Ascension is supposed to be a long term goal. Its part of the reason why the economy was changed in the first place. Common ascensions are still in a much better place than they were pre-patch, and should no longer be bottleneck status once spare resources from the old economy have been cleared out. And when common troops aren’t holding you back, you are going to wish those gold keys are something else. Besides, the 670 offered per week right now are practically free, so everyone should have a much easier time than before.
There are too few glory keys offered for too much gold for their relative drop rates on respective things. You still need thousands or tens of thousands to hunt out your ascencions (sometimes that many even to get the first of a specific legendary) but the amount available and their respective cost as plummeted from version 2.0.1, at nearly every single progression level. I know this was very a deliberate change, but I still think it was a bit of an over-correction - you’ll still need some combination of around 30k gold keys/10k glory keys to get a rare to mythic with no other ways to obtain them, the acquisition of which I’m projecting to take me about 30% longer than it did to get the gold keys for mythic commons prepatch without me ever spending gold on gold keys direction and while also not being in a max guild.
So, “rare” troops are the new ascension bottleneck? Maybe, maybe not. The economy has on a whole made stuff of rare+ harder to ascend for a good portion of the playerbase, which was kinda the point. Legendaries will probably still be my bottleneck until a kingdom event repeat rolls around six months after a troop’s release.
I tend to agree with your assertion as far as troops go but…
20k gold keys would give on average 12k glory
and 200 gems (personal numbers, others would say 400)
and around 140k gold
Obviously you’d take the 20k gold keys.
In regards to 160 glory keys versus 1530 gold keys, those gold keys would have given:
roughly 15 gems (30 says other sources)
Around 902 glory (45 glory keys if you were so inclined)
over 25k gold (useless at this point because you can’t feed it back into the system, though, since you’d be maxing tasks at this point)
Meanwhile, resource drops from glory keys themselves are spread between a “push” (glory, gems, roughly equal and occasionally slightly higher value) and a “null drop” (major traitstone, gold, unquestionably lower value).
For me personally, I might have actually taken the gold keys if I were at all starved for them, but since I’m sitting on over 9k that I have yet to open, I’d probably be more inclined to take the glory keys even at these pitiful numbers, because they are so much more limited and annoying to obtain from other sources. The fact that I’d even have to think about it highlights just how low the glory key numbers are.
It might very well also be moot to try and compare the numbers of what was never actually in game with what we ended up getting.
Bottom line, really, is that all the glory key related stuff is probably paying out less than it should.
Suggestions:
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Restore brown task to entirely gold keys. Lower the return on investment for the higher level tasks so we end up with less than 2200 gold keys overall if we were to complete it, but more than 670 (say, 1500?).
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Buff yellow task to 200% or 300% of current values. Even a 300% buff would have it be a comparatively worse reward ratio than what was offered pre-patch over the task, and it would still have taken a bigger overall hit than gems. Or, just remove a lot of the garbage drops from glory keys. Or some combination of both.
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While we are on the subject, buff purple to at least 150-200%% of the current values. Especially at lower levels where this might actually matter to someone. Cost per soul is already higher slightly after the halfway point of the task line than it was prepatch (or before halfway, considering individual tasks), which was already pretty much universally considered a bad deal.
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Give green 1 or 2 extra event keys total over the task line to more evenly spread things out and avoid dropping off on RoI before their respective points on green/blue, even when directly comparing just gem values. Event keys are the lowest relative value of the gem items for a large portion of the playerbase (usually used by players trying to get a day 1 legendary, or for hoarding for many weeks to get your last legendary you’d need from an otherwise random drop, less useful in small quantities while building a collection), so this one should probably have a slightly higher RoI.
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Leave red/blue where they are.
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