Expedition of the Guild hidden forest is the other dungeon added in the October 2026 update, and it is the point in the progression where the purpose of a run changes. From Hidden Forest onward, runs mostly stop being about gear and start being about banking money for talent points, because the affix system is too shallow to keep replacing pieces.
Expedition of the Guild hidden forest: the other new dungeon
Hidden Forest and Hidden Swamp arrived together, and Hidden Forest is the achievement "First Steps: Hidden Forest" — the first time you clear it. By the demo build's stage of the game the roster of maps had grown to five dungeons, which took roughly five to six hours to clear.
The map's reputation inside the game is specific: it is where gear farming stops paying off. That is a statement about the affix system rather than about the difficulty of the fights, and it is worth understanding before you plan an endgame.
When gear farming stops paying off
In the demo build of the campaign, Hidden Forest was the point where runs turned into money runs. The gear you find stops improving what your party can do, so the value of a run shifts from "a better sword" to "talent points in a few hours".
That has two practical effects:
- Stop treating drops as an upgrade. If the piece that drops does not change a fight, it is not worth restructuring your gear around.
- Spend what you earn. The money from those runs feeds the talent point budget, which is what actually raises your heroes' output. The talent tree guide covers how those points are allocated and how many you have in each world.
What comes after the gear phase is covered in the endgame gear guide, which covers the Equipment Score milestones that do keep climbing.
Yellow gear carries four affixes
The reason gear stops mattering is the depth of the affix system. Yellow-quality gear carries only four affixes, which is a narrow pool to work with — the same four lines on every piece, with the same handful of stats worth having on them.
That is a shallow system by design rather than a temporary state, and it explains why the gear choice is nearly fixed once you know which affixes matter. With four affixes per piece and four slots per hero, there are only so many combinations worth building around, and the gear stats guide lists every number the four affixes are drawn from.
The five affixes that decide a fight
Even with a shallow pool, the affixes that matter are the same five:
- Accuracy — decides whether your attacks land at all, which is the threshold problem the Hidden Swamp boss guide covers in detail.
- Physical Defence and Magic Defence — reduce the two damage types a boss can hit you with.
- Physical Resistance and Magic Resistance — cut the damage that gets through those defences.
The rest of the sheet — the attack stats, the crit chances, Block, Dodge and the rest — matter less than those five once the affix pool is this narrow. The gear stats guide lists all eighteen numbers with what each one does, and the loot distribution guide covers how a piece reaches the right hero in the first place.