Gauntlet mode is great, but there’s a pretty clear problem with regards to the lack of viable options for a starting blessing. After playing the daily Celestial Challenge regularly for the past almost a full year, I’ve only just started getting upgrades to the ‘Fine’ version of the blessings. Meanwhile, Arena of the Gods gives out some of the best blessings like Kastor’s Elite Bodyguard or Gaia’s Lashing Roots with no waiting required. I just can’t imagine any use case where I’d willingly hamper myself by bringing along a blessing that’s worse in almost every way.
There’s also a lack of incentive to go for full clears of Gauntlet mode after you’ve unlocked all Legends and Bragi’s Kennings. Sure, there’s the level up system to unlock new abilities during matches, but it takes so long to level up that it doesn’t really feel satisfying to grind out several gauntlets just to unlock a power that might not even be that impressive.
My suggested solution for this is to have Gauntlet mode serve as an alternate method for levelling up blessings, where completing a run can provide a level up to a blessing of your choice. Now I understand that Celestial Challenge’s main reason for existing is to get players to come back to the game every day, and that allowing all unlocks to be done without engaging in those daily logins would make that whole process pointless, but I think there’s a good balance that can be struck.
- For one, I think levelling up a blessing via Gauntlet should require you to actually take it into a run with you as your free blessing. This encourages experimentation with blessings that the player might not otherwise use.
- I would also suggest locking the higher tiers of blessing upgrades behind the higher difficulties of Gauntlet runs, so that it’s not just a free guaranteed upgrade that anyone could just bang out without actually putting in the effort. If a player isn’t at the skill level required to unlock the higher tier of blessing, then there’s always the option to wait for that upgrade to roll around via the Celestial Challenge rewards system.
- Finally, this wouldn’t serve as a way to unlock those blessings in the first place - that would still be required to be done via Celestial Challenge. That way new players are still encouraged to play regularly so that they can fill out their blessing portfolio.
There are currently 37 blessings unlocked via the Celestial Challenge reward pool, each with 5 tiers of upgrades. Given that you need to play 5 days to unlock one level (excluding the first blessing, which only requires one day), you would be expected to play for 921 total days to unlock everything, or over two and a half years, and that’s assuming there won’t be more blessings added down the line. That’s something that even the most diehard fans are going to struggle to accomplish to any real degree, and even if you just want to start unlocking the Heroic blessings to get abilities on par with those unlocked via Arena of the Gods, you’ll be expected to play for between 371 and 551 days total. That’s an extremely long time to invest just to get a bit more gameplay variety. I think my suggestion could remove a lot of the monotony of the unlock process, enable more build variety, and get players engaged with Gauntlet mode for much longer than they would have been otherwise.