*If you use your free lantern on miniboss room 2, you’ll get 2 imperial deeds. If you spend 50 gems per day to make sure you reach that dragon, whatever your spend is (up to 350 gems) it is cheaper than 2 for 500 from the wandering merchant in Explore. Who rarely offers me imperial deeds, and I’ve done a lot of exploring … I do very rarely get one from The Angel - although it is usually purple ingots orvwhite pet food
And I’m blocked by both books and medals right now, but yeah, books are the big issue
you and everyone else is blocked by books
That’s why i said a few times - rewards, for long time players, are not worth it.
I have hundreds of orbs of all colors. I have 26 power orbs (totally useless as of today). To pay sooo many gems to get 100 dragonite at the end and a few orbs and 1 imperial deed… i just can’t justify that.
Now, if they would have put BOOOKS there… i could see me trying harder every week. Until then, free sigils it is
Instead of sleeping, I decided to color and annotate my Underspire map, as others have also done. And fix it multiple times because I kept uploading it with mistakes .
Shortest path = 78 torches (if I didn’t miscount again)
Actual path taken = , too sleepy now, didn’t count. I definitely wasted a lot of torches in the 5th zone (yellow/Legendary gate) because I didn’t think the correct path would hug the right wall. The 1st zone was me spending extra torches exploring.
Finished my run. I prioritized getting the dragon and the gate, and did not buy any keystones or lanterns (except the free one).
The shortest path (Dragon, not shop) was also 78 for me. In fact, for each but the first section (12) and last section (1) it was 13 battles exact. In this table, I do not count lost battles, though I lost 4 or so.
Area
Shortest Path
Dragon
Dragon + Shop
Max
Actual
1
6*
12
12
14
13
2
13
13
18
18+
18
3
13
13
19
26
26
4
13?8*
13
16+
16+
15
5
11*
13
15
18
18
6
12*
13
19
23
23
Final
1
1
1
Total
68***/?63****
78
99+
115+
114
Additional
18***/?13****
28
49+
31+
64
Buys
4/?3
6
10
7
13
= keystone buy
I did not see the shop in the 4th area. Unfortunately, I blew my lantern on the Diamantina battle, and had some bad drops, losing the battle!
Default, no buys: With 35 battles default, you should almost always be able to get to the 2nd boss even with the worst pathing luck. You might be able to get to the 3rd boss if you’re lucky.
Notice how often I hit the max possible rooms, even when not trying for that. Maybe I had bad luck? Only one zone did I bypass the shop, and quite often I hit dead ends.
13 buys means 2 a day: ~ 950 gems a week to complete. If I’m going for completion each week, I’d probably buy all 3 the first day to be a little safe. I might consider buying one lantern bundle to use on the bosses. I think the map generation makes it so that even if you have the worst possible luck, you can complete it only buying torches.
I wonder if other people’s results are similar?
–edit, looking at Voq’s post above, it matches with the dragon path being exactly 13 for each section. If you’re extremely lucky, you could finish the underspire with only 6 torch buys each run.
Let’s just say that Diablo Immortal is the most transactions heavy game I have ever seen. There are number of predatory ways to extract money from the player. You can easily spend over one hundred thousand dollars (and that’s a lower estimation) to fully deck one character. And you have 7 classes - for now. Everything you buy, you buy not for the whole account, but for ONE character.
The way that they developed psychological nudges and use fear of missing out to entice players to spend money is truly fascinating. The Youtube viideos explaining Diablo Immortal’s transaction model are very interesting to watch, but it’s also terrifying to know that this is the present and future of gaming.
One video you might want to see is this one: The immoral design of Diablo Immortal
As for Gems of War, I see it starting to go down this road with torches and lamps. Insane number of rooms where you are always short on torches and lamps. You burn your diamonds to buy them, but eventually you have to spend money if you want to finish to get “great rewards”.
Also, each new update brings more currencies that all feed into each other. Diablo Immortal has some 22 currencies and crafting materials for now. They are all connected and you’re always short on at least some of them. I think that this is the way the devs are going with, and it’s not going to end well. Because, even though Diablo Immortal is the most predatory game I have ever seen, it still rakes in insane amount of money. I really hope I am wrong, but we’ll see.
I wish, I could compare the cash flow for campaign passes tomorrow with those of the last months.
If the update really drove away lots of the paying part of the playerbase, this should be the most reliable place to prove it.
The mythic from the campaign looks bad. After the last one was underwhelming, I won’t be buying this one, irrespective of annoying updates. I have enough shelved mythics as is and the recent tarots are also rubbish.
.
, too sleepy now, didn’t count. I definitely wasted a lot of torches in the 5th zone (yellow/Legendary gate) because I didn’t think the correct path would hug the right wall. The 1st zone was me spending extra torches exploring.
