Update 18.3 Overview

Your guide to the gameplay changes in 18.3

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 were taken.

Introduction

Welcome to 18.3, home of the vending machine, a new artifact, and some pretty nice quality of life changes. Let’s get started.

Vending Machine

First up we got the Vending Machine, a new piece of furniture which is designed to allow you to gain some income whilst offline. The machine costs 1,500 gems, takes up a furniture slot and you can only own 1 copy of it.

Here we can see the machine’s stats at level 1. As you can see it provides energy, can hold up to 6 items, sells 1 item per hour you are offline and has a 3% chance for that sale to be surcharged. Levelling up the machine increases these stats, here’s some examples of what it looks like at higher levels:

Interacting with the machine brings up the load menu where you can add the items you want to sell to it:

You can either tap a + sign to pick what items to load or you can use the autofill feature. The cogwheel button next to autofill allows you to filter what items the autofill button will use.

Once the machine is loaded all you need to do is go offline and it’ll get to work. When you log back in there’ll be a collect button over the machine if it made any sales whilst you were gone – it doesn’t tell you how much gold you made from it though, you’d need to check your gold before and after clicking it to figure that out.

Other things you should know about the vending machine:

• Sales grant merchant xp.
• It cannot be placed in the basement.
• It cannot surcharge an item you don’t have enough max energy to surcharge yourself.
• You need to refill it yourself once it sells the items in it (you can do this at any point – like if it has sold 1 item you can refill that one or if it sold 6 or w/e.)

Backfire Hammer

This update also brings a new major artifact – the Backfire Hammer.

At 1,200 attack the Backfire Hammer is the strongest mace of the tier. Its special effect grants you +25% attack at the cost of starting battle at 25% lower health (so you start at 75% health.) Handy for berserkers as it allows you to start with the first level of their innate already active.

Whilst that attack boost may sound cool it’s actually rather lacking – from what we can tell its a base attack multiplier (like a normal attack skill) so it doesn’t actually add a great amount and it ends up losing to dual wield items.

We’re unsure if this is a bug or not (the attack not boosting overall but instead just acting like a low tier skill) – we’ve flagged it to Kabam so keep in mind it might be buffed before it goes live. If nothing else they could raise the base attack to give it a helping hand.

Update: The Backfire Hammer now also gives +100% stats to maces, acting as a pseudo weapon skill and also buffing the secondary health stat. That now makes it a pretty good mace that is worth using on Warlord characters over other weapons.

Blueprint Stats

Blueprints now have an information tab that you can tap on to view the stats for that item. For example, here’s the information tab for the Backfire Hammer:

You can see its value, the equipment stats it provides to your hero, how many copies you own, its airship power rating and its caprice value. For artifact items you can tap the symbol in the lower left corner to see its effect.

Multi Grab Bag

You can now open 10 grab bags at once instead of just one at a time.

It’ll open 10 of whichever colour bag you picked. Saves a lot of time when you’re trying to burn through coins, though it would possibly have been better being set to open 7 at a time instead of 10 (as 7 is what’s needed to open the star bag.)

Miscellaneous Changes

• Dual Wield and Quiver items now give a lot more worker xp which is good as it sucked levelling Roland before.
• You can now mass invest in a maxed out building instead of a single tick each time. Great for when you’re trying to round out your ticks, especially in places like the tavern and emerald inn.
• Guest champions will now kidnap the aura and familiar you give them when they disappear, returning them when they come round again. This might mean anything you give Tamas will be gone for a while – you’ll be waiting a year to get it back unless they have an exemption plan in place for him.
• You no longer have to go through flashbacks to buy the superior pack. This is a nice change as it means you can avoid the ick packs without missing out and having to buy them later just to get to a good superior.

And that about covers it. Go forth and vend, vend, vend!

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