What is the Sacred Altar? | Punball Guide

The Sacred Altar is one of the newer mechanisms available in Punball and was introduced in tandem with the Apollo Ruins, which we have now learned are going to be new monthly challenges for players to complete.

Although newer players are not going to be focussing on the Sacred Altar, mid-to-late game players are going to want to focus on this new utility to help boost their damage and make sure they can clear more content.

The reality is that Gear is the most important factor in the game, then Talents (especially right-hand side Talents) then Pets and finally the Sacred Altar, though this works out as the Sacred Altar will need a lot of grinding before players are able to maximize the impact it can provide players.

After the Apollo Ruins, F2P players were able to level up their Sacred Altar to tier-3, though at this point (depending on if players were able to maximize their efforts on utilizing the glitches in the Hephestus Ruins, they were able to level up their Sacred Altar to tier 4 or 5. 

Although the Sacred Altar doesn’t provide the absolute best stats in the game, due to the fairly inexpensive cost of upgrading the Sacred Altar it’s really worth maximizing your upgrades there as you will see a good boost in content such as the Trial Towers.

The following guide will take you through everything you need to know about the Sacred Altar, including how to ensure that you are doing what you can to help improve the amount of time it takes to power it up and make sure it is working for you, instead of against you.

HOW DO YOU ACCESS THE SACRED ALTAR?

The Sacred Altar can be accessed in the bottom right-hand corner of the Gear screen. The Sacred Altar unlocks at Stage 35 (thank you Yuri for commenting the answer), however, the resources to help power it up become available to players around Stage 30 in the Main Stages.

Upon clicking on the Sacred Altar, the Altar will reveal what resources players need to upgrade it as well as the Artifacts that are available to the player.

Although players may initially believe that the Sacred Altar is only useful for access to Artifacts, this is not true and I will cover more on this shortly.

WHAT DOES THE SACRED ALTAR DO?

The Sacred Altar is primarily used as the space players can swap around their Artifacts. Not only that though, players will be able to passively upgrade their Attack Damage and Health using the Sacred Altar, and while slow, due to the inexpensive cost of the Sacred Altar, players are highly encouraged to do so whenever they have the resources as upgrades are pretty similar to those of Pets. 

At the end of the day, it’s going to be extremely important that players level up their base stats as high as they can as the tougher Stages of the game will no longer be able to be completed using skill and the Skills you choose, but instead will be based on your raw damage output. 

Even if players are simply farming out previously completed content for Gear and other resources, the Sacred Altar will provide players with a good amount of padding that should help secure the player with higher damage to ensure that they complete the content faster and smoother. 

Realistically, though the Sacred Altar takes more farming to power up, the resources needed to power it up are guaranteed, unlike other resources, meaning that it should be easier to maximize its upgrade levels in the long run.

WHAT DO I GET FOR POWERING OR UPGRADING MY SACRED ALTAR?

Each time you power up your Sacred Altar, you will get a small amount of Attack Damage and a fairly large amount of Health that is added to your base stats in the game. As mentioned, these will both improve the power of your balls as well as the damage your Artifacts deal, making chipping away at your upgrades very important.

Unfortunately, players will not be able to lower their Sacred Altar’s level, so make sure that you do not need those Coins for something else as Coins become fairly limiting in the mid-to-late game, especially if you are trying to balance upgrading your Gear, Pets and Talents. The Talents being the most baity, especially in the later stages. 

Each tier of the Sacred Altar will provide players with bigger boosts, having a maximum of 6 tiers right now. The bonuses the different tiers provide are as follows.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 1

This tier is immediately unlocked upon receiving the Sacred Altar and provides players with a single Artifact Slot.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 2

Players will have access to 2 Artifact Slots.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 3

Players will have access to 3 Artifact Slots.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 4

When players use an Artifact, the player will deal 30% more damage for a single round.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 5

All artifacts will gain a 25% damage increase.

SACRED ALTAR TIER 6

After 5 Rounds players will be able to use the first Artifact they used in the battle one more time. If players have used two Artifacts in the same Round, only the first will be refreshed. 

Some players have reported a glitch where all Artifacts used in that Round have refreshed, though by the time players unlock this tier, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is patched. 

HOW DO I POWER UP OR UPGRADE MY SACRED ALTAR?

There are two main resources that are used to upgrade a Sacred Altar, Amethyst and Divine Saintspar.

Amethyst is the easier of the two to farm out and will simply require players to farm out bosses in the regular Stages, Events and Challenges. 

For each Boss killed, players will receive 100 Amethyst, meaning that if players are farming 60-Round Stages they will be farming 200 Amethyst per stage. 

Early on, this should make it reasonably easy to level up your Sacred Altar, though as a player progresses they will need a lot more Amethyst, making this grind quite annoying and long-winded. For example, in Tier-3 and Tier-4, every level is going to cost a player 5,000 Amethyst, meaning a player will have to complete 60-Round Stages 25 times before they are able to upgrade the Sacred Altar.

In the long run, this isn’t going to be the worst as this will help make sure a player has enough Coins to support their upgrades, though it will also help raised the enticement to farm Talent Stones and Gems, which are both very rare to obtain. 

Amethyst comes in fairly large quantities when players are completing the Ruins, with each Floor providing the player with at least 20k Amethyst.

Although this is a good yield of Amethyst, the reality is that players can only get these resources once and will have to resort to completing old content repeatedly as they do for all other resources.

As for Divine Saintspar. This resource is the rarest in the game currently and can only be found in the Ruins or for purchase in the Monthly Shop. I strongly recommend that players be patient with Divine Saintspar as it is very expensive to purchase with real-life currency, though I have to admit that waiting can feel daunting as a player cannot progress with levelling up their Sacred Altar without it. 

“Luckily” for players, the later stages of the Sacred Altar have so many stages of upgrades that require Amethyst that waiting is not as much of an issue, so it hasn’t been too daunting to wait for Divine Saintspar for me, as I have not farmed nearly enough Amethyst to use all of mine yet. 

With both resources, players will see growth with how many of the resources players will need, making it much more apparent that Habby really wants players to farm if they want to continue with the game.

Farming 60-Round Stages continues to be the best way to go about this game, though now with more incentive.