The Gauntlet - BETA DETAILS

[Fudjo]

Here's some more thoughts on the gauntlet...

Talisman management is probably the hardest part about all of this. If you don't have enough Talismans to go around, you're going to spend a load of time moving them from person to person after every few fights. It would be nice if there was a faster way of doing this, however I'm totally blank on suggestions.

Agreed. Having a roster of fully-leveled and fully-sharded characters isn't enough. You also need the Talismans on them to succeed. The opposing teams aren't f'ing around. An easier way to manage your inventory would be great. On top of it - and I've said this in other threads - Alexander the Great Eddie is worth the purchase. If you want to compete in the Gauntlet, you need the Talismans and you're gonna run into a bottleneck of getting 3-star colorless evo runes. Alex Eddie gives you the ability to auto-farm Number of the Beast Madness, which gives you a very good return on 3-star colorless evo runes. You'll get enough every day to level up 2-3 Talismans to 5-star.

I just reached Tier AAA and you have to win 5 battles using only Warrior characters. That's 5 Warrior class Eddies and 15 Warrior class toons and they'll need to be fully-leveled, fully-sharded, fully-Talisman'ed, and not pumpkins. 8 SOW per battle, too. Hoo boy.

[Fudjo]

I'm really digging Gauntlet. I love playing around with a much larger set of characters, and I'm happy to see some benefit for keeping dupes of my favorites.

Completely agreed. I love that you have to use a lot more of your characters and that there's some thought and risk behind what you choose to use.

Question for everyone . . .

As I understand it, there is no way to manually reset progress. So, if you get stuck in a Tier and use all of your viable characters, you just have to wait until the automatic reset. Do we like this? Or would we prefer a manual reset option to go back to the beginning with a fresh roster (this is more similar to the Star Wars GOH approach, I think)? I see pros and cons of both. Thoughts?

On one hand, I can understand the frustration of hitting a dead end and not being able to play that mode for a week or more. On the other hand, I really like the "hardcore mode" feel of it and it adds a fun amount of risk. The battles I win feel a bit more rewarding and I like that I have to put some thought into it.

[Yup]

Apparently app crashes count as losses and you get that team locked out as having been used. (Just a seemingly random crash at A4 when My Klansman was mid-strike)

I think I'm kind of spoiled by the uncreative people in PvP.. I EXPECT Prisoner to have Primordials... I EXPECT M Lilith to have Destiny.... nice that it's not always true. Well.. at least up to the AA battles.

It does somewhat suck when the AI team seems to get first strike for every battle. I think I hit first in a total of 3 fights from ground zero to the AA level.

[Tim28213]

The higher tiers are definitely becoming ironite cost prohibitive. I want to do a few more levels tonight but I’m burned out on buying more SoW atm. I’ll try more tomorrow. The levels seem appropriately challenging and require a good bit of planning ahead. I have not run into any bugs in my progression so far.
Having 3 characters revive at once seemed to lag a bit but everything picked right back up once they were back in place.
It was almost like they revived sequentially. There was a couple second delay between the second character popping back and the third getting up. I was afraid the third was not coming back then he finally did and play resumed.

[Kamuz24z]

If you thought using only warriors and Magus in order to clear a floor was a challenge wait till you reach level SS I think that’s were the challenge will start for me 10 fights in order to clear it each fight cost 10 sow a total of 300 ironites plus you won’t be able to use the characters that you use in this floor for the next one I’m midway the teams that you will find in this floor is like fighting the top 10 teams in the arena, a decrease in sow will be a good change assuming that one day is going to be available for everyone if this sow over cost continue not many players are going to compete every week once I get the rewards from this week I don’t think I’m going to spend that much ironite again for next week, gauntlet it doesn’t take a lot of time in order to get to floor SS and that is good, is fun to play with characters that were in the bench and create new teams it will be cool if you guys add a floor that needs to be clear only with Eddies so far I’m having fun

[Metalreaper13]

Just got access a few hours ago

[Stormseye]

Currently on rank AA which is the 7th Tier of fights. Each tier increases in the number of battles, the cost of each battle in SoW and the reward for winning. The first tier is 2 fights. There are also progression rewards for every win so you can earn Heroic souls, gold, class souls and shards.

It seems every odd nunber tier has a class restriction. This restriction of classes will most likey change every week. The current seems to be using only Magus/Warrior characters. The menu is considerate in that your character list will only show what classes you can use.

There is also a pretty good reward for Achivements the first time you clear tiers. Earned 200ic for clearing A tier and ironite. Reward to clear AA tier is 45 ironite, 35 Heroic Fragment and 300 IC. As stated these rewards are subject to change.

Current costs for AA tier is 7sow per fight, 32 IC for each win and 75 Heroic Fragments awarded progressively in the tier with 3 rare warrior souls for completing the tier.

[Yup]

Well if SOW costs remain the same I won't be venturing into the gauntlet often - at least not to try and rank really. Just fight the first couple tiers where the SOW costs is, well, livable I guess. It's just too high a cost for the upper tiers. I mean 1 fight, then wait 10 hours for another fight.. then another 10 hours for another fight.. just ridiculous if you ask me. And 3 days isn't enough time to build SOW naturally to even dream about competing.

At least with PvP you can use naturally accruing SOW to remain relatively set at a given rank or teir.

[druid138]

I'm really digging Gauntlet. I love playing around with a much larger set of characters, and I'm happy to see some benefit for keeping dupes of my favorites.

Okay, so after another dozen or so fights, I have to revise my prior comment a bit. Gauntlet is amazing! This is the most fun I've ever had with this game. Fighting with constraints, dusting off several of my old favorite characters, playing with combos I had never before considered, and feeling the crazy pressure of knowing that a loss is a burn of 7 SoW and four valuable characters. Awesome job, NF! This thing exceeds what I had hoped for by a light year!

Edit: And, one more thing, it's running smooth as butter with no real meaningful bugs that I've noticed.

[EnricoPalazzo]

OK, so I played up to AAA and liked it very much. I'll not be able to play some more this week, and here's why:
I can see that I'll have to level up some more Eddies, especially Warrior ones, currently I only play Samurai but that's going to have to change.
All other classes I got at least 3 fully sharded Eddies.
I really like the challenges, I hope they are not fixed but will change from week to week.
One thing though: I only have 5 Warrior Eddies total. Round AAA has 5 battles and you can only use Warrior class. I lost the second battle, and that automatically means I can not finish this round, since I cannot start a battle without the Eddie slot filled.
One loss, instant game over.
I like the challenge, but that is maybe a bit steep...

Apart from that, I find the SOW cost much too high at this point. 8 SOW for a single battle in AAA? Imagine one BNW stage costing 64 SOW and think again if this is reasonable.
The whole AAA stage would cost 40 SOW, and that is without any loss (not that you can afford to lose often, see above).
So some scaling is definitely in order, but I understand that is the main reason for releasing a beta version.

The whole thing is marvellously bug-free (not counting the known bugs that plague the other modes and characters of course), and overall, I really like the concept.
It is way more challenging than just setting up a single, great go-to team and blasting everything away with the same tactics over and over again.
Please keep it up and improve where necessary!