Hey now, if that stupid briefcase would go away and be replaced by , it'd be a bit better to open that damn gacha box. I agree Hustler having a stupid low chance to give out a Godly would also be fine by me. That's how I did pull my AoN! It took years, but I got it!

I personally don't mind that an opponents give out weapons below their tier because I'm still using T9 weapons for my low T11 and I can save them for when my other pets (mostly T2/T1s) eventually get that high. Those weapons as a whole might not be as useful to my T11 but I think of them as a tool for the future and I'm glad they will be an option for my other pets.

My main gripe is the fact that battling still isn't fun if you don't have a T7 or something. It wasn't fun for me until like T9. It's been a bit better now than like two years ago but it's still an uphill battle to get pets up to a point where there's a wider range of opponents and a wider range of weapons to use. Battling is fun when you have a range of weapons and opponents but the T1-T4 scene is still kind meh in that regard.

Oh, this! Early battling is so minimal, it's such a grind. This year at T7 and with a handful of cash shop credits, I can finally see the appeal. I think having a plethora of low-level baddies to beat up would make it a lot more fun, even just from an entertainment standpoint.

Hello! I just wanted to speak to this point you've made here to shed some light and clarity on training multiple pets - it is difficult to train multiple pets before you have one high tier pet that can beat a good amount of tough guys. The reason for that is because you are still building your armory, scrolls and strategy with the first pet. Speaking from personal experience, raising my first pet to cap was the hardest. I needed to buy or borrow weapons to beat opponents that could reward me with even more weapons to add to my armory. Every other pet after that came easy once I got my main pet to the end of T12. Once you have a pet that can beat the challengers that drop extremely hard and impossible tokens, you can convert those down to thousands of easy tokens. You can then buy battle shop boosters to use on the next pet to level them up faster than simply doing battle quests and the training center. The weapons your high tier pet wins can also be used to add to the armory of your lower tier pets so they have an easier time battling. For example, say you have the challenger crithbolcan unlocked. Crithbolcan is best suited for pets T10+ but he drops a really good scroll that can be used by any tier pet. You can win the scroll with a T11 pet and the your T7 pet also benefits and can beat up tougher challengers at T7 because they can now equip an end game scroll.

It's harder to try and raise two easy pets together because you are constantly forced to split a smaller supply of resources between the two.

That all makes total sense and I understand the battle system is designed that way- my issue is this:

Which still might take me years to achieve. So in the meantime I just want battling to be like, a fun experience before I get a T12/T13 pet, because it takes forever.I dk, but to me this response still seems like "eventually the battle system will be fun, just give it a few more years!" I want it to be really fun now! I want to enjoy battling. xD I am like, just getting to the fun parts at T7 (and buying opponents from the cash shop).

And I do want to thank the super experienced battlers for being willing to chat about the battle system and help out people who aren't at the top tier. It makes a huge difference. This whole system is built on user-made guides and the ability to ask for help in the forums. But does it need to be designed to only be great once you've got a single, fully optimized, top tier/capped pet? Why can't the lower tiers be fun?

I have a T3 (or something idk) pet who I'm just putting like, all stats into strength to make it a glass canon, and I think it would be a really fun and interesting experience to see how differently two pets with wildly different stats handle opponents, but getting that pet to be even close to battling, I'm looking at a multi-year investment of time.

And I do want to say, for myself at least, fun and difficult aren't mutually exclusive. I don't have a huge issue with battling being hard or a long-term investment, I just think more should be going on T1-T7. Instead of options, variety, exploration etc those lower tiers have restriction and tedium. I'd even buy weapons, scrolls etc over and over again if we could just like, engage more with this system at low tiers.

I don't have any one thing I think "I want this aspect of battling to change." I really get the feeling, listening to many T13 battlers, that I don't "get" the system and maybe I just shouldn't be commenting anyway. But I have really liked getting new opponenets and loot this year, and I want to share my two cents whether or not it is helpful in the long run.

Sorry for typos, typed this on my phone. :x

My response was only to clarify how it can be made easy if you want to raise an "army" not for how battling can be made fun. For me battling isn't fun if it's always easy all the time. It took me years to raise my pet to cap, but that was the fun part. It's not about the destination, but the journey getting there. That's the reason why I raised more pets from a low tier- so that battling was an actual battle and a struggle again. It's no fun for me personally to beat everything up in one or two hits. I like the growing pains and challenges each tier experiences. Winning weapons and other battle loot wouldn't be as rewarding or as much as an incentive to battle if it was always easy.

There are A LOT of good cheap options at the low tiers, way more than there ever was when I first started. I think what most people struggle with in the beginning is the battle mechanics and coming up with the right strategy so you are not taking 100 losses every time. But that is what the community is for - to ask questions and to help you with your strategy and set building

Fwiw, I agree with the OP's sentiment re: weapon prizes. I found that pretty demotivating when winning against challengers.

I loved the possibility of grinding for a top prize. I was one of the top scorers in my tier and won a Malhuili (since I've sold, the regret of my subeta life, that was a bad decision xD). But I also get why we can't have that right now, what with site lag.

My favourite part of battling was the strategising. The unfortunate thing is a good chunk of it becomes one hit knock-out or close to it that it becomes easily boring. And the strategising only works if the opponent is beatable. So there's a narrow range where strategising is a thing. Plot/event challengers are great for this, because they're so time limited that one can't help but to strategise even if, in the end, there's not even a single win. So I appreciate plot/event challengers in whatever format they come!

Also, I can barely get around to other quests because of time/motivation, so I'm probably the wrong demographic to give feedback as I'm not the demographic who is consistently into anything. :'D

i totally feel this. i have a T12 pet i've been training up for years, about 4k away from the stat cap, and i've just never been able to actually get into battling the way other people seem to. my brain just slides right off it. i HATE having to futz around with multiple weapons and sets and elemental types and switching scrolls mid-battle and all that. drives me nuts! there's already enough click-click-clicking involved! please no more for the love of god!! what do you MEAN i should have a different set for every challenger??

so i've been using the same set for a long time (maybe even since T11?), open with the same four weapons i always do (at least on the stronger opponents where i can't just immediately outclass them), and mash the "make your turn" button until someone dies. of course that means i can't beat the most upper-echelon opponents (i can consistently breeze through the first 28 levels of battle quests, but the last couple opponents can be a crapshoot depending on who gets picked).

and of course i feel like i'm missing out on an aspect of the experience—maybe even, like, the whole POINT of the expereince? but like i said, my brain just doesn't vibe with that stuff and i hate it and it bores me. on top of that, whenever i DO try to figure out if i should be using different weapons and scrolls, most of the recommendations are CS opponent loot, and i'd rather spend my CSC on clothing tbh.

so yeah i guess i just fundamentally don't understand battling in the way that everyone else just sort of seems to "get." i'm sort of like that with pokemon, too; i have my specific strategies that i like to stick to and not get too crazy or fancy with it. (the difference, i suppose, is that you're pretty much MEANT to play pokemon that way, since each one can only have 4 moves.)

first off, love this thread. the battle area of the site is wild to me because it takes so much passion, time, and effort to get right. plus, it hasn’t really been touched (programming-wise) in like, forever.

right now i’m working through the site’s “rewrite” and mostly just tinkering where i can, trying to build something more flexible than what we’ve got. i used to lean too hard into the “start from scratch” mindset, but now i just want to get something done that we can iterate on.

for battles, i’ve been toying with a way to spice things up. instead of just unlocking an opponent and then immediately fighting them, what if they had to “challenge” you first? like random encounters in pokemon. you could even ‘farm’ battles by ‘walking around’—similar to neurogalaxy’s roam feature or the way time passes in some games. that opens up a ton of possibilities, like:

1. tweaking how often certain challengers appear. maybe keep the odds tight when we first release them so it feels more random, then adjust over time (or reverse it for something like Jelly wars).
2. controlling battle flow means we can rely more on your pet’s level instead of scaling based on the number of wins. so battles won’t get impossibly hard just because you keep winning.
3. rare or hard-to-find opponents would still exist, but with better scaling, we could do cooler stuff with them. and we could make them actually rare, e.g. they'd challenge you infrequently but not be impossible. now we have to say once you've unlocked them, well, you can challenge them and get all the loot asap.
4. loot doesn’t have to be a one-time thing. if we manage how often opponents show up, there’s always loot to grab. rare items could drop more realistically without stressing about “one-and-done” loot scenarios after x wins.
5. for early battles, we could speed things up with QoL tweaks like auto-checking options. make those low-level fights feel more like quick pokemon-style encounters. maybe even throw it into a widget? idk.

i’ll probably experiment with this idea when i start building out the battle system. i’ve already worked on a migration script to make the weird way we store battle data less of a pain going forward.

No to random encounters ala Ice King random event.

Why do you think even Pokemon went away from random encounters?? They're not fun. No. No. No.

I guess I'd invite you to think beyond things that we've done before and think about what we could do :)

I'm not talking about using random events - I'd consider something like a log that collects while you use the site, having items that automatically get a challenge, things like lures / etc that attract specific types of battles.

There is a wide of range of things that we could to make the underlying points I made more interesting, instead of focusing on one specific piece.

i dunno, i feel like the whole point of battling on here (far as i've ever been able to tell) is to grind out wins for the loot drops and EXP, keep training up so you can grind out enough wins on the next guy to get his special loot (and more EXP), and so on. so obviously having the opponents readily accessible for whenever i happen to be in a grindy mood is pretty crucial to that process, no? if we're adding a secondary step to that grind, of having to farm the encounters themselves, that sounds like a not so great time imo. like, it's one thing when i'm curled up in bed playing an RPG wanting to immerse myself in a world of adventure; it's kind of a whole different thing for a browser game where mechanics are quite a bit more abstracted.

seconding on their stance with how subeta is laid out, extra steps would just be inconvenient when you wanna knuckle down and grind out battles.

we did like trying to find blake, if its something like that it'd be fine!

I also greatly dislike the idea of having to farm for the chance to battle. It's already way more complicated to learn than it needs to be. Let's not also lock even attempting behind another needless mechanic.

Also for an example, today I went through and fought all the easy and medium challengers with four pets. So like 4-500 battles. If I had to farm those encounters? Nah, I wouldn't even bother. Ever.

overall, i agree with the opinions about encounters as potential gates to normal battle farming and don't totally love the idea of making specifically harder to encounter challengers; that just feels frustrating for frustration's sake.

in the interest of thinking about what battling could be on the kumos site:

i could see encounters being fun as a way to fast track certain loot milestones, like you could get an arena encounter and pick which challenger + milestone to be able to challenge for? (i.e. get encounter > be able to pick like slavam + tome 1/tome 2/scroll piece > fight slavam at the specific difficulty, as in win 15/35/50, and pick up the battle exp between your current win and the challenge difficulty).

• maybe the normal/secret/csc challengers can be grouped into map/theme-based arenas (i.e. rift for like erdoo/canaak/slavam, centropolis for like jeremy/esmeralda, delphi for lindsay, shadowglen for quentin/rictus, gemstone golems, minion mutations, so on and so forth)
• could also do increased chance of arena encounter for highest x number of battles farmed in same arena group in a day?

if you win the challenge, you can have a "challenge win streak" with some added benefits at milestones?

• i.e. every 3rd challenge in the streak, you can pick another challenge encounter in the same arena group right after
• i.e. every 5th challenge in the streak, you can pick a new arena group or choose to stay in the current one
• i.e. every 10th challenge in the streak, you can get a random booster (i.e. shinwa prize pool, battle shop boosters, etc)
• i.e. every 20th challenge in the streak, you can get a bonus mage tome

a battle roam feature could be fun for finding battle shop tokens or mod crystals even. could even do like a crystal shard "refinery" system where you roam to find shards, then turn in x shards of the same element to get a crystal of the corresponding element (i.e. 1 shards for tear, 2 shards for baguette, 3 shards for cabochon, 4 shards for moonstone, 5 shards for brilliant, 8 shards for marquise, 12 shards for EoR).

• could also be fun to be able to upgrade crystals we do have into stronger crystal shapes (i.e. marquise + 4 shards to get an EoR?)
• could also tie to the arena idea where specific arenas are more likely to yield specific element or special shards? (i.e. freezing/ice shards in arctic frost, singed/fire shards in darkside, dark shards in shadowglen, parched/light shards in delphi, etc etc)
• silly pipe dream idea, but maybe some way to recover mods you smashed when slotting new mods? i know that i personally sometimes have hangups changing out EoR mods just because they are more expensive/harder to farm

i do want to point out that plenty of users find the current battle system convoluted and confusing enough as is. i think new features should aim to streamline/supplement the current system (i.e. making farming less tedious, making it easier to access/gain stronger mod crystals, making equipping consumables less of a headache) rather than posing more luck-based hoops for users to jump through. i think the goal should not be to dramatically change the landscape of current battling (which battlers already love), but give some alternate routes to get where we want to go!

• also as an extra note: i'm not sure i love the idea of level-based scaling because boosting via tomes can blow up your level really fast and i could see that being detrimental rather than beneficial. could be interesting with some careful testing of more balanced scaling, but i'm kind of wary.

Just responding to the particular ideas you're floating, Keith.

rng-based mechanics generally don't feel super great for people who are interested in them, so if that's the plan there absolutely needs to be a way to force those encounters to happen (e.g. like the tempest lure or w/e it's called)

I don't really understand this point, unless you're suggesting that the scaling will be less because you're going to encounter enemies less often? Which sounds like a more annoying situation than an opponent you can regularly challenge and restrategize against.

This is /theoretically/ cool but looking at things like the rift and tempest kumos cookies, I really think consideration needs to be given to new things being locked behind RNG and how that can be a feelsbad moment for players. The idea of making seasonal/temporary challengers less crazy scaling is interesting though.

Again, locking loot behind RNG after already being gated behind having a pet that is able to challenge the opponent can be a real feelsbad moment.

NGL I don't see how this would be that different from how early battling currently is?

Considering Kumos as a site, I think doing something akin to a battle pass where players can work towards specific item or stat booster goals by engaging in battles would be an interesting angle to investigate, because it allows players to actively work towards what they want to do in the Battle Arena.

Obviously that'd require some balance around what the values for various items would be and what certain opponents would contribute to that value would be. This is kinda like a battle shop that could allow for randomized specific challenges (e.g. "beat x opponent without using freezing scrolls" or s/t like that)

You can actually grind through the lower tiers very quickly. I have 60+ battle pets and do the Tier 1 base stats to ~Tier 6 run on the regular. Between the battle eggs, BQs and just beating all challengers for experience I fly through the tiers. I don't even use much auto training anymore.

Besides an encyclopedic knowledge of how the BC works and great weapons/spells, the real difference is that I have EVERY challenger. Having all the Secret and Cash Shop challengers really makes a difference in how much experience and eggs you can grind out for a pet in a short time. I basically have what people requested earlier in the thread where you can just grind to grow your pet.

I said before that a huge help would be to have all non-event/holiday challengers shown in the BC. Make the ones you have access to normal looking and the locked challengers grayed out. Click a grey challenger to see vaguely where it comes from i.e. Cash Shop with a link and Secret with something like "Can you find how to unlock".

Hell I wouldn't even mind getting rid of the classification for most Secret challengers since finding the trick to getting them is fun for like 5 minutes when they are first released and then it just another gate between old players and new players access. After 6 months or a year migrate the challengers to Normal. Or just don't bother with Secret at all and put them in Normal from the start (I think that's how it was done last year for new non-Cash Shop challengers).

You're looking to change an aspect of battling that nobody is asking for (how challengers are presented in the coliseum). The way it is currently is fine.

You mean the battle screen itself, the actual fight?

I'm glad that you're thinking about battling as you work on Kumos, Keith!

I think that your suggestions are interesting but not really the kinds of things that battlers here are looking for.

My personal QOL suggestions just off the top of my head are:

More access to mods/ability to grind mods. For example I just used the one I owned to get my wins on the Hydra this year, and A. I have NO idea when or where I got it and B. Have no idea where to get another! I could look offsite for the answer, but I think it'd be cool if there was some sort of mod database saying where you can get certain things. If we're talking in terms of like, Pokemon, this would be sort of like grinding EVs from specific Pokemon. Grinding the variations of attack and defense mods would actually be a huge benefit to trainers, I think, because mods are absolutely essential to making a weapon.

Easier way to equip mods also comes to mind. It's just clunky now.

The armory could use an upgrade. I'd be cool if we could sort by different things like offense icons, defense icons, bombs, healers, freezers, etc, instead of the alphabetical order we've got going now. Most people (including myself) don't have what each weapon does memorized and that's a real detriment to people getting into battling. Having to hover over each and every weapon to see what it does is pretty tedious. It's WHY certain weapons become staples, because I can go "Oh Natasha blocks fire" without knowing the 30 other weapons that do the same but to a lesser extent.

Same with scrolls. I just went diving into my scrolls recently and realized I don't remember off the top of my head which ones are freezers! There's the obvious like Shrieks and but I'm sitting here staring at the scrolls being ".... I think this one is a freezer... it's got the negative HP to support that idea....... hm". And because freezing scrolls only have a percentage of a chance to activate, I throw it on and it doesn't freeze but I'm in the middle of doing the fighting thing so I either don't notice or I do, and it's just kind of irritating haha. If the scroll library had like a sorting toggle and I could click "Freeze" and it showed the ones that could and the percentage rate, that'd be nice.

Idk, just some thoughts.