v1.29 Addendum: Two New Raids + Scoring V2
A v1.29 addendum. Two threads here, both shipping into your Raid roster this week. Two completely new Guild Raid floors (XXI and XXII), each with a brand-new enemy lineup. A redesigned scoring system that pays a real partial-credit floor when you fall short of a clear, scales every floor consistently as you climb, and stacks a guaranteed bonus on top when you finish the fight clean.
Read the full v1.29 "Mount Up" release notes.
At a Glance
🐕✨ What's New 🐕✨
- Two new Raid floors - the Sealed Grove (Raid XXI) and the Storm Veil (Raid XXII), each running a full week.
- A brand-new enemy lineup - five Hooded Mage variants and two new bosses, including the G.O.L.E.M. mech-boss anchoring Raid XXII.
- Scoring V2, on every floor - the new math replaces old scoring across all 22 Raid floors, not just the new ones. Every day of progress within a floor pays partial credit on a steepening curve, the floor below you sets your starting line, and a clean win posts a grade-scaled bonus on top so finishing always beats stalling on the final day.
Designer Deep Dive
This is a v1.29 addendum, not a full release. Two surfaces are getting a real upgrade this week and they deserve their own page. When you're done here, tap the link to jump back into the full v1.29 "Mount Up" patch notes.
Two New Guild Raids
Raid has been one of the most-played surfaces in the game for a while now, and the highest-floor guilds have been camping floor XX for several rotations. v1.29 opens the gate on two new floors above that, each with its own theme, its own enemy roster, and its own week on the schedule. Both run the full 8-day Raid cycle with the new opener and the curse-and-blessing flow you know from XVII through XX.
Raid XXI: The Sealed Grove
- Earthly magic, hooded and hostile. Raid XXI is the first floor with no "normal" monsters at all: every group is a coven of hooded mages, each one wielding a different earthly school. Crimson flame. Frost binding. Verdant root.
- Boss: the Blight Mage. A masked Blight Mage anchors the floor's late-day battlegroups, stepping forward behind paired wards of fire and frost (or fire and root, or frost and root, depending on the wave you draw).
- Pattern, not chaos. The hooded coven is built around three- and four-mage formations, so the order in which you burn down each ward changes how the fight feels. Going for the fire mage first leaves you to play out the rest in cold and creeping root; going for frost first leaves you cooking under flame and chasing damage-over-time.
Raid XXII: The Storm Veil
- Celestial magic, and a mech-boss. Raid XXII swaps earthly schools for celestial ones: Storm and Eclipse. The hooded coven returns with new variants, and the G.O.L.E.M. anchors the back half of the floor as the headline boss.
- Boss: G.O.L.E.M. The same mech-boss you've fought in story before, but this time wrapped in a coven of paired Storm and Eclipse wards. Stripping the wards first opens the fight; pushing the G.O.L.E.M. first leaves you fighting on a clock with storm and void pressure on top of you.
- Curse rates flattened. XXII's curse rolls have been flattened to a 50/50 split. The grove will still cost you; the cost is just no longer lopsided.
The New Enemy Lineup
The seven new enemies in this addendum break down into five hooded mage variants and two anchor bosses. Each mage carries a single elemental school and a single damage pattern. Read the colors, plan the focus order.
The Hooded Coven (Raid XXI: earthly)
- Crimson Pyromancer - fire damage and a burning damage-over-time. The most pure-DPS of the three.
- Frostbinder - cold damage and a slow that ramps into a freeze under sustained pressure. The least bursty, the most annoying.
- Verdant Druid - nature damage and a creeping-root damage-over-time. The closest thing the coven has to a sustain mage.
The Hooded Coven (Raid XXII: celestial)
- Storm Thunderer - lightning damage with rolling thunder pulses across the formation. Pressure scales with how many Storm mages are alive at once.
- Eclipse Voidshaper - void damage with debuff pressure. The first hooded mage that pushes back on your buffs as part of its kit.
The Anchor Bosses
- Blight Mage (Raid XXI) - the masked mage of the Sealed Grove. Always shows up flanked by hooded wards, never alone.
- G.O.L.E.M. (Raid XXII) - the mech-boss of the Storm Veil. Always anchors a paired coven of Storm and Eclipse mages, never alone.
The hooded mages are tuned around focus order, not raw stats. Tougher than a normal monster of the same floor, but each one has an obvious soft answer in your kit. Burning the right one first is the play.
A new bag of tricks
Heads-up: this coven plays by some of your rules now.
- Tricks that used to be yours alone. A few of these hooded mages carry abilities the game has, until now, reserved for your heroes. You'll feel it the first time a clean-looking burst window slips its mark, or a wave you thought you'd punch through eats more of your damage than the numbers say it should.
- No spoilers in the patch notes. We're not going to name which mage does what here. Read the colors, watch the wave, and you'll spot the new behaviors fast enough. The hint we will drop: the soft answer your heroes use against these tricks is the same soft answer the mages use against you. Build accordingly.
- Telegraphed, not random. Every new behavior is on a tell - an animation, a wind-up, a VFX cue. Nothing fires from a clear stance. The first run will teach you the cues; the second run is where you act on them.
Scoring V2: 1000 Per Floor, Real Partial Credit, Grade Bonus
Raid scoring used to lean hard on "did you clear it." Push the boss to 95% and lose? You scored about the same as a guildmate who never opened the fight. That was always the wrong incentive. Scoring V2 fixes that: the deeper you push within a floor, the more you score, and finishing the fight clean always beats falling on the final day.
The new formula, in plain terms
Think of your score on each floor as three pieces stacked on top of each other.
- Piece 1: the floor below you is your starting line. When you open a new floor, the score that floor starts at is the full credit you earned on the floor below. Stepping up to a harder floor never costs you points. The ladder only goes up.
- Piece 2: partial credit, on a steepening curve. As you complete days within the floor, your score climbs from that starting line toward the floor's partial-credit ceiling on a steepening curve (exponent 2.5). Early days inch you forward, the last few days move you a lot. Survive every day of a floor without clearing it and you'll land at the partial-credit ceiling for that floor.
- Piece 3: clean win posts a sweetener on top. Actually finish the floor and a grade-scaled bonus lands on top of the partial-credit ceiling: S > A > B, with the exact percentages left for you to feel in play. The bonus is wins-only. That means a clean win always scores higher than a deepest-possible push that died on the final day - which is exactly the incentive we want.
Two upshots worth calling out:
- The "cap" you sometimes see talked about in guild chat is the partial-credit ceiling (Piece 2). It's where a never-clearing push tops out for the floor. The actual high-water mark for the floor is ceiling + sweetener, and only a clean S-grade win gets you there.
- Higher floors are worth more, by design. Each floor's ceiling scales with how high up the ladder it sits, so pushing into harder floors is always the move that adds the most points - the harder the floor, the more the math leans in your favor on partial credit and on the sweetener.
Why we shipped it
- Trying matters now. Pushing into a new floor used to be a guild-points punishment if you didn't clear it. Now it's a guild-points opportunity: every day you survive into the new floor is real points on the board.
- The ladder is finally readable. Old scoring was easy to misread at a glance: "how am I doing, in this floor, against the rest of my guild?" The three-piece model (starting line, partial credit, sweetener) is the answer to that question without a calculator.
- The clean win still pays. We didn't want to flatten the difference between a 95%-push loss and a full clear. The grade sweetener keeps the clean-win incentive alive without making partial pushes feel pointless.
What you'll feel in play
- One scoring system across every floor. Scoring V2 replaces the old math on all 22 Raid floors at once, not just the new ones. The same starting-line rule, the same partial-credit curve, and the same grade sweetener apply whether you're pushing into floor 22 or grinding floor 7.
- Your guild's leaderboard reads differently everywhere. Expect the spread between guildmates to look more like "how deep did each person actually push," because that's now what the math rewards on every floor.
- Grades on the result screen now do real work. S, A, and B aren't just flair; they translate directly to points. Aim higher.
We're watching this closely. If the curve, the floor multiplier, or the grade sweetener need a tap on the brake or a nudge on the gas, you'll see a follow-up addendum land on this same page. Tell us what feels wrong in your guild chat and we'll read it.
How We Balance Now
Carrying this section forward because it's an evergreen explanation of how patches like this come together. Rigorous testing and player telemetry, with the community in the loop.
- Thousands of test runs per change. Before Scoring V2 shipped, we ran the new curve against historical Raid attempts from real guilds and read the distributions, not single points: how the partial-credit floor lands for a mid-guild, how the curve treats a near-clear, how the grade sweetener compares to old scoring at the top.
- Telemetry on real player choices. The hooded mage formations in Raid XXI and XXII are tuned around focus order. Which mage you burn first is something we can see in the data, and we're watching whether the intended soft answers actually show up in play.
- Days, not months. Both floors and Scoring V2 moved from design to live inside a single patch's cycle.
- Thank you. The "trying a higher floor shouldn't punish you" feedback came directly from guild chat across multiple shards over the last few months. You broke the old formula in creative ways, you found the seams, you told us where it hurt. Please keep doing it.