Empires & Puzzles - Path of Giants

Over on E&P, then upgraded the Path of Valor quest screen to have a whole parallel set of quests.  So now this a Path to Adventure page with two tabs: the old Path of Valor and the new Path of Giants.  The first costs $9.99 per 30 days to get the full set of bonus items (which I do pay for every now & then), and Giants costs $19.99 (which is too much for this kind of thing for me).


Having twice as many available quests is nice, even with the default free sets of rewards.  The Giants series almost always has 3 or 4 quests dealing with unique challenges for the Raids.  The Raids got pretty boring and repetitive after a few years, but now there is almost always a quest to defeat 5 heroes by class and another to defeat 5 heroes by element.  So 5 paladins, check.  5 fire heroes, check.  On the downside, it's a bit annoying that when showing the opposing teams, the class icons are not visible unless you click every hero.

Some of the other raid challenges are much trickier.  "Win 5 battles with all nature heroes" (or any other single element) means that I have to downgrade my team to 3000 or so to meet the challenge, but the opposing teams might still come up with strengths of 4500 to 5000 because my overall ranking is high.  But after losing a few, the ranking goes down and the foes are in my range again.  It's an interesting balance.

One quest type that I find funny is "Win 5 raids with at least 5 heroes alive."  There are only 5 heroes in a team.  There can never be more than 5 alive at the end of a battle.  Oops.

Other quests include "Heal 10,000 hp in Raids" or "Deal 2,000 damage in raids".  Those just happen eventually -- I can't see a way to make them happen sooner.  "Win a raid with a classic hero on your team" or "3 costumed heroes" ... these get a little too specific for me, but I can usually swap some guys to get it done.

Some other quest types are on the world map, such as "Defeat 5 fire creatures on Season V level 20", or "Complete a level on Season IV without using loot tickets or special skills."  Not using special skills is probably the hardest of these new quests, since most of our damage and healing comes from those powers, and without those it's surprising how ineffective our heroes are.  Good challenge, though.  Keep mixing it up.

Path of Giants adds an interesting twist back into those Raids by having you go after goals using weak or unfamiliar heroes, and try new things.  The rewards are also better, but I'm not going to pay $ for those imaginary bits.

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