Update 18.0 Overview

Your guide to the gameplay changes in 18.0

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 were taken.

Introduction

A wild Roland appears! Along with a few other things but let’s get straight into the really cool part of the update.

Video

This guide is also available in video form. They pretty much cover the same content with the exception of the video doesn’t have precraft/research costs and this text guide doesn’t have Rei’s opinion on druid quivers.

Roland the Veteran

Update 18.0 adds the newest premium worker to the game Roland the Veteran. He requires you to be level 32 to unlock.

We’ll start with his special effect which is pretty damned awesome as far as worker perks go. Roland allows you to, once per hero, pick any skill on that hero and replace it with any other skill of your choice so long as it’s a valid option (so you can’t for example put marksman on a bishop sorry.)

This takes quite a bit of the sting out of making good heroes – no longer are we at the mercy of RNG when it comes to landing a weapon skill on an otherwise perfect attack skill loadout and acquiring things like sorcerer unique skills is significantly easier.

It’s a bit of a shame that we can only do this once per hero as when you’ve finished up your roster this ability will have no purpose outside of making new heroes when we get more slots. Kind of like how Yohan tapers off once you run out of furniture/dragon marks, though understandably Roland would be pretty overpowered if you could use it on every skill.

New Item Line: Quivers

The first new item line Roland brings to the table is the quiver line which starts at Tier 5. These are classed as an accessory and so generally occupy the same spot as rings/amulets/etc do. Let’s take a look at one:

So from a crafting perspective there’s nothing super unusual here, it’s a standard accessory craft line which favours leather/fabric. Much like Herbal Medicines and Meals all quivers are dual-stat items – they all give attack and defence.

From an equipment perspective they have 2 features that set them apart from other accessories:

1. Quivers only work if the hero has a bow, crossbow or gun equipped. If they have none of those as their weapon then the quiver will provide 0 stats (much like how equipping a Torc of Peace makes a weapon give nothing.) It won’t actually let you equip a quiver if you don’t have a valid weapon type to help make this clearer.
2. If the hero has a bow equipped then, alongside giving stats, the quiver will also boost the stats of that bow by 30%¹.

If you ever forget these rules fear not – tapping the little i symbol on the blueprint will bring up a helpful reminder:

Fun fact: all baseline quivers are based on the questing zones. They range from Whispering Bog through to Elysium.

New Item Line: Dual Wield

The other new item line Roland introduces is the Dual Wield weapon line. Before we get into the equipping mechanic part let me just clarify these are crafted the exact same way as any other weapon line is – there are no special “you need to combine X and Y” or anything like that. As with quivers this item line also starts at Tier 5.

Equipping Dual Wield weapons on your heroes is a bit different – each dual wield weapon counts as either 1 or 2 other weapon types and so long as a hero can equip one of those types they can use that dual wield.

Let’s use the Elysium Reavers as an example and see what happens when we tap the i:

We can see that it’s classed as an axe and a dagger, meaning any class that can equip either of those item types can use this weapon.

As you can also see in the above picture these weapons are packing a pretty solid attack stat – they’re on par with wands and guns meaning Warlord finally has a weapon line that makes it much more competitive (no longer must it suffer from the trash tier axe for example with like 50,000 less attack than anything else.)

Dual Wield currently covers Swords, Axes, Daggers and Maces. Spears and Staves might happen at some point but the animations would be weird. There are no plans to cover paid item lines like guns as, even though it’d be pretty sick and make a lot of sense, they’re iffy on making a premium print that requires another premium worker as well.

Guild Adjustments

The guild finder algorithm has been improved to make it suggest more sensible options for players looking for a guild and it has a couple of new filters.

For the player search tab you can now filter between worldwide and nearby (no idea what it considers nearby – if it’s like the leaderboards idea of nearby then it’s going to be lying anyway):

And the guild search tab now allows you to filter to guilds using the same client language as you:

The Guild Choice feature has also been restored to the guild settings page:

There are also 3 new levels to the bounty board capacity perk. We do not have the numbers for these because they were missing on the beta server but they should be in place when it goes live.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Druidic Grimoire’s ascension milestone now changes the quality of the required rings to normal instead of reducing the quantity for one. This change is due to Nerilea so make sure to thank her cause it now sucks much less to craft.
• The i button on some other blueprint lines such as meals and familiars also explains their special rules as well.

And that about covers it. Go forth and minmax your heroes without needing to rely on RNG quite as much!

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Appendix: Miscellaneous Information

Precrafts

Given there were only 2 precrafts involved between the lines it didn’t really feel worth making a table for :P.

• The Murder Two (T7 Dual Wield) requires 2 Swift Blade (T2 Dagger) to craft which drops to 1 after the second mastery milestone.
  Amount Required For Mastery: 117.
• Crystal Destroyers (T13 Dual Wield) requires 1 Greater Moonstone (T10 Moonstone) to craft which is removed after the second mastery milestone.
  Amount Required For Mastery: 10.

Quiver Slots

A list of which classes can wear the new quivers and what slot they go in.

Research & Ascension Costs

The amount of research scrolls and ascension shards you need to max out both of the new lines on day 1.

Dual Wield
Research Scrolls Required: 818
Ascension Shards Required: 1,665

Quivers
Research Scrolls Required: 812
Ascension Shards Required: 1,665

Combined
Research Scrolls Required: 1,630
Ascension Shards Required: 3,330

The tier 6 quiver cost 6 less scrolls to unlock than the dual wield. Your guess is as good as ours as to why that is.

1. this works the same way the multiplier for weapon skills does. For example if you had a bow that was 100 attack, equipping a quiver would multiply by that by x1.3 so your bow would give 130 attack. It also multiplies the defence and health of the bow if it has those stats.