Rei Ruminates: Tomb Troubles

Tragedy in the titan tower depths

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.

I mean I write those disclaimers but 9/10 times the version we’ve seen is the release client that’s going live pixel for pixel, bug for bug ¹, etc etc. My point being the odds of there being drastic overhauls from what you see in any of my posts using preview material are about on par with me finding Narnia.

Rei Ruminates is a new series where I’ll be posting my thoughts and commentary on updates – this allows me to keep the patch guides simpler and just the information for those who want it, and I can use these to call out things I think are awesome or tragic in a patch. In this first post I’ll be talking about Update 26.6².

I’d like to start with discussing what I think it did really well.

Firstly, making the earlier slots cheaper and a lower level to obtain via gold was a really good move. It helps with onboarding newer players and allows them to get some momentum going quicker – given how many tiers and how much content we have now in the game anything to help with the earlier game is a win in my book (the building/worker changes were also a good thing.)

The Lucky Weekend event is amazing, having had a chance to experience it on the preview build it is incredibly fun and I am legit looking forward to having that running every weekend for this update:

A 21 day login calendar is cool as well and hey free stuff is free right? Can’t really complain at that. Well okay you can but it feels a bit weird to do so.

I also think the permanent cost reduction to Evelyn and Roxanne was a great move – Roxanne in my opinion was always priced a bit too high for what she does, like she’s nice but not really $29.99 nice (though I swear it feels like that break reduction does nothing at times.)

And with the stuff I thought was done really well covered, let’s dive into the part which might get me kicked from the creator program :D

Having now seen the difficulty that Terror Tomb provides (if you haven’t read the guide for it you really should before continuing) and the rewards given we find ourselves asking the most important question – is it worth it?

Cards on the table friends and enemies I’m not 100% sold on it. I view it in its current state as more of a novelty thing I’ll probably run a few times before just no longer caring about it at all. A large part of that is due to the drop table but also the artificial difficulty that the tomb has. Let’s address each of those points, starting with the difficulty.

To explain what I mean by artificial difficulty allow me to show as an example what floor 60 rolled during one of the beta builds:

We’ve got the Reaper modifier I called out in the tomb guide along with Ambusher (can’t miss first 3 rounds), Mythical (great bonuses to all stats), Vigorous (has extra HP) and Can Opener (More likely to attack Fighters. Ignores some of their Defence, too.)

The modifiers combined means this boss was packing, not including the stat boost from the curse on that floor:

• +300% Critical Hit Chance
• +250% Critical Hit Damage
• +90% Health
• +30% Damage
• +15% Evasion
• -10 Hero Regen Per Turn
• -10% Hero HP
• -50% Fighter Defence
• Can’t miss for the first 3 turns

Given that straight-up fighting it without attempting to evade wasn’t possible the only way to achieve victory was to pray for an incredibly lucky set of evades and that whenever an evade fail he didn’t manage to crit (the picture in the tomb guide of the hero getting crit for 6.4k was from this guy and that character had 40k def) which whilst yes, I did pull off in the end, it took an incredible amount of tries and luck.

This isn’t the kind of challenge where you can go “okay, clearly need to change a couple of skills and gear pieces” it’s just a big artificial “screw you get lucky or die” and that to me is cheap – it is entirely up to chance with near nothing you can do to actually make a difference.

Once I had got past that floor I basically coasted for a long time, to the point I went past floor 100 and this is after the tomb has been made harder repeatedly cause I was going way way beyond what they expected each beta :P

Now I’m aware that I’m an outlier here – after the latest buffs the next highest (well, lowest I guess) Kabam Creator Program (KCP) member got was floor 22³, and below them a few got stuck at floor 18, and that was a recurring thing over the betas (my deepest being floor 127 in one of them.)

The only floors that felt genuinely threatening was when the tomb was just pairing together cheap modifiers to try and stop a player, like the “I have a high crit chance, I crit for 6.4k regardless of your defence and I cannot miss on my first 3 turns.” Outside of that more or less nothing else was tricky and this is before we get the power boost from the new cards (don’t worry I’ll be covering them later.)

I feel that if the only way your end-game dungeon, something that’s meant to be challenging, is difficult is by having modifier combos which require favourable RNG to pass then the design is flawed. We’re not being challenged by the Tomb’s Curse, just by whether the game has rolled Reaper + something that helps the boss land attacks – either by giving it guaranteed attacks or by stripping evasion. The tomb essentially becomes a slot machine where you pull the lever each floor and hope those symbols don’t come up.

A slot machine though would possibly pay out better loot because on that topic what you saw in the tomb guide is actually the updated/”buffed” loot table and that was a very last minute change (by last minute I mean Friday it was changed kind of last minute.)

I won’t sugar coat it the original loot table for Tomb was, to quote William Butcher, “****ing diabolical.” Like it was incredibly awful, take a look at this prime example:

I originally had planned to not cover Tomb of Titans at all because of that drop table like I wasn’t going to waste the time, energy, or pixels on a feature I had zero intention of doing because why would anyone run that over just doing Meteor Zone or Ancient Jungle or basically anything else. Below is what I had intended to publish had nothing changed:

The one saving grace I would say for the original table was it had the chance to drop 120 ascension shards but that got bug fixed – it could have at least helped offset these other rather ick outcomes.

Fortunately, having indicated repeatedly that going deep into the tombs wasn’t really paying off that has been changed to the pools I showed in the tomb guide (and hopefully might be even better than those after publishing these posts⁴⁵ 🤞.)

If the loot was really awesome I’d sort of be able to understand it from a perspective of “we don’t want you clearing too many floors because we’re giving you tons of good stuff” when it pops up the RNG floors which is a tactic I’ve seen in other mobile titles but I don’t think we’re there yet:

I mean cannonballs are cool, LE tokens if you run short but things like 1 repair kit (given you’ll likely break more than 1 item obtaining said kit) or 20 research scrolls ain’t it given what’s required to go deep (starforged, legendary, luck, etc etc.)

The mirror loot bug is on steroids in the tombs as well, expect to see duplicated loot over floors a lot (for those of you unfamiliar with it, the mirror loot bug is when it dupes the same reward over multiple quests because for some reason it fails to randomise. Great if it lands on a good result, painful if it’s a bad one) :

Basically it needs another shakeup on the loot front and with its current RNG (or lack of when it bugs out) not only do you have to deal with some potential bollocks modifier combos you could as a reward get pretty much nada for pulling off that victory.

At least now we have a good use for starforged gear – without it I think may be a struggle to get really deep so your chances of rolling good loot each month is going to be on the slim side and it is nice that cannonballs are more accessible for DI.

Although, with that being said, there is an argument there in that if you have the heroes capable of clearing deep in the tombs you probably don’t need the cannonballs for clearing DI (and you can easily get too many, to give an example during my latest 1-100 dive after they changed it I looted 61 cannonballs. You need at most 25 for a DI and this stuff is monthly.)

Complaining of course is easy so here’s 2 things I would have done differently. First with regards to the drop table we already have a decent drop table they could have used for the baseline – they could have just taken the drop table for Terror Tower, tweaked the item levels for the drops so it drops T15-T16 and then just scaled it up the deeper you go.

It has a chance for dragonmarks (which tomb doesn’t), can drop shards in a bigger quantity than tomb, could have thrown in some jungle/meteor/pearlescent keys to replace the current ones and away we go. Literally already had a base that would have been so much better than what we were originally getting and with some simple tweaks would be better than what we ended up with.

And secondly I’d have added a reward track like all the other events have. Maybe set it to every 3 floors like the tower or 5 floors if they wanted to space it out more, either way this would guarantee you’ll get some rewards for your time/effort spent in there if the RNG is against you. Opting to go without one is a bold move which I don’t think will work out without substantial improvements to the loot table.

Moving on now to the cards – 21 new collection cards for a new mechanism to buff your heroes to silly degrees, as well as potentially making it much harder to get the very useful cards such as Owen for the extra furniture slots. If we look now at the current chase card odds vs the new chase card odds:

So the chance to draw a chase card has gone up (which is good) but the chance of it being one of the original ones, which are quite strong (extra furniture slots, max energy, etc) has gone down. I don’t understand how the **** Chronomancer ended up in the chase card pool, it’s like they went “T7 classes are the most expensive so they should be in there” just completely ignoring that Chronomancers aren’t fantastic (to be clear all classes are viable for endgame, they’re just not winning gold medals for best hero class.)

I don’t think any of the hero cards should have been added to the chase pool – they should all have been classed as normal cards and not messed with the odds there. If there had to be hero classes in the chase pool would it not have made more sense for it to be the powerhouse classes such as Geomancer, given they’ll be even more busted with these cards?

These stat boosts, being a new multiplier, are not exactly insignificant either. A rank 3 card for a hero class is a major jump in stats if you’re packing high quality gear as well, like the rich get richer is turned up to 11 for this set of cards.

Selling a new way to power boost your heroes whilst also in the same update releasing an infinite dungeon also feels in really poor taste, like “hey we tuned this to be hard for you but you can buy a boost so it’s all cool right.” The optics alone should have ensured these cards didn’t launch at the same time as the tombs that we’ve been waiting over a year for.

I will admit I’m looking forward to them for some of my heroes if only because it’s going to provide some ridiculous numbers for having fun with but I’d have also been equally fine (if not better than) if they had just not added anything else to the card system given how ick it is. Fortunately I still have a load of packs saved from when they screwed up and made it so you could infinitely fuse them.

I also think they should have made it so when you max a card it gets removed from the pool, instead of this shard/dupe system, that would have been so much better than this system we ended up with. Or not have allowed packs to be opened with gems, meaning everyone at least was on a level playing field when it came to card acquisition and getting screwed by luck.

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

1. see: Stardust bin for example
2. I did like the change to updates being year.month, much easier to remember
3. hi Vuaux!
4. got my notebook ready for Aslan’s autograph
5. well, paw print