Rei Ruminates II: Transcendent Thoughts

Super Stats and Tomb Tweaks

Obligatory Legal Notice: As part of the Kabam Creator Program I was given access to a preview build of the update before it went live which is where the below images were taken.

The pictures shown were obtained from an early build, not indicative of the release version, and subject to change.

Rei Ruminates is a series where I post my thoughts and commentary on updates. In this post I’ll be talking about Update 26.7.

Transcendence is here and wow talk about a power creep (more like power leap) to owned blueprints. I covered a couple of examples in the update guide where it can enhance stats or add a new one to a blueprint that had no secondary stat. What I didn’t show though is that for some blueprints it’s a tertiary stat instead, allowing for frankly quite silly things such as this on the Pyroclastic Crown:

Which we can then stick on a Spellknight to see how far we can push it:

No more having to decide what secondary stat you want on some slots we can just have all 3 :D. It’s really cool on things like evasion-based shoes as well:

It does also mean a baseline print can be made more useful by converting them to a dual-stat item. Whilst a paid print would gain more from transcending it wouldn’t be a terrible idea if you’ve not got those prints/perhaps have only baseline starforged.

Alternatively you can transcend LCoG items, stick a second stat on them and use them with Ring of Midas. Fun build options are opening :D.

Whilst I welcome transcendence in terms of any stat boost is going to be good for Terror Tomb I’m concerned with the rate of acquisition. Okay, so to be clear Kabam have said they’re meant to be sparse on launch which I can get onboard with that given the power this feature grants to blueprints.

The flash quest running every 14 days and not monthly is good in that by my count if you clear it on Extreme every time you can transcend (unless luck screws you) a T16 print giving us a baseline of 2 stars per month, not including any you manage to get from Terror Tomb.

My concern is with IAPs. A currency that is meant to be sparse through gameplay can start feeling like a whale currency, more so if they turn out to be priced similarly to Ascension Shards where you can part with $80 and not fully ascend a single T16 print.

The original drop tables for the flash quest weren’t exactly confidence inspiring either:

It was possible for one of the drop tables to give you only a single seal. Below is the original drop table data:

• Drop Table 1 (guaranteed): 31-40 Transcendence Seals
• Drop Table 2: 1-20 Transcendence Seals
• Drop Table 3: 20-25 Ascension Shards
• Drop Table 4: 20-25 Ascension Shards
• Drop Table 5: 80-100 Ascension Shards

Fortunately they were buffed twice following polite feedback to the state I posted in the update guide.

Making seals sparse through gameplay but readily available to anyone willing to spend enough isn’t exactly great optics, and unlike the premium worker who is coming next month it wasn’t advertised on the roadmap as “largely for spenders.”

Personally I would have held off selling the seal packs initially so everyone started from the same position for the first couple of updates and then added the packs later (I mean it’s a given they’d be sold but did it really have to be from day one?)

It’s also a bold choice to put them only in the webstore given that there’s a subset of players who are unable to access it due to being linked to an email that they can no longer access/no longer exists. As it stands they cannot buy seals even if they wanted to.

Moving on to the tomb tweaks now, the lanterns are just straight up busted strong. To show just how strong let’s look at how far I’ve pushed the terror tomb before boredom kicked in on the preview build this time:

They’re fantastic at dealing with the RNG combo floors and help mitigate what progression was lost from the fix to the Tomb-Bound Spirit.

That they are available for gems instead of being a paid thing like cannonballs are (well, at least they can drop in tomb now) is nice given that gems can be earned during gameplay without having to swipe the credit card.

I can understand why you may see this as “you’ve fixed the bug with tomb spirit that let us push deep, made the scaling harder, and now you’re selling us a way to get that progress back.” That’s a legit first impression however I’m not sure there was a better time to introduce lanterns. Waiting until a later update to add them- or not adding them at all – and leaving us doomed to reduced progress each month would have been considerably worse in my opinion.

The drop table tweaks are good. Increasing the chance for table 5 to drop is very welcome, and whilst it is a bit sad I won’t get enough cannonballs to blow a hole in the space-time continuum at least it won’t always be timewarped components when that table rolls.

Only other thing I’d like to comment on is I don’t get why they changed the symbol for Royal Merchant and I’m honestly not a fan of the new one, considering we had a cool crown before and now we got this:

Wasn’t any need to change it, part of me does wonder if it’s so they can use the old symbol for something else (much like how vanity was changed to its current icon so the stars could be recycled for starforged.)

Anyway that wraps up my thoughts on this update, feedback is welcome in the comments or on our discord.