating set for the Arena season, but the season reward could be LITERALLY ANY OTHER SET (yes, even you EFFR) and people would probably be happier.

To add insult to injury, the set pieces all have the standard EFFR substat roll potential.

Probably the only bonus out of this is that many of the pieces can be used as a broken set piece IF you roll well. The Ring is especially OK for some tanks.

Overall, though, the set is rather disappointing and I would suggest buying and rolling the previous season’s sets first.

Ah, practically the only ray of sunshine for me this patch. As she is gated behind mystic summons, this is not applicable to 99% of the player population.

Faithless Lidica arrives with her whipsword to maybe change up the current Arena meta (unlikely).

She’s got quite a few tools in her arsenal, and I’ve listed some of her selling points below:

Pros:

• High ATK and decent scaling on everything except S2

• S2 is a 100% self-CR boost with 1-buff strip that chains directly into S3, allowing her to boost and neuter one enemy Hero.

• In addition, it is an unconditional LARGE CR boost for the team, unlike say, Baiken or Schuri, who require crits.

• S2 cannot trigger enemy counterattacks - no Elbris, no counterattack set, etc. (but ostensibly procs SS Bellona’s Focus bar increase/extra attack due to her ‘counter’ not being an actual counterattack). Significant against ML Ken.

• High base Speed of 114

• Full enemy CD reset on S3

• Cycles herself FAST. Larkspur (S2) has a 3-turn cooldown when used on a full enemy team. This also shortens the cooldown of all S3’s after the first cast, making her a very strong controller, just like normal Lidica

Cons:

• S2’s damage is worsened by its .7X ATK scaling

• S2’s strip occurs AFTER her damage is dealt. She needs to be significantly heavy on the ATK/CritD to break F. Ceci shield and then remove Debuff Immunity

• This in turn makes her EXTREMELY stat hungry - she needs high Speed to go first, high damage to break shields, and some modicum of EFF% to strip away enemy debuff immunity

• S1 is rather weak - Blind is a nice debuff, but it only lasts 1 turn at max and the attack itself only has 1X ATK scaling. Lasting 1 turn has the unenviable downside of being useless against Extra Turn takers

• S3 CD without the self-turn push (on single targets) has a long CD of 5 turns with max investment

Lidica has the potential to make a splash in Arena, but she is neither the fastest nor the strongest Hero. She can be outsped by CR pushes, doesn’t hit that hard on her own (especially when built for Speed/EFF) and requires potent follow-up from her team, landing her solidly in cleave teams, somewhere.

She is also unique because of her S3, which can fully reset boss cooldowns - previously, this title belonged to only regular Kise. Now ML Lidica has come along and taken that job from her.

Let’s hope that regular Kise gets the promised buff soon™.

You can see our thoughts on summoning for Ravi and Sigurd Scythe at the link here (will be updated once complete).

Smilegate didn’t seem to learn overly much from the last time that Huche’s Shop was implemented, and it seems like this is their idea of a good Black Friday Sale.

Hint: It’s not

Here’s a quick rundown of the shop itself and why it’s bad:

After the pets system update, my mantra has been to expect nothing and see where it goes. Epic Seven is a fun game and worth playing, regardless of what new content comes out. But it is disappointing to be promised new content and get features that are best ignored, or otherwise don’t add to the gameplay experience at all. A lot of these updates fall under that category, and fail to solve the problems they were meant for. In that regard, I feel like some other solutions would have been more effective:

Mere words can’t express the frustration I feel with how Smilegate has decided to handle implementation of their ‘new’ features. Don’t get me wrong, though. I absolutely still love the game and want to see it last a long time. Criticism hurts because it provides perspective on your flaws and how you can improve.

Other Notes

• Changing gear should always be free (or at least free on WB days). The flexibility of free unequip events allows more experimenting in PvE, which is one of the most fun and intrinsically rewarding parts of the game.

• Overall, the Alchemist’s Steeple costs too much to be useful to anyone as anything but a last resort.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

We hope you join us for the next week’s patch notes. Hopefully Smilegate reads some of the feedback from the community and we have better news for you then!

In the meantime, please feel free to leave us some comments (we've enabled a new comment feature for this part of the website!) \o/

How do you feel the game is going? What direction do you see it headed in?

We look forward to hearing from you and we'll see you next week!