Update 13.0 Overview

Your guide to the gameplay changes in 13.0

Obligatory Legal Notice: As part of the Kabam Creator Program we were given the chance to preview the update before it went live which is where the below images and video footage were taken.

Table of Contents

Introduction

This article covers the features and changes that 13.0 has brought to the game. Use the table of contents to skip to whatever you’re most interested in or settle down for a read.

Tier 13

The main headline feature of this update (and has been long awaited) is the introduction of Tier 13. We have a total of 37 new blueprints – 30 for the base crafting lines, 6 from the new dungeon chest and 1 extra shield as Mundra’s new blueprint. There are currently no new elements or spirits. Let’s take a look:

We’re still keeping with 3 workers for each blueprint and you can see the resource costs are getting pretty high now (part of the reason why there isn’t a cap on bin types any more is to allow you to hold the numbers that you may find yourself needing.)

We’ve also said goodbye to sigils and in its place we now have Essence, a brand new resource that’s considered to be tier 4. Essence is required for every tier 13 blueprint and takes the place of either a tier 1 or 2 resource, meaning you’ll see a wide variety of resource pairings now such as:

Wood/Oil/Essence
Iron/Jewels/Essence
Herb/Ironwood/Essence
Steel/Ether/Essence

and so on – more details on Essence can be found later in the article. The Astral Fabric component that you can see in the picture is from the new Void Dimension dungeon. Let’s take a look at the milestones now:

Only 45 crafts are required to master most Tier 13 blueprints – the number has been kept on the low side (which is fantastic given the amount of resources involved to craft them.)

As anticipated Tier 12 lost their secondary resource milestones to fit in the unlock ones for Tier 13 however what Kabam did this time around was they buffed the other resource reduction milestones on an item to account for that loss.

Take for example Excalibur, the Tier 12 sword. Although it lost the -17 Steel milestone from its mastery track the -17 Steel on its ascension track was upgraded to -34, so effectively if you have the item ascended you shouldn’t notice much of a difference in terms of resources needed to craft them.

Nothing really unexpected here- the ascension track tends to hold the Essence reduction milestone so if you’re looking for that be prepared to part with shards. The cost has increased now to 100 per star meaning it’s 300 shards to fully ascend a T13. They also cost 200 research scrolls to unlock (250 for the familiar because sure why not make them more expensive) so to fully unlock/ascend Tier 13 (presuming you have all premium workers) you’ll be looking at:

6,250 Research Scrolls
9,300 Ascension Shards

Their gold values scale from around 5.4m to 7.4m pre-1.25x milestone meaning there’s a lot of money to be made here.

Energy Costs

Rushing a Tier 13 craft is about as much energy as you’d expect (that is quite a bit.) It’s about the same jump from what we observed between Tier 11 and Tier 12.

As for surcharge costs yeah that’s lots and that’s including the reduction from 15 stars.

Essence

Reilea note: Based on feedback provided to them during the beta Kabam have agreed to increase the regeneration rate of essence. We are unsure by how much so don’t take the numbers shown in the following pictures as a definite “break out the pitchforks” moment yet. Or do, it’s a free world we can’t stop you.

Essence is a new resource required for all Tier 13 blueprints. It’s the first tier 4 resource to be introduced and is produced by Zolea the Ghost, a new resource worker who lives (well, lives might be the wrong word) at the Mausoleum.

The Mausoleum requires you to have a level 10 Temple in your city to unlock and is located north of the Wizard Tower.

She works the same as every other resource worker – increase the buildings level to increase the speed at which Essence regenerates. As for how quick that is – well, it’s not listed as measured in minutes but in hours:

Also who comes up with these gold-gem ratios?

To be able to collect Essence you will require copies of the new Essence Beacon resource bin. At level 1 a beacon can hold 5 Essence and is 2×2 in size – when upgraded to level 6 it becomes a 3×3 but interestingly at level 11 the size does not increase further – it stays at 3×3 (please retrofit the Ether Well to do this Kabam.)

Below is the cost for the first 5 bins – to our knowledge the price doesn’t increase beyond the 5th one (so if you bought say a 6th and 7th bin they’d cost the same as the 5th did.)

The Dragon’s Hoard from the Dragon Invasion event has also been upgraded to support Essence – from level 16 onwards it can hold it, starting at 1 Essence at level 16 to being able to hold 5 at level 20.

Void Dimension

The Void Dimension is the new spooky place to be hanging out if you want to gather the components required for Tier 13 crafts. It unlocks at level 62 and requires either ~~4.5G gold~~ (as of update 13.1.2 it costs 3G gold now) or 5,000 gems.

As we saw with Cinderlake Volcano each of the 3 resource areas in Void Dimension contain an elemental barrier on every difficulty. This time around we have Light, Air, and Fire for the components and Light for the boss.

Reilea note: The barriers in the beta were Light, Air, and Earth but we were informed the Earth was being converted to Fire. If that conversion didn’t happen direct pitchforks to Kabam Jeremie.

Below you can see Neri’s quest stat sheets for the Void Dimension and the boss. This data will be uploaded on the quest data page as well.

In terms of drops we were able to get a rough idea of what to expect -though much more data is going to be needed to be precise cause we’re 2 people (we’ll have a section the STC discord for people to submit and show what we saw on beta for drops).

We’re looking at roughly:

Easy – T10 to T11
Medium – T10 to T11
Hard – T11 to T12
Extreme – T12 to T13

Reiga note: I was able to see T13 drop on Medium if Polonia was in the party as she boosts the tier of the loot with her ability remember, not just steal. Her stealing is still capped to T10 items.

The Immortal Quartet in T13

Reiga note: This subsection is for people who use the Immortal Quartet team. If you don’t, feel free skip ahead to the next part of the guide.

The quartet handles the Void Dimension extremely well – not only do we have a matching light-barrier component still the boss is also using a Light barrier. Whilst the team can (and as we’ve shown before) ignore barriers that don’t align it is nice for them to match up to increase the speed/potentially get away with lower quality items in parts. This is a video of them tackling the new dungeon and the boss.

New Building Levels & Rebalance

With the exception of the Town Hall and Training Hall the other buildings in the city have had a level increase and a rebalancing of the amount of ticks (that is, invests) required for each level.

For guilds that are well-established/in the endgame you have some new challenges to aspire to. For newer guilds/non-late ones you should find it easier to reach the member increase amounts and a lot easier to get your training hall to 17 for the 4th skill slot on heroes.

New Guild Upgrades

You can now upgrade your guild to level 300 and there are 2 new perks associated with Essence.

New Ascension Milestones

Most of the ascension tracks got a couple of extra milestones glued to the end of them. These are pretty much the same for every line, the only difference is the champion coins.

New Titles

Two new titles have been added – one based on the age of your account and one based on how many helps you have given guild members. We did also see a title added for ascending stones but think that was more of a bug fix rather than a new one.

Misc changes/info

You can have as many copies of a resource bin as you want (excluding Dragon’s Hoard cause that’d be hella broke.) You want 20 iron bins? Go ahead, have fun storing it all! Become the iron ruler!
Market is fixed again (it was working correctly on the beta at least but sometimes stuff breaks when transferred to live.)
Antique Store won’t show blueprints that are higher than your max crafted tier +1. Stops new players seeing T12 in there and stuff which they wouldn’t be able to use for a long time.
Tower of Titans has another confirmation prompt for difficulty to hopefully avoid a repeat of the Alpha incident.

And that about covers it. Go forth and craft items made from materials from another dimension. Feel free to swing by our discord if you have questions about anything we wrote here/wanted to ask about the update.

Thank you to our Patreon Supporters and donators!

And a little bonus: here are the stats for the two blueprints we teased!

You can checkout the rest of the tier 13 blueprints over on STC-Hub | Tier-13!

Appendix: Data Tables

Dungeon/Market/Equipment Unlock Levels

The levels required to unlock the dungeons, access some of the higher tiers on the market, and equip high tier gear on your heroes were rebalanced in this update.

Merchant Level	Dungeon Unlocked
0	Howling Woods
15	Aurora Cave
22	Whispering Bog
30	Barren Wastes
38	Sun God's Tomb
46	Chronos Ruins
52	Haunted Castle
55	Sunken Temple
58	Bleakspire Peak
60	Cinderlake Volcano
62	Void Dimension

Merchant Level	Market Tier Unlocked
7	Tier 2
15	Tier 3
21	Tier 4
28	Tier 5
35	Tier 6
40	Tier 7
45	Tier 8
50	Tier 9
55	Tier 10
59	Tier 11
63	Tier 12
67	Tier 13

Hero Level	Equipment Tier Unlocked
3	Tier 2
6	Tier 3
9	Tier 4
12	Tier 5
16	Tier 6
19	Tier 7
22	Tier 8
25	Tier 9
28	Tier 10
31	Tier 11
33	Tier 12
35	Tier 13

Tier 13 Collection Book Value

There was no extension of the reward track for the Collection Book in this update (maybe in June for the anniversary? You never know.)

Quality	Point Value
Normal	14
Superior	14
Flawless	28
Epic	42
Legendary	70

Which means in total there’s an extra 6,216 points available for your Collection Book.

Precrafts

Potentially not a complete list as we didn’t see some of the blueprints but these are the ones we do know about.