September was kind of boring, but how can we prepare for the future of Illuvium?
Illuvium PB3 has been delayed is now being released sometime in Quarter 4, although disappointing, hopefully the product will blow away my expectations.
So although we got lots of leaks and other good stuff during the month of September, it all felt kind of empty within the context of expecting PvP to launch. In light of that this will be the shortest article I ever write however there is still lots to discuss in preparation for one of the most polished and hyped strategy games in the past few years.
Here is what I will be covering in this newsletter:
Just how close is PvP?
We have seen the ‘team builder’ - Its time to theory craft
We will cover all of that here and more so please keep reading. I am excited to share this journey with you.
Please don’t forget to subscribe below! It really means a lot and together we can tackle the Illuvium metaverse better than anyone else.
Is PvP actually coming out in Q4 2023?
It felt like the team was confident in a September release but now its hard to say how close they actually are without seeing videos first hand.
To recap on the timeline as it stands, quite a few verbal things happened during September. I had 2 AMA’s, one with Kieran and one with Grant and the team announced the updated roadmap about 2 weeks before the end of Q3. What was unusual about all this is that we hadn’t seen any major leaks from PvP that looked like proper ‘gameplay’ until after the delay was announced. Although normal for most studios, this is out of character for Illuvium close to a launch.
Many can infer whatever they’d like but its become evident that the team is interested in keeping the Illuvium Arena PB3 as leak free as they can to enable a more compressed hype cycle shortly before release. However this unfortunately means its hard for anyone, including myself to gauge the actual launch date for PvP. Next to that, Kieran hosted a town hall where he discussed everything regarding the delay. He stated that although the game is playable and no longer crashes on every little action, there are still major bugs, some of which are game breaking and need to be fixed. Alongside the UI leak, we can see that the art and Illuvial effects seem more or less complete. However if anyone is familiar with game dev, estimating when bugs will be fixed is an impossible task.
What we do know for sure is the Illuvium team is playing the game often and even having internal tournaments. However you feel about something like that, it does tell us 2 key pieces of information. Firstly, the game is stable enough to have dozens of players not getting frustrated during a tournament. More importantly the game is being tested heavily, since bugs and game breaking bugs are the clear issue, the only way to find them is by playing the game and doing everything you can to break it. This means that the process to finish the game to a playable state is underway, and hopefully within reach.
I know the delays are disappointing but there are exciting times to come for Illuvium and I am very excited heading into October and November.
We just got a HUGE Team Builder leak
Here is where the true fun begins, it’s time to start theory crafting.
There is so much to unpack here its unbelievable. Lets start from top to bottom. Right at the top we have the deck name in the corner and the tag for the type of gameplay mode the deck has been built for, which is a really nice touch. Since we have an edit team button this looks more like the team display rather than the builder itself, but it presents us the same information. On the top right we have a clear 30 card limit and a clear list of all the different quantities of Illuvials, augments, suits and weapons Rich has in his deck. Below this you can also see some standard filters reflecting this and clear grouping with the different types of cards.
Now lets address something I don’t think many had seen before. The dominant synergies, as you can clearly see on Umbre it is Steam and Slayer, but its dominant synergies are water and rogue. It may have added benefits in the new Arena beta but for now all we know is that dominant synergies affect the bonding of your ranger and affect what composite synergy they can achieve. In the case of Umbre you can effectively add 1 of 4 variations in your deck, meaning that even though there are 205 unique Illuvials, there is actually over 500 potential combinations for any given unit. Although I don’t expect this to influence your opponent much, adding any new game mechanics to dominant synergies could really enhance the strategy of the game.
The other thing we should talk about are the weapons. For each of the 5 weapon types, there are 5 tiers, 3 stages and 5 affinities. Meaning 5 x 5 x 5 x 3 = 375 UNIQUE WEAPONS. Now I have seen first hand what a T5 gauntlet can achieve with the right composite synergies but why would you ever use a T1 or T2 weapon in your deck? Extrapolating just the information we have here it looks like stage jumps a weapons cost by 5 mastery points and tier jumps it by 10. By this calculation a tier 1 stage 1 weapon would be 20 mastery cost and a tier 5 stage 3 would be 70. The difference between the two essentially being a unit that fills your composite synergy to boost your team or a unit that fills the composite and then uses it to help you win the battle. For the 50 mastery difference it is definitely worth the choice.
Another thing I wanted to look at was the armour because this is one of the least used mechanics in the current survival mode beta. The first thing we notice is that the tier 5 stage 3 armour costs 40 mastery points which is significantly cheaper than the weapons. However what’s most important is the image itself. It looks like it provides something related to earth to the ranger or maybe gives it a special ability to help during combat. Currently armour feels a bit out of place and I am looking forward to seeing how they will make an impact in the future.
Last but not least we have the augments. Here is the elephant in the room, the tier 1 and tier 5 augment have the exact same mastery cost, which is completely different to every other aspect of Illuvium. Does this mean the higher tier augments are just as strong or rather that their effect is simply more unique. I don’t know what to make of this but I hope they are more powerful and they are simply just fantastic value compared to the tier 1 augments but its hard to make sense of it all. We can’t deny the art is a massive improvement over previous iterations and I am very excited to build a deck of my very own.