Learn All About Scrolls with M.T.M.
Hello everyone. It is Monday, which means (other than desperately fighting for leaderboard position) it is M.T.M. article day! For those who don’t know me I’m the curator of the Legendary Database, Heavenly Spire sheet, and a bunch of other informative spreadsheets I occasionally forget I have.
Today, I want to cover a perennial question in…you know, pretty much anywhere you can ask a question. That is, Scrolls. Scrolls are an enigma at the end of the relic line, seeing use so rarely that even veteran players may have never encountered one. The basic idea is simple, a consumable version of relics, so why aren’t they used more regularly? In order to answer that we must travel into the distant past of two years ago.
Scrolls were released alongside relics during April 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast” event (gotta love the public domain!). Much like the original relics, they mostly gave stat boosts, though there was also a “Transmute Scroll” that created a couple gems each turn. Truth be told, I wasn’t even playing Legendary yet so my knowledge is a bit sketchy on these, but what I’ve heard is they were sold in “Scroll Packs” that weren’t terribly popular. The boosts weren’t that impressive and if you were going to buy a pack…why not just use those resources to get something that will last?
After a couple of events Scrolls went on hiatus, reemerging in “Head Hunters” (June 2017). The “Medusa’s Bane” Scrolls could be earned during the Crusade portion of the event, and had a chance to dispel Poison and Earth Petrify debuffs used by Medusa (kind of like having a couple extra Counter Skills). This was incredibly useful because that event’s Ultra Rare, Perseus, was, is, and in all likelihood will always be the only hero with Dispel Earth Petrify. Perhaps too useful, because (again, so I’ve heard) you didn’t get enough to use for every boss, and it was extremely difficult without them.
My first run-in with Scrolls was with one of the various attempts at “Event Scrolls,” specifically during the short-lived War Beast Conqueror…sorry, I mean *World* Conqueror events. I’m not going to even try to explain how they worked…ok, fine, I’ll try a little, but that is it. Basically it involved lots of swapping of gifts to make “Demonslayer Scrolls” to remove a shield from the final boss which otherwise made it immune to damage. Which, first, is basically just a weird key, and second, ended up not mattering for tiny baby M.T.M.’s newbie guild because we didn’t even get that far, but ended up with a ton of Blessed Stakes and Deadly Mechanisms anyway.
Scrolls came and went for a while after that. When elder players speak of the fabled Vault they tend not to mention getting a million “Vault Scrolls” for the “Vault Bosses,” but the giant piles of them were a big annoyance at the time. Slightly less elder players also remember them from Player vs Player events, but even there, they were unpopular because the ATK bonus was small and the “Marksman Gems” they spawned weren’t particularly useful.
I could go through the specifics of each version, but they really boil down to the same few problems. When the scrolls were literally or “literally” (that is, figuratively) required to defeat bosses, they became a key with extra steps. When scrolls were bonuses, they tended to be too small or not available in the right quantities. They were either too scarce to make a difference or so common you could just use them every time and it became a fiddly thing to remember to swap in and out rather than a resource to use strategically. Despite tons of experimentation, Scrolls never found the right balance of utility, availability, and most importantly *fun* to have a lasting place in Legendary.
At this time (“this time” being June 2019) there are no hints of Scrolls on the horizon, though I’m personally hoping to see some use for Scrolls and the various PvP/Arena relics people have gathering dust in their inventories in the upcoming (yet mysterious) “Proving Grounds” promised on the Legendary Roadmap. If you have your own solution to the Scroll problem, or your own recollection of the old Event Scrolls, let me know in the comments!
