Can you get Spectre arcana for free from Nemestice Battle Pass?

Jun 25, 2021

Reading time: 3 min

While games like Fortnite and Apex Legends give players a good chance to grind their way to all the rewards in their seasonal battle passes, that hasn’t often been the case with Dota 2. But are things any different this time around?

The greatest rewards from each of the recent The International Battle Passes have typically come with a price tag worth hundreds of dollars. That doesn’t change with Nemestice, as all the biggest rewards from the battle pass are likely to be far out of reach even if players complete every challenge they’re given.

With Valve potentially making a big shift from enormous The International Battle Passes to smaller but still sizable event-based battle passes like the one seen for Nemestice, it’s bad news for players. Here is how many levels players can get without buying extra levels, and how much they’ll need to spend on top of it to get items like the Davion of Dragon Hold hero persona and Spectre arcana.

Catch up on WIN.gg’s Nemestice coverage:

How many levels can you get from Nemestice Battle Pass for free?

As of this writing, players can get up to 103 levels in the Nemestice Battle Pass for free. The breakdown for where these levels comes from is as follows:

31 levels from Cavern Crawl rewards
12 levels from Nemestice game mode weekly points
60 levels from weekly challenge rewards

For the most part, the Cavern Crawl is exactly what fans saw in the TI9 Battle Pass and earlier. The Nemestice Battle Pass has a creeping maze of challenges that tasks players with playing a variety of heroes with a number of different power-ups that can make navigating easier. Each hero that is completed opens up a new area that contains either a power-up or a BP reward of either 250 or 2,000. The total amount of BP rewards in each player’s cavern crawl totals 31,250 BP, just over 31 levels.

Players can also receive up to 1,500 BP from playing the Nemestice game mode each week, with the event currently being set to run for eight weeks. That totals 12 levels.

The bulk of the free levels available in the Nemestice Battle Pass come from the new weekly challenge format. Instead of just offering a single challenge per week, players have a number offered at a time that are worth up to 7,500 for a total of 60 levels across eight weeks.

Those are all the free levels that are available now, but it’s possible more will be available in the future. The Nemestice Battle Pass overlaps with the previously planned dates for The International 2021 and while the event is in limbo, there’s a decent chance that something related to the event will be included if there is still crossover there.

Dota 2 fans are also used to some calamitous server issues, bugs, or other problems forcing Valve to either extend the running time of the battle passes or give players free levels. Something like that could happen again.

How much does the Spectre arcana really cost?

Even if a player completes all of the challenges and grinds every BP they can get out of the Nemestice mini-game, they still fall far short of earning enough levels to earn even the first big prize of the Nemestice Battle Pass, the Davion of Dragon Hold hero persona for Dragon Knight.

If a player earns 103 levels from the Nemestice Battle Pass by completing 100% of the challenges, they still have to pay over $100 in order to unlock the Spectre arcana at level 330. That’s a brutal hit to the wallet, especially given how seasonal battle passes in the past were actually fairly easy to run through with regular play.

Though it’s understandable that Valve is putting some high-quality cosmetics behind a paywall, the value simply isn’t there.