this cracked me up b/c I’m pretty sure it was @PGSundling who dreamed up the “leaderboard triple crown” challenge as the final frontier for the super hardcore crowd at the time … I’m too lazy to find the thread atm but this is a person who has invested … let’s just say a “not-casual” amount of hours in this game
But, guess I can’t vouch if they are playing that much anymore though! So maybe you’re right now
And your point I think is still fair for a lot of players in general that stuff like this does require grinding, unfortunately. I’ve landed a couple of them but not many, but I’m not bothered for now bc I don’t find the new stuff super enticing anyway
Yep, that’s me. I inspired the GowDB leaderboards with my most mythics list. I went on to not only achieve a triple crown but a quadruple crown. I was tied for #1 on ascensions, weapons, class levels, underworld renown, and was closing in on the top spot in pets, which would have been five.
Then the devs showed me they were greedy jerks by adding two paid passes at the same time and showed their unfairness with a pet, 15, which we never got a shot to max. So the devs will never see a dime from me again. Not paying that extra pass had knocked me down the leadboards.
I’m trying to retire from the game, which means 800-1000 trophies a week (3K trophies with new delves). I’m focusing more on my books. I will still hold to my challenge to sneak the phrase “mana surge” into my next book, Hot Nights and Cold Wars: None of the Above 2. I snuck “devour” and “death mark” into my first book.
I had three great reviews in the last month in online book club, so it’s been an ego boost, even bigger than the leaderboards:
“Brilliant”
“Masterpiece”
“Best book I’ve read this year.”
I don’t have a lot of time to grind anymore. I’ll focus on gnome a palooza to get the stones slowly over time.
So, basically what I wrote in the other posting, despite some chuckles, was right then?
.
We’re not discussing the low encounter rates.
And we’re not discussing past accomplishments.
I land around 1k-2k trophies in a normal week and at around 3k trophies on a vault week(end) and have a very low encounter rate of cursed gnomes since the last vault event, too. But it makes no sense to me to heavily grind outside of vault event. Then again I suppose, around 3k trophies during a vault week still isn’t “heavy grinding” - compared to others.
sure worse for the runes overall, as you will mostly do E1 for GAPs and explore to let them not escape with wish gems.
or at least with one-shot teams like rowanne or phoenicia on mid-level explores
The wish gems don’t change the optimal cursed rune farming strategy imo. Farm level 1 explore during Vault weekend for verse gnomes. Run a few GAPs for the keys during the event but aim to build up a stash for afterwards. Then after event, use your surplus GAPs to farm cursed runes at level 12 explore retreating each battle until you find a cursed gnome. And when you do, making sure the battle takes at least 60 seconds. Should get you 30-60 runes per GAP that way
I will throw in my feeback here, for what it is worth.
I started playing again with the drop of the new soul forge levels and cursed gnomes and such; I’ve been taking a break from the game in between updates. As such, I had very little in my stockpile of gems. My approach to this update was to level soulforge from 10 to 20 using whatever resource was readily available at each level. I also didn’t buy any extra gems (aside from a ring of power, because eh why not? It’s probably going to take me a month to get these latest achievements, and I needed extra gold for tasks to meet my guild reqs). This is probably no surprise to anyone that I’m now at soulforge level 19 and I haven’t used cursed runes to level it up once. In fact I have only encountered one cursed gnome, and that was during the “boost” event. I’ll probably need another week, maybe two, to get it to level 20.
Since I’m playing more casually now, I don’t really go out of my way to farm resources. I only hit up explore if I need gold or if it is a campaign task. As such, I’d say the only viable way for a casual-to-average player to fully level the soulforge is through the paid currency (gems). Cursed runes are really only an option for those players that spend a lot of time farming resources, and even then you’d probably want to save them for recipes. The way it is designed, on its surface, is to have gems be the only reasonable, logical way to level up the soulforge, so basically a large timesaver microtransaction.
The wish gem does (slightly) make the Vault battles harder. On high levels, it’s a race to kill Cedrick before he casts and jumbles your team. The wish gem can instantly give him full mana (and probably will).
At least with vault though, it does’nt matter if the treasure gnomes scamper off.
