New Feature: The Labyrinth - Started December 6th 2023 at live

[jelom]

My first assesment of the new Labyrinth feature.

Mechanics:

- Selection of girls: at the start you have to select 70 girls, the only sensible way is just auto select them.
- Battle team selection: The game instructs you to put tankier girls in the front line, but there isn't much difference in stats between girls. The different battle lines reminds me of other games (e.g.: Sengoku Rance). If you want to protect some of them they must go in the back line.
- Info during the battle: The numbers are huge, but It is not very clear what is happening because of the speed of turns and how fast the numbers fade out. Speed x1 should be slower.
- Tired girls: Even with strong level 750 girls, you end with one third of them tired or damaged at the end of the three levels. If the whole team is not healed after each two days session, then there is no way to survive one season of 60 days unless you spent Laby coins into rejuvenation stones every 3 or 4 sessions.

Shop:

- Income: you get a bit over 2100 Laby coins after a 3 floor session (every 2 days)
- What to buy? Girls at 13200 and 14400 coins are the main objective. You can probably earn that much in a season if you don't spend in other items. Rejuvenation stones at 850 coins are attractive because they heal ALL of your girls, so they are a must if there is no auto healing after each two days session, but they could take a good part of your coins. Mythic (1200 coins) and Legendary (2 for 1800) lightbulbs are also in the shop and are a good option if you have some coins left after the girls and stones. You should not spend your coins in any other items.

Rewards:

- After each won battle you get: Money, kisses and sometimes combativity, in adittion to a small amount of laby coins . The boss gives you a great amount of Laby coins. The kissess and fists can help you if timed with KK or a girl in a boss.

Conclussion:

It is a nice addition. It is PvE and not PvP 👍 The rewards are good enough and you can use it as another small temporary storage of kisses and fists 👍. The mechanic is simple 👍. You don't have to spend kobans or real money (yet) 👍

In the negative side, it is another time sink ⏳ Kinkoid should consider removing some event or feature, the game is starting to feel like this

 

[DvDivXXX]

4 hours ago, jelom said:

Girls at 13200 and 14400 coins are the main objective.

To be clear, that's the price for 20 shards for each, so for the exclusive girl and likely for revived girls as well (if you need them and are at 0%) you need at the very least twice that to make them reach the 40% mark so they become eligible for the SM Shop. Five times that for a complete girl from the Lab Shop alone.

4 hours ago, jelom said:

Rejuvenation stones at 850 coins are attractive because they heal ALL of your girls, so they are a must if there is no auto healing after each two days session, but they could take a good part of your coins.

I had no idea how this would be priced, since I hadn't seen any, but today there's one available in my Shop! Actually, if you compare to my screenshot from yesterday, everything changed except for the exclusive girl and a couple of items (Mythic GG piece, 2 days of Silver card, and EvP orb; not sure if these are permanent options or I just rolled them again), even though officially it's still supposed to reset in a week:

I'd also consider the 18k option for a random but guaranteed Mythic GG piece. Maybe not anytime soon, as it's costly and the priority should of course be on the new exclusive girl of each 60-day session, as well as any relevant revived girl (I expect when this goes live the revived girl slot will be for past girls from either older Mega-Events or other rare or formerly exclusive sources, not unlike the new ME Market). But still, considering how low the drop rate is for Mythic Girl Gear pieces, further down the line it might be worth picking up one from there.

Interesting to know there are also red light bulbs as possible items and their price, thanks for that too. For the same price as 2 purples, we also have the very tempting option of 3 epics, as I have right now. That's a bargain! ^^ /s

As for the "+2 days of monthly card" option, I'd like to know a bit more about it. I'm guessing for someone who doesn't currently have a monthly subscription, this does more or less the same thing as the occasional 3-day trials we get, and so it would give the perks of the card one tier higher than the most expensive one we ever purchased in the past (or just a Silver card for players who never purchased one). But you never know. This is a unique option and I'm curious what it does exactly. If it does work like the free trials they give away every now and then, I guess they might be worth considering (if we get enough coins to have surplus) especially if you've purchased at least one Gold card for real money at any point (so you'd get the Platinum card perks, including koban-free x10s and skip rest for regular champions). Maybe on special occasions like during MD, if you've purchased a Silver card in the past, so you'd get the koban-free x50s for villains. For a purely F2P player, 1.8k coins for 2 days of Silver card doesn't sound like it would ever be worth it. EDIT: Not worth it, at all (thanks to Tom's clarification on what it actually does).

Anyways, not sure how they managed to make new items appear in the shop on a Saturday, but I'll go and refresh my Squad now! 

Edited December 2, 2023 by DvDivXXX
updated

[Tom208]

il y a 7 minutes, DvDivXXX a dit :

As for the "+2 days of monthly card" option, I'd like to know a bit more about it.

Simple :

• If you have no monthly card, it gives you 2 days of silver card
• If you have a silver card, it adds 2 days of silver card
• If you have another monthly card, it converts 2 days into the proper duration for your card

 

il y a 12 minutes, DvDivXXX a dit :

To be clear, that's the price for 20 shards for each, so for the exclusive girl and likely for revived girls as well (if you need them and are at 0%) you need at the very least twice that to make them reach the 40% mark so they become eligible for the SM Shop. Five times that for a complete girl from the Lab Shop alone.

Important information: Labyrinth girls system is the same than leagues, club champion and places of power system. So you can finish the girl even after the 60 days sessions.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Tom208

[DvDivXXX]

Good to know on both points, thanks a lot @Tom208. <3

I'll move my Edit here since there's been new posts since. ^^

Cool, so this confirms that you can only buy each item once per shop reset, just as described in the long rules and info page for the feature (which is pretty clear, for once, I must admit! ^^).

I doubt I'll have enough coins to test it, but I wonder if this also applies to the girl shards. If so, then it means you can't just save up your coins until the end of the 60-day period and hope to unlock her near the end. [Then again, considering what Tom just confirmed about the exclusive girl pool working as onion layers like the LG or CC girls, that point seems moot).

Looking at that page again, I remembered this:  

4 hours ago, jelom said:

If the whole team is not healed after each two days session, then there is no way to survive one season of 60 days unless you spent Laby coins into rejuvenation stones every 3 or 4 sessions.

Given the above, I highly doubt a Lab reset is anything short of starting a fresh run from scratch, including not only no longer having Tired or Damaged Girls, but even being able to select a new Squad of 70. So I wouldn't worry about needing Stones in between runs.

[430i]

39 minutes ago, DvDivXXX said:

As for the "+2 days of monthly card" option, I'd like to know a bit more about it. EDIT: Not worth it, at all

In case one missed to claim their last season, PoA, PoV etc.. rewards it might be worth it. But that's about the only scenario where it makes sense to buy it I think.

[DvDivXXX]

Good point, I hadn't considered it.

Okay, so I've finally managed to beat the Easy mode. I wasn't sure but it seems you only get to do one run per Lab session (which will last 48 hours when it goes live), so whichever difficulty you pick, you're stuck with. I kind of expected to have the option to try Medium after beating Easy, then Hard after beating Medium or something.

In general, I feel an option to make more runs is missing. Even a "Casual Mode" or "Training Mode" would be awesome, honestly. By this I mean a mode that doesn't give any rewards, but lets us play as many runs as we want,  just for the sake of playing and perhaps testing different strategies, familiarizing ourselves with the mechanics.

Just the option to "Retire" or "Reset" a run for a small-ish amount of kobans would be nice too. Obviously, it would need to be on a basis such as "Are you sure you want to restart your Labyrinth session? You will lose any progress or rewards accumulated in the current one." Otherwise, it could be abused to farm rewards infinitely (play everything except the final boss, reset, rinse and repeat). But if you get stuck in an unwinnable run, the option to cancel it and restart would still be useful. Especially since we can only choose one difficulty per session. If I pick Hard and it turns out I'm getting destroyed there, I'd gladly spend 600 kobans for a chance to restart on Medium or Easy instead of having to wait 2 days and losing one run worth of rewards.

[bolitho76]

Thanks to a post at Discord I could solve my reported bugs with Labyrinth: The Problem was, that I hadn't set the language for the game to english. After I changed to english I had a) the correct text at the different places, b) could get my relic and c) can progress in the Labyrinth.

[Tom208]

Il y a 1 heure, DvDivXXX a dit :

I kind of expected to have the option to try Medium after beating Easy, then Hard after beating Medium or something.

Only the easy mode will be released for now. The harder modes should follow in 2024.

 

Il y a 1 heure, DvDivXXX a dit :

Especially since we can only choose one difficulty per session.

Well, I don't know what KK want to do about that but maybe we will be able to perform 1 run per difficulty per session?

[jelom]

3 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

I feel an option to make more runs is missing. Even a "Casual Mode" or "Training Mode" would be awesome, honestly. By this I mean a mode that doesn't give any rewards, but lets us play as many runs as we want,  just for the sake of playing and perhaps testing different strategies, familiarizing ourselves with the mechanics.

You are insatiable. How many hours do your days have to allow you to waste more and more hours in the game?

[Horsting]

I also played through the 3 levels on test server now: It says 48 hours each session, but when doing, it tells me that I have to wait >7 days?
EDIT: Okay moreless answered by Div above: Will be 48 hours on live server. I hope it can be made shorter instead of longer on test server, so we can actually really test it? Could someone ask on Discord? 🙂

Generally I like the system:

• It did now take, ehm, forgot to check, 30 minutes or so to go through all 3 levels, skipping especially the easier (green) fights. That is fine IMO every 48 days. More would become problematic for casual players indeed. I like the idea of Div for training runs without any rewards, just to learn the system and test how far you can get with your 70 girls when going for more rewards (harder opponents) vs safer paths with more awakenings. This does not hurt anyone, and even very casual players might find additional 30 minutes during weekend to play a bit, otherwise they won't loose anything.
• There is some randomness inside: The difficulty of the opponents you face, the amount of coins you get from treasure fields (sometimes you can choose between 2) and the relics of course. The path you walk through one level can be planned, and the range between opponents with the same difficulty/color is small, so that is fine. The relics probably even out along the 3 levels. What I am not too happy about is the shop coins: As those are the major reward, I would like to get a fixed amount per treasure field, at least when there are multiple such fields at one line. But probably this is already the case.
• About the relics: The Rejuvenation is okay, but you get much more healing from the Defeat Medication, at least when batting weaker opponents. So this is my favourite now, before Protective Bubble. Against red opponents, I did loose usually 1 time, i.e. when going for them (for CP), relics which give bonus to a single girl or element are IMO pretty useless, and not even much stronger for this single girl, compared to those which affect the whole team. But I am at level 243 which girls capped at level 500 and not many of them, so probably this is different with higher levels (hero and girls). If so, the Duck Master was not bad for the front girls, so they dodge a relatively large amount of attacks (30% from epic relic).
• Generally as a tactic, it makes sense to move girls with low ego to the back so they can heal, instead of e.g. switching them out completely.
• Based on which attributes raise which stats:
  • Hardcore gives ego and defence, hence they should go to the front
  • Know-how gives AP (and speed), hence they should go to the back
  • Charm gives Mana, hence worthless if not having GS5 as well, or are those minor skills relevant for you? In my case they do "Not so critical slap" which deals ~1k, while a regular attack dealing ~30k damage.
• Regarding the monthly card: It shows the "silver card" icon, so makes sense that it is the value of 2 days silver card, recalculated for other monthly cards in case, the way you get extra days for other cards, when you have a silver card already. Indeed not so valuable, aside of as an emergency Season/PoV/PoG/PoA/DP rewards claim, if you forgot it, or if you want to claim doubled PoV PXP rewards during LC day 1 🙂.

And some questions:

• How do I know the ego a girl will have? Defence and AP are shown, as well as their "speed". The two potions are likely starting Mana and Mana generation per action, but as long as they do not have a GS5, this is irrelevant. But the ego is not shown anywhere. The overall "Power" value looks misleading to me, as often girls have more ego, defence and AP but still a lower Power, probably also impacted by the Mana stats, which are often totally irrelevant.
• Are you going for max rewards (hardest opponents) or the simple way, with more simple/green opponents and in case these resurrection fields? With my test server account I would have been able to go the hardest way, but the rewards for harder opponents are usually insignificant: 1 kiss for yellow, 1 kiss + 1 CP for red ones, and 100-200 more PXP, not really worth the trouble and risk to not defeat the last boss.
• Was someone able to test girls with GS5?

So as feedback so far:

• It would be good to know from the tooltips the amount of (base) ego a girl will have. Aside of defence, and AP, this is relevant to know where to position a girl.
• Probably rework the "Power" attribute: Currently, at least when girls do not have GS5, it seems pretty misleading, and hence wrong sorting and auto-selection. Ego, defence and AP are the relevant stats for me, speed secondary, Mana mostly irrelevant, so those should probably have a higher impact on the "Power" value.
• Speaking of Mana: It would be great to make it more relevant if girls do not have GS5. As mentioned above, ~1k damage from a single identical skill from all girls, done after 5 attacks, compared to ~30k damage from a single regular attack, this does not make sense.
• Equalise the amount of coins from the treasure fields, if this is not the case yet. At best all those across 1 level give the exact same amount of coins, so we can plan the path to include the most of those fields and do not need to worry RNG.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Horsting

[bolitho76]

The 9 days the first Labyrinth session at test-serve last seems to be a mistake from KK side:

[Horsting]

Ah 24h intended on test server, that is great 😀.

[bohammettuz]

On the 2-day silver card

18 hours ago, Horsting said:

...or if you want to claim doubled PoV PXP rewards during LC day 1 🙂.

That is a very sneaky way to exploit the system.
I like that you came up with it, but I also feel maybe it would be better for it to not work that way for the LC contest. The top brackets are already hard enough to hit top4 in even if you save up every PXP reward normally. Adding double PoV rewards into that would not improve things I think.

[Horsting]

That method is not something new. Someone else shared it with me here on the forum when I was wondering about high scores on my very first LC in May (or was it the 2nd?). Well, I was wondering about 2M shortly after reset and did not think about PXP rewards at all 😅. However, I think it is very unlikely that all top 4 contenders do this, in fact I have never seen scores which were not possible without, neither in my bracket(s), nor in any other scores shared on the forum since. I was once able to claim doubled PoV rewards when one ended directly before LC day 1, with a sliver card anyway, not claiming PXP rewards and not logging in the 30 minutes before contest start. But it was not necessary, as in fact only those rewards from ended PoV were enough to win the contest, while all other PoV/PoG/Season remained untouched. A moreless free 2 days silver card makes it more attractive for players who do not have a monthly card anyway, but I would never use it that way when I can get shards instead. So I am quite sure that the worst is higher top 1 scores, while top 4 remains the same (which is all that is needed to secure the girl).

Edited December 3, 2023 by Horsting

[garadron]

[Horsting]

Did another run:

• 30 minutes is realistic when skipping (the "Skip" button) most green and yellow fights, i.e. 10 minutes per floor.
• Not sure if it was like this before, but all opponents of the same color/difficulty now gave the exact same rewards (despite having different team powers) and all treasure fields of one floor gave the same amount of coins. That is a good thing, makes route planning easier with only a small RNG variation, that opponents with the same color can have slightly different team powers.
• This time I went the hardest possible route, when still collecting all treasure/coin fields: All possible red opponents, no stones, only a single resurrection field I could not avoid, as it was the single field right in front of the last boss. Also I was a little unlucky with relics: No Defeat Medication, only 2 Rejuvenation relatively late. And I made it, quite close, with only 10 girls (mostly C1) left for the last battle against the last boss. This underlined my previous statement that relics for specific girls (and also elements) are much too weak, as girls are rotated/defeated too fast + the pool is/gets too small and it would take too much time to not only take care about classes, but also check for and swap in specific elements.
• Due to late healing relics, I could not test swapping injured girls in to middle/back lanes for healing well, and recognised/understood something else important: The Rejuvenation relic does not heal X% of an injured girl's max ego, but X% of the missing ego. I.e. it only heals relevant amounts when a girl is nearly down, and heals nearly nothing when girls still have high percentages. And of course it means a girl can be never fully healed with this relic. This is the reason why Defeat Medication worked SO much better than it looks at first. So until one has Defeat Medication, it does not make much sense to swap in >70% girls for healing, but only the heavy injured ones. With Defeat Medication on the other hand one can also heal e.g. tanky girls with lower injuries back to max ego.
• There seems to be a mistake on the info page, or something changed recently: Charm (not Hardcore) gives defence, at least all my CH girls have significantly higher defence. So it currently looks like this:
  • HC => ego
  • CH => defence
  • KH => AP
  • My CH girls of equal power have ~2k more defence, while HC girls have ~10k more ego. So against weaker opponents (including yellow), it makes sense to put 2 CH girls to the front, who take less damage and would also survive longer, since weaker opponents usually require more than 5 hits to defeat one girl.
  • Against red opponents, respectively when expecting to be defeated once, it instead makes sense to put HC girls to the front, who can take more damage and survive longer against those opponents who defeat one girl with less than 5 hits.
  • I put KH girls into middle and back lanes, for their higher AP and speed. For healing, against weaker opponents it can make sense to swap in injured girls for them, and against harder opponents it might make sense to put tanky HC or CH girls into the middle lane as well. But not 100% sure about that, since more damage and speed also means that the opponent's girls can be defeated earlier and hence do less damage.
• I sadly missed to have a look at the "minor" skills again, in case something changed. But AFAIK they were still irrelevant, otherwise I should have recognised.

Edited December 4, 2023 by Horsting

[garadron]

I was hoping that the girl prices on test server were a placeholder so we won't get the girl during our testing but damn it will take A LOT of time to get these shards

If we get 2k per a completed run, we need 7-8 runs per 20 shards, times 5 for a complete girl. So if we don't fail any of our runs, we'll get the new girl in 70-80 days?

[krayzo]

It seems that the final version is more difficult than on the test server.
Has anyone checked whether boosters, equipment and skills make difference?

 

Just now, garadron said:

If we get 2k per a completed run, we need 7-8 runs per 20 shards, times 5 for a complete girl. So if we don't fail any of our runs, we'll get the new girl in 70-80 days?

Yes, 66-80 days, it will be a problem depending on how often they plan to add new girls to labyrinth

[hihi1237823]

What is this ?

[Horsting]

Some bugs:

• When using auto-select, it is not possible to deselect individual girls anymore. Only girls manually selected can be deselected. Since the Power value is currently broken/misleading, this is quite annoying.
• The Power value is currently broken or at least misleading. I don't know how it is calculated, but I have girls with literally all values lower (AP, defence, speed, starting Mana (Mana generation is always 20 here)) and ego, but their Power still shown as higher.
• They added (I did not see this on test server previously) a hint about which class serves which purpose: HC tank, KH damage dealer and CH mage. But CH are actually the better tanks, since they have significantly more defence. Comparing with the info page: HC was supposed to give defence and CH starting Mana and Mana generation instead. But currently CH gives defence, KH gives starting Mana and nothing gives Mana regeneration (it is fixed 20 across all girls). So currently the better class <> task mapping would be:
  • CH: Tanks against opponents you expect to defeat without losing girls.
  • HC: Fodder against opponents you expect to loose girls against, since they have more ego, but less defence => take more damage.
  • KH: Damage dealer AND mage.
• "Mage" is probably a bit misleading, since this only applies if the girl has GS5 skilled. Otherwise Mana is useless.

Awesome how I write my fingers to the bone about these exact things when it was on test server, reading from Discord quotes "thanks for feedback on forum", and none of these is fixed but the feature is merged buggy as is ... What purpose does the test server again have?

Edited December 6, 2023 by Horsting

[mdnoria]

il y a 3 minutes, hihi1237823 a dit :

What is this ?

2 days of Diamond Monthly Card

Edited December 6, 2023 by mdnoria

[krayzo]

5 minutes ago, Horsting said:

Awesome how I write my fingers to the bone about these exact things when it was on test server, reading from Discord quotes "thanks for feedback on forum", and none of these is fixed but the feature is merged buggy as is ... What purpose does the test server again have?

I've asked myself this several times, but apparently it's to test the function by players and collect feedback, but these are unlikely to be implemented when the new feature is released, so it should take at least two weeks to make some changes

[Horsting]

Another bug: GS5 has no effect on the spell the girls cast when having full Mana: My Elder Magus Bianca has GS5 maxed (shield skill) and just had the opportunity to cast her spell: "Not so serious spank" with ~15k damage, compared to 80-160k damage from a regular attack 😂. So not only are the attributes around Mana broken and do not provide what they are supposed to provide, and even when, "Mage"s are no mages as long as you do not skill their GS5. Nope, after animating players to invest additional bulbs into random girls (luckily I did not do that), they will recognise that those were completely wasted.

You cannot believe how massively disappointed and speechless (not literally) I am about the (again) disastrous implementation of a feature, which could have ended up quite well.

EDIT: Same with Boatswain Eugénie, which has her Reflect skill maxed: Just "Not so serious spank".

Edited December 6, 2023 by Horsting

[430i]

Let's open the floor to some questions - I should just auto-select the top70 girls right? There is no point in theory crafting an ideal lineup right?

[CuminJutsu6]

My dumbass applying dom scheme thinking it'll do something, tbh I read the rules after clearing it lol 

 

I guess this means we have to optimize are harem in the back to pull through these seasons without over doing rejuv stones. 

Also it looks like the equipment bug has come on the live servers as well

Edited December 6, 2023 by CuminJutsu6