Best Of

Ascension is being treated like an overly complex rank up, but it is not. It is a new rarity release in a different shape. New rarities are all about resetting the chase, and players have never had the ability to acquire new rarity champs particularly fast (in general), or target them particularly well, or build up new roster especially quickly. It is, for most players, a much slower paced thing unless you choose to accelerate that pace with spending, as new rarities are one of the more important monetization paths the game has traditionally had.

Ascension is basically rarity 7.5 and 8.0 (L1 and L2). Instead of completely resetting rosters again, which players have traditionally complained about, it builds upon existing 7* rosters. But it still has to reset the chase and make things difficult to acquire initially. Traditionally new rarities had a linear conveyer path to acquisition. You could get the champ in things like featured crystals paywall crystals, then in things like featured shard crystals or the Titan crystal, then eventually in the basic pool. The basic pool is pretty big at this point, so when a champ exits the paywalls and the featured early (or earlier) release crystals it becomes very difficult to target. The devs seem to be experimenting with a different idea with Ascension: instead of there being an early Ascension pool and then a giant Ascension basic pool, chanmpion Ascension is being spread out among different pools and sources. The Empowered Crystals are a source. The Super Duper box is a source. The idea seems to be to, in effect, create a bunch of smaller pools that players can work through separately. Each one might look slow, but players can be earning progress in multiple pools simultaneously. The Grace crystal is not the only source of Ascension.

It is still early days, but conceptually speaking I like it. To oversimplify a bit, imagine if instead of one Titan crystal we had like a dozen of them, each one with its own set of shards, and each one having a fixed pool of champs in it. A champ would never get "lost" in the basic pool once it left the Titan pool, because it would never leave the Titan pool. No matter when you start playing the game, no matter if you missed a champ or not, you'd always have a way to target those champs in a crystal that has only a limited number of champs, and thus a much higher probability of getting what you want.

Ascension isn't exactly like that: rather than having a dozen different crystals, there's multiple sources with different mechanics. But it still gives the devs more ways to give us better chances at specific things we want, without making it too easy to just automatically get what we want and have the chase be instantly over, forcing them to reset the chase again and force players to start over sooner than later. Right at this moment I have nine Ascended 7* champions. The Empowered crystal is not a bottleneck to Ascension. It is just one source of it. Considering Ascension has only been out for a month, that doesn't seem all that bad to me.

Again, if Ascension was just another rank up, that would be terribly slow. But it is not, and it is not intended to be. Rarities were not just an extra way to give champs more attack and health. They were a way to reset the champion chase. Rank ups don't do that, new rarities do, and Ascension is a way to add what new rarities did without completely forcing players to start from scratch.

For years, players have been making what I considered to be a ridiculous complaint. They would say "oh, another rarity: how unoriginal. We had four stars and then five stars and then six stars. Why force us to start over? Why can't they think of anything more interesting?." And I would always say: be careful what you wish for. If you think all the problems with new rarities was an accident Kabam was too stupid to avoid, you don't understand what new rarities are intended to do. Most of the properties Ascension has that players don't like were put there deliberately not accidentally, because they have to be there. Ascension softens the blow of new rarities. It cannot eliminate all of them completely, because that would defeat the purpose of it existing at all.

One Ascension every 15 Empowered crystals would be ridiculously fast. If you think that is a normal rate of acquiring Ascension tokens, I don't think you understand what Ascension is supposed to be doing. That would be like saying you wish they had just released 8* rarity instead of Ascension, except 7* dups should award 2000 8* shards instead of 275.

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doubt it

well, to be fair, if you aren’t paying for ascensions, that dust is pretty much worthless right now

You definitely should, he also has potential to be one of the best Magik counters so he might become more relevant soon in other game modes. After his buff he hits really hard but he's been slept on mostly because of how bad he was pre buff. The difference post buff however is huge he does 550k RoL HPs in 30-45 secs at r3.

For now tho, he is a really good long form content champ, and his ramp is actually quick unlike someone like Blue Marvel or Sentry which for Epoch is very important. The utility he has also has decent range, some of it is niche but that slow is always valuable.

I agree. Garbage event desing. Rewards good tho.