Dupe System(s) Announced!
Today, Plarium released a video detailing the upcoming dupe features… finally..
There will be 3 different systems being added to the game at an undisclosed date as of yet – All of these features will be accessed through the new and ‘improved’ Sparring Pit – The Guardian Ring
Let’s break them down.
Faction Guardians
The faction guardian tab will let you assign duplicate champions of different rarities to become faction guardians, boosting the stats of all champions of the same rarity for a specific faction.
Each bonus will boost the base stats of that specific faction and rarity, these will act similarly to the Great Hall Bonuses, except they won’t be tied to certain affinities.
Champions that you use in your Faction Guardian slots will still be usable in the game.
10% HP
10% ATK
+30 Resistance +30 Accuracy / +15 Resistance +15 Accuracy / +7 Resistance +7 Accuracy (Legendary/Epic/Rare)
+10% DEF
+10 SPD / +6 SPD / +3 SPD (Legendary/Epic/Rare)
These bonuses must be earned in this order, once you’ve activated one stat, the next slots will unlock.
Champion Empowerment
The principle to this is all about boosting your favourite champions, you pick a champion and feed them with duplicate copies of themselves, empowering them permanently up to a maximum of 4x.
We do not yet know how big of an empowerment this will be, but they’ve expressed that it will not be game-breaking.
You will permanently lose the champions that are used to empower others in this feature.
Some champions cannot be obtained multiple times, so additional champions have been swapped in as replacements, The example we’ve been given is:
Lydia – Empowered by Visix.
Champion Unbinding
The final feature revolves around exchanging the duplicate champions that you have, for a new currency: Life Tokens
Life Tokens will be used to purchase Champions from a new shop which is found under the Token Trader Tab on the new Sparring Pit.
Current Champions that have been shown in the Token Trader:
Minaya
Fu-Shan
Tomb Lord
Maulie Tankard
Foli
Sir Nicholas
Champions from this shop will have a varying price based on their strength, and you will obtain them ONCE from the token trader – but we do not know the price of them just yet! 
We will update further on this as we know more about the incoming Dupe Systems, but for now – Let us know in the comments how you feel about these.
Faction Guardians… Now I need 10 dupes of each rarity, in each faction to even have a chance at competing with the whales. Just more separation between the big spenders and us normal folk. Empowered champs! Yikes. That makes it even worse. I know my def arena team can take a hit from trunda and survive. But a +4 trunda.. damn it… This is terrible. I’d rather have no dupe system. If they think this will cause us little fish to turn into whales, they’re wrong. If anything it will encourage the little fish to leave the game.
I’m at level 95 and I cant compete with the whales
why are you trying to compete with the whales?
I think lots of options is a good thing. For those that say “this gives whales an even bigger advantage” – I’m struggling to think of what could possibly be done to get something out of dupes that wouldn’t? The whales have more dupes. Anyone hoping the system would close the gap was deluding themselves.
These systems look good. Whales will always be whales. And don’t forget that whales are the ones that allow this game to exist.
My only concern is about PvP and more specially 3v3. I don’t care that Platinium Arena is a “whale-only” area, but 3v3 is a different thing.
Honestly I feel like those first two should only affect PvE. If it makes whales beat something more effectively or quicker, who cares? But with PvP it’ll make things just more imbalanced. Hopefully Plarium will understand that (wishful thinking?).
am not suprised cos plarium never listen to us players or if they do listen its in there interest not ours . am free to play not bothered about whales cos i play for fun , but thats my opinion
meh. it is silly to expect a mod to allow free-to-play folks to wipe out a big spender; can’t see why folks are complaining
i like the first option; even if i don’t have much in the way of dup legendaries i have a lot of others that could use a boost.
not sure about the empowering change, a little too amorphous for me to evaluate (long time player, low cash spender)
the second chance at the fusions you missed is good in principle, because those were almost all spending fests.
for fusion champs,just reopening the fusion cycle might be enough.
if it applies to fragment champs, depends on how it’s mechanized, how expensive things are, and whether they give you credit for the 50% you already did
Faction Guardians is interesting but not sure how to interpret “champions that you use in your Faction Guardian slots will still be usable in the game?” Do you keep them in the vault to use them as guardians or are these guardian slots a sort of “2ndary vault” where you can place dupes only? This option is the most intriguing of the 3 to me…I suppose I should watch the video but typically Hell Hades summarizes well enough to save time wasted on Plarium marketing.
Champion Empowerment doesn’t excite me, if you have a champ worth a sh*t then a dupe is often more useful than tweaking one. Their description makes this sound marginally better than feeding a dupe for a book… My issue is dupes of garbage champs… more on that below.
Champion Unbinding may be good, but it sounds sort of like trading in a Labourghini for a Lamborghini-branded jacket?
My gripe is the dupes do not feel random at all… seems like there’s an underlying algorithm that influences which champs you pull? Like my account – I’ve pulled 4 Ignatius and 4 Tomb Lords, yet I couldn’t pull Duchess Lilitu even during a 10x event? I’ve seen other examples in 3v3 arena, such as an account with 3x Duchess – they are probably pissed they can’t pull Ignatius or Tomb Lord!
I can’t come up with a mathematical model to explain 3-4 of the same leggo when there are dozens I’ve never pulled? Just seems like there’s a non-random element at play.
What about making clans more useful- allow clan members to swap champs, artifacts, etc… now *that* would be cool!
Option 1 is going to need us all to keep a bunch of doubles to be faction guardians. Champion lists and vaults are already bursting at the seams, now we must keep multiple copies of multiple heroes for a faction guardian system. I am assuming they will remain in the list or vault because they will be available to play.
Have to agree about the comments about how faction guardians and empowerment should be limited to PvE content. Although, faction guardian boosts up to rare level might be acceptable as it keeps it obtainable for all players but that just gets complicated.
Would be really nice to trade some of the previously acquired fragments life tokens though. Have way too many fragments for champs that can’t be obtained from fragments anymore and that’s super annoying….
I’m excited. Whales get a small amount of growth at a very high cost, mid-gamers can balance out their rosters, and new-players’s epics will catch-up with the average mid-game players’ legendaries.
As players we basically demanded that Plarium build a dupe system – by definition a system which whales will get much more use out of than F2Pers. However they’ve done it in a way that will actually help to close more progression-gaps than it will open. That feels… good?
1. A F2Per will greatly strengthen their epics. A long-term F2Per will slightly strength their legendaries. A long-term light-spender will moderately strengthen their legendaries. And a whale will greatly strengthen their legendaries. So whales pay a lot to get slightly ahead of other end-game players, but no further ahead of F2Pers, meanwhile F2Pers catch up with light-spenders / new players catch up with longer-term players. Sweet!
2. Yeah they might mess it up / make it OP, but they’re concerned about that too so let’s see what happens – since actually they’re really good at balance (roster variety vs balance vs hero relevance feels objectively impressive for the genre). Also I like that a dupe Foli (empower!) feels different to a dupe Drokgul (life token!). Shard opening stays fun, and certain dupes actually become sought after.
3. Yeah, they could mess it up / make it expensive. But if no one buys stuff, they’ll want to tweak the feature to get more out of it. At worst this allows very unlucky players to fill spots in their rosters. At best it’s a generous, player-focused move.
Hey Hellhades.
First of all thank you for all the content and for helping people across all stages of the game to better understand it and progress. I have personally benefitted very much from your videos and content on this site.
I do not have a solid opinion on the dupe system. I just wanted to address something I have seen you say a couple of times now about the sparring pit, i.e. that it is useless and I think that is wrong advice.
It is wrong advice for anyone who plans to play the game (especially for those that plan to actively play the game) for more than 3 – 4 months. This is not my opinion… this is a fact based on the game mechanics and maths. Taking into account the investment to open all slots in gems and using that same amount in energy to farm xp / food, after a period of roughly 3-4 months (depending how optimally you have your pit utilised) you have a return of your investment and then it keeps giving.
So I am not sure why you think it is useless. Would be interested to understand if I am missing something, but I think you are wrong on this one.
Once more thanks for all the help!
When will this go live?
they have said by end of year
Appreciate the summarised content team HH!
Looks like might be of some interest ,in respect of the faction boosts but elements 2/3 seem only to impact Legendaries, I find the main dup issue lies with Epics …would be nice to boost /exchange them too
Anything about difficulty changes? Boss logic refinement, definitely imminent nerfings, as 4x empowerment is huge, they worked hard on making each stages of game difficult and time consuming, now speedrunning UNM is not what they want. Let’s wait the counter of it…
Maulie and Sir Nic in Life Shop? Must be on insane price then, or they will replace them at launch.
Summery:
Good bye free players! lol
I guess I am one of those unlucky light spender players that could possibly benefit from Life tokens. Yeah me.
I thought it would be more exciting if we had some sort of shrine where we put our dupe + maybe some silver and get another champion with the same rarity, it could be yet another dupe but the game is riddled with RNG anyway.
I also wish that features that are Legendary-only are extended to include Epics as well.