Best Of

It just feels as if the Trader's Outpost now has a fairly low amount of valuable rewards nestled into a lot of different bundles that you have to pick and choose from, which means that it doesn't even add up to a satisfying whole in the end. If there were, say, 5 random class sig stones in the bundle with the lone t5b and the exalted shards, I might be more inclined to buy that. However, just a single random stone? I find that so incredibly unappealing, especially since I get a daily Nexus from the DSE. And suddenly one of the biggest addition to the store becomes moot. I might still pick up the generic stones but that would require me to find the Mysterium to do so, and I'm not sure if that's there.

I feel like Kabam has lost the thread with Mysterium. When it was first introduced, it seemed to be a SQ reward replacement that lets you pick what you want. They no longer had to create themed stores each month (I remember there was an Odin type store one month), plus the rewards were pretty good.

Now? It seems like the rewards are going back to the SQ (either in the terms of objectives or what you get from the path). So the Mysterium store is still there, but its purpose seems to be adrift - it doesn't provide the exciting rewards from SQ, it seems less varied than other stores (like even the Glory store), and like you mentioned almost everything in the store is replicated by the DSE.

The only thing that I can see that they added that I think brings actual increased value to the store are the sig stones, in both generic and random class form. I will definitely start picking those bundles up. However, the rest of the stuff that they've added are...weird.

They've added t6cc selectors, which is nice. But only 10% per bundle, and you can only buy that bundle twice a week. That means that you get less t6cc from the store per week than you can get from the Daily Super Event in a single day. Significantly less.

I'm happy that they put all t3a and t6b into the same bundle but it's also dwarfed by what you can pick up from the DSE. Not quite as egregiously as with the t6cc, but close. Three days of DSE gives you approximately four of those cats, which is what you can get from the Trader's Outpost.

So by playing four days of DSE, you can gain a week's worth of those types of Trader's Outpost rewards.

Then we have the 7* shards. We can get 2x 625 shards per week from the store, while we get 750 shards per day from the DSE. In other words, 1250 vs 5250 in total over a week. Technically you have the Exalted shards that can also net you a 7* but I don't count them because any crystal with an 80% chance to give me a 6* champ is functionally useless to me. I would never go out of my way to buy them. In fact, I think that they are actively making their specific bundle worse by taking the place of something that could be more useful to me. That bundle is just a random sig stone, those exalted crystal shards and a single t5b, which is enormously pointless to me.

Finally, let's look at the sig stones - the main new reward in the store. I love that they're there, but you can get a total of four random class sigs and two generic ones per week. Meanwhile, a week of DSE nets you seven sig stone Nexus crystals. On the whole, I'd say the TO and the DSE are roughly equal in sig stone value on a weekly basis.

So basically, we get much better rewards from a week's worth of the DSE than we do from the Trader's Outpost's weekly output, and that's without even taking the Mysterium economy into account. None of these DSE rewards are mutually exclusive. Meanwhile, when it comes to the Trader's Outpost, you only have a limited amount of Mysterium each week to spend there, which limits how many of these bundles you can pick up. This week, my Mysterium only allowed me to pick up the two basic alpha selector bundles and a few of the Research Grants. If I hadn't had to pick those up, I could probably have bought one out of the two bundles with a generic sig stone and some 7* shards. But I can't really see myself getting all of the rewards I mentioned above, which are themselves worse than a week's worth of DSE rewards.

I think this is more of a "I think the DSE is amazing" thing than a "The Trader's Outpost sucks" situation, but the update nonetheless feels very underwhelming. I don't necessarily need the Trader's Outpost to just have the same rewards as the DSE but in higher quantities, but the non-DSE rewards are simply not enticing enough for me to go for them and let the DSE pick up the slack when it comes to rank-up resources, 7* shards and sig stones.

It just feels as if the Trader's Outpost now has a fairly low amount of valuable rewards nestled into a lot of different bundles that you have to pick and choose from, which means that it doesn't even add up to a satisfying whole in the end. If there were, say, 5 random class sig stones in the bundle with the lone t5b and the exalted shards, I might be more inclined to buy that. However, just a single random stone? I find that so incredibly unappealing, especially since I get a daily Nexus from the DSE. And suddenly one of the biggest addition to the store becomes moot. I might still pick up the generic stones but that would require me to find the Mysterium to do so, and I'm not sure if that's there.

It's possible that all of the relic mats become far more valuable once the new relics enter the picture, but for now they are pretty pointless as well and add very little to the bundles they are in, as far as I'm concerned.

In conclusion, it's fair to say that this update wasn't exactly a slam dunk. I can appreciate the attempt to make more bundles look valuable than simply the ones containing 7* rank-up mats, but I think Kabam unfortunately missed the mark. It basically feels as if they took two or three bundles' worth of rewards and spread them over six bundles. Couple that with the lack of Mysterium and this update just feels rather off.