Given the volume of feedback and the confusion around the implementation, this response is especially disappointing and honestly insulting. Based on your own communications, the implication is that the primary source of relics will be completing dungeons, which in theory is good as it creates an incentive to run dungeons repeatedly for the opportunity to improve your gear. The notes also indicated a small chance to gain such relics from salvage, further implying that it was a secondary, and less likely option than dungeon completions. You said nothing in the notes about daily deals, although I think we all assumed that to be the case based on the shop structure and the recent currency shift from less gold to more gems/crowns.
But now you are saying that relics are to be very rare. As the others have said above, this frequency essentially ends all current evolution, full stop. Not only are the relics very rare but there are various rarities, so the likelihood that I can put together not just 4 dungeon specific relics but 4 dungeon specific rarity aligned relics is astronomically impossible (even more so if the drops are reminiscent of runes/scrolls where I’m swimming in mythic mats but barely able to maintain 4 of each color epic mat).
I honestly cannot wrap my head around the conception of this system as being one that promotes the growth and sustainability of this game. I consider myself a pretty big cheerleader to date and I am especially tolerant of early access developments as a necessary pain to get an improved product. But I find it very difficult to explain or discuss and not feel like a baffoon. The core growth element of the game is evolution of obtained gear and it is fundamentally impossible based on the information you have given us so far.
I think the main part of her statement is likely “and in an upcoming Update there will be more ways to get them. (The main way introduced will be where they primarily drop)”
So for now we are screwed and there is no point playing except for goll accrual. Maybe. Or getting your achievements up or whatever.
The core grind mechanic in my opinion is also evolving gear and figuring out ways between the different gears to get a great loadout that works well with the character. This is indeed largely impossible and you are not even mentioning gear attributes that you may not want and that you may want to continue grinding for a new gear piece with better attributes for. So yeah, bit stop on evolution for now until the time the new update comes out with whatever new gameplay which drops relics.
Sounds like the relics were rolled out too soon before the mechanic that drops them was programmed. We sit tight or move on. My folks back in GoW may really benefit from this development
Either a big fumble on the part of the devs or we don’t quite get yet how they intend the game to be played.
And yes, if the new part of the game is where the relics are dropped and not chests then this also constitutes a full communication breakdown between player base and developer as you verily point out, the patch notes do specifically state where relics are dropped and so far I think one relic dropped amongst the communicating player base, some of which do play a lot is amazing. I have cycled 8 chest slots with dungeon tokens, additionally opened chests from about 60 dungeon runs plus an extra 40 chests I got from the store and opened outright, all level 100 and have gotten a lot of gear and mythic shenanigans but not one relic. So very rare indeed. And I know from the forum and world chat I am by far alone in this nor one of the grindier players.
At this point we can focus on evolving followers and that is it.
I have opened more chests than I can count and so far nothing.
This reeks of cart before the horse and everywhere I have looked are upset players. We have all tried to cheerlead the game so far as there is some great content hear but as @Sibelios has said, I can’t defend it at the moment as new players are locked out of progression that we had used earlier as well as gems now being even harder to get without paying.
It really feels like the game just got pushed from f2p viable to if you don’t spend money, you are done
This is a disappointing reply. Very rare and non existent are 2 different things.
Maybe we should be happy to have had a reply at all instead of just plain ignoring some requests like gems/keys in sidequests.
At least the lower rarity to ascend to rare shouldn’t be that hard to drop. We get a lot of already rare items from chests, why did evolving a specific item become so hard to do?
Knowing there will be a primary way to get relics without giving us any specific like a timeframe is not something that will make the player base happy.
Why would you even come out with a new currency (I mean zillions of them) in this update if the primary way to obtain it is not before an unknown possibility in the future?
If there was any mistake in the drop tables, it’s fine, we’re all human and can understand. This is an early access after all but correcting it soon and communicating on it should be top priority.
You opened the early access to get players feedback so please, PLEASE try to listen to your playerbase and fix the broken things before trying to come up with more ways to get money out of the players.
Some common sense notion for me that seems to have escaped you guys : Happy players will always find a way to support a game.
To second this, so far there has been a general sentiment of players desperately wanting to support this game and defending a lot of the decisions made. This one has just made it hard to play at all at the moment.
This statement is incredibly tone-deaf. It’s fine for items to be rare but not items this essential to progression, and not so rare that AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY has struggled to find one, when players will require dozens of them for normal progressive.
Just a further thought: Given that you say the design team anticipates additional ways to collect relics in the future, I suspect you have given the tiniest bit of thought to what that rate of collection would be on these future modes. To the extent that any of them are participatory (items gained through effort as opposed to purchases), why not adjust the drop rate on relics from chests to compensate for the absence of relics by other means? Drop rates in theory are actually very flexible and easy to adjust from a coding perspective. Would this create a false sense of “drop rate from chests” than intended in the long-range outlook? Maybe, but it seems like it would certainly be a better approach than what’s happened thus far. Given the current absurdly infinitesimal drop rates, increasing them by a factor of 2, 3, or even 5 in the short term clearly would not negatively impact your early access approach and you could always draw them down in the future. We know you have no problems taking something away! cough Gems cough
P.S.
I’ve updated this post with @Cyrup’s overview of the Evolution changes. It very explicitly addresses the challenge of the older system with evolutions and the increasing difficulty in the future; this makes sense as it would be harder to evolve epic to legendary than rare to epic because of the disparity between drop rates of rare and epic gear. That would imply to me that the new system would have a drop rates of relics that would at least approximate the existing system which was acknowledged as being too difficult already (I should be able to find enough resources over let’s say a few days to do an evolution of uncommon to rare or rare to epic and then have a better chance going forward of being able to do evolves to legenadary and mythic.) But again, and I can’t repeat it enough, that is not the result of the new system. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I really must stress how much of a communication failure this is and how disconnected from reality the pitch on this update has been.
To be clear, I think that the drop rate is the only issue here. I would basically have no problem with the new system if you could actually get Relics, but getting relics would have to be around the rarity of getting an equivalent rarity item, or better, for it to be worth trying to upgrade things yourself.
If relics dropped at a rate of the same rarity gear and glyphs dropped at a rate of how mythic runes/scrolls drop now, there would be 0 issues with this new system.
The problem is they are around 1,000x - 10,000x rarer than that, and that isn’t even an exaggeration.
That’s pretty much the issue the inability to evolve gear or get stronger by any margin while dealing with content that’s pretty difficult. Enemies literally 2 shit you in dungeons and the only way to win is if you get a beautiful board from the start with a good amount of mana on your fist turn and if you don’t get a stun by turn 2 your dead.
@Tacet I have seen zero evidence of any dropping from a chest at this point and I personally have opened hundreds of lvl 100 chests for glyphs and at least 75 to 100 dungeon chests since update.
I have not seen anyone even say they have a glyph from a chest yet and now we need 4
