Best Of

The weekly quest doesn't even start for another nearly 90 minutes. The 3 sigil credits were there last week

They fixed that bug

No. Poison only pauses Heimdall’s buffs if it comes from champion abilities. Poison from nodes or masteries do not trigger this pause.

No because it doesnt come from a champion

You would have to pull it first.

Comparing Ascension to 8* Rarity, let's say your favorite champ is Jean Grey. You already have Jean as a 7* rank 5 sig 200. You've invested a ton of resources into her. Now you want to Ascend her. First, you have to wait for Ascension to become available for her. Then you have to pull her Ascension token. Then you need a class token. This will take your 7R5 sig 200 to 7R5A1 sig 200. You would need more specific tokens and class tokens plus dust to take her to TR5A2 sig 200. Higher Ascensions will require more tokens and more other resources.

Instead, suppose Kabam just released 8* rarity. Now you have to wait for Jean to release in the 8* release schedule. This is no different than waiting for 7* Ascension to become available. Next you have to pull her. This is no different from having to acquire her Ascension token. You then need to rank her and level her up. Given how previous rarities work you would likely need to rank her to at least 8R2 for her to be of comparable strength to your 7R5, and at least 8R3 for her to finally exceed the strength of your 7* version. This would almost certainly require very rare catalysts at least initially, and a variety of resources. You'd need basic cats, class cats, and also ISO and gold to level her up.

And after all of that, she would still be sig zero. You would need to dup her to awaken her (or use an awakening gem which are typically very rare for new rarities for at least a year or two after launch), and then dump a bunch of sig stones into her to get her back up to sig 200. All the resources you spend to dup her, level her, rank her to R2, and sig her up will just be to take the 8* version and catch her up with your existing 7* version. Only past that point are you actually investing resources into a "better" version of Jean.

This is probably more likely in retrospect, but Kabam is being squeezed from both directions there. Some players don't see through the system and judge it hardly as being too complex when it really isn't much more complex than rarities are, and other people are seeing the connections and reused metaphors and understanding the system better, but then judging it harshly because those mechanics aren't being used for the same things.

7* Ascension is mechanically much like catching a new champ, duplicating it to awaken it, ranking it up, and leveling it up. To ascend a champ to a new ascension rank you need a champion specific token. This is like pulling a champ for the first time in a new rarity. You also need class ascension materials which is new, but it is analogous to needing class catalysts to rank up a champ. Ascension is acquisition + rank up in one step. Each higher Ascension rank requires champ specific tokens - like pulling the champ again - and more class stuff - like catalysts - and other stuff like Dust - again, much like champion rank ups that require different, and generally more, resources to rank up further.

Once you see it, it's not all that complicated. But then you have the problem that people see it like rank ups, so they judge it like rank ups. Kabam could have made the system completely different, with no similarity to rank up mechanics at all to prevent players from comparing to rank ups, but then it would be a whole new thing to learn.

You see this elsewhere. I'm surprised more people haven't realized what the Super Duper Box is. It is the Ascension version of the Titan crystal. Consider: you dup a 7, you get shards. In fact you get 275 shards. And 15000 of those shards let you pull something from the Super Duper Box. But rather than being totally random, you're guaranteed to get a different champ and ascension token with every pull, until you pull everyone, then it resets and you can then stack up more Ascension tokens. That is a Titan crystal that never pulls the same thing twice, has no fillers, and never rolls its champion pool. It looks different, its mechanics are superficially different, but it is just a Super Titan crystal. It could have even had a spinner that visually dropped in the same way as crystals and the actual results would have been the same. But the visual metaphor makes it seem completely different.

Deciding how things actually work and how they appear to work or are named and described is a tricky thing. You want to reuse player knowledge so they don't have to relearn everything. But you also need to make sure players intuitively understand in what ways different things are actually different. And sometimes you don't know whether you've done a good job at balancing that until you see how the players react. In retrospect I believe you're right: they should have called it something else. But I don't know if I would have thought that prior to launch.