EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

September 22, 2023

The Draconic Warlord Battlepass is NOW LIVE! Login now to earn the latest collection of dragon/knight-themed weapons, armors, vehicles, morphs, bots, cores, and more crafted with care by Acatriel!

Good luck and happy dueling to reach level 60 of EpicDuel's latest Battlepass season!

So more of you know what you're getting into with the new bots and cores available in this season, the skill descriptions are listed below:

• Dragonblade Familiar P
  • Dragonblade Familiar Slash P: Attack with a sentient sword, dealing physical damage.
  • Dragonblade Familiar Drill P: Drill through target, converting 25% dmg. to Energy and HP.
• Dragonblade Familiar E:
  • Dragonblade Familiar Slash E: Attack with a sentient sword, dealing energy damage.
  • Dragonblade Familiar Drill E: Drill through target, converting 25% dmg. to Energy and HP.
• Cores
  • Saevussax Annihilation: Remove target's armor (1 turn), sidearm (2 turns), and auxiliary (3 turns).
  • Saevussax Evisceration: Reduce Crit, Block, and Deflection for 4 turns. 15% stun chance.
  • Saevussax Slash: Sacrifice 95 HP for 125% blockable strike damage.
  • Saevussax Heart: Use the Saevussax's heart to reduce debuff effects 75% and gain 100 HP.

Other Changes 

• Battlepass XP price decreased to 325.
• Classic Armor is now available from Steve 2.0 in Fortune City.
• To expedite match times, level 40 and 39 NPCs can join automatches.
• Acatriel's NPC (regular battle) level increased to 41.
• Necronaut Clemek and Necronaut Paz HP reduced to 2200 from 5200.
• Juggernaut victories count towards 2v2 missions.

Gifting Clarification

Last week we posted about the return of Gifting. Though we try to be as thorough as possible with the rules and covering all scenarios, there are sometimes omitted. In this case, we forgot to mention the 1,000,000 Gifting score Founder rule from last year is still in play. This means that if you place in the top 15 with a score of 1,000,000 or higher, your Legacy item reward may be Founder Armor. As last time, this only applies to the top 15 places. If hypothetically, your score is greater than 1,000,000 but you're still in 16th place, you will unfortunately not be eligible for the Founder Armor. Additionally, though this is a rare scenario, if you place in the top 15, and have the original Founder Achievement, but not the armor, you may request Founder Armor as your Legacy item.

Tags: Nightwraith

September 15, 2023

As some of you guessed from last week's cryptic but not too cryptic post, Gifting is returning to EpicDuel December 2023. We had been discussing the possibility of it's return for awhile, but we were waiting until my condition had stabilized before committing. There's so much to prepare for this massive event that we had to plan ahead to make sure we could still provide some updates while creating Gifting content without burning out. 

To help mitigate the scope creep of our rewards in previous years, we are updating the prize structure of the event this year with new tiers and modified rewards. These will allow more people to qualify for big rewards while making sure we're not still working on fulfilling prize requests years after the event concludes. Please please PLEASE read these changes carefully if you're thinking of participating in Gifting! We don't want anyone to feel disappointed or mislead at the end of the event. We also don't want to negotiate with winners for different prizes, additional bonuses, or rule-bending changes after the fact. To prevent the issue of reselling custom item codes (even if you super-duper-pinky-promise you wont), there will be not prize codes provided for the top prize.

• 1st Place: Custom item + Legacy item* (can be Founder) + Golden Gifting Chest
• 2nd-10th: Legacy item* (non-Founder) + Golden Gifting Chest
• 11th-15th Legacy item* (non-Founder) + Silver Gifting Chest
• 16th-25th: Silver Gifting Chest
• 26th-50th: Bronze Gifting Chest

The reward chests will contain sets or parts of sets of items in a similar manner to the Secret and Silver Secret Chests from previous years.

*A Legacy item is any EpicDuel item aside from Founder Armor that is no longer available in-game. It could be something from a phase like the Gamma Bot or a permanent rare like the Bunnyzookas. Participants in the top-15 at the end of the event may choose 1 Legacy item. These items will not be personalized like in previous years. A class-changing weapon counts as 1 item.

The custom item grand prize can be an item from any existing category. If it's a category of item that has P and E variants, the opposite variant can be created as a recolor. Customization requests can be refused if they're deemed unreasonable or illegal (copy-written material, offensive, etc...) or if they exceed the limitation of the game (creating excessive lag, too large, too complex). Cores attached the custom item or robot attacks can be customized, but their effects in-battle must have in-game equivalents.

Additional rules from previous years apply:

• No custom styles/helms this year.
• No Replica prizes to be sold in-game will be offered this year.
• No prize codes will be offered to the winner this year.
• Choose carefully! Winners will be restricted to 1 item as a prize. Mutating items and mutating armors count as one item. 
• If you request a Physical variant of an item you will not also receive an Energy variant and vice versa.
• The prize item can be any sword, sidearm, auxiliary, home item, armor, vehicle, mutation, bot, or class-specific item that has ever been available in-game except Founder Armor unless otherwise specified.
• The item must have been available in EpicDuel at some time. Items from other AE games are not permitted.
• If your requested item originally included an achievement (i.e. Infernal Slayer), you will NOT also receive the achievement if you request the same item.
• The item(s) must be awarded to the same character that made the top 15 gifting list. No item transfers will be honored.
• The item may have any core available in-game equipped to it as long as it's of the proper category (i.e. no auxiliary cores on primary weapons, etc...).
• Core graphics and animations for Legacy items will NOT be customized.
• For balance reasons, skills cannot be modified (i.e. additional damage, % effectiveness, cooldown, damage type, cost, etc...).
• Please consider your prize carefully because once the item is in-game, there will be no revisions permitted except for bug fixes. 

In addition to those changes, we also want to add a bonus condition for prizes to reward power Gifters. The player with the most Top Daily Gifter wins by the end of Gifting will receive the option for a Legacy item (non-Founder). We would also like to implement an additional reward structure to add incentive for people to participate in giving without the need to climb to the top of the leaderboard. This structure would provide new rewards for Gifting at different thresholds, similar to a Battlepass, from 10K to 200K. More details will be listed as content is completed. We want to have more prize content visible earlier than previous years so Gifters will know what they're trying to win!

We hope these changes will make Gifting rewarding to a larger number of players while also transitioning Gifting into a more sustainable event!

Gifting Clarification (Updated 9-22-2023)

Last week we posted about the return of Gifting. Though we try to be as thorough as possible with the rules and covering all scenarios, there are sometimes omitted. In this case, we forgot to mention the 1,000,000 Gifting score Founder rule from last year is still in play. This means that if you place in the top 15 with a score of 1,000,000 or higher, your Legacy item reward may be Founder Armor. As last time, this only applies to the top 15 places. If hypothetically, your score is greater than 1,000,000 but you're still in 16th place, you will unfortunately not be eligible for the Founder Armor. Additionally, though this is a rare scenario, if you place in the top 15, and have the original Founder Achievement, but not the armor, you may request Founder Armor as your Legacy item.

Draconic Warlord Battlepass

The Battlepass development is still underway and expected to release next week. If you still have a few levels of rewards to grind out in the Cathedral Knight Battlepass, there's still time! It will also be your last chance for awhile to obtain many seasonal rares and PvP drops!

Tags: Nightwraith

September 08, 2023

The Cathedral Knight Battlepass is nearing its end, ready to make room for the Draconic Warlord Battlepass! The tentative plan is to remove the Cathedral Knight Battlepass next Friday and update it with the Draconic Warlord Battlepass. That should allow enough time to earn the last few levels of prizes in the normal and enhanced tiers.

Although there is not update today, we wanted to outline the plan for the next few months, which will include new Battlepasses, a tournament, balance changes, and more!

Leaving Soon

When the Draconic Warlord Battlepass goes live, there will be some changes to the availability of seasonal items and PvP drops. Seasonable rares will be reset to their regular release times. Many PvP drops, including the Dage drops will be removed from the drop pools.

Cosmic Carnage 2 Tournament

Enough time has passed since our last barrage of tournaments that we're finally ready to announce a new Cosmic Carnage 2 tournament coming in October! As in the past, Players will buy tickets to compete with each other to earn PvP victories, climb the leaderboard, and win exclusive rewards!

Olympus' Wrath Battlepass

The Draconic Warlord Battlepass hasn't yet launched, and we already have the next Battlepass in-progress! This Greek Pantheon-themed showcase will feature some mind-blowing animations that push Flash to its limit!

Maybe More?

Though EpicDuel ended 2022 with a new Battlepass, there was definitely something missing compared to the usual excitement and festivities that punctuate the Winter holidays on Delta V. This year, we hope to celebrate the close of another year of EpicDuel with the return of an old favorite...

Tags: Nightwraith

August 25, 2023

Balance changes, a Battlepass preview, and free bonus Varium for all in this latest EpicDuel update!

Free Varium

Starting with today's update, all new characters will start with 500 FREE Varium and an additional 5,000 Credits. Existing characters will also receive 500 Varium and 5,000 Credits. Unlike previous Varium giveaways, there is no activity requirement to receive this. Even if your character has collected years of dust, you should still see this bonus in your inventory.

Balance Changes

• Maximum critical strike rate increased to 50%. Though Crits are never guaranteed, the previous max rate of 20% may have been throttling skills/cores that increased Crit rate beyond that maximum rate %.
• Field Commander: Removed restriction preventing it from being used with Blood Commander or Chronopact.
• Fixed stacking issue with +Highest Stat % cores like Flagellation and Feast of Flesh. This means powerful synergies are unlocked with cores such as Feast of Flesh and Flagellation.
• Chained Blood: Multi use.
• Feast of Flesh: Reverted to single use due to increased power potential after bug fix.
• Necrotek Siphon P/E: Re-added use limit. Unlimited heal potential with Rage drain was too powerful.
• Incensory: Removed Rage gain aspect.
• Ultra Corsair Crusher P/E: Updated skill functionality to do a mini-Rage of 75% dmg on target's HP and Energy; 15% Stun. Damage type corresponds with Bot's damage type.

Draconic Warlord Battlepass Preview

The Cathedral Knight Battlepass is still online, but that doesn't mean we're not preparing the next Battlepass -- this time with a draconic theme! When the current Battlepass ends there will be a brief cooldown before the next goes online, but the goal is to have little delay between the passes to make sure there are still strong incentives for battles and daily logins.

Tags: Nightwraith

August 18, 2023

Arcade Tokens burning a hole in your pocket, but you're burned out on ArcadeBots? Now, you can undertake easy missions to quickly exchange your Tokens for mountains of Credits!

Arcade Token Exchange

After years of Gifting events, PvP drops, and mission rewards, many players have an absolutely shocking amount of Arcade Tokens. Many have requested the ability to sell Arcade Tokens, however, in testing we found that because there were so many different sources for acquiring Tokens (drops, gifts, Varium, etc...) it wasn't possible to allow direct sellback for a consistent Credit price. To work around that limitation, we're offering 5 new mission chains (1 permanent, 4 daily) to allow players to cleanly exchange their Tokens. 

• Permanent Missions
  • Arcade Token Buyback (Valestra) - Awards Arcade Token Redeemer Achievement.
• Daily Missions
  • Arcade Amnesty (Valestra)
  • Token Transaction (Valery)
  • Dead Token Redemption (The Lawman)
  • Coins for Charon (Snork)

While not as clean and concise as direct sellback, these missions should allow many players to efficiently reduce their Token surplus. If we can find a solution to the sellback problem in the future, we'll make the adjustment accordingly.

Bank Space Buff

Running out of space to store the latest Battlepass weapons? The Bank space cap has been increased from 2020 to 10,020, which should last quite a long time for even the most hardcore collectors!

Tags: Nightwraith

August 14, 2023

The Battlepass has been live for over a week so it's time for some much-needed balance adjustments and fixes.

Bug Fixes and Changes:

• Removed first cooldowns. It seems generally people see it as too much of a nerf to first strike and Support.
• My items including Battlepass, tournament prizes, and war prizes tagged as sellable.
• Incensory: Removed use limit. 4 turn cooldown.
• Feast of Flesh: Removed use limit. 4 turn cooldown.
• Flagellation: Removed use limit. 4 turn cooldown.
• Necrotek Siphon P: Removed use limit. 4 turn cooldown.
• Necrotek Siphon E: Removed use limit. 4 turn cooldown.
• Frostbite: Can be cured by Field Medic.
• Frost Shards: Can be cured by Field Medic.
• Cold Ignition: Can be cured by Field Medic.
• Draconic Frost King's Might: Can be cured by Field Medic.
• Acorn Annihilator P/E: Drain 35% Robot Damage As Energy Poison For 4 Turns. Can be cured by Field Medic.
• Energy Storm: Energy drain reduced to 20% strike damage from 40%. Reusable with 5 turn cooldown.
• Sea King's Spirit: Gain 100 Energy. Conversion % increased to 100% from 50%. Duration reduced to 2 from 3. 6 turn cooldown.
  
  

Bug Fixes: 

• Ultra Corsair Achievement not awarding with purchase of 4,000 AP package.
• Botanical Wrath: It's still possible to stack poisons on a target while skill is active, but all poisons will be cured by Field Medic, even if poisons are stacked.
• Necrotek Siphon P/E: Can be used when target has 0 energy. Adjusted damage which was closer to 100% than 50% because the skill was incorrectly bypassing defense.

Tags: Nightwraith