PAD Rewind 2019 – A Recap and Review

| Jan. 1, 2020 | 2,550 views |   6    
, , also helped!

Last year I wrote up an overview of 2018, time for the 2019 edition! Let’s see how many things you remembered from here!!


Major Events

On initial thought there really aren’t a lot of “major” things, but as with last year, there’s a lot more that we didn’t realize happened this year! Here are some of our selections.

It is (still) raining Magic Stones

Stones everywhere.

Magic Stones everywhere! This year is one great year for those who has never seen triple-digit Magic Stones in their stone count! (Though last year we did get 200 free Stones…)

Date Event Number of Magic Stones
2/20 7th Anniversary 100
4/24 Final Stones of Heisei Era 100
5/26 GungHo Festival 2019 77
11/1 PAD Big Appreciation Festival 305 on JP (310 on NA)
  Total (JP):  582 Magic Stones! 

Stone distribution per month this year

JP player @c_g2461 tallied up how many Magic Stones were given out this year, including daily stones and bonuses from first clearing dungeons. If you religiously cleared all dungeons (skillup dungeons, quests, rankings, etc.), you’d end up with 2170 free Magic Stones total (this including above):

Month # of Magic Stones Month # of Magic Stones
January 255 July 146
Febuary 241 August 131
March 151 September 256
April 159 October 71
May 258 November 208
June 55 December 239

Pretty crazy to see this breakdown to be honest. Where have your Stones gone? All into box space right?

Even more streams

Last year there were 5 streams total, and this year we ended with 6 streams in total! We still have yet to see YamaP talking live, but in the last stream, YamaP mentioned streams will be live again starting next year. That’ll be a first after the fiasco from 2017! Some key points here:

Lots of QoL Updates

2018 started with version 12.6, this year we started 2019 at version 16.2! Certainly the version numbers didn’t increase a ton, but we did receive a ton of quality changes we’ve never anticipated. 

Here are the major ones, how many of these do you remember? I certainly remember how big it was to have reversible Assist evolutions!

The Year of Depreciation

Let’s start with the rant of forgotten things this year. While I still love the game as much as many of you, a lot of things this year are forgettable. Here are my selections:

Mega Awoken (& forgotten) Evolutions

Last year during anniversary we were hyped to see Mega Awoken evolutions for Sonias, Rodin, and more Fes. Exclusives. Most of the ones this year were from the anniversary stream, then 3 months later, we got Skuld and Viz from the GungHo Fest stream, and finally Kali a few weeks later, before a long 7 month break. It’s like GungHo forgot Mega Awoken Evolutions are a thing… and forgot about Kanna too…

Perhaps they’re still deciding how to handle the exploding list of Fes. Exclusives, or working too hard to revive the ex-Fes. Exclusives (Red Sonia, Green Odin etc.)?

Holy smokes. (PDX Database)

Super Reincarnated Evolutions

Super Reincarnated evolutions (SRevos) feels like they’re here forever, but really was added this year after 7th anniversary stream in February.

To be honest, a lot of the SRevos really feel lacking besides a legit art upgrade (especially Leilan), in comparison to collab cards this year. With few exceptions, most are simply hard-to-evolve trophies that don’t end up in your most-used teams. It feels more of a reason to introduce new descended dungeons and dungeon mechanics… which is a bit of a waste of the nice animation for these cards!

Latent TAMADRA (Slot Unlock), a way to save SRevos?

Introduced in the recent Version 18.1 update is Latent TAMADRA (Slot Unlock) , which unlocks an extra Latent Slot for SRevo cards.

It feels like they’re trying to push for SRevos, but even the TAMADRA isn’t really saving them at the moment… Perhaps new SRevos in 2020 will require the 8th slot and will change our minds?

Non-stop Super Godfest

10 Magic Stones! Super Exchange Material Gacha Returns!

2019 is a weird year where 10-Stone Super Godfests become the norm… Of the 25 Godfests we had this year, there was only 1 that costed 5 Magic Stones (happened on 1/31). Many feel that Godfest really became a way to roll for Monster Exchange materials (Fes. Exclusives), as many modern teams rely on select collab monsters instead of Fes. Exclusives.

As some put it, it can be hard to justify holding onto most Fes. Exclusive dupes this year.

I only hope we see an ultra-rare normal Godfest sometime in 2020. No seriously, 24/25 Super Godfests in a year is a bit much, even with all the free Magic Stones we get.

The depreciating Event Medal – Rainbow

Once upon a time, these Rainbow Medals were precious. Everyone were careful in using them, religiously collecting them from monthly quests, and debating if trading for SO-135 Alastair or Honoka Shindou was a good idea, or whether they should spend some to exchange for the current collab’s Rainbow Medal in Monster Exchange. In 2019 the question evolved into “what should I use them on, so that I get some box space back?”

The value of them lowered further with the introduction of one-time exchange of the unwanted pantheon gods to Event Medal Rainbow since this godfest in December, and has become a norm in recent Godfests.

I don’t mind if they depreciate, but can we just stack them, seriously??

The More Memorable Things

With my major rant out of the way, here comes the more positive side of things. This year we have a lot of new additions — so much that you probably forgot about them!

PAD Pass

月額有料サービス「パズドラパス」登場!

It didn’t take long for PAD to follow the trend and come up with a subscription service, rewarding with Magic Stones, extra team slots, 5% bonus EXP, and various daily rewards that may level up next month. The major attraction is the Lv. 5 of free Godfest roll, where you will be guaranteed a Fes. Exclusive (that’s 5 months into PAD Pass anyways).

While I put this as “positive” feature, there will be people who disagree. My view about this is that the subscription system do not lock any core features behind a pay wall. At least none of this give you a Fes. Exclusive of your choice.

The downside of course is the price tag: 980 yen ($9 USD) monthly after 7-day free trial isn’t very appealing to casual light-IAP players. It makes me wonder if NA server will see this service as well.

New types of Active & Leader Skills

While SRevos may be disappointing, there are still quite a few surprises this year with new skill types. How many of these have you used this year?

Leader Skills that add combos. These leader skills really helped against spawns with high combo shields when playing on 6×5, but since we have seen several strong 7×6 leaders taking up a lot of the meta now, this type of leader skill isn’t quite as powerful as it was near the beginning of the year. Examples: Beach Veroah , Zela Kitty .

Leader Skills with additional fixed damage. It’s really nice to have an automatic bonus attack (auto FUA, or follow-up attack) when handling resolve mechanics. Most notable one this year is Ina, who is heavily used in the Phenom/Ina pairing .

Leader Skills with awoken bind recovery. Recovering certain amount of HP by Heal orbs to recover awoken binds is nice, but still relatively niche. Examples: Teletha Testarossa , Luluna .

Active Skills giving guaranteed 4 color skyfall. Very useful for optimizing the amount of skyfalls that you can get in something like a ranking dungeon to maximize your combo score. A lot of them were from collabs, which did make collabs much more desirable. Examples: SFV Sakura , Akuma , Jeanne .

Active Skills removing “unable to match orbs” mechanics. One of the most annoying mechanics in PAD, finally has a solution. I hope we get something to deal with Spinners next. Examples: Miku Hatsune , Revo Hades .

Active Skills that bypass Void Damage Shield effect. Amazing active for those farming, or those who doesn’t like matching 3×3 orbs. Example: Shelling Ford , Akine .

Active Skills with bizarre orb changes. It’s cool to see how many more ways we can change orbs, and this year we had outermost orb changes. Eventually we’ll make hearts right? Examples: Zangief , Pixel Thancred , Blue Eyes White Dragon .

Oh, did I mention the first two (luxury) Bonus Attack Assists in game this year, which are Goury and Mai Valentine (Assist) ?

Rank 700 & 800 Memorial Egg Machines

フェス限定モンスター確定!「ランク800メモリアルガチャ」登場!!
Rank 800 Memorial Gacha featuring guaranteed Fes. Exclusive! (I quickly got myself to Rank 800 for it too!)

More reasons to get higher ranks with these machines added, and even easier to get there with a large number of EXP-boosting events! Rank 700 Egg Machine was added on 2/27, featuring only ★7 cards with Fes. Exclusives and pantheons. Rank 800 Egg Machine was added on 8/8, and is limited to Fes. Exclusives only.

Will we see Rank 850, 900, or even Rank 1000 Memorial Egg Machines next year? We shall see!

Collab Train

Scary collab train from February to August… From @Yuukoro.

The 20 collabs from 2018 hit like a truck, this year the collabs fly by like a bullet train, with 35 collabs in total! We see some unexpected new additions including McDonald’s collab, Samurai Spirits collab, and of course the current Yu-Gi-Oh collab! However, the amount of collabs is so intense that caused a lot of complaints. Thankfully the train has slowed down a bit lately.

As well, while collabs are always nice to see, the medal-farming has gotten from fun to really tiring very fast. I certainly have given up and starting trading in Event Medal – Rainbows .

Here are some fun things to note though:

  • 8 new collabs this year, and many old collabs returned with buffs (looking at you, Final Fantasy)!
  • Most returned collab of the year is GungHo collab. It’s now at 18 reruns total if you include the old days with only PEM rolls!
  • One collab didn’t came, I think you all know which one!

Click on a column header to sort by each heading. For a more detailed view including Assists and such, see this summary.

DMC collab: The meme of the year

Literally impossible to skip this post without a section for Devil May Cry 5 Collab (DMC Collab), which was announced during 7th anniversary stream in February, but no further information was released during the year.

Last year we spent half a year waiting for Yo-kai Watch World (YKWW) Collab which eventually arrived by December. The wait for DMC is a lot longer, and eventually became the constant top replies of all official tweets.

YamaP did mention in a recent stream that the collab will come next year, soooo we shall see!

New Monsters

It’s crazy to see that we gained over 700 in Monster ID over the year. While there are a lot of  Medals for Monster Exchange or collab cards, we still had some notable core additions this year:

New Fes. Exclusives (that are good)

While there was no new pantheons added, we had a whole new Dracoblade series, that are extremely popular amongst players. Base forms of Selica and Kio become the first Assists with leader skills, and of course Ina is pretty much the most valuable card of the year (Voted by GameWith users too, sorry Bride Zela and Tifa ).

Like last year with Valkyrie, Athena, and Zeus, the classics returned this year as Fes. Exclusives! All of them also have Assist Evolutions too!

Also noteworthy is that NA server actually got Fagan and Zaerog pretty quickly — 28 days difference compared to Japan!

(Yes I left out the other forms)

I don’t think we can forget the first card to remove void damage shield effects, which is important for all you farmers out there.

Kind of off-topic, but here’s a reminder that order matters when you use actives, as attribute absorb can be overwritten with damage absorb actives (Fujin). See here for details if you’re curious.

Seasonals & Specials: The year of orb skins

Orb Skin unlocked by Valentine’s Venus.

This year starting with Valentine’s special, we’ve been seeing constant addition of pantheon orb skins! It’s great, but we are going to run out of pantheons at this rate, since we didn’t have any new ones…

Hmm, will we see Heroine, Dragonbound & Dragon Callers, and Orchestra orb skins some time?

Date
Event Pantheon for Orb Skin
2/4 Valentines Greco-Romans 1 (Venus )
4/8 PAD Academy Japanese 1 (Amaterasu Ohkami )
6/17 June Bride Indian 1 (Parvati )
8/5 PAD Island Norse (Idunn & Idunna )
10/21 Halloween Egyptian (Bastet )
12/11 Christmas Archangel (Uriel )

Monster Exchange, the graveyard for PAD Radar goods

Last year we saw Dark Radra, Athena, and Ragnarok Dragon sold as real life gacha, this year they’re all added permanent additions to Monster Exchange, costing us a number of Event Medals – Black instead! In addition, Toragon also joined the party!

Card   Exchange requirement
Fallen Deity, Ra Dragon x 3
Guardian of the Water Capital, Athena x 5
Calamitous God Machine, Ragnarok Dragon x 5
Ultimate New Dragon, Toragon x 3
 * One-time exchange [JP] 

We all hope to see that cutie Light Bastet and the new/forgotten Agito-Dio there this coming year!

Monster Point Store, Mostly For Japan

The strange trend thsi year is that most of the new Monster Point store cards added are Japan-exclusives. As these are mostly local collaborations, they never made it to NA server.

It’s no wonder that many in NA wonder what to do with their piling Monster Points…

Date     Series
3/5 Umaibo Dragon Flavor Umaibo
3/15 Game Center Arashi Game Center Arashi
7/15 Van Flyheight ZOIDS
11/15 Yonkuro Hinomaru Dash! Yonkuro

Dark Myr: New Format of Monster Memory

Seeing Myr is great, but it’s even better to see two new Myr with Chrono Ma:Gia artwork! In the past, Monster Memories are  in the shape of plastic toy medals, this time they switched to simple cards. Very Eco-friendly move from GungHo, except that GungHo limited sales of this Myr to select events, so very few actually own one or two to play with.

Thankfully last week GungHo start selling Myr on Amazon Japan! Perhaps this is because the QR code on the cards have an expiry date… Haha.

Notable mention: This year’s Radar Dragons

Unlike previous sets, these Radar Dragons really aren’t as high in demand as Keela and friends. They all appear in the current PAD anime, but honestly, do you really need them much? Rokks isn’t the friendliest enemy of all to handle, and farming isn’t too necessarily as they aren’t used as any evolution materials. At least they drop in Alt. Grotesque Being (AA3) if you need them?

Special mention: YamaP made art.

Besides being producer of PAD, YamaP spent some time making pixel animations of the PAD slimes! Murako (official PAD Twitter) held a poll, asking all players if YamaP’s creations should be added (in a very savage way)… The response was a big yes! Took a while, but they’re now in JP version!

Now let’s see these lovely YamaP artwork get added next (please no):

New dungeons & descends

Story Dungeons

I don’t think I can skip this part, tyrra. This year we see a new mode added to PAD, with story! We have two chapters, one with Sonia, the other with Odin, and more coming up (maybe Chinese gods?)! It’s great to see more personality of each gods, like how Red Sonia is a “scary-looking bad Dragon Caller” according to Tyrra!

We also ended up with amazing new evolutions for ex-Fes. Exclusive gods like Red Sonia and Green Odin ! Looking forward to more, and looking forward to seeing it on NA server eventually.

Player Skill Test Quests

Many of us joke that we have Player Skill Issues (PSI)… GungHo gave us a way to confirm that! Since November, we’ve seen three of these Player Skill Test dungeons, and they really push for the puzzle aspect of the game (looking at Navi’s puzzle on Lv. 7 in first set, for example). We do anticipate seeing more of this next year!

Egg MachineDra Challenge (Gachadra Fever)

ランキングダンジョン「ガチャドラフィーバー!」開催‼

The idea of Gachadra is not new, but Gachadra Fever is the newest addition this year, featuring 1 floor dungeon with the goal of gaining higher maxing out your cumulative score, for that guaranteed easy crown! A total of 6 easy crowns were given out this way this year!

The worst part is how time-consuming it can be on 6×5 boards

Forgettable descended dungeons

This year we have a comparable 9 descended dungeon additions, where most of them become food for Super Reincarnated cards. Besides the cute girls, I basically forgot the rest existed…

When   Descended Dungeon When   Descended Dungeon
1/29 Libertas Descended 7/2 Dorothy Descended
2/20 Qilin Descended 8/9 Brahma Descended
4/10 Scheherazade Descended 9/20 Senri Descended
5/10 Reiwa Descended 10/25 Jabberwock Descended
5/26 Eris Descended      

These dungeons are more memorable.

And maybe more meme-able too.

When Dungeon Notes
3/28 +Point Cave / Super +Point Cave Having a guerrilla for +Points is nice!
6/26 Extreme Challenge Arena Everyone farming for Fama !
7/24 Alt. Grotesque Being! (AA3) Easier way (?) to get Kunpoo and friends! (also, Gaslowe !)
9/14 True Training Arena 60 hours only on debut, and now returns regularly!
9/24 Complete Annihilation Endless Corridors Virtually every floor is dangerous, and even successful clears of the dungeon can take over an hour. In addition, contains an unavoidable 300k preemptive attack, and a boss with effective 25 billion hp. Have fun!
12/5 Catastrophic Ultimate Colosseum That colosseum we were waiting for. Drops Latent TAMADRA (Slot Unlock) .
12/12 Annihilation Descended Rush! Features all of the Super Revo mats from this year. In addition, now you too can farm a Gaslowe without needing to run AA3, at what’s seemingly below a 1% invade rate.

All sorts of Challenges

What started this year are more random challenges throughout the year, instead of the old Lv 1-10 challenges or One-Shot Challenges to spice things up. Some examples are:

Re-energizing The North America Server

While Japan server is exciting, North America server really got the spotlight this year with all the changes. None of us would’ve seen this coming at the start of 2018!

World Premiere – Dorothy Descended

Dorothy Descended in June was really when the change of pace began. Who would’ve believed that North America server gets a (cute girl) descended dungeon before Japan? Who would’ve thought there was a time when no dungeon info is available, except on PDX Database? (lol)

Although Dorothy was added to Japan server 4 days later, it was still quite an awesome time to see Japan players checking for English data, and looking forward to NA content for once!

Exclusive Collab – Power Rangers

Given how poorly-received Voltron Collab was, it’s a real surprise to see another North America server exclusive, especially when it’s Power Rangers Collab!

I was very fortunate and honored to hold an interview with official GungHo staff: GungHo Sam and Kenji, who showed us the lovely artwork before the collab hits!

Some NA players felt that the lack of bundles and the 10 Magic Stone cost is quite steep for the collab, hence the value of the collab became quite controversial amongst players. Thankfully the fires were settled within a week, and the reviews gradually became positive. I sincerely hope that does not discourage GungHo NA to bring over more exclusive collabs!

The Unexpected – Fujimi Fantasia & Kamen Rider

Most of us were surprised to see Lina Inverse or any Kamen Rider in North America server. The “curse” of “any anime collab will not appear outside of Japan” is broken! Though this was not too surprising to those who knew that with only 2 older exceptions, all recent collabs that Hong Kong/Taiwan (HK/TW) server received also landed on Korea and NA servers.

The most awesome part is that with Power Rangers and Kamen Rider collabs both in NA server, you can have Kamen Riders AND Power Rangers in the same team. No other servers get this experience!!

Special Mentions – Gunma & Amberjack

The wait is over. If DMC is the meme of Japan server, then Ultimate Gunma was definitely the meme for years. Ever since October 2017 when Ultimate Gunma was introduced to JP server, NA players have been waiting for its arrival for a year…

Then during GungHo Fes this year, Super Cold Amberjack was added to Japan. Seeing how Gunma was never added, many of us thought both of them will never make it to NA server…

But GungHo NA surpised us! Super Cold Amberjack and Super Gunma were added in September!! While the cards are no longer “meta”, this still gives us hope that NA server is not a forgotten server.

Big Quality of Life Changes

The most revolutionary change ever on NA.

Long-awaited Monster Box search functionality hits NA server on 10/23, with Version 18.0 update! Even though Story Dungeon was not added on this patch, the search function was definitely well-received by everyone!

Except… you can’t search for some sensitive terms, like Fagan.

Another big change is that Player’s Choice Godfest (PCGF) voting polls are finally in-game. No more voting on Facebook, and no more Hino Kagutsuchi as default submission answer (so we dont’ get Kagu voted in accidentally)!!

Let’s also not forget the constant streams this year with the amazing GungHo Sam & Kenji!

Branching out from mobile – PAD Gold

It’s been a while since PAD is on other platforms, and this time we have PAD Gold on Nintendo Switch, which will be released on January 15, 2020 as a digital-only game! The game features a few modes that you can read from the link above, but the most notable things are:

  • Japanese and English for language choices, for the first time!
  • The first Player vs. Player (PvP) mode for NA server, no need to use 3P for that (lol)
  • It really is PADZ + PAD Cross + PAD Radar blended into one.

Thankfully there will be no in-app purchases available! Looking forward to this, and I may write up a review if I have time to play it.

The Bad & Questionable

As GungHo played it safe this year, there really aren’t crazy questionable things this year aside from DMC collab and…

That 1,000 Magic Stones Giveaway

Japan loves gacha, but this one was totally wrong. Supposedly there was a random chance to win 1,000 Magic Stones, and 10 lucky players win daily over 25 days (chosen from active players), but no one reported a win. It was at the point where everyone doubted a winner existed, and many felt the “gacha” was unfair.

GungHo ended up holding a survey to giveaway prizes for people who didn’t win (basically everyone), and 50 Magic Stones were given out. Totally failed there…

The Untradable Collab Cards

While seeing Sanrio Collab again was great, we didn’t expect a new rarity tier to be added to the collab. This is all cool until you realize that the lower tier collab cards become untradable. So if you wanted Kirimi-chan , you had to roll/whale for it.

And of course that was only the start — Attack on Titan (AOT), Kinnikuman, Fist of the North Star (FOTNS), Shonen Champion, Fujimi Fantasia (good luck rolling the Bonus Attack Assist), and Shinkalion collabs all had the same issue. We all hope this won’t continue to 2020…

The 7th Anniversary Art Contest (really is 8th)

While we waited for DMC collab, the results of the Monster Design contest were released in February, but it took 10+ months of wait before knowing that they will be added to the game this January. The long wait does make me question how well they planned this, it felt kind of unfair to the winners to keep them waiting. In comparison, this is a bit more nitpicky compared to the points above.

The good things are that January is still part of 7th anniversary, and that amazing artwork of Sha-77 Dragon was not edited.

PAD Radar – Truly forgotten?

This year is exceptionally quiet for PAD Radar, with even fewer events and new additions. Perhaps it’s due to development of PAD Gold, which overlaps with PAD Radar. Let’s see what GungHo will do to the game next year though, especially if they want to keep the E-Sports branch going.

Fun facts of 2019

Back to some fun stuffs. These are some interesting findings we have this year!

  • No new pantheons added this year. None.
  • 300 maximum friends still, for this year… I want more friends.
  • Reiwa, the missing banner. Reiwa ‘s debut did not have a banner. She secretly descended… We assume that GungHo staff were enjoying their Golden Week too.
  • Collab-ception. Shinkalion collab is the first example where we can have collab within collab, where Miku Hatsune (Vocaloid) and Shinji (from EVA) appeared. I doubt this will be common though.

  • Only 1 GungHo games died this year. Remember how we saw 3 GungHo games ended last year? This year Disney Magic Kingdoms was the game that ended, due to the contract. Some games aren’t looking good for next year though – Looking at you, Chrono Ma:Gia…

Looking forward

While for the most part it’s quite a mixed bag for 2019, I can safely say that I feel more hopeful in the game than when I started the blog in 2018. GungHo played it steady and safe this year, but I hope for a more adventurous year next.

JP server

2019 is really a year of UI and QoL improvement, but it’s not enough. Scrolling through Monster Exchange remains painful, not to mention trading in Gold Medals for Rainbow Medals still uses the old layout, which require clicking a medal at a time. Ugh.

With the rise of collab train comes the depreciation of Fes. Exclusives. We have gone from collabs being a luxury to a necessity, which isn’t a healthy trend in the long run when the collabs roll costs are constantly increasing (Yu-Gi-Oh being 10 Stones per roll is still scary). YamaP hopes for the game to be playable even as NIAP, but this past year was a bit deviated from that goal. I hope we see better usages of non-collab cards in 2020, and I hope poor Kanna finally gets some love.

Oh, I also hope Draconic Orchestra will eventually get Voice awakenings. It just doesn’t make sense without toot-toots.

NA server

The future is bright. With the pace of NA server picking up, the gap between the servers have closen up (with the exception of monthly quests and select events), where some events arrive in less than a month. This would not be possible without the GungHo NA PAD team – We would not be at this point without them pushing for the content!

(I hope I get to interview them again LOL)

The Blog

In the start of this year, we witnessed basically discontinuation of Miru Bot. It took months before tactical_retreat (TR) was motivated enough again to rebuild DadGuide and release an iOS version, which remains a great resource for all PAD players.

On this end, some of you know about the site apocalypse, where you have a 50% chance to load a page in one minute (including myself).

This year certainly wasn’t a good year for developers, but we are all striving to do what we can while having fun. With that in mind, remember to keep supporting your favorite resources, and hopefully this year I can push out some of the ongoing projects onto the site!

To all the authors, thank you for bearing with my noob coding skills and my non-existant patience in everything this year, and thank you all authors for writing articles!

To the long-term followers, thank you for always leaving hilarious comments, I do read all of them!

And to all readers, thank you for reading this long review, see you all in 2020!


Comments from our authors

From Cate

2019 was the last year of school for me and it was a whole lot more intense than previous years. I’ve taken more classes and started doing intern, so simply put, I was busy and it didn’t really stop there either. Through the year we have lost Ken, we had incident that happened to tactical_retreat, whom we work with quite closely. To sum it up shortly I have just lost a lot of motivation for PAD.

The game itself has not changed much either. In fact GungHo has only made it more repetitive by implementing tons of token farming, to which I would say is not real content. The story mode is a nice change of pace and act as a nice tutorial that has been long overdue. However it’s all coming out too slowly and it isn’t exactly a good indicator to any of the new players that these dungeon will help you learn about the mechanics.

Going forward to 2020, it will be a complete new start as my daily schedule is going to be completely different. Whether I will have more time to spend on PAD will remain unknown. As much as I’d like to say that I want to work on a few things, I cannot make any promises. However I should still be around nontheless.

Oh and by the way this was just completely forgotten.
Oh yeah and I want Romia’s hoodie

From Onion

While 2019 was a conflicting year for me with respect to PAD, I will say that i’ve been extremely grateful for my ability to give back to the community this year, through helping out with writing for miru bot, and getting to write a few articles here as well. I hope to continue doing this in the future, but it really depends on my situation with schoolwork in the coming year.

With regard to the game itself, I still had a mostly good time playing PAD, but the more I thought about the shifts the game has taken this year, the worse the experience became. Every new collab has a repetitive 5/1 token exchange which takes many stamina bars to finish, and as Reni mentioned in the article, having almost every godfest this entire year cost 10 stones to roll is ridiculous. Super Godfests used to be an event to be hyped for, but with them being nearly all we see now, they rarely generate excitement. The lack of any new pantheon cards being added this year hardly helps either, as 10 stone godfests don’t allow you to roll any potentially useful ex-gfe or non pantheon cards. I feel this lack of variety in available cards will hurt the game in the long term should these 10 stone godfests not stop.

On a more positive note, the wide variety of new dungeons and dungeon/card mechanics we saw added into the game this year was very nice, especially during the second half of the year, and they did help distract from other issues present throughout 2019. I really hope we see the Player Skill challenges and dungeons like the DBDC Arena expanded upon in the coming year. I also hope we see a more steady release of new super revos and mega awoken gfe, as I really want my Astaroth , Pandora , and Kanna to be potentially useable again, regardless of if they end up being “meta” or not.

All in all, while PAD’s core gameplay, community, and the many friends that i’ve made on the various PAD discord servers have kept me coming back to the game, I do feel that if the game continues down the path it’s currently on, My overall interest in the game may decline in the coming year.

6 Replies to “PAD Rewind 2019 – A Recap and Review”

  1. Blunts 2019 write up: omfg mad credit card debt OMG WOW LOOK AT THIS COLLAB omg more credit card debt. Perhaps one day in the not so far off-distant future, I can break bread with my brother onion

  2. I’m almost at a complete standstill with Pad. I need assistance with team selection for many a dungeon. Please help.

Leave a Reply!