Easter Event

The Easter Event has started in River Crossing and will run for the next 10 days. It follows the standard holiday event formula.

There are a few things worth mentioning for this event. Firstly, the reward tiers have been changed up a bit. The troop rewards are significantly worse than usual - specials and U grabs. On the other hand, the individual rewards are better than usual. If you can get under 2500, you'll get at least a super and legendary grabs, and tiers under 800 can net you supers and ultras.

I would bet more people than usual will be spending during this event, thanks to these rewards and the holiday specials that PennyPop is running this first day of the event. You may find it a little harder to get into the tier you expect from previous events.

The other interesting thing about this event are the boss mechanics. The changes to the lieutenant fight that we first saw in "I, Joebot" continue to be in effect. The Architect is also present, offering "prestige" raids to troops that can complete 5 extreme boss fights.

The boss himself, Farmer Brownhare, doesn't do any direct attacks. Instead, he inflicts a very strong poison - dealing 20k damage per turn on hard difficulty, and 30k per turn on extreme. You'll need to carefully manage your hearts and heals to get through the full timer.

Head over to River Crossing and start beating on bunnies and marshmallows. Good luck!

Update: Raid Halls, New Quests and Pet Skills

PennyPop seems to be making big changes on a monthly basis these days. In addition to preparing for the Easter event, today's update gave us several new features.

Raid Halls

Raid halls are new dungeons that can be found in Teepee Hollow, Turtle Falls, Spring Clearing, Rocky Ridge, and Mt. Magma. They're marked by these little wooden signs.

When you first enter the hall, you'll see a little animation showing off a big, angry monster. This is the final boss of the area. Each raid hall has several mini-bosses and a final boss. These boss fights are for your whole troop and can only be started by an admin.

Each mini-boss is a separate fight. Defeat each of them in succession, before their timers run out, to beat the hall. You'll get a reward for each boss you beat along the way. When you beat a hall on easy mode, you'll unlock the extreme mode - with harder fights, and better rewards.

Be aware that once you start a raid hall, you're locked out of all the others. Additionally, once you've beaten a hall, you have to wait 24 hours before activating it again.


One big change comes along with this. Players are required to beat the raid halls in Spring Clearing, Rocky Ridge, and Mt. Magma in order to earn the badge for those zones and unlock access to the next zone. This basically means players will have to be in a troop with people willing to run that hall, or they can't advance in the game. For old players who have already unlocked the zones, this isn't a big deal. For newer players, it might be annoying.

New Quests

The new daily quests seem to mostly involve running between multiple rangers on different maps and carrying out some simple instructions like "donate x of this monster". Overall, they seem to be less repetitive than the old ones, but also less lucrative.

Troop quests have also been introduced. These require the entire troop to do something within a 24 hour period, such as "pet the troop pet 15 times". They seem to be tuned so that moderately active troops can easily complete them.

Troop Pet Skills

Troop pets have finally woken up and are able to defend themselves. They now gain abilities at level 10, 20, 35, and 50. This might give troops a little more incentive to burn specials leveling the pet. This will be a very long-term goal for most troops. It's hard to even contemplate the number of specials required to get a troop pet to level 50.

UI Improvements

These are relatively minor compared to the last update. The raid log is the biggest improvement, as it's now split into four categories:

• Event (for donating specials and dealing damage to event bosses)
• Raid (including the new raid halls, old-school troop raids, and Lost Temple raids)
• Ranger (which shows troop membership changes and member level-ups)
• Pet (which just shows who has been petting or feeding the troop pet)

They've also added the monster animations to their detail cards in the Management section.

Monthly Updates?

The Lost Temple update was in late January, and the Troop Dungeon update was in mid-March. With this update falling squarely in the middle of April, I'm hoping that PennyPop is settling into a cycle where they add new features on a monthly basis.

What do you think of the new features? What would you like to see in the next month or two?