Inside Version 27.0.0 — the count arrives, and the witch's invitation

First: the [Transcendent] label vs. the row

The official notice announcing V27 (its full text is quoted in the two sneak-peek posts) carries Vlad as Vlad [Transcendent] — the same word his October 15 announcement used. The data, again, does not: BalancingData_Rarity shipped byte-identical to 26.2.0, all 9 rows, still ending at rank 9. Vlad occupies the rank-8 Exotic row — the same ceiling Frost, Hana and The Skull already have. "Transcendent" remains a title printed on an Exotic kit, not a rung the ladder grew. Everything the two sneak-peek posts called this on holds.

The roster grows: Vlad & Misty, costed

Both kits read the way their announcements promised. Vlad's — officially "Care for a Drink?" in the locale — is a timed blood pool: total damage over a window, lifesteal at 0.5× of damage dealt, allies healed inside it at tier 3. Misty's "Witch's Brew" is the coin flip, and the announced 50/50 ships as literal 0.5/0.5 in SkillSubData — no weight table, no drift. Her tier-3 cast scatter-brews over an area and extends the buff to "yourself and nearby allies", exactly as the announcement lines up.

The runes: 43 → 49

Six new Hero Rune rows ship under two new prefabs: Rune_Hero_Mythic (Misty's trio, ids 44–46) and Rune_Hero_Exotic (Vlad's trio, ids 47–49) — grade-appropriate ceilings, max level 70 for the Mythic pair and 80 for the Exotic pair. The names are the announcement's verbatim: Growth Potion, Schrödinger's Potion, Elixir for her, Rose of Wallachia, Walpurgis Night, Come, Sweet Death for him. One naming note: the locale circulated as "Giant Potion" in the announcement — the shipped locale says Growth Potion; both are the same rune row (id 44), the name just settled before launch.

The mechanics behind the names live in a genuinely new table, RuneUniqueOptionSubSkillData (343 rows), where the unique options finally get per-level growth slots — Misty's ATK-boost synth scaling and her revive's per-level HP are in there, not in the generic per-level field the older runes use. This is the table that makes the six new runes fully tunable inside the existing rune economy — max-level cost math included.

The gacha: a featured-hero box with a real pity

A new box (id 17) ships on rate group 1007, with a pity ladder of 30 pulls at the featured rarity. The weight table tells the story cleanly: Vlad (item 26) and Misty (item 25) each carry weight 10, the previous featured pair (Blaster, Hana) demoted to 1. So both new heroes are pullable in the ordinary pool from day one — not event-gated, not unattainable without a card — just the featured slot rotating as it has all year. (The pity applies when 30 featured-pull-count is reached, which with weights like this is a very long-horizon guarantee; the everyday acquisition expects to stay the 100-piece unlock, same as everyone else's.)

The Halloween event: a full pass, a minigame, a candy economy

The event block is one of the bigger subscriptions in this build, and it's all switched on:

• Pass enabled — HALLOWEEN_PASS_ONOFF=1, with a 51-row reward ladder in HalloweenPassRewardData (VIP tiers marked alongside the free track).
• A shooting minigame — HALLOWEEN_MINIGAME_ACTIVE=1, up to 2 plays/day per player.
• Field spawns — the "catch owls" spawners ship via the new LiveopsFieldMonster table (35 rows, all enabled on liveops_type 6). Every respawn-cooldown and daily-cap column carries the -1 sentinel — the client stores the spawner locations while the cadence is tuned remotely. The tuning knobs sit in this same build's remote config, though: RESPAWN_COOLTIME=300, AFTER_FLEE=60 seconds, DAILY_MAX_COUNT=9999 (effectively uncapped) — so the event can be rebalanced without app updates, exactly as the sentinel promised.
• Candy exchange — the pass bonus exchange ships stored as CANDY=40/COUNT=30 — a 40-per-30 pay ratio the client renders, so the pass shop math is already hardcoded here.

The Hero Collection System — the codex tables

Notice item 3 in the official text ("Hero Collection System") maps to the trio of CostumeCodex* tables that shipped this build — a per-hero collection bonus layer over the existing roster, plus a CostumeStepupPackageData purchase ladder (ON_COSTUME_STEPUP=1) and its own shop rows. Concretely: 184 codex bonus rows, 470 per-hero membership rows, and 53 star-grade bonus rows — bonuses keyed to OptionType codes like the costume ladder already uses. The fan-facing summary lives on the Heroes & Evolution page's collection section, and the full deep dive — all 184 sets and the 53-rung star ladder — is its own post: The Hero Codex, decoded.

Also in this build

• Google Play Games definitive rewards — a small PlayGamesRewardData (2 rows) wiring sign-in rewards to reward groups on the Google Play platform path (it's a definitive, one-time grant, not a ladder).
• An invasion-mode balancing block — ~20 new INVASION_BAL_* remote-config keys (dagger bonus multipliers, dispel uptimes, margin caps, race-gap exponents), the tuning surface for a future invasion-mode patch. Nothing about today's ladder changes yet: the existing invasion tables kept their values.
• Boss raids learn their own scoring — BossRaidRankingScoreData grows from five shared rows to 24: all six raid bosses (Crystal Crab through Cerberus) now pay separate base scores per difficulty, from 1,600 (boss 1) to 4,000 (boss 6) at the top band. Full table and the roster decode in Boss raid scoring, decoded.
• Ad-waterfall plumbing V2 — the AD_OPTIMIZER_V2_* family of remote keys. It's the ad SDK's internal waterfall tuning (disabled by default, AD_OPTIMIZER_V2_ENABLED=0) — nothing player-facing, and unrelated to any third-party ad config you may run.

The four tables that quietly slipped out

Four game bases present in 26.2.0 have no file in 27.0.0: BalancingData_Currency, BuildingLumberMillData, BuildingStoneHouseData, StatDefaultData. None of these have been load-bearing for the site — no guide, calculator or bot command reads them — but if you mirror the raw textassets/ folder, that's the delta. Every other table kept a current revision; roughly a tenth of them got real content (hero kit rows, runes, gacha, remote config, the codex family, the event block).

What's next

The push-into-live cadence has been: announce, extract, post same-day. The remaining open question is whether "Transcendent" ever becomes a real ladder row in a later build — the data still says no today, and the ceiling stays rank 9. As always, every number here is pulled from the game's own tables and rebuilt into the site's tools the same day they land.

Data from the 27.0.0 APK tables (game v27.0.0), diffed byte-for-byte against our 26.2.0 extraction; pull the raw files on the Progression & Economy page. XP Hero is developed by Supercent — XPHero Fans is unofficial and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Event availability and remote config may differ by region; nothing here is pull advice.