Devblog: Dimensional Rifts 2021-05-06 14:00
Back to listDimensional Rifts are inspired in part by the old Mobile Arenas, but also add some new mechanics. This new content complements the dungeons you know and love by offering a different gameplay experience: rifts will offer unpredictable battles, each one different from the last, and ask players to make additional choices over the course of a battle.
Accessibility
Rifts are intended for groups of 1 to 4 characters; both Heroes and Sidekicks can participate.
They are accessible to individual characters, and their difficulty increases with each additional character who joins the fight.
Even in a group, though, the battles still won't be too hard, because we want to encourage players to play together.
There are two types of Rifts:
- Classic Rifts: waves with 4 "normal" monsters (no bosses) and no entry cost.
- Ultimate Rifts: waves with 2 bosses that require a key to participate. They're intended for players looking for a tough challenge!
In Update 1.72, we'll be including six Rifts: 4 classic and 2 ultimate.
They'll be accessible through their portal, which is visible from the world map.
We wanted to offer a universal mechanic that would be fun for all players, no matter what level their character is, how big their social group is, or what level of difficulty they're looking for.
It's all about survival
The old mobile arenas offered fights with no set limit on their duration. They could sometimes go on for hours!
We wanted to fix this problem with Rifts: fights will automatically end after 40 turns.
Your goal will be to survive these 40 turns and defeat as many waves of monsters as you can.
You can play at your own pace and try to beat just one wave in 40 turns, but the more waves you take on, the more rewards you'll receive.
On the other hand, if you lose the fight before the 40 turns are up, you won't win anything! You'll need to be cautious and avoid taking any unnecessary risks.
Combinations of monster families
Rift fights will let you take on monsters that you're not used to seeing at the same time.
For example, the Tainela Rift will feature the Gobball, Tofu, Treechnid, and Skeleton families.
These combinations will generate surprising battles by introducing unexpected synergies between certain monsters!
A fresh experience
The Rifts are inspired by certain mechanics from the "roguelike" genre, notably the unpredictable nature of certain battles.
Between each rift attempt, the following elements will be changed randomly:
- Makeup and position of the waves of monsters
- The artifacts offered to players (and the location where they appear)
The goal is to distinguish rifts from dungeons by offering unpredictable experiences that will require players to adapt to a wide variety of situations.
New waves
Each time a wave of monsters is defeated, a new wave will immediately appear in partially random positions. You won't have to wait for the next turn.
The new monsters will alternate with the characters in the timeline, allowing players to anticipate and react as the monsters' attack progressively unfolds.
This feature prevents lulls between waves, and will potentially allow you to take on a very large number of them in 40 turns.
For each new wave, the difficulty will increase: the monsters will be a little stronger and a little tougher.
This feature will ensure that powerful teams can still find a worthy challenge in lower-level Rifts, since the difficulty will increase considerably if they quickly fight their way through multiple waves.
Artifacts
Artifacts are powerful items that you can collect during a Rift battle (they are lost at the end of the fight).
They'll increase the power of your entire team, but beware: the monsters can take advantage of them too!
Each time a wave of monsters is defeated, two random artifacts will appear on the battlefield at partially random locations.
When a character walks onto a cell with an artifact, it is assigned to their team, and the second artifact is automatically assigned to the monsters' team.
The choice of artifacts will make a big difference because they provide bonuses that will specialize both your team and the monsters' team.
There are 4 categories of artifacts:
- Wakfu Artifacts: moderate bonuses and no downside.
- Stasis Artifacts: bigger bonuses, but the team takes additional damage for the entire duration of the Rift.
- Shushu Artifacts: extreme bonuses that only last a single turn.
- Divine Artifacts: bigger bonuses, but the team is immobilized for one turn (no MP + stabilization until the start of the next turn).
This system allows us to modify the gameplay experience between each Rift, and to confront players with some tough decisions: should you focus on choosing the right artifact for your own team, or the artifact that you don't want to give to the monsters' team? Which would win in a fight: the elephant artifact or the hippopotamus artifact?
If the artifacts haven't been picked up when a new wave of monsters appears, they will be assigned randomly to the two teams.
In Ultimate Rifts, 4 artifacts are provided in each wave.
Life orbs
When a monster dies, a life orb will appear on its cell. When players walk on that cell, they will recover a percentage of the HP they've lost.
The orbs will stay on the battlefield for 1 turn.
This mechanic lets us offer fights with large numbers of enemies, but without requiring players to include powerful healing abilities on their team.
Rewards
When a Rift battle is over, the characters will win all of the rewards associated with the monsters they've defeated: experience, resources, items, etc.
Each wave they defeat comes with an XP and loot bonus to compensate for the increased difficulty of each new wave.
Rifts will also allow characters to obtain certain specific types of rewards:
- New Sublimations
- Pets
- A few new resources
Eventually, we want Rifts to give players a way to obtain all the pets that were previously monetized in the shop (and are no longer monetized since we replaced them with pet skins).
The keys for Ultimate Rifts will have to be crafted from resources that can only be obtained in Classic Rifts.
Competition
Rifts will offer a competitive mode similar to the one already available in dungeons.
Each month, characters will be ranked by the number of monsters they were able to defeat in a Rift.
Every time the characters make it all the way to the end of the battle (40 turns), that battle will be counted toward their ranking.
There is only one ranking per Rift, which includes all team types.
Competitive Rifts will not allow you to win exclusive rewards; they will allow you to win the usual Rift rewards but in larger quantities.
The beta version of this new feature will be available very soon on the beta server. We encourage you to test it and share your feedback with us!