New features

Wow these all seem like positive changes. Thank you for listening devs!

Mushroom divines? Well, thank you! I'm looking forward on getting a few from now on. They used to be too expensive for the straw costs and that made them not worth it. Seriously, thank you for listening to your playerbase.

AoO? Eh.. I don't believe that changes anything. If you really wanted to make a good change - make the obols/drachmas more expensive and/or limit it so a player can only obtain 1000 fragments for a divine per season. I will give this gamemode one more chance, but that's it. I really do believe that Your intention was to kill the gamemode, just slowly.

Weirdly enough, I got kind of stuck on the rewards screen for room 3. It won’t let me pick a bonus or any cards. Not sure if this is a planned game mechanic or if I’m just using it wrong?

So now you can make it further but as it still requires three cards almost every time, the energy only prolongs the inevitable as +1 buys you one more try. One and done again for me which is too bad as I have a bunch of trophies I’ll never get.

Here's my updated stats after the new Ascent tweaks. I've played 16 obol games so far and no drachma.

- Obol win rate is 43% for Season 15. Last season with Nyx it was 25% for the same number of obols. All other seasons were between 51-71%. So this season has been slightly easier than the Nyx season, but still significantly worse than all other previous seasons.

- I lost no games due to lack of energy. As in I didn't have to deliberately continue with 0% chance. I did get pretty close once but the guaranteed energy next room saved me. This does make planning strategies a bit easier, more predictable, and saves games that last season would have been hopeless.

- Two of my runs lost on the final room vs Athena, both >80% chance of success. In previous seasons with the 18 points in the final room both of these would have been guaranteed successes and would have given me a positive obol win rate in line with my previous statistics. But, due to the changes, this is no longer the case. I don't see how this is fun or encouraging? The 22 points in each category at the end is simply not possible without three fully leveled 5 star cards, which are not common to get on a standard obol run. All other cards have been made obsolete by the point increase.

- Guaranteed energy and levels have caused bonuses to show up less often. If you don't get lucky with what cards you get then bonuses are essential for the final threshold. So having less bonuses makes unlucky runs much harder when in pre-Nyx seasons you could rely on bonuses to carry your less-than-ideal cards. The pre-Nyx season balancing of rewards was fine. In fact, if this energy change had been made during those seasons it would have fixed one of people's main complaints about the Ascent and maybe encouraged more people to play.

While these change have made Ascent more playable there are still improvements to be made.

- If you want people to use more drachma then make buying drachma cheaper and obols more expensive.

- Make better secondary divines available. These past few rounds of Ascent I've only gotten divines by happenstance because I already had a lot of fragments for them. I used to play >100 obol games a season to get divines I actually wanted. The last few seasons I played <40 obol rounds a season because the divines got less worth it. (I haven't forgotten when people requested a gemstone divine be put in the Ascent and after admins teased that it would happen it turned out to be Emerald. Touché howrse lol)

- If you don't want people getting multiple copies of a good divine than put a limit on the amount of divines you can get from Ascent at like one of each available. This will stop those 'cheaters', howrse has cited for the past few years as the reason for changes, from getting too many divines.

Looking forward to see how Ascent will actually be improved. I'm still not buying obols/drachmas or Ascent related packs until Ascent is equal to or better than it's previous iterations. Also I will never participate in luck items promos and you can never make me lol.

I haven't bothered with ascent this round because the feedback that I've seen basically says there's no point. I am not interested in wasting my time on a pointless game mode for useless divines, so that's 2 less divine series to care about and one less thing to waste time and passes on. That's a win on my end given how busy I am anyway.

One of the comments I saw says that they're losing with a 90%+ chance to win again... another says that they lost 5 games in a row. Nope, not wasting my time on this, let alone for no reward. My obels and drachmas can stay maxed out for if I ever decide to try again. Which may only happen in a few years... if this game even lasts that long. I'd much rather spend potential excess time on other things that are actually important or enjoyable or both. This game mode just fell off that list completely. As i said, one more chance before dropping it completely. That chance is up.

Bring our trophy icons back and i might reconsider just for the pretty little pictures that I could get for completing the divine series... right now, it's just a bunch of useless divines with an annoying skill set that I have no reason to collect or work. Or rather, the changing skills and specializations are too much effort for useless divines. I can't stand having to do different competitions daily, so I'm quite happy to ignore their existence and there's no reason to collect them otherwise because they don't have a perk. Good riddens from my end I guess. I don't even board the ones that I have anymore, so it's a win for me.