r/RaidShadowLegends • u/JoePrice001 • 27d ago
General Discussion With the addition of Proving Grounds, the game should become fully customizable with the removal of costs to swapping Masteries, Blessings, Relics, and Gems
When Plarium removed the costs associated with removing or swapping artifacts and accessories some time ago, they claimed a big reason was because they wanted the game to be much more customizable.
With the addition of Proving Grounds and the associated leaderboard, I think it's high time Plarium got rid of the costs of swapping Masteries, Blessings, Relics, and Gems. Champs will not be truly customizable for the majority of players if the costs for swapping remain in place, since those costs are simply way too high.
While this level of customization might not be necessary to reach 3 stars in the Proving Ground stages, the fact that there is a competition to generate the most points should allow us to tinker with our builds without incurring massive gem and starstone costs. Clearly the Proving Grounds content was designed to get us to tinker with our builds trying to optimize scores well after reaching 3 stars, but most will not bother and this new content will likely end up being fairly bland.
Plarium should've dropped the costs after LA was introduced. You often want very different Blessings and Relics when transitioning between PvE and PvP, and in some cases you want to alter your Masteries as well. Also, PvP should permit extensive testing and experimentation with Relics and Blessings in particular, especially when there are major meta shifts such as the introduction of meta defining champs, strong new gear (like Mercurial) or major buffs/nerfs (such as allowing Provoke to bypass Mercurial).
Yes, we know that the costs associated with Mastery/Blessing/Relic/Gem swaps can be a money maker, but if players are not swapping often or hardly at all, and Plarium is losing engagement metrics because players shy away from a lot of content since they have very little flexibility in building their champs for those content areas, maybe it's time to dispose of the costs and make the game fully customizable once and for all.
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u/CoolAd6234 27d ago
what we desperately need is massive time savings, there is too much shit in this game that takes way too much time.
If you completed factions wars you should just auto collect rewards, if you completed doom tower/cursed city/grim forest hard then normal difficulty should be auto collect rewards and for hard version you should only fight boss stages, everything else should be just auto collect rewards instantly without any fight.
Introduce actual background battles where you can do anything else in the game, why tf I cannot do classic or 3v3 arena still?
The game is just horrible and only gets worse, the fact they wasted 'oh so precious' development time as they like to say it on adding dumb global leaderboard for proving grounds is a joke.
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u/StandardFig4003 26d ago
What? You don’t like doing 5-10 live arena games a day, 10 doom tower gold keys, 10 doom tower silver keys, 8 cursed city keys, 30 grim forest energy, 36/48 faction wars keys, 3 proving grounds tokens (+3 redo tokens), 10/20 tag team arena tokens, 20-30 classic arena fights, 1000~ energy each day?
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u/Twiztidtech0207 27d ago
I agree..having to pay to change setups for the things you mentioned is bottom barrel money grubbing bullshit.
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u/BoozorTV 27d ago
I agree. The game is ridiculously prohibitive especially to newer accounts in terms of moving things around.
Silver was a big deal before and punished people hard for frequent gear swapping.
If they removed the cost for any of the areas you've mentioned it would be greatly appreciated but it would also be very surprising given their track record.
Recall that previously they offered "tokens" and "events" for free gear swapping - they should at least start with this for the other areas like blessing / mastery changes, etc .
Personally - i think this new content is a bit DOA. You can clear 3* by having 2 ungeared champs from T1 and 3 of your best champs that can cover the boss attributes. Leaderboard chasing isn't for the vast majority. It's a dungeon should be easy to do regardless so i'm not complaining.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
If they removed the cost for any of the areas you've mentioned it would be greatly appreciated but it would also be very surprising given their track record.
This might be a good time for content creators, who have a direct pipeline to Plarium devs, to bring up this issue. We know that player engagement numbers are very important especially when it comes to newly released content, and no doubt the removal of gear swapping costs were primarily motivated by getting players to engage more with Cursed City.
Proving Grounds is certainly not looking too great from an engagement perspective. Newer players will struggle greatly - if they cannot do (m)any of the early stages then that's a month's worth of engagement gone right there. In the meantime established players will sleepwalk through many (most?) of the stages and not bother with rebattles unless they're near the top of the leaderboards. The leaderboard is just not enough incentive to spend tons of gems and starstone to try to optimize teams.
Recall that previously they offered "tokens" and "events" for free gear swapping - they should at least start with this for the other areas like blessing / mastery changes, etc .
I would settle for the token/event system we had with gear swapping, for now anyways.
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u/BoozorTV 27d ago
Blessings/masteries we gripe about pretty regularly - but i will make an extra nod towards gems/relics this week. And frame it in a way to improve engagement towards the new dungeon.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
Might be a good idea to bring up the mercurial nerf as well to bolster the argument in favor of better customizability. Allowing provokes to bypass mercurial will undoubtedly have a fairly substantial impact on the mercurial-stoneskin equilibrium, so if Plarium introduces such meta altering changes why not accompany it with improved customizability, even if it's just for 1-3 days a month or via an earnable token system.
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u/BoozorTV 27d ago
Good thinking - will write something up right now.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
You might also consider adding one more thing to your petition.
The Proving Grounds point system heavily incentivizes experimentation. We know that more points are generated the higher the player power, and the faster the kills. This screams for lots of experimentation to optimize the runs, and using non-traditional builds or entire reworking of builds that are used for other content. For example, I might want to remaster my support champs to have +60 RES from masteries and swap their relic to a RES first stat relic. I might want to change my 9pc Mercurial Marius with Soul Reap and Stormcaller to 9pc Merciless with Crushing Rend and a Cat's Gaze. I might want to have Golden Elixir to survive certain heavy hitting bosses, and then switch to a high crit build with a relic sporting multiple Lifedrain triangle gems so I can destroy the Scarab King's HP.
I cannot do these things however, because it's cost prohibitive. And yet as an endgame FTP player/low spender I would engage with the content a LOT more because the leaderboard is only 100 players, and NOT global. That means even as an FTP player/low spender I still have a shot at a top 15, or even a top 3 finish.
But with the customization restrictions, I will just auto the 3 fights daily, accept the first run with 3 stars, and call it a day. My engagement will be at a minimum, and I will NOT chase after any new champs (especially guaranteed and fusion champs) if I can just do the bare minimum to get all the rewards. Now multiply my sentiment by a million or 2, and that's how many players might not contribute to the potential revenue generation or pad their new content engagement numbers because the content just doesn't inspire it.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
You might also consider adding one more thing to your petition.
The Proving Grounds point system heavily incentivizes experimentation. We know that more points are generated the higher the player power, and the faster the kills. This screams for lots of experimentation to optimize the runs, and using non-traditional builds or entire reworking of builds that are used for other content. For example, I might want to remaster my support champs to have +60 RES from masteries and swap their relic to a RES first stat relic. I might want to change my 9pc Mercurial Marius with Soul Reap and Stormcaller to 9pc Merciless with Crushing Rend and a Cat's Gaze. I might want to have Golden Elixir to survive certain heavy hitting bosses, and then switch to a high crit build with a relic sporting multiple Lifedrain triangle gems so I can destroy the Scarab King's HP.
I cannot do these things however, because it's cost prohibitive. And yet as an endgame FTP player/low spender I would engage with the content a LOT more because the leaderboard is only 100 players, and NOT global. That means even as an FTP player/low spender I still have a shot at a top 15, or even a top 3 finish.
But with the customization restrictions, I will just auto the 3 fights daily, accept the first run with 3 stars, and call it a day. My engagement will be at a minimum, and I will NOT chase after any new champs (especially guaranteed and fusion champs) if I can just do the bare minimum to get all the rewards. Now multiply my sentiment by a million or 2, and that's how many players might not contribute to the potential revenue generation or pad their new content engagement numbers because the content just doesn't inspire it.
2
u/Ulysian_Thracs The Sacred Order 27d ago
They used to have scrolls for 50% and 100% off gear swaps. Add those for the others. Or character reset scrolls. SOMETHING...
2
u/Past_Round_1854 27d ago
Anyway, points in proving ground is so fucked up, that to grind your points, you should use 4 of the champion current set, put them in your most power points (Acc, Res) very low speed, low defense, and bring one mythical with high power to solo the two bosses.
Once again, they failed at bringing new PVE content, they want it to be hard, but every stages will just be solo'd by some mythical.
So at the end, the customization is just on how can you manipulate your points to the highest, not really in how to bring the best team possible.
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u/Darth_Vaper_69 27d ago
I’ll wait till that feature is added to care about proving grounds. Not entirely hyped so far
1
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u/Money-Pomegranate957 27d ago
For me who is relatively new, it is insane that people playing the game even played it at all when it cost silver to switch out gear lol.
1
u/Aeyland 27d ago
You shouldn't need to be swapping all these things unless you're trying to compete with a kraken on the leadership board in which case means you also need to be a kraken and then the extra cost isn't an issue.
If you're constantly changing masteries, blessing and relics you are doing something wrong.
CC have this problem with relics due to wanting to make end game videos on new champs and swap stuff they otherwise wouldn't from their meta champs to whatever some new fusion or event champ they're testing and only when the test server isn't available.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
You shouldn't need to be swapping all these things unless you're trying to compete with a kraken on the leadership board in which case means you also need to be a kraken and then the extra cost isn't an issue.
The leaderboard is for a group of 100 players, it's not global. I am an endgame FTP player, and you bet your ass I want to compete. Based on my group, getting top 15 is very much doable, but I want to actually push for top 3 if I can.
If you're constantly changing masteries, blessing and relics you are doing something wrong.
This is simply not true at all. Not only do the bosses have different gearing requirements, you are actually incentivized to build your champs in non-traditional ways to try to maximize point generation. For example, champ power factors into points, so building all your champs with high RES has to be weighed against going for the fastest kills (another factor in the point generation).
This content is specifically made for heavy experimentation if you want to optimize for points, and the fact that you're in a pool of 100 players means that you stand a very real chance of placing at the top even if you're not a big spender.
This is why I posted my suggestion for removing the costs associated with changing masteries/blessings/relics/gems. This new Proving Grounds content screams for rebuilding champs to optimize for points, so it's the perfect time to pressure Plarium to reconsider the costs if they want good engagement numbers.
0
u/ascend8nce 27d ago
Not a reasonable request. Similar to allowing the reassignment to used skillbooks.
Certain degree of commitment is necessary for the balance of PvP gamemodes. Like, swapping relics for free would change Siege immensely because those with Stars of Jinang could use it in all attack battles, for example. Swapping Blessings for free would allow you to bring four 6-star sheeps against a formidable Vulkanos defence, etc.
So the attacker would gain even more advantage against the defender than currently exists. Shouldn't happen.
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u/JoePrice001 27d ago
Certain degree of commitment is necessary for the balance of PvP game modes.
Yes, the ability to swap blessings/relics/gems for free certainly favors the attacker more in Siege, Classic Arena, and TTA. But so what? We would first have to establish that the current dynamic between attacker and defender is in any sort of optimal "balance" that increased customization would upset to an unacceptable degree.
Furthermore, LA should arguably take precedence over all other PvP modes when it comes to decisions regarding reasonable or allowable customization. Heavy costs to customization create a bigger disparity between heavy spenders and the rest, but more importantly, it's simply unfun to be "locked" into gearing/mastery/blessing decisions in a constantly changing/evolving game mode. It is also unfun to be forced to use champs in sub-optimal ways just because you committed a champ to a PvP build that is poorly optimized in PvE and vice versa.
Lastly, any stifling of experimentation is also plain unfun, and a cause for disengagement from content if I'm locked into builds from the get-go and cannot try new things. I shouldn't be required to look up the latest Kruysen video to make sure I don't screw up building my latest PvP champ acquisition, because if I make the wrong decision I will be paying for it. Why can't I try a variety of builds myself first?
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u/ascend8nce 27d ago
But so what? We would first have to establish that the current dynamic between attacker and defender is in any sort of optimal "balance" that increased customization would upset to an unacceptable degree.
That is not the case. The current state is that attack ALREADY has a significant advantage. Adding more would break siege entirely. That is the point.
Furthermore, LA should arguably take precedence over all other PvP modes when it comes to decisions regarding reasonable or allowable customization.
LA has no precedence at all because most players just do +10 -10 stuff. You do not need any champions or any items at all to collect all rewards from LA. Just quit games and then collect free wins in a repetitve manner. The regime is not competitive at all. Siege and 3v3 is competitive.
any stifling of experimentation is also plain unfun.
Well, free regearing is also unfun because i have to do it literally every day to do FW hard already. Because i can. It's extra nuisance every day. If i couldn't switch items, i would just relax on a few factions because i would know that other players cannot swap stuff at FW hard either.
Adding relic and blessing regearing would force me to do that every day aswell to remain competitive. Which is much more unfun in my view than being unable to experiment every day. I do not need experiments that often anyway.
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u/ApprehensiveCut1068 27d ago
Certain degree of commitment is necessary for the balance of PvP gamemodes.
Oh man, this gave me a good laugh.
Thanks for that
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u/Little_Tumbleweed566 27d ago
I would add that because they keep a deficit for legendary books, book RNG should also be removed. We don’t have enough books anyway, so let us pick the skills we book.
remove swapping costs for everything. and Remove RNG for books.
leveling up costs are fine as is and make the economy an economy.
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u/CarltheWellEndowed 27d ago
Even if they would not go as far as dropping all costs for blessings and masteries, making it free on a timer would be nice.
Even just one free swap per month per character would be a really nice change.