Legacy of the Beast 2020 Retrospective

Hoo boy, this has been quite a year.

It's no doubt that with COVID-19, things have gotten difficult for all of us. Despite the challenges we all face day to day, we've persisted through and made it to the end of this dreadful year. So, pat yourself on the back for making it through.

As for Legacy of the Beast, this year has been quite interesting with some of the things we've gotten in the game. So, let's go over what's occurred so far, and then talk about what I (and you guys commenting below) want out of 2021.

The Good: Clans have gotten some awesome updates and characters tied to them that have changed how we play the game. Raid Boss fights are a fun mode and it's interesting to try and figure out new character combinations that can bring down the big ol' bastards. We've also seen some amazing quality of life improvements over the year, with Cosmic talismans becoming searchable by the type of effect they give, the store getting a huge revamp, the events section becoming much easier to navigate, and the tickets system for bugs and game issues becoming much easier to use. We've gotten some new content here and there, with a ton of new characters and talismans coming out. Awakening characters has become more widespread, making some of the older characters that have fallen out of rotation work much better in the current game, with the most improved (in my opinion) being Grim Reaper Eddie. We've also gotten the new event currency system, which (though confusing at first) makes it so much easier to not have to navigate fragments upon fragments in events. This year has seen a lot of improvements to the base game, with little expansion on story as a sacrifice. In addition, we've gotten some sort of mega event spanning either a month or longer throughout the entire year, from Blackbeard Eddie's event to the event where we got our first playable raid boss, Odin.

The Bad: A repeat offender for Legacy of the Beast is balance. Balance is very difficult to achieve when you have nearly 500 characters in a game, and even more so with talisman combinations that can cause them to be busted further. One of the main issues this year saw was the ascent of Live After Death Eddie, who basically became a win button in arena for a few months after his release due to his special "Apparition" effect, making it nearly impossible to counter him. We've also been slightly cursed with new innate effects, which make it very, very difficult to figure out what is and isn't going on with your team; the worst offender of these being Ghost of the Navigator, who can cause innate passive disable which means you can't tell if your passive is working correctly or not against him. Character passives have gotten incredibly long, making it difficult to keep track of what each character can and cannot do. Just look at the new Baphomet characters from the most recent mega event, each of their passives have huge text. Older talismans are still very outdated and do not stack up against current talismans (compare Shroud, a 6 piece purple talisman set, to Rot, a 4 piece green talisman set). In addition to balance issues, we also see power creep hitting very, very hard. Look at Gauntlet nowadays; in F rank we see characters who have some levels of awakening, bespoke talismans, the works. I would say balance has made things very tedious in the game, and hopefully in 2021 we can see the power creep slow down a little bit.

The Ugly: To begin, server issues have plagued the game quite a bit this year. Taking hours to enter into the game, the game crashing when you open the shop, and other large scale slowdown issues have caused the game to become slightly unplayable at certain points. I know the dev team is trying their hardest to rectify this, and I appreciate the effort. However, it still needs to be brought up due to the amount of annoyance it has caused. In addition, we need to talk about how some characters in events have become quite annoying to acquire. Take Monsters Bat Eddie, a 5 star Ed who I was personally very excited to see enter into the game. For his event, you only got 9 chances at him from event challenges. This left you with 90 fragments of his soul if you didn't manage to pull him, out of 1000. To guarantee him without event challenges, you needed to spend 9000 ironite for him. That's insanely pricey, and considering we aren't really told when Eddies or other characters will return, it's quite a gamble to not get him. Besides Monsters Bat, we also had Skuld and more recently Dark Advent Lilith. These characters can only be acquired by chance; there's no way to grab them from fragment build up like how you could with Monsters Bat. Also, Guy Fawkes Eddie becoming Awakenable is cool, but you could only max awaken him by paying even more money. That sucks. You already supported the game by purchasing him, so you shouldn't have to do so again just to complete him. I think that characters like Guy Fawkes and Skuld are setting a dangerous precedent for future events, acquiring characters in ways that are very taxing on the players.

Overall, 2020 for Legacy of the Beast was a decent year. It was nice to see certain characters get a spotlight, and quality of life updates are always welcome. Again though, it may be quite annoying going forward if the characters in the game take as long to acquire.

Going forward, we will see new areas like Avalon and (maybe) Silent Planet. I am quite interested to see where the story of Eddie and his allies goes from this point on, and I hope that with that we get some new characters who don't break the meta but also are fun to use in their own way. I also would like to see a way to see innate effects on enemies, because currently it makes it really confusing that they aren't. In addition, I hope to see some even cooler new talismans that give us neat effects that aren't gamebreaking.

What did you guys think of 2020 for Legacy? What do you hope to see going forward?

Pretty much what you said but I'll put it in much shorter words.

When the game is running smooth it's great. I'm having fun, trying things out, and just playing around.

Unfortunately there has been a lot of times when it's not going great. If we could finally get that sorted out, things would be pure fun again.

The fact that we haven't just dropped this game for one that works all the time (and there are plenty of them out there) means you've got something here worth fighting for. Please, convince us that we aren't wrong.

2020 was, for better or worse, the year for LOTB and they...squandered it. The game is very very intensive, and in our modern world we can't just afford to let the phone run a game for hours on end when we are at work. Could get us fired.

But we got hit by a new plague. Most things shut down, we were locked in. And it's just more "complete 500 runs for like 30 ironite lmao buy the new pack".

LOTB has always tried to be this FF wannabe. Limit breaker to fury, a team you move through the world, turn based combat. But the story stopped, what, with Lucifer? We may get a snippet or meme from holiday events, but we won't see any more development until Avalon and Silent Planet. This was THE year to give us a beter story mode that wasn't "press autoplay and refill sands now and then".

I mean, has anything happened to the Dragon King? Why are we fighting Odin and Baphomet? What has happened to the Beast shards? Why not make the end video after completing the story mode available to be seen again?

Moving on, to the server issues. The game is either
a) growing faster than the devs can buy server infrastructure
b) not making enough money to spend on server infrastructure
c) so badly coded that it won't matter your internet speed, the server the game is hosted on, it will always fail.

It's getting to be a problem. We ussually can't log on for a few hours after each event launches (and with events overlapping this is worse), and sometimes even the next day brings connection issues. We lose precious time on trying to just get in, let alone wade through the BUY VISIONS EDDIE HE'S GOOD WE SWEAR popups so we can actualy load in a dungeon. This forces the devs to spend time not only fixing the issues, but also o bring in a compensation package (that never covers enough of the lost time)

AS stated above, passives, bespokes, skills and talisman sets have gotten ridiculous. Ussually the combo of "latest character and talisman" is enough, since they are designed to counter whatever monstrosity was released before them, but guys, it's a phone game. I don't want to sit and read page after page of effects. I want to sit in the toilet, bust a few heads with the eddie I have on my shirt and then go on with my day.

In 2020 we also saw the rise of the "x% to avoid damage" We started with counter based on type, then invincibility, endure, then the Perfect Damage Shields now...this. It's Moonchild all over again. But I don't see a nerf coming for the Mongol toons or the archer talisman, to name some names.

As for good things! Clans clans clans. The more that they are involved in events, the better. Keep the PVP clan war thing for the forever future though. We already have our hands full just grinding events.
We see the return of toons to the Frontier Store and that's great, new people shouldn't be left out of collecting Eddies. Cosmic talismans became clearer and now stronger, but things like COSMIC ALCHEMY?!I get reducing 2 or 3 slot talismans into one, but a 5 set? Suddenly toon without the space for such talismans can mount them, and now you don't know what the enemy on arena/gauntlet might have.