My Thoughts After Finishing League

[DiMono]

I just got my 5th ascension, which completes the League event. I also picked up the souls bonus that auto-collects quests and runs the Daily gift claim, so now all I need to do is open the League and close it again every day for the eventual addition of all my potions and 10% of my souls to my main game.

My overall thoughts and feedback

It was fun to go back to how the game behaved at the beginning for a bit, but a full month+ of micromanagement after having moved past that (I'm on A10 in my main game) kind of got old pretty quickly. League play ended up taking rather a lot of time. I'm not sure there's much that can be done about this, it's just an observation.

Random pets with random bonuses was an interesting idea to shake it up, and I think it got me an achievement for catching an endgame pet that I normally wouldn't have gotten yet. However, it leads to some problems, namely an unbalanced menagerie (at one point I had 9 air pets and 2 ground, with none having a reincarnation bonus but two having mining bonuses), and a lack of pet combos since they were found entirely out of order. I think this mechanic could use a bit of a rework.

Now that there are dozens of League rewards all on a single ribbon, it's really inconvenient to drag that ribbon all the way to the left several times in order to see which bonuses remain to be reached. A horizontal scrollbar would be nice.

The A11 Bonus - Keeping Your Previous Ascension's Equipment

I have a serious complaint about the A11 bonus for keeping equipment from your previous ascension. The way it works in League, and I don't know whether it works the same in the main game because I'm not there yet, is that you keep your equipment, but it's level-capped at the highest level equipment you've found so far in the new ascension. The idea behind this is that you don't need to farm equipment any more, because you already have equipment that's suitable for late in the ascension.

The problem is that, in practice, it doesn't work that way. Due to the artificial level cap on your equipment, you actually still do need to farm equipment to raise the cap - you just don't need to worry about swapping it out. So you're not really saving as much time there as it may seem. Further, because there are so many bonuses on your kept equipment for the level to be spread out over, the stats are actually significantly worse than the equipment you're finding. A level 1000 item with 2 bonuses is much better than a level 1000 item with 16 bonuses, even if the 16 bonus item has a bunch of level increases on it.

I would argue that, in order to be useful, this feature needs to be adjusted. Either kept equipment should always be at full power, which is what I would intuitively expect to have happen, or it should have a minimum power of, say, 50%, so that it actually remains useful in the early part of the ascension - which is supposedly the whole point of keeping your equipment in the first place. Because as it currently works, I'm not sure it actually did anything useful for me in my League play.

Closing Thoughts

It was a fun addition, and a nice way to get a pet (which doesn't seem to be used in any combos), but given how much of a time sink it was I'm not sure I'd do it again.

[Silberfuchs]

The A11 bonus works the same way in the maingame.

But the "A level 1000 item with 2 bonuses is much better than a level 1000 item with 16 bonuses, even if the 16 bonus item has a bunch of level increases on it." part is a non issue.

Because if you have 16 stat equip you can skip whole worlds already with your raw stats, you will be rushing earlier worlds real fast. No item farming required, a single item with an higher rating will upgrade your whole set all at once. In short you will be reacheing around 13-15 stat items within minutes, shrinking the difference A LOT.

Even better:
Once you reach ascension levels that keep whole worlds you can just manually change your area after reincarnating to lets say world 3, etc. Those ascension perks work hannd in hand.

PS:
The last patch added the pet promotion system, this opened up a new method to make item farming even easier.

You want two things on your item rating pet team: a pet that is easy to promote (for example area 4-2 Nuts), that pet will reach 10/10 real fast and provide all the item rating on it's own. And one of the early aka easy to have "equipment minimum rarity" combos to basically get a free headscratcher aka more items of the rarity you actually care about.

[adeyke]

That's a good point regarding the pet combos. I'd previously given up on them, since having six times the item rating bonus is more important than saving a bit of time. I don't have six 10/10 pets, though, and only the most-promoted pets matter, so I might as well use those other slots for something productive. It's even possible to have two of those combos simultaneously. The Nuts you mentioned is included in one combo, but there's also room for Nidhogg from 4-1.

[GazimoEnthra]

how are people so fast? i'm still not at the first ascension, started day 1 of league.

[Silberfuchs]

Originally posted by GazimoEnthra:

how are people so fast? i'm still not at the first ascension, started day 1 of league.

No offense, but around half of all players that play league, even those that barely touched it already reached A5. The whole top 1000 of the leaderboard is filled with A5+ players, and we only have a bit over 2k league players.

To be still in A0 you have to be missing one or more of the key gameplay stats. Here are two: equipment found in area 1-9 (and in area 2-7+) comes with the "+reincarnation exp %" stat, wear that stuff when reincarnating; each 100 levels in each class provides a +1 talent point bonus that is kept if you switch to another class.

In regards to talent points you want to aim for as many reincarnation exp nodes as possible (expensive, but good). Reincarnations are best done to either farm a lot of class levels on other classes for a couple of minutes, or to reach around 80% of the level needed to your next ascension, the last 20% can be done in one go. Don't reincarnate without a clear benefit in mind, because the time multiplier resets to zero each time.

[Oninou]

Originally posted by Silberfuchs:

No offense, but around half of all players that play league, even those that barely touched it already reached A5. The whole top 1000 of the leaderboard is filled with A5+ players, and we only have a bit over 2k league players.

More like 15k are in the League leaderboard, but i actually made the final reward (real one, not all the soul up to A5), based on the avg and it was around A2-3 after 20-25 days since it started to be fair with everyone.

Im gathering all the feedback about this 1st League to make change for the next one, but again it was a small thing to give a few reward (and as i dont want to force anyone to do league, starting the next one some of the "exclusive" reward might be in the normal game as well). In 3-6 months i dont have enough time to make League very exclusive with a tons of changes, as working on the normal game already take so much time :( and right now i have a lot of new content / feature / mechanic i want to add before working on the next League.

[DiMono]

Originally posted by Silberfuchs:

The A11 bonus works the same way in the maingame.

But the "A level 1000 item with 2 bonuses is much better than a level 1000 item with 16 bonuses, even if the 16 bonus item has a bunch of level increases on it." part is a non issue.

Because if you have 16 stat equip you can skip whole worlds already with your raw stats, you will be rushing earlier worlds real fast. No item farming required, a single item with an higher rating will upgrade your whole set all at once. In short you will be reacheing around 13-15 stat items within minutes, shrinking the difference A LOT.

Even better:
Once you reach ascension levels that keep whole worlds you can just manually change your area after reincarnating to lets say world 3, etc. Those ascension perks work hannd in hand.

That all sounds great for the main game. Thank you for that. Unfortunately it doesn't really do much for League, which is where the problem is. C'est la vie.

[bayyard]

When is league going to end so we can get our potions/souls?

[Silberfuchs]

Originally posted by bayyard:

When is league going to end so we can get our potions/souls?

In 12 days.

30th July, 4PM UTC.