I've been playing this for about a month now, because I don't know why. It's another AFK simulator and I was kinda curious I guess.
Anyway, here's how it works since the guy a couple posts above me who is suggesting it's not that bad is a little out to lunch on the grin aspects.
There is an auto battle system that works fine to a point, there is no reason to be pushing through the game, but rather you pick a node on the map that your team can easily clear, you do the X5 battle and you minimize the game, they auto battle 5 times and at the end you get 5 rewards that are money/XP potion/orbs and small/medium "devils" which are this games version of heroes or whatever you want to refer to them as. The Large devils you can get 2 of per week by completing the dailies, any other come rarely from Legendary Quests which aren't terribly uncommon once you finish normal mode but the kicker is they mostly reward 4 star heroes, and the best heroes in the game outside of a couple, are the ones that roll as a 5 star and only from Large devils. So for the first couple weeks of afking this game you're going to get fucking nothing. There is a , it's called a weekly hero but it's actually daily , that if you use your large devil token on that hero, and the token rolls as a 5 star ( it won't) you'll get that hero. The only 5 star heroes I've gotten actually came from using medium devils which have a chance to roll as a 3-5 star, but they obviously are heavily weighted as is everything else in this game to only roll as a 3 star, which is the top end for small devils which roll 1-3 star.
Farming the battles awards shit all for XP you need to level heroes off of potions. If you pay a great deal of money to this developer you can actually earn XP at a normal rate, otherwise you need to use potions which are a drop, and expensive buy from the store that refreshes every hour.
You can evolve heroes to a higher tier. This requires the e prvolved hero to be maxed level, then you need 3-5 duplicates of that hero that are all the same star level to evolve the hero. So to say take a 3 star hero to 4 you need a maxed 3 star with 3X duplicates. Since that hero only starts at 3 star, once you've evolved them to a 4 star you now need 4 4 star heroes of that type. Which means you need 16 3 star cards to evolve that hero to 5 star. And then for the final evolution you need those 16 cards 5 times, or 80 fucking duplicates. It's insane. It's an insane grind for anything 3 stars and below.
For 4-5 star heroes it just requires, like in the 5 star 6 heroes to evolve it. But of course, that requires you to roll a 5 star hero with a large devil, which is rare as hell, and it needs to be this hero, and you need to achieve that 6 times. Without spending money you can maybe get 6 Large devils a week if you're lucky with quests or on a daily spin.
The kicker to all this is you can get through normal and most of the way through heroic if you evolved cards and are a fucking sadist like me. However if by that point you've not been lucky enough on your devil rolls to get at least the purple haired chick or the gun chick, you're done. You will also have to have been lucky enough to get a few lvl 3/4 orbs and have the money to level the orbs to survive even a round of attacks.
Once you do manage to get a couple 5 star base cards and lvl 3/4 orbs you'll reach a point where if you don't have 6 gun girl cards to evolve you'll hit this wall where the battles never end, you're purple hair chick will keep you alive forever, but the enemy heroes can't die because you don't do damage. I'm running 3 five star heroes and one max evo 5 star dps with all lvl 4 maxed orbs and I reached a point in legendary where I can't get any further because I don't have the damage to beat the healing, I got this far though luck on stun locking healers and that was luck whether it happened or not.
Evey upgrade path in this game is RNG and the RNG is heavily heavily weighted toward the low end of the scale, or in the case of orbs just straight money dumping failure. When you look at the reward structure on the Patreon page, nothing short of the 50 dollar a month option would make this game even remotely playable. So anyone coming in and defending it as anything other than a pay to win system is a fucking liar. You can get far only by sheer dumb luck and no lifeing the game hard, like having it running in the background all fucking day, which is what I did for the past month, and even then like I said of the 30 or so Large Devils I opened not a single one rolled a 5 star, I got the couple I have through sheer luck on the couple hundred medium devils I opened. Next person can come along and be lucky and get 6 of one type of card and run through everything and win all the tavern battles and rifts. There is no ryhme or reason to it and there is no pay off to putting in time other than you have to put in time and in all likely hood, even if you paid, there is a good chance you'll roll shit and end up with nothing. This is why a guy who didn't pay is at the top and others who dumped 50 bucks a month are below him.
This game has a cool premise and could be fun, but it's currently operated on a pure 100% extortionate greed model and I would not suggest anyone support it financially.
At the time of my post, X5 wasn't available.
Furthermore, it does not require you to use the same heroes as materials. All you need are heroes of the same star tier. In another words, a natural 5 star hero can be evolved using five 5 star natural 1 star heroes. This is why all the lower tier heroes are used as materials to boost their stars, which in turn later can be used to evolve another hero.
As for paying to play, none of what you said is true. There is RNG involved within the game, similar to other games like Summoner Wars, where you'd need luck to gain a certain hero. That being said, more features are being implemented to combat this issue, including a "Hero of the Week" system that help players gain a hero with a higher chance.
You call it a pay to win system, yet you admit yourself that some of the top players in Tavern are using Guest Accounts. You accuse us of lying when it just seems like you can't manage your heroes enough, nor bother to ask questions to learn, and therefore stuck at a level you can't complete. If you're going to write a review, be it negative or positive, at the very least, make sure you understand what you were playing in the first place. Things like your version of evolving heroes are simply self-imposed difficulty.
With the newest heroes, especially Feimura, you can complete Legendary without even using any of the 5 star heroes, assuming you have decent speed orbs. Feimura is just a 4 star hero, making her easily available by Large and Medium demons.
Furthermore, now that x5 is implemented into the game, crystals (the currency of the game) are so widely available that it doesn't take long for you to upgrade your orbs anymore. Even if you're a patron, you didn't really gain advantage in this area over other guest users. A simple hour of gameplay, where you click every 8-ish minutes, is enough to earn millions. The only advantage Patrons have are combat speed (everything, such as animation and moves, are faster so you finish the level sooner). That being said, the RNG within orbs is a natural mechanic and doesn't even take much of your time to complete.
Concerning Large Devils. They're rare for a reason. Simply put, be it patron or guest users, it's difficult to obtain large quantities of Large Devils and natural 5 star heroes. As the game isn't real time, and the player base isn't large enough for too much interaction, the PvP aspect of the game (Tavern) is restricted for end-game players, as there's no ELO system involved. With that in mind - players who have strong heroes will gain the rewards from Tavern, which includes a Large Devil. That being said - that's only one extra per week. Patrons will receive 1/2/5 for $2/$7/$15+ PER MONTH. For the price they're contributing to the game, it's not as game-breaking as you make it seem.
The daily and weekly quest system, which was implemented for everybody, provides plenty of opportunities for all players to receive Medium and Large devils. Before this, the only major way to obtain them were through Daily Spins (which is available to all), Tavern and Quests (which are rare). Now, they're even available, although seldomly so, in shops (for in game currency, not $).
It's unfortunate that just because you didn't want to ask someone how the mechanics of this game works, you assumed the game is completely pay to win and bitch about it incessantly, despite acknowledging the fact that there are many free users who haven't paid a dime just as successful as patron users. One look at Tavern and Challenge Rift will tell you that.
It's not rare to see someone completing Legendary world within around two to three weeks of gameplay as a guest user.
