Dev Diary: Divine Era #4, Divine Equipment

Created by Lizzy D, Modified on Tue, 17 Dec at 6:32 PM by Lizzy D

Hi Descendents,

KIX_Standard here again. This is the big one. Today, we’re taking an up close & personal look at the Divine Era equipment.

With this update, you will have access to 128 new pieces of equipment to outfit your heroes: 108 meant for battle, and 4 new economy sets making up the last 20.

None of this new equipment needs to be crafted! (All of the existing equipment like Radiant Lord is unchanged.) The way you get this equipment is to go out into the world and fight. The primary source, and your first stop, will be the Dens of Thieves that we laid out in a previous blog post: reclaim stolen goods for a chance to earn a piece of Divine equipment. Over time, more sources may be made available, but not right away.

Before we dive in, this is a great place to point out that we’ve added new preset slots to the Exchange Equipment function! The limit has increased from 15 to 30 presets to give you room to play around with all of these new toys.

Economy Equipment

Finally, the time has come to update some of your economy sets! We have created the Founder set for your Architect, the Apothecary set for your Infirmary officer, the Disciple set for your scholar, and the Arbiter set for your Drill Sergeant.

Each of these sets is perfectly matched for the Divine Legion. Not only do they provide more construction speed bonuses than ever before, but upon completing these sets you’ll unlock powerful new bonuses that attune you with the Legion. Bonuses like a reduction in Divine Tomes while conducting research, and revive cost reduction for Divine Legion troops. Make sure to check out the codex after the update for more details!

Battle Equipment

In addition to not having to craft your equipment, for battle equipment we have made a second big break from tradition. None of this new equipment belongs to a set! This means you are free to mix and match to get the perfect combination for an attack, without having to worry about losing your set bonus.

Fantasy & base items

With this update we’ve made efforts to establish a stronger fantasy around equipment. First, you’ll see that there are only a handful of “base” items:

Heavy helm, called a Barbute
Medium helm, called a Helmet
Light helm, called a Leather Cap
Heavy armour, called a Cuirass,
Medium armour, called Chainmail,
Light armour, called Jerkin
Main-hand weapons: Long Sword, Gladius and Sabre
Off-hand shields: Tower Shield and Buckler
Off-hand weapon: Battle Axe

(For this update, we have only provided new equipment for your helm, torso, primary and off-hand slots. There are no new pets, or battle accessories at this point.)

Each one of these items comes with unique intrinsic properties that directly affect your hero. For instance, a Gladius has more raw damage than a Sabre, but a Sabre provides some defense. Wearing a Cuirass will provide more protection for your hero than a Jerkin, but also applies a damage penalty since they cannot move around as effectively.

But is that all? Not at all! Every piece of equipment has been magically enchanted by the Light.

Effects

Extending the fantasy, we have decided to impose a scheme where weapons provide access to damaging effects, and your armour and helm provide defensive effects.

The first thing to note is that every single piece of Divine Equipment will provide an extremely valuable boost to your Divine Legion base stats. This means your Paladins, Inquisitors, Crusaders and Dragon’s Breath will all start from stronger base numbers before applying the buffs from all other sources like your research, building levels and other equipment.

And that’s only the beginning. You’ll have to choose from a number of different effects, experimenting with combinations to find the most efficient way to take down your chosen target. Do you want to take a Penetrating Gladius of the Crusade into battle, debuffing your enemy’s defense and bolstering your own attack? Or is a Precise Gladius of the Legion more your style, with a focus on debuffing their HP and increasing your march size.

(If you attended our Dev Q&A on Discord a couple of weeks ago you may remember our initial plan was to focus on “brute force”; purely buffing your own troops. Thanks to lots of great feedback from people who attended, we ended up including debuffs back in the mix.)

Every piece of equipment is meant to be high in fantasy, and high in effectiveness. For every slot, and every attack, you’ll be able to make decisions for trade offs to dominate your opponents.

One other aspect that we had a lot of fun with is the face-off duel. Maybe you like to test your will in mortal combat, and need to feel the thrill of victory. For you, there is equipment specifically designed to power up your hero in a duel, as well as complementary equipment that provides juicy buffs if you win. Step into the arena, if you think you have what it takes!

I’m so thrilled to finally be able to reveal this equipment, but I’m going to hold back on the rest and leave it for you to discover. You’ll find tools for your toolkit to buff your army, debuff your enemies, handle meat, increase your march size, and more.

Since these are not set items, you can visit the Special Equipment Codex to see all the options and start to plan your attack!

Selling

Because we have decided to make equipment a fairly common reward from regular gameplay, we knew that eventually you’ll have more equipment than you know what to do with. And so, the rewards from selling your spare equipment have been much improved; no longer will you only get a tiny amount of silver!

Now, you will be rewarded with a sacrifice chest that matches the grade of the sold equipment. Inside these chests, you will have a chance to get a quantity of Stardust, Blessed Iron or Purified Carbon.

For a limited time after this release, you will also be able to sell any excess Aspirant, Willful, Ferocious and Overwhelm equipment that you may not need any more for sacrifice chests.

But what are those? Read on!

Upgrading

Let’s start with Stardust. Stardust is a very important material to the Divine Legion. A rare material with some mystical importance, it is used primarily to upgrade equipment as you promote from Basic to immortal.

There is also a mysterious new equipment that can be crafted at the forge, the Legionnaire’s Heart diamond. This is made by compressing Stardust with enormous pressure. But its purpose still remains a mystery…

Enhancing

Now that we’ve looked at Stardust, let’s talk about Blessed Iron and Purified Carbon. These are critical materials required to craft something special: the Divine Medallion. You can find the medallion for crafting in the forge under the Accessories tab. You may recall from an earlier blog post that the King’s Bounty event would be rewarding something called a Dragon’s Heart. Well now is finally the time to put that piece in its place, and reveal that it will be one of the other materials needed here. The fourth ingredient we’ll cover at the end of this blog.

On its own, it isn’t much to look at, but this medallion has enormous importance amongst the Divine Legion. These magical medallions are the key component needed to enhance all of your Divine equipment.

The medallions are accessories that your hero can wear, but you’ll realize much more power by consuming them to enhance your other equipment.

All Divine equipment can be enhanced to +10.

Dismantling

Another key change to the equipment of the Divine Era is in dismantling. We fully expect enhanced equipment to be dismantled and replaced on a fairly regular basis, and we wanted to make sure that experience was less painful than it is today. And so, when you dismantle, you are refunded a large portion of the medallions that you used to enhance it, which you’re then free to use to enhance your new equipment!

Brucie bonus: Monsters!

Monster Blood is the final ingredient needed to craft Divine Medallions. The only known source of this potent elixir is from slaying level 50 monsters.

We’ve taken the liberty to try out some changes with monsters. When you hunt a level 50 Lava Turtle, you are guaranteed to get 15 AP. That means that for every one of these turtles that you kill, you gain AP!

Not only that, but we have shaken up its rewards. With every kill you have a chance to get Monster Blood, food, a Cache of a Fallen Hero which contains treasure dropped from some poor hero that this monster killed or a speedup chest.

Why only level 50? Well, we’re considering this an experiment. Depending on how it goes over, we will roll out a similar idea to a wider number of monsters. If you’re lucky enough to get a level 50 Living Armor elite monster to spawn, it will always drop Monster Blood.

Okay, so that’s everything! In past blogs we’ve gone over what the Divine Era is, the King’s Bounty event and Den of Thieves targets. Today we looked at the equipment in detail, how to upgrade and enhance it, fully explored the critical Divine Medallion, and even looked at a change to a monster. We’re all really excited to get this stuff into your hands and let you play with it all. The Divine Era will officially begin right after the server comes back up, but keep an eye out for Aela to announce the start of the King’s Bounty which is when things will really kick off and the equipment will start to be available!