Ekkorr's dropped two new patches over the last week in Korea. There's a lot in them, but for the purpose of meta discussion the important parts are:

- 7* units evolved from existing 6* units. They have higher base stats, can be T4, give bonus IP (5/15/30/50), and have extra skills (credit Dubs/Perp) that are totally busted (because they're multiplicative with everything, including multiple copies of themselves). Also 7* Fire Mage gives 300 fire resist, Unicorn Knight undoes 7% the gradual range nerf applied to units, Death Knight gives 300% medals on revive, Wolf Rider gives 20% game speed (only Fire Mage works from time shop, at least for now).

- The gem cost for selling medaled units has been removed.

- You can now preset up to 5 teams and swap them on the fly.

The last two are a significant change, since it allows for different setups for different parts of the run. It seems to me like instead of running undead 1.5 core, we'll be doing 2 core > 1 core > offline march > warp/SP/revive, which begs the question of whether Undead will remain on top and what it takes to switch.

Other implications: skill pushing is even more accessible early (since you don't need to pay 2400 gems to switch teams back and forth) and PvP attack teams are now a thing.

Speculate away! Or provide data/math if you have it. Some things that catch my eye:

- The new gold skills have pretty high gold level requirements (which makes some sense given that they're stronger than slabs in terms of pure power). You need to be at 6500-6800 glevel to access the 4th skill, which rules out non-endgame players from using Wolf Rider/Death Knight since their 4th skills are damage skills. If Wolf Rider can be made to happen it might help endgame players with game speed issues (or maybe we'll just get it from time shop w/pet and orcs continue to gather dust :p).

- Elf has an interesting passive. It's not well known unless you've been around a while, but range units suffer a penalty to their attack range starting at floor 30000, and we've just been playing through it. I think it's 30% at max. Undoing most of that could potentially be huge, but it's not obvious to me how to make it happen right now with an elf focused team. May not be good now but a few more 7* generations could make it happen.

- Fire Mage's glevel skills look really, really good for lower players. FM's gold multiplier is relatively accessible at 4100 glevel, both attack skills by 5300, all on top of FM having the lowest glevel requirements in general. Possible new midrange human meta?

- There are some artifacts that boost two races, which could mean you can take advantage of different races for 2 core/1 core pushing without any loss...if you have the right ones.

- 7 star units can't activate any existing slabs. This is mostly a concern for game speed but it can be a significant one.

- The number of 7* you can evolve is restricted by their new pet: 1* pet: 1 unit 2* pet: 2 units 3* pet: 4 units 4* pet: 6 units 5* pet: 10 units, so they're not super accessible right out the gate. Also 7* units are expensive (47500 gems/10000 HC for a T4 and 7* trans tickets will likely be sparse). KL won't be an issue to access the pets though cause Ekkorr is nerfing the KL requirements for SH~

After years of being relatively straightforward, teambuilding suddenly looks very complicated.