Great Rift is the premier ‘competitive’/ranked mode, with it offering a leaderboard for scores and being the main method of comparing decks against other players. Great Rift is a seasonal gamemode split into two halves spanning the 2nd and 3rd banner of a Season. The first half and second half will have two completely different bosses, often catered to their banner unit, and are each unlocked upon completing the Story designated to that banner unit’s patch.
Boss Guides
More coming soon!
Introduction
Great Rift is further split into two sides, which require two different teams. Vanguard is the first side, which will eat away the Protos’ turn counter if they go over 5 turns, clearing it (-1 turn for each turn over 5). Rearguard is an infinite HP or respawning boss, which has a virtually limitless score limit, often based on damage.
Great Rift Rules
The mode has several Seasonal ‘Great Rift Rules’ that incentivize or disincentivize certain playstyles. Rather than ‘rules’, it is better to think of them as modifiers which often buff or debuff characters or give bonus Score to certain effects.
Some common/default rules are:
+0.5% Same-Season Save Data Score Bonus to Final Score (max 6 stacks).
There is a max ceiling to the amount of score that can be acquired from the Damage Amount inflicted by a single Attack Card.
You will gain Combat Score based on the Damage Amount, and once you reach a certain threshold of damage, the score you receive in this manner will gradually be reduced.
Score
Score is typically based on damage, but sometimes there are modifiers such as Season-1’s Suppressed Servant Great Rift, which gave bonus score based on healing/shielding. This score tends to have an asymptotic curve around 1.3-1.6M because damage begins to heavily decrease in score as it gets higher and higher. This is a fancy way of saying that once you past a certain threshold, the score does not increase at the same rate which means the difference between a score of 1.3M and 1.35M might be more than double the prior’s damage.
The Great Rift Rule, alongside difficulty will give a bonus score multiplier.
Rewards
Based on Score, there are three different reward types.
The first is ‘first clear’ which asks the player to clear with a single clear (must be done in one run). This threshold is often quite low and manageable by simply clearing the Vanguard side on Hell (highest) difficulty, but it can be difficult for new players.
The second is ‘weekly clear’ which places a threshold for a cumulative score (can be across multiple runs).
The final set of rewards is ‘Merit Ranking’ which is based on ‘Ranked’ performance within the leaderboard. Players who are ranked within Masters, will get a special sticker for the season.
Bosses and Teams
Teams in this section are based on the highest ranking / most common of their season. Where applicable, there is an [FSO] tag for teams who are used for a different version seen in Full Scale Offensive.
Vanguard is only included for Great Rift’s where there was a specific team or teams of high dominance.
