Well, since I only just got the first legendary on my 2nd account recently and that was merely Celestrion, I decided to try out how it would be to reroll with a legendary.
Took a long time 'til I got my first, which was Tiamad. Considered using him but I had Omegasdragon on my primary acc and wasn’t liking him much. With only a 160s Poison Eater that wouldn’t really speed up much either.
Thus I kept going and after yet another very long duration I got…Tiamad again. This time I actually decided to progress a bit so I can the restore code in case I’d end up with nothing else.
Well, and then low and behold, an hour or so later I actually got the god damn Penguini.
One and a half days later of lots of playing I’ve just finished the SC on Extreme, am level 26, reached level 70 on the soon expiring UC, most of the offline campaign is done (maybe like 7-8 quests left or so) and I’ve saved up 56 gems (spend one on tickets after I screwed up the 25 ticket power up level thingy that expired this morning by accidentally life flipping my Penguini instead of last biting x.x)
To conclude: Penguini, and of course Dragaia for that matter, are just ridiculous in regards to powerleveling through the content.
From a game design standpoint that’s actually kinda bad. The most efficient way to play a game should also be the most fun. Even when monster RNG and the like is involved, you still want a good baseline. Here though, the one thing you’d 100% recommend to any new player who might be interested in playing efficient and more so, not feeling like he lost out on a good opportunity later down the line, is to recommend rerolling until you get either of the Last Biter. That in itself is of course ridiculously obnoxious. It took a day to get that thing (using my smartphone on the side while on the PC and stuff) and i was lucky enough that my 3rd legendary was Penguini. And well, once you got him, the gameplay experience will have a substantially worse difficulty course and you needn’t catch as many monsters, experiment with lineups and strategies and so on. In short, you take away from what’s the good, fun part of the game.
Overall, this isn’t a huge issue with the game, in particular because a very low percentage of the player base, especially new players, will even know any of this and can be bothered by it. Still, it might be recommended to do something about at some point. Since this game isn’t bound to the google account for now and rerolling can’t be prevented, maybe it’s better to limit the first egg role to just epic and SE. Actually, how about just epics and then the second egg people get is guaranteed to be a SE. Afterwards, it’ll be the normal random stuff. That way players start out evenly in the beginning and by getting a guaranteed SE they’ll have this rewarding feeling one wants to provide. There’d still be a lot of refinement left to do and it doesn’t completely solve the issue (some SE are better than others after all, though those disparities won’t even come close to the difference a Last Biter has) but might be an idea to take into consideration.
There’s a certain appeal about having ‘true RNG’ from the beginning and the chance that even the first monster you get without even really doing much of anything is a powerful legendary, but, the other side of the coin is frustration and issues with game design. In a scenario where two friends find out about this game and start playing simultaneously and one of them starts with an epic, the other with a legendary (no rerolls because the average user has no clue about any such things anyways), wouldn’t it kinda suck for the person with the comparatively ‘lame’ epic to see his friend not only get a cool legendary but also progress through the content, right from the get go? Though, maybe he also just thinks “hot damn, I want a legendary, too” and spends a 100 bucks and the developer is grinning to his ears. However, if that stuff can come ~30mins later in the game that should still be fine. I think from a fun and fair game design perspective it would be better if those two players both started out with a (likely) different epic and see that there’s a lot of different strategies offered via the variety of different monster skill sets, rather than just pure power. For that matter it would be important to eventually go back and attempt to make the fairly repetitive (for each type basically) epics and super epics a tad more unique, but that’s another matter.