The developers have improved the interface a lot but I still find myself wasting a lot of time backing out of menus to go to the Soulforge, etc.
Ideally, there would be a Soulforge button in the Troop area – like has been done with a Daily Tasks button, and/or it has its own button on the main area button bar. It’s weird that it’s put into Games.
Would be helpful.
Thanks, Ubik
Wel there is a good idea. 
But I would prefer the button in the main area, would be the more logic place for it I think 
Could do both, is what I was thinking.
Why are you clicking on soul forge more than once a week
What are you implying? (That’s not a challenge – I’m interested.)
I frequently forge the traitstones I need to level troops. It’s very handy.
Maybe you are past the point in your game that I am and all your troops have all their abilities levelled? I’m not there yet.
The recipes for traitstones are generally not in the player’s favor—you’ll be better off in the long run of you never convert them in the forge, and just spend more time doing Explore battles to get the ones you don’t have.
I click on soulforge more than once a week because I’m always forgetting how many diamonds I have. I’m always planning out what I’m gonna forge and I’m always forgetting which troops are in there. Sometimes I might learn something new in the middle of the week and realize I just need a copy or two of a card to promote them and decide to go in and forge said card.
While you’re right, @Magnusimus, it’s still handy to go there if you need just a few stones in a hurry. In particular, the abilities have quite an appetite for the Major Traitstones, yet it doesn’t give you many in Explore.
Forging trait stones… not a good value unless desperate to trait a really useful troop.
I check troops after reset, buy what I need then in the forge. I don’t need to go back 
I’ve been saying for aaaaaages how this isn’t a “game” and shouldn’t be there.
Much as delve treasure objects are not “troops” and shouldn’t be there. 
Agreed with the Objects/Troops thing. I foolishly Ascended them before I knew what they were. Gak.
Ok I really don’t see why it’s such a big deal for you to state you only check it once but… I’ll award you the gems of war badass award I guess? Congrats!
This makes the minmaxer in me cringe, but if it floats your boat go for it 
“Back in my day” I settled on one team and stuck with it, but then the only event was GW. I guess today you’re motivated to trait up 2 or 3 troops a week, and if you’re not rolling in endgame gems “just buy the tiers” isn’t really advice you can follow.
Do make sure you aren’t traiting things just to trait them, though! At one point I set out to have “as many arcanes of each color as I need for all unowned troops” and by the time I finished that I had plenty of majors. It’s the Runics that held me up for a long, long time, though those are a little more plentiful through Delves these days.
On topic:
I’d put an additional shortcut button somewhere else while preserving the button in “Games”. I know its not really a “game” and never was, but I’m used to that button being there by now.
Off topic:
Not to pile on, but I’m genuinely curious at how you managed to run out of major traitstones. All data I have gathered over the years still suggests about one half to one third of every major traitstone drop is useless due to minor or runic bottlenecking traitstone completion (compared to how many are needed in the game, nearly any source of minor stones or runic stones can also drop major stones at twice the ratio needed). Right now, the only path I have where you could even could run out of majors is a combination of a play pattern where you get barely any stones from normal battles and a great majority of your keys opened are gem keys (so you get runic gluts from gem keys, and excess daily pack feed you arcanes/minors, two of the few ways you can get these types of stones without getting major stone gluts), and/or you craft away too many of the majors you do get. You said you do a lot of explore, is that your main mode of play?
To @Slypenslyde, I like the word minmaxer, which I take to mean being efficient. I think I do trait troops up without thinking sometimes. Also, to try to get my Kingdoms levelled. Maybe I’m not getting the minmax issue here? I can generate 500+ souls with my soul farming team, and I have tons of Minor and lots of Major traitstones… which leads me to @Mithran
@MIthran: My apologies, but when I said Major Traitstones, I meant Runic. I got the level wrong.
I’m open to any and all advice. I tend to play lots of Explore game to complete Daily Tasks. I play the Guild related games, etc. I perhaps don’t play enough PvP.
What are your thoughts on this wrt to minmaxing?
Thanks, Ubik
The thing is you need loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooots of fights if you need arcane traitstones 
As far as the modes you are playing, you are fine. You should play what you find fun regardless.
With respect to resource management:
The most important aspect to realize is that traitstones are largely a closed system. Every traitstone type except celestial is used only to trait troops or craft other traitstones, and celestial is crafted only from non-traitstones. Therefore, the only thing that matters at any given time with respect to traiting troops is whatever your bottleneck is, the type or rarity that you happen to be missing at the time. If you have 900 of every runic but no minors, those runics are useless to you now and forever. But your long term bottleneck might not be readily apparent.
I’ve done the math on this a few times based on how many stones of each type are needed to “finish” traiting (including projections for new troops). Minors might bottleneck you if you are in a fast guild and focus on explore a lot but don’t get a lot of tributes for gold keys, Runics might bottleneck you if you are in a slow guild and play at a more casual pace, Arcanes can bottleneck you just because you don’t happen to have the right type on hand at the moment (unless you explore a lot, a great majority of Arcanes will come from the glory troop packs week to week), and Celestials can bottleneck you if you don’t buy the Sunday 50 gem offer in the dungeon and craft too many troops/weapons in soulforge. If you are within the bulk of the “normal” playerbase, your bottlenekcs will shift back and forth between minor/runic/arcanes (sometimes celestial, but usually only if you craft them away), so crafting away any of these has potential to cost you time long term.
With majors, though, you get so many majors with respect to how many are ever needed, you should never craft into those, but its okay to craft some of them away. As long as your major stone count stays within about half of what your minor stone count is for a given color, you should be ok. However, even though 200 souls is “faster” to farm than a runic, you can generally get 3 random stones in the time it takes to do one soul-farming battle. If you have to soul farm excessively to fuel traitstone conversions habits, you are probably still extending your overall grind, because you could just use that time to explore faster toward your next arcane bottleneck, and those will bottleneck you unless you are in tons of legendary task per week guild or massively overbuy glory packs (and even then, you’ll probably have one or two types that are almost always out). You can wisdom orb to get past some of these, but orbs are most efficiently used on 3rd mythic traits (24 arcanes saved) then 2nd mythic traits (18 arcanes saved), with legendary second traits being a pretty distant third (10 arcanes saved).
Wasting some majors to craft to runic should otherwise be fine, since my numbers show you’ll only use about 50-66% of those that you obtain, ever, so as long as you don’t completely run yourself into the ground. But crafting traitstones in any other circumstance generally cost-negative long term, because it takes much longer to get those stones back and then has a soul tax associated which is another time cost. It is much faster to farm 1 runic with an optimal explore team than it is to farm, for example, the 21 minor and 700 souls that are needed to make 7 majors and 200 additional souls to craft the single runic, and doing this too often would result in you needing to go back and farm those when your bottleneck shifts to needing the minors or souls, and farming the minors and souls cost much more time than just getting the runic (about 3-4 times as long, roughly, in explore).
Again, the bottleneck is what matters here. If you manage to keep your bottleneck on the same stone type forever without ever needing to craft a stone have ever crafted away, and avoided any significant soul farming/arcane gathering opportunity cost, you have successfully navigated and min/maxed the system. If you ever have to go out of your way to acquire a stone that you have previously crafted away, you just deferred and extended part of your grind.
Everyone elses cautions about using the soulforge to craft stones were likely about this as well.
With respect to traiting stuff, this is a matter of preference, but if you don’t “need” it (either for kingdom star progression or because the trait is significant and you actually intend to use the troop), you can just avoid traiting it. For me, this includes nearly every siegebreaker troop/godslayer troop on all of my alts, since epic troops are overly costly in terms of power, particularly for something you never use again. This lets you have more options open at any given time when a good troop drops that you do want to use (eg., any empowered converter), and you don’t have to go farm explore for hours or use costly soulforge to be able to have it at max strength immediately. That way you can farm proactively and only pull the trigger on traiting (and also leveling) troops only when it will upgrade kingdom stars. Troops you aren’t using and aren’t contributing kingdom power don’t need resources committed to them.
My findings over thousands of explore battles were about 1 in 17. On the Dev Q/A stream, they stated a different slightly lower drop rate (I believe 5.5%?, which would be about 1 in 18). Either way, thats an average of 10 per hour in explore… yes, you are going to streak, but it isn’t that bad long term. Also honestly, you get so many arcanes spread throughout the game that if you use them sparingly, you don’t need to craft them and you barely need to explore unless you are at a point where you are just trying to accelerate specific kingdom stars. Consider the cost to craft - 6 runic, 2 celestial, 400 souls. Celestial I’ve estimated at about a third of the drop rate of any given arcane, so if you ever use so many celestials that they happen to bottleneck you, you just multiplied the amount of time you needed to farm by six, from about 6 minute to about 36 minutes for two celestial. Crafting celestial themselves is now also a worse deal than it has ever been, since you need these jewels to craft old event weapons, which in turn makes Arcane a worse deal than ever.
Well, that was super helpful. Obviously you’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve been profligate with my traitstones. I guess I’m too eager to trait troops and need to wind that back and be more strategic.
I’m bottlenecked at Runic, but I say that even though I don’t have nearly enough Arcanes. And those I do find stupidly expensive in the Soulforge, so tend to orb my way past them.
Thanks for you wisdom. I’ll be more careful.
While I’m at level 1068, my Guild is fairly casual, which, realistically is about what I can devote to the game.
Ubik
1 in 17?? Really? Are you sure you are playing the same game? A while ago I’ve kept some statistics and I came out with 1 in 27 counted over 1500 games. Also I would like to point out that not everything turns out as the devs say.
second point: It’s nice you are able to spent a lot of hours playing but not everybody can/ is able/ is willing to play hours on end. Some people have some other things to do as well. (they have a job, they have other hobbies….)
But even then let’s say the 1/17 you say is right, do you now 1 troop that needs only 1 arcane traitstone? I don’t, so let us make a quick sum let’s say you want to fully trait a mythic, so you need 2X 21 arcane, so 2 X 21 X 17 = 714 fights… And that is for ONE mythic… and in your “ideal” circumstances which will never happen.
But the matter is that this is totally beside the point as to what started this topic to have a button on another place
So back on topic…
You shouldn’t need to go to soulforge often.
Main screen should be reserved for often used.
Devs would have far more important things to add.