I second the most recent opinions, either put the crystals back to where they were, or deal out some equally heavy nerfing to a lot of opponents.

Happy birthday 🍰

I don’t think the change to Parched is too bad - you only need three crystals to provide adequate freezing protection for the entire battle vs two before.

BoNA on the other hand requires six crystals now to get the same effect vs four before. Raising that one back up a little would be much better :(

Happy birthday ! 🎉

Hmm...weakened how? They've already been made weak with the drop in activation. What we need are weapons with more natural blessings built into them so then we don't need to use Bona or Parched as much. Think OHS' blessing for example.

I respectfully disagree that they make them worthless. Having strong freeze/steal protection should actually free up the other mod slots for us to use since we need to use fewer of them :P

Honestly I’d like to see opponents rebalanced. My mods are breaking a lot of the time due to that glitch I mentioned and it would be nice to not have to worry as much about freezing and stealing protection.

True, good rates on the parched or bonas means I would only need to apply one at most. Now with the activation rate nerfed, I feel more compelled to add more of them to make up for it, instead of using the EoRs now.

alternatively, give us higher denominations of parched and bona then. The better rates are on higher tier crystals that are much harder to obtain then.

I think the short answer is that it really doesn't matter which if the options that you choose, neither of them I think will actually change battles that much anyways. This was a fairly small change, that I'm pretty sure people are only noticing because they saw the numbers posted even though its been live for almost a week.

Parched/BONA mods as a concept I think are completely flawed, and as long as they exist they will always beat out the other mods, because at the end of the day you will never lose a battle because you didn't mod your weapons with attack mods, but you will lose very very quickly if you do not bring freeze/steal protection against the wrong opponent.

So I think the best option would be to nerf them (delete them?) and rebalance the challengers, and add in weapons/Potions that generate reliable freeze/steal protection.

The other option of course would be to do what Jess said and Buff them so we can only use 1 of them on a weapon and then use fun mods in the other slots.

But by far the easiest thing to do, that really doesn't have a negative impact on the game would probably to just revert them and not deal with the drama. Are parched Bona good game designs? No, but the things that your proposing seem equally lackluster.

It's a game design that can be examined another time imo. The main focus here was improving defense, and that was accomplished. Messing with another aspect of battling (freezing/stealing) is another can of worms for another day.

Thanks for letting us know about the blessing mod situation. It's so much better to gain insight of the thought process and intended plans (nothing's perfect, but better than users assuming or having no idea, and then reacting). It can get confusing especially if it's not obvious why something changed.

About blessing mods.

So what's my suggestion? Focus on the source of the problem which is the challenger's rates of freezing stealing etc, then make plans to balance it. IMO many rates are too high and needs lower. Not sure? Get feedback. Then the adjustment follows. It might not be quick and easy, but as long as you let us know, then it's a smoother transition. If you have to make temporary adjustments, let us know too. And please, give us enough insight so we aren't left guessing. Thanks and appreciate your effort.

Fully agree with Jess and Metroid. Obviously.

How many blessing mods used is directly related to how many defense mods used. If you must fill every slot with blessing mods to win then defense mods are under valued. Defense mods being more useful links with improving defense overall, which was the main goal of this project.

I'm fine with either solution of updating challengers or reverting blessing mods. I do think that of the two updating challengers' freeze and steal rates will likely have more benefit to the battling system and maybe open up more options in challenger design. I also acknowledge that updating all the challengers is a huge amount of work. Though challenger updates were stated as on the table from the beginning.

Oh and it makes me sad that this far into battling existing on site that the modification glitch, where they just stop working for no apparent reason, is being used for not caring if defense mods are worth using or not after this revamp. I know programing is extremely limited and focused on new Subeta, but can't someone take a look at this issue? Having an important mechanic randomly not function isn't great.

Just spitballin' here at 6 in the morning, but wouldn't it be better to remove the freeze mechanic entirely, have a new armory section where you can equip one shield, and then the opponent hinders you with a replacement for freeze mechanic (where you can't use weapons or scrolls) but you're at least able to shield during that turn? The shield only shows up when the new element goes off. Shields then aren't taking up a slot on the weapon set, and can actually be improved at every tier without fear of being overpowered.

If I'm awake later tonight when I get done with work, I can conjure up a rough image draft of the idea.

At least with stealing, even if activation rates suck for blessings, if you have a weapon that can generate items each use, then that does mitigate the issue. Same can't be said for freezing.

alternatively, improve freeze rates on weapons and allow us to be on par with opponents that are freeze-happy.

Oh speaking of updating challengers.

Could challenger loot be looked at before the reset? Standardize when amulets and tomes drop across Normal, Secret and Cash Shop. Make it standard that all Easy and Medium challengers (or at least all Normal and Secret for those difficulties) drop eggs. Event and seasonal challengers do not need to fit the pattern since some of the fun is endless chance of good drops.

It could also be good to get rid of the Secret category by combining with Normal. I know that finding Secret challengers is supposed to have a fun element to it. But it seems to discourage new and returning battlers who weren't here when the Secret challengers were released and don't know they should be looking to unlock them. We have an absolute ton of challengers now between Normal and Secret yet I still hear people say that there aren't many challengers to fight because they only see Normal. OR Have it coded that all Secret challengers are shown in the Secret section. The ones you have unlocked are in color and the ones you don't have yet are grayed out. That way people know they should be trying to unlock the challengers.

Yes, I would love for the challengers that don’t follow the standard such as the majority of CS challengers before this year’s theme and the millionaire center opponents

I also agree all the available challengers should be done that way for both Secret and CSC

Personally, the parched/bona crystals could be dropped to a 1% chance and I'd just replace all my mod crystals with those two. If they lost freeze protection entirely I'd double down on shrieks/Freezing Marquise Crystals because it feels like most challengers rely on freeze protection/chain freezing.

So, if the goal is to get the other crystals (and popular opinion or not the scrolls too, looking at the shrieks I typically default to) then the freeze or be frozen needs to be changed. Otherwise nerfing freeze protection is going to backslide to "everyone focuses on healing"/high HP since defense doesn't mean anything if I'm frozen for ten rounds in a row.

Like a great example is Forj. No freezing to focus on instead I need to worry about blocking Y icons while also dealing X icon, so I mod those weapons accordingly to dump as much water as possible. If more challengers required me to focus on dealing X icon, or a lot of any icon(s) to break past the defense, then I'd actually be remoding my weapons.

I would personally prefer to rebalance opponents. I like the idea of making the other mods more useful so that you aren't only ever using freeze/steal protection mods. As long as high freezing exists, you will always need freeze protection. It's one thing to be frozen once every 20 or so turns, quite another to be frozen 5 times in a row. Same for steal happy opponents.

There is also the issue with opponents that have infinite use weapons that heal over 700 HP per turn from any one weapon. If we want to get away from the overheal meta, the opponents could do with some updates to match.

Just a question about the golden goddess shield - is the intention behind that so it could be used with another shield like the turquoise shield and then the matchup wouldn't be too OP with damage?

[Edit]

Maybe another option is to make the activation rate of the defensive mods higher or have it last for more turns so that even when you are frozen, you are still able to block some of the incoming damage. To protect from freezing then you can either mod with parched/bona to stop it altogether or mod with a bunch of different icon defense mods that block damage when frozen.

I also love ColdDragon's idea!

It'd also be super cool to see how many wins/losses/ties you have against each opponent right under them.

Esp. now with trying to catch up, I simply work down the list on Jess' challenger guide, which provides links to each opponent with info if there's special loot to aim for and one click statistics and battle from there. It's such a time saver! Since the repeated wish for real tabs for each challenger category and direct link to their statistics hasn't been acknowledged in many years.

Regarding mods that provide freeze protection, I'd rather we could limit to ONE freeze protection mod, with a decent activation rate, and that way we don't have to equip several of them to do the same job, and use the other free slots for other mods that are usually less used.... that's just my humble opinion.