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?

Battle Camp Update: Troop Dungeons, and More!

The last big update to Battle Camp had a pretty mixed reaction. Lost Temple and second evolution added some much-needed new content for very strong players, and the new raid rewards offered some variety for everyone. But the changes to the ability system and the new happiness system were much less popular. In fact, PennyPop quickly decided to disable the happiness system.

Another large update rolled out today, and I think it will prove much more popular. There's a really nice mix of new features and quality-of-life improvements. And no "features" that immediately irritated me.

Shiny New Interface

The first thing you'll notice is a lot of improved graphics and polish. The most obvious of these is the menu that now runs across the bottom of the screen, consolidating lots of buttons and freeing up some screen real-estate.

While the developers were working on this, they've really sped up the interface as well. I used to have to tap and wait...tap and wait...every time I wanted to do something. Now, it seems like the menus and troop tabs are much more responsive. Troop chat is also much less laggy.

Team Management

The map has been changed a bit as well. The leveling areas all follow a single path now, making it clear what the progression is. The Troop Hall, PvP Fort, and Troop Wars are clustered together on a little island, and the special event areas have their own section of the map as well.

The changes to the Team Management window are probably my favorites. It's much easier to sort through your monsters and swap them in or out.

The quest interface has been updated yet again, and I really like this version. It's clean and concise and shows you exactly where you've got things to do. The little help popups should make it easy for new players to figure out how to complete each quest.

Bigger, Better Daily Quests

While you're checking out the new quests interface, you'll also notice two new daily quests.

The first is the Daily Raid, which will presumably reward you for completing a different raid each day. PennyPop has been looking for ways to encourage high-level players to run all the different raids, instead of just farming the same one over and over. This is a nice way to do it, while rewarding the players.

The second is the new Daily Hall Dungeon quest. This one encourages players to try out the brand new Troop Hall dungeons.

Both of these new dailies reward 500 stones, which is a pretty awesome bump for people who are working on second evolutions. If you're in a good raiding troop, you should be able to get 1100-1500 stones per day just from finishing daily quests.


Troop Hall Dungeon

The Troop Hall dungeon is the big new piece of content in this patch. As you might expect, you can access it from your troop hall. Just go left from your troop pet to the cave.

Despite being located in your troop headquarters, this dungeon is a solo affair. It's similar to the cave quests, or the Celestial Towers, where you battle waves of enemies before finishing off a final boss. Much like troop raids, there a bunch of possible prizes, and you'll randomly receive one when you complete the dungeon successfully. However, the dungeon lets you pick your difficulty, and higher difficulty increases your odds of better loot. Then, if you really want to improve your odds, you can spend additional energy to improve your drops even more. Of course, you still have to win, or it all goes to waste.

Active Ability Tweaks

New Active Ability Graphics

The way active abilities work has been tweaked slightly in this update. Previously, active abilities would fire as soon as you tapped them, in-between rounds of gem matching. Now, each monster in your party shows a counter that tells you how many turns are left before you can activate their ability. When you do activate, a check mark appears. You then finish your turn, matching gems like normal. After your damage is dealt, then your chosen abilities will fire. There are also some nice new graphics that make it very clear which abilities you and your opponents are using.

This definitely gives battle a slightly different feel, but I think it will be a good change once we all get used to it.

Oh, and for some reason the developers decided to turn on the auto-cast option for everyone by default. You can disable it in the Options menu.

Monster Stat Adjustments

When you first log in, you may want to go to the troop roster and check your power rating. Monster stats have changed somewhat. (People in my troop noticed a large increase in HP.) Overall, power ratings seem to have gone up across the board, which should make people feel good for a while, and also give us a slightly more precise measurement of how we compare to others.

It doesn't feel like my team is significantly more powerful, so I'm guessing that enemy monsters have had their stats increased in a similar way to compensate. It will probably take a while to figure out what effect these changes have had. Overall, it feels like a neutral, or possibly slightly beneficial change.

Evolution Ingredients

This will probably be the most controversial change in today's update. There are new ingredients required for evolution (first evo, that is). Instead of just requiring four specials of the same type as the evolving monster, you will now need a special monster called "candy".

These candies come in three flavors - Super, Ultra, and Epic. To evolve a monster, you now need one candy of the appropriate rarity, along with three regular specials of the appropriate element and the two evolving monsters.

At first glance, this seems like it will make evolution more difficult. However, the troop dungeon and troop raids both have a chance to reward candy. So you have two ways to farm the candy you need - individually or with your troop. I believe that active players won't have too much trouble finding the ingredients they need. However, we'll have to wait and see what the drop rates are like.

Go Check it Out!

I assume you've got your phone in front of you as you read this, but if not, go play! This update added a lot of fun and little improvements to the game. This post is already long, and there are even more features I haven't mentioned. (New abilities, new monsters,

I'm actually impressed at how much was added, since the big Lost Temple update wasn't all that long ago. And this time around, the developers seem to have done a better job listening to the players and adding features that we'll enjoy.

So go check it out and leave me a comment to let me know what you think about the new stuff.