Thanks for the calculator. I actually did have everything planned (my research is around on the forums somewhere), just confirming again for the people using orbs, and sharing my team and methodology based on more stable metric (ie., 5 damage casts, minimal mana matching versus 8 damage casts and a lot of mana matching instead of “this team wins in 30 seconds”).
Time wise, full rewards took me about an hour, significantly faster than most bounty runs for me (not that I do this often), which was large due my magic being high enough this week to save a casting cycle (weekly bonus on Archmage + Artifact), so technically my average battle clear time was still nearly a full minute if we include battle to battle and load times but I wasn’t really treating it like a speedrun and only swapped some stuff around to go from a 6/7-cast to five-cast clear about halfway through the run.
The notable part is that a 5-cast/two refill (on a basically permanently enchanted caster with tons of banner mana and unblocked) with a x22 modifier, optimized, should be enough faster than the fastest round20 full bounty team (eight cast, plus four partial refills?) with a x30 modifier even when load times are factored in to be a significant time save, given that you have enough sigils to do so. Given a 27% lower modifier (and therefore 36% more battles need to be done on the lower modifier), and given load times are a factor, you need to cut your full bounty battle times by at least about a third to have an advantage (say, 90 sec avg to 60 seconds, including load times). Which, judging just by number of actions needed for a clear, including mana swipes or generator casts, and the fact that L&D has an effective perma enchant for reliability, should hold true for most situations, unless you have a stat spread where your bounty team’s actions to win is significantly closer. From experience, saving the necessity for one refill and cast by getting my magic just high enough for the 3rd L&D to always kill in itself was a significant time save for the same amount of battles. Previous bounty + hero runs were pushing 80-90 minutes and the one time I attempted full bounty (albiet with much lower stats and less optimal troops, just after potions became a thing, with a lot of experimentation) was at least two hours, very likely more, and had me bored enough to never want to do it again.
So if you are going in for t5 already, using the hero should still be a significant time save and you don’t need to use a blue orb. If you don’t miss any ravens, the lower end of the raven threshold should always carry you across the finish line even with x22. The higher modifier from using an asenscion orb on the bounty captain (x24) means you’ll finish about five battles sooner, and you’ll also insulate yourself against losing a raven, possibly two, but it isn’t much of a time save otherwise. If the troop is blocking a significant power milestone short term, theres that, but if not, its collateral from gold and glory keys at any future point past a month. Even at the point we are at now, 45k gold keys alone nets an average of over 50 of every key dropped rare in existence, and is doable about twice a year from keys that would otherwise collect dust.
As an aside, consuming two Ascenscion orbs to potentially save 300 gems (or potentially earn an additional random greater orb, depending on how you look at it) is going to be a hugely bad deal for the majority of the playerbase and should only be reserved for people that have literally no better use for ascension orbs. Keeping in mind that reward 20 is effectively worth 20 gems and a random major orb, and that 4 normal ascension orbs can be crafted into a greater one, and the chance at major ascension orb is significantly less than 50%, you’d be trading down. If you hope is for major clans orb, to recoup some of your costs in terms of “key value”, you’d be trading down on average if they are anything less than a ~37% drop… which they almost certainly are. The option to not push for tier 20 (or any other given tier) is always there if the cost/benefit ratio stops making sense.
