Wonder Chest and Miracle Chest Balance

Wonder Chest and Miracle Chests have been in PMU for a few years now and while they did recently have a change, I cant help but always feel they are quite unbalanced when considering where to get them and how underused one for them is.

Wonder Chest and Miracle Chest recently became team items with the the cost of a little bit of the bonus. While I do like this, I still feel that Wonder Chest could be better in some way. I understand that Miracle Chest has to give a bigger boost since it does in the Mystery Dungeon series but in PMU, location plays a big key as to why i feel that something should be rebalanced.

Wonder Chest is only inside Tanren Chambers while Miracle Chest is in multiple dungeons such as Sky Fortress and Mysterious Jungle. Wonder Chest is arguably harder to obtain. For sure it’s more tedious and time consuming to obtain. Again, I do unstand that Miracle Chest has to be better but I thought of a way to balance them a bit while still percentage wise having Miracle better then Wonder Chest.

My idea it to have The Wonder Chest stay as a team item with the 10% experience boost while reverting the Miracle Chest back to a user held item with the 25% experience boost. Also keeping them unstackable with each other along with the Beginner Badge as well. This would allow players to think a bit more on how they want to train and give more options than before.

The Wonder Chest would give less experience than Miracle but allow players to hold a separate item they may with the hold while training sure as Safety Goggles or Tight Belt. Players would get boosted experience while having benefits they with to have to also make surviving while training easier.

The Miracle Chest would give a much bigger boost then Wonder Chest still but have to be help by the user. This would be best for players who may use Cloud Nine along with a weather rock and not need a different held item so they can hold Miracle Chest with no setbacks and get the experience boost that they once had before the recent change. A certain downsides is the risk of losing the Miracle Chest to a trip trap if unfortunate. that is a risk to be taken with any help item but here its the risk of not getting the boost xp since its not being held after a drop or knock off.

This is my idea on how to rebalance both chests give an experience boost but Miracle Chest always outdoes Wonder Chest in every way despite the truth that Wonder Chest is more tedious to get. Tanren Chambers is the only dungeon that has it in 99 floor endings while take several steps and type changes to get to. Thats why it takes much longer to complete and without the guarentee of getting it from the Deluxe Box at the end: likely around the same chance if not, lower than the chance of getting Miracle Chest from its Deluxe boxes and boss drop.

While Wonder Chest as it is should step up to later and higher level getting Miracle Chest; that is not the case here. Most players skip trying to get Wonder Chest completely to either hunt for their own Miracle chest or even just buy one from another player. But Wonder Chests are very rarely hunted for and never sold anymore. This is part of why i wish they were balanced to both being good and wanted while Miracle Chest still gives more experience then Wonder Chest.

I thank you for reading this suggestion and hope it would be useful.

Thoughts on the current situation and your suggestion

When the change of the two experience boost items rolled out, I actually had the same thought of reverting Miracle Chest (MC) to it’s original 25% exp boost while being a held item and making Wonder Chest (WC) the item which had its exp nerfed to 10% while now being a team item. This would definitely give WC slightly more use in case people out there would like to use other held items, while MC would remain the standard go to training item for those who don’t mind bearing the risk of trip traps.
Sounds fairly reasonable to me, but giving it some more thought there are two issues with bringing about the suggested change :

  • MC being changed to a team item has brought about a positive change for several other items which might have been useless to most explorers, especially in training situations (ie Choice Band/Specs, Trap Scarf, Tight Belt, etc). An increased demand of these off meta items also helped improve the condition of the market by a bit. This change also meant that abilities like Unburden could be fully used during training. A cost of -5% experience isn’t the worst price to pay in my opinion because it opens up many more possibilities.
  • Most of the community (at least the part that was vocal about it) have come to accept the change and seem fine with it.

One could argue that all these new benefits could be utilized with the WC if the suggested change is brought about, but let’s be real who wants to level up with just 10% boosted experience when there’s a 25% item out there. Before moving on, I’d also like to add that we still get a 50% exp boost item bi-annually (ie Lucky Easter Egg and Sleigh Bell). So overall I don’t think the slight drop in experience will affect us much in the long run.

Fate of the Wonder Chest

Now moving on to the second problem you addressed, the change ended up making WC, an already mostly redundant item even more obsolete. As you mentioned the root of the problem lies in the WC being so hard to obtain combined with the limited supply in the market. With its exp being nerfed to just 10% I think it’s safe to say that late game players will never need the item, however it would still make for a great item for the newer players, especially the ones in Late Exbel/Winden/Early Tanren.
I think it being a rare reward in the end boxes of some moderately harder dungeons in these regions would be optimal. Dungeons like Tanren Mines could definitely use an added WC in their end box set, giving players more incentive to complete Mines all the way till the end, rather than just to use Rock Climb in the overworld thus making the hard journey less punishing. Slightly easier dungeons such as say Snowveil Den (random example) could have a WC in the end box too but with a slightly rarer chance, and so on.

My suggestion

Lastly, I’d actually like to add in my own suggestion regarding the state of the two items. I believe there are 3 grievances with these items :
(1) Making them team items has meant -5% reduced bonus experience,
(2) Players would like the ability to use them along with other items/abilities (which is currently granted, but will be retracted if they are reversed back to being held items, essentially a trade off for point (1) ),
(3) The Wonder Chest virtually serves no purpose

While the availability of the Wonder Chest can be tweaked to make it a useful asset for newer players as mentioned above to solve (3), it still remains a redundant item for late game players.
Reverting just the MC to a held item would give back the 25% bonus experience, but people would no longer be able to use the benefits of other items/abilities. The WC would be an option but with mere 10% it wouldn’t be worth it. As you can tell, solving one grievance would mean compromising on the other and it ends up being a vicious cycle.
Only if there was a way to solve all these issues with one change without making things too convenient…and there might be one :

  • Having the MC remain a team item which gives 20% bonus experience
  • Making the WC a held item that gives 10% bonus experience, stackable with the MC

This would allow a player to choose whether they would like to use a different item along with the MC for a 20% bonus, or a WC for an additional 10% to push the bonus experience to 30%. Though this may seem to favor late game players more, all players will eventually be able to afford/obtain an MC and at the right time for the late game dungeons they tackle. WC being introduced in lower difficulty dungeons (elaborated in the previous section) with a 10% bonus experience will be more than enough for the early game players. At the same time the WC will be sought after by late game players who wish to opt for that additional push rather than using different items.

However this change entirely depends on whether the balancing team considers 30% bonus experience a little too much. If the experience drop introduced for the MC and WC was partly because people interpreted training as being too easy then it is improbable to happen. But to be frank, if a 5% drop is considered little, then a 5% increase from the original 25% should not be considered too much. And moreover, dedicating two item slots on one’s team for experience items is a pretty big commitment when most people would rather substitute those with weather rocks, type enhancing items (charcoal, magnet, etc) and various important team items (Trapped scarf, No-Stick-Cap, etc) while also giving up on possible held items (trap scarf, choice band/specs, x-ray specs)

To summarise, this change would still mean a compromise between bonus experience and the choice of held item (i.e, (1) & (2) mentioned above) but the choice will be entirely in the player’s hand.

Few things to consider if the change is introduced :

  • Would the Miracle Chest be stackable with a Beginner’s Band too? If so the added experience increase could potentially reach 35%, which is agreeably quite a lot. This could be solved by making the Beginner’s Band a held item as one solution.
  • The bi-annual 50% exp boost items may have to be reverted back to held items which don’t stack with any other bonus experience items.

The change to the items was quite recent, so now is the perfect time to bring up any thoughts and suggestions. I appreciate this thread and would love to hear more opinions on this!

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