The Bazaar

Looks like its Reynads game. Going to give it a try. Been looking for something different to play.

It looks like a real game? Kripp's been playing it constantly.

Yeah it's Reynads game that's been in the works for a few years. I am waiting for release.

Problem with it currently is that there are too few items (they plan to add far more). From what I've heard the intended mechanic is that RNG should decide the build and skill comes in how to best utilize what you've been given. To get away from meta builds that's been a problem with similar games (like Backpack battles). Sure there will be some strong combinations, but you're not ment to be able to force them. Right now, you can get a few items early on and then, more often than not, force a build based on them.

Looks like the pack comes with an extra invite if anyone wants.

There are definitely meta builds you can force at the moment, but every patch is plugging infinite combo holes. Servers are pretty unstable and I've repeatedly lost progress/rewards, so I might suggest waiting until free beta in December while they work kinks out.

The ability to randomly acquire items meant for other characters on some runs creates some really neat hybrid builds. The NPCs you fight also have the chance to drop items/skills that are sometimes strong enough to warrant pivoting your current build to

Kuro said:

Servers are pretty unstable and I've repeatedly lost progress/rewards, so I might suggest waiting until free beta in December while they work kinks out.

Click to expand...

This is my biggest complaint so far after trying to play for a bit. Servers keep crashing non stop.

So I've seen a few videos on this and got very confused until I saw an overview of it. Looks more like Hearthstone battlegrounds style auto battler?

What is the monetization mechanic on this, just cosmetics?

Yeah, it's an asynchronous auto battler, you build your hero's gear and then fight snapshots of other players from the same day.

Current monetization plan is cosmetics, but also additional "tickets" for ranked play, and ranked is how you get the currency to buy more heroes.

Palum said:

So I've seen a few videos on this and got very confused until I saw an overview of it. Looks more like Hearthstone battlegrounds style auto battler?

What is the monetization mechanic on this, just cosmetics?

Click to expand...

There's free and ranked play. To play ranked you either use a ticket which you get 1 per day or from winning a FTP run, or 100 gems which is a PTW currency, but if you are decent at the game you can go infinite cause ranked runs give you more gems.

It's kinda like Hearthstone arenas.

Today's patch nuked all the mono class infinites, and removed rerolls from most good merchants, degenerate builds are going to be much harder to come by. Returned nerfed versions of most of the previously removed items too

I ended up getting a key. This game is generally fun and I personally appreciate the async nature of it. However I only have the one character and it's kind of limiting especially after the patch. It seems like the gulf between synergistic drops early on and random shit is far too big. You then slowball into mediocrity. In the few games before patch I played you could sometimes find combo pieces to rescue the run but now it's just not going to be as powerful.

I'm frequently ending in the 6-9 category and cannot win 10. Almost always being beaten by someone with just perfect scaling from ground zero, and that's luck I guess I don't get. Now that the starting items seem more normalized, you seem to kind of make or break a true snowball on the first 3 days and the completely random nature of a lot of events just make that unlikely.

It doesn't help that so much stuff is just 100% useless. For example, you get random monster drops and instead of whatever you are running for damage or crit out of the gate you get two of the plus shield items. Well if you don't have any shield items to buff, you literally got nothing at all. Same thing you get a skill that buffs poison items but you have none. I don't know what a solution is besides just having it all tack onto whatever item and providing at least some bonus (e.g. left most weapon gets 3 poison, if it comes with poison gets 6 instead) or something like that.

Only having the one character free kind of sucks right now too.

velk said:

Yes and no on the monster loot stuff like shield buffs - just having it available gives you more options for branching out when you pick up more items later. The old version was stuff like '+1 to your poison items' or '+3 to your shield items', which was much more inflexible. ( Also you get gold for selling them even if you have no poison or whatever ).

Vanessa is in kind of a weird place post-patch, most of her previous builds are trash tier now, but she's still, by far, the strongest hero using aquatic pufferfish builds. I expect that to get a nerf in the near future, given they *tried* to nerf it last patch but somehow ended up making it even stronger than before ;p

Click to expand...

I've tried to make ammo builds work as an example and every time I just don't get the one or two enabling items and get crushed by poison really early, which starts me down a losing path.

I just don't remember getting so much stuff that does nothing in HS. Like the beach ball giving haste only to aquatic so it's basically pointless if you're building up a weapon build early on. Or monster skill that affects Regen when you get none without finding specific nodes.

The other thing is it's really not very mechanically tight in some areas. Like I got this skill that gives you I dunno 30% reduced cooldown to diamond items. Fantastic. Only when I picked it up I only had golds. It never worked. Not clear if it only impacts items you have when you pick it up or if it only impacts non weapon items or it's just broken. But if it's not broken, then it's a shitty design.

So I've been playing this a bit more in the background. Good idle style game when doing other stuff. I've been able to more reliably get farther with Vanessa. Haven't bought any other heroes yet (kind of waiting to see the next set). One thing I seem to find is that opponent RNG is way too much of a deciding factor in success. For example, bad luck + weaker build that needs more time to ramp means you'll have a bunch of losses going into middle game, and there's no guarantee you face anyone with similar records. This means that you can get compounding luck, and then face people with world ending builds several times in a row and put your run into the grave.

This makes the game scale so that you can get crushed mid game even with 'good' but not great luck and ending pretty early, which makes it less fulfilling. I think if you have a 'strong' build you should get reliably into 8-10 range, but right now it may be 3-10, because you can just get trucked over and over early on.

I've gotten up to 9 free tickets so far. Haven't played any ranked yet since there doesn't seem to be a point while learning. I think one thing that might help is giving say two loot choices off each NPC fight to choose from. Not really sure otherwise because the RNG is so massive that since you can have your build mostly fleshed out by day 4-5 you must in order to win.

There's been a handful of times I've shifted builds mid run based on drops successfully (tried loads of stuff out just to test it). There's such a cost to changing due to level up bonuses and little things here and there it's really hard to justify. The ones I've done it successfully have basically involved something like rainbow potion or weather machine where I can chain cast freeze easy.

Freeze is another problematic status effect. Almost every time I have substantial on game start freeze and repeat freeze I win. It's relatively hard on Vanessa due to items but it's so strong. You can do so much in 4-6 seconds it's crazy.