Deep Dive: Active & Passive Genes
Introduction
Well met, adventurer — welcome to a special edition of The Hero’s Hold! Today we’re taking a deep dive on combat genes with what we know about those elusive Active and Passive abilities that have become a hot topic in recent weeks.
Let’s dig in!
Background on Hero DNA & Genetic Traits
As I previously wrote about in my article on Hero Genetics, every hero has 24 different genetic traits that define its abilities and visual appearance. At the time, we focused primarily on Class and Subclass, and how those genes are passed down and can mutate in the process. But I also mentioned a handful of genetic traits that haven’t gotten a lot of attention yet, including these Active and Passive traits, as well as ones called StatsUnknown 1 & 2.
Active and Passive Traits
Recently, we’ve seen a lot of attention on the four genes labeled active1, active2, passive1, and passive2, particularly because like Class and SubClass, these genes can mutate. In fact, their mutation tree 100% mirrors that of the class tree, with 15 different abilities across four tiers. The only main difference is that the top tier is called “transcendent” vs “exalted” for the class tier tree.
The chances of mutation here are also the same as with Class, so a basic1 and a basic2 gene, once selected to be passed on, have a 25% chance of mutating to an advanced1 gene, and the same goes for advanced to elite. And the two elite genes have a 12.5% of mutating to transcendent.
Need a refresher on how gene selection and mutation works? Check out my previous article on Hero Genetics — everything works the same:
But what do they do?
That’s the question, isn’t it? Some of us have long suspected that these genes could be connected to combat abilities, giving our heroes specific active moves or passive buffs/debuffs that could provide benefits in combat.
But we finally got a bit more information at a recent AMA, when Hubert Cumberdale, DFK’s Game Mechanics Lead, was directly asked about them:
As far as what they do, they are mostly intended to be used for combat, but I had some of them planned to be used for something else that I don’t want to disclose yet, kind of like how you have a profession gene or stat gene that might give you a passive or active. There will be advanced ones just like you can get advanced classes. The advanced ones will be more powerful than the other ones. As far as details of what they do I’m not going to disclose that right now.
That is to say, that although these genes will have combat use, this will not be their only function. Or, perhaps one active and one passive might be for combat, while the other two are for another use.
When pressed about whether these abilities are connected to Class or other hero traits, we learned that, no, all 15 of them (for each gene?) are set, and may or may not align with your hero’s class:
Each of those passive and active skills will be pre-determined, not based on the class combination, on its own it stands as an ability. There will likely be some class combinations that work better with certain abilities (just like some classes work better with certain professions and certain stat genes). You’ll have hits and misses and then some where abilities and other aspects of the card to align for min/max strategies.
One might assume, however, that higher tiers of ability are less likely to be hit-or-miss for any specific class, and would be broadly useful to all heroes.
Additionally, we now know that every hero will also have its own class-specific skills, where we can spend our hero’s Skill Points, and that the active and passive abilities will be in addition to those:
What remains unclear is whether we’ll be able to place Skill Points into Active and Passive abilities as well, or just into class skills.
What’s with the team Gen0s?
Part of the reason that these genes came under close scrutiny was the discovery that many of the heroes with the highest-tiered Elite and Transcendent skills were held by DFK team members. In fact, nearly every hero with an Elite ability and every hero with a Transcendent ability is descended from one of the team’s promo Gen0 heroes (#1–19). A closer look at these heroes revealed that unlike any other Gen0s, Advanced, Elite, and Transcendent abilities were seeded into these Gen0s’ recessives (the one exception here is Hero #9, which has a dominant elite2 gene for its active2 ability).
As Hubert explained, these recessives were mistakenly seeded into the team Gen0s, and this was not at all intended:
We were not aware of this at first. There was no intent to have the recessives be anything other than the basic genes and we aren’t sure what caused that. Yes, you are right, the randomness allowed for ability genes above basic to show up in the recessives. That is something that we want to fix and we’ve been discussing for quite some time on how we will fix that. […] For each hero created using those recessives it furthers the problem because they were created not using the mutation gene. For purposes of tracking the lineage of any hero back to the first 20 [sic] heroes it takes time but we want to make it right.
So, what’s next?
As Hubert noted, the most important takeaway is that the proliferation of these advanced, elite, and transcendent genes was not intended, and the team is planning on making changes accordingly.
What exactly those changes will look like is not yet clear, as there are approximately 3,000 heroes that can trace their lineage back to the team’s Gen0s #1–19. And, of course, many of these advanced genes have naturally mutated from their parents as well, and are not affected by this lineage.
But it does seem like a good bet that heroes that improperly received these genes may be subject to having them changed or rerolled at some point in the future. As FriskyFox noted recently to the DFK developer community, one option might be requiring these heroes to see a ‘Doctor NPC’ to check on their genes, or require that they be fixed in order to participate in PVP:
Given what he later said to the DFK DAO about assigning combat skills, it sounds like this idea, or something similar, may be gaining some traction:
The bottom line, then, is that if you have heroes with these skills or are looking to buy and speculate on these heroes, you should be absolutely certain of their lineage and of whether these genes are newly mutated or inherited from Heroes #1–19.
For me, anyway, all of the unknowns around these abilities are what makes them so exciting. They are almost certain to provide a boon to combat, and building a team with them, or working to summon your own, could pay off in the long run.
Good luck!
Thanks to Samichpunch for AMA write-ups. The AMA quotes here are adapted from his articles.
That’s it for today! Thanks for reading, and please subscribe and stick around for future editions of The Hero’s Hold. If you like what you’re reading here, I’m happy to accept tips at: 0xf543311360d1072873D627B06ffe85587e8fc41a.
Questions, comments, suggestions? Send them to me at MrZipper#7564 on Discord or @MrZipper7 on Twitter.
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely my own, and do not reflect those of the DeFi Kingdoms team. Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, or should be taken as such.
Recent Issues
- The Hero’s Hold #13 — February 7, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #12 — January 31, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #11 — January 24, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #10 — January 17, 2022
- Deep Dive: Hero Genetics — January 5, 2022
- Deep Dive on Advanced+ Class Summoning — November 27, 2021
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