Deeds - Discussion and Critique

This is a thread dedicated to the discussion of a feature in the upcoming Gems of War 4.5 update.

Deeds are a new currency available in the update, which are used to upgrade Kingdoms beyond level 10. There are 7 different types; one Deed corresponding to each color and one deed of a higher rarity known as an Imperial Deed.

The new level cap for Kingdoms is 15, with plans to increase to 20 in the future. The costs and benefits of the new Kingdom Level system are the following (as shown in the 4.5.0 Preview Stream, may be subject to change):

Level TOTAL Cost Bonus
Level 1 Free +1 (Color) Mastery, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 2 500 Gold 1x (Rare Troop), +1% Tribute Chance
Level 3 1,000 Gold +3 (Color) Mastery, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 4 2,000 Gold 1x (Ultra-Rare Troop), +1% Tribute Chance
Level 5 4,000 Gold +3 (Color) Mastery, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 6 8,000 Gold Kingdom Team Bonus to Tier II, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 7 16,000 Gold 1x (Epic Troop), +1% Tribute Chance
Level 8 21,000 Gold +3 (Color) Mastery, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 9 30,000 Gold Kingdom Team Bonus to Tier II, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 10 40,000 Gold +1 (Skill) Bonus, +1% Tribute Chance
Level 11 55,000 Gold, 2 (Color) Deeds Kingdom Team Bonus to Tier III
Level 12 75,000 Gold, 4 (Color) Deeds +25% Faction Hoard Stats
Level 13 100,000 Gold, 6 (Color) Deeds Kingdom Team Bonus to Tier IV
Level 14 140,000 Gold, 8 (Color) Deeds, 1 Imperial Deed +25% Faction Hoard Stats
Level 15 200,000 Gold, 10 (Color) Deeds, 2 Imperial Deeds +1 (Skill) Bonus

Notes:

  • The free troops are one copy of a chosen troop of the given rarity from the given kingdom.
  • (Color) represents the kingdom’s color. For example, Suncrest is Yellow, and Zhul’Kari is Green. These correspond to the mastery bonuses already in the game.
  • The first 10 levels of this table are primarily the same in terms of costs and bonuses. Notable inclusions are the 3 free troops from each kingdom, and the Kingdom Team Bonus.
  • The skill bonus at level 15 is the same as the skill bonus for level 10, and at Power levels 5, 10, and 20. For example, reaching Kingdom Level 15 in Zhul’Kari would provide a permanent +1 bonus to the Magic stat of all troops in all gamemodes.

The total costs to level all kingdoms are (NOTE: Excludes the 122,500/4,165,000 Gold required to reach Level 10 in all kingdoms):

Single Kingdom All 34 Kingdoms
570,000 Gold 19,380,000 Gold
3 Imperial Deeds 102 Imperial Deeds
30 Deeds 150 Blue Deeds
  • | 150 Green Deeds
  • | 180 Red Deeds
  • | 180 Yellow Deeds
  • | 180 Purple Deeds
  • | 180 Brown Deeds

Deeds are available primarily through the Adventure Board, which, with the 4.5 update, will have identical RNG for all players. The developers have also stated that additional Deeds will be available through Flash Offers, and have stated completing all kingdoms is expected to take approximately a year.

There are tasks at different rarities and colors, as shown below. Only the contents of the Epic task was shown.

Task Rarity Rewards
Epic 4 Deeds
Legendary 1 Imperial Deed, ? Deeds
Mythic 2 Imperial Deed, ? Deeds

The Kingdom Team Bonus is a team building bonus that stacks on top of the 2x/3x/4x matching troop Team Bonus. This new bonus is actually surprisingly large; especially when the associated pet is leveled. We don’t know all the details, but for a 4x Broken Spire team, with Minfernus at Rare and the Kingdom Bonus at Tier III (not Tier IV), the bonus is 12 Life and 6 Armor. This means a bonus of 18 Life and 9 Armor with a Mythic pet, going even higher once the Team Bonus is at Tier IV. This is a significant increase in stats.

The boost Faction Hoard Stats is a +25% additive increase to the amount of stats provided by the Faction’s Treasure Hoard stat bonus. Combined with the Kingdom Team Bonus (which applies to Faction Troops as well), this is intended to be at least the first part of the solution for improving the experience in Level 500 Delves.

Note that Purple deeds (and to an extent Green deeds) are significantly more valuable since they contribute towards an increase in the Magic stat.

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This thread moves a discussion about Deeds and their possible Pay-to-Win nature from the Gems of Streaming thread, where they are considered off-topic. This is to make the discussion more accessible and understandable. Here are a few notable responses from players and developers from that thread.

The latter post prompted the creation of this thread.

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Sorry for triple-posting, but I feel it’s appropriate here (the first being objective data, the second being a transfer of previous discussion, and the third being my personal response).

I feel like this feature is a continuation of a trend that has become more and more obvious, that started with the introduction of Raid/Invasion, and become more exemplified with Potions, and reached a head with Deeds.

It is objective fact now. A person who has paid significant amounts of Gems, or money to purchase Gems, has a distinct stat advantage over other players in Raids, Invasions, Class Events, and Faction Events, one that CANNOT be overcome by players who are playing for free.

This feature has now been extended to all modes, including PvP, in the form of Deeds. Players who purchase Deeds gain a major advantage, in the form of approximately like 5 Magic, 10 Attack, and 20 effective HP. Probably more if people figure out how to game the new Kingdom bonuses. Literally pay to win.

I understand that the game needs to provide revenue for its publisher, but it can be (and is) possible for a game to do this without making the venue for it a literal incomparable advantage.

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A few responses.

First, how does gems translate into deeds? If deeds are being listed in flash offers, they won’t be available for gems — PS4 excluded, maybe?

Second, stats are not the be-all and end-all of Gems of War. I routinely take down level 500 troops with 400+ stats across the board, with troops whose stats are significantly lower. In PVP you get free rein to choose any troops you want, so bonuses are a lot less meaningful than strategy. The only place where these deeds might have a real impact is Guild Wars. And, while I am absolutely not privy to the roadmap for Gems, I question how much longer that game mode will exist.*

Third, what are the “1x” entries in your table?


*We’ve had a third map teased in the 5.0 version. It’s a plausible guess that this comes with a new game mode, one that—like Delves, Raids, and Invasions—has a shop to help monetize it. The calendar is already full, so where do you put a new game mode? The only spot in the schedule that doesn’t have that kind of shop: Guild Wars.

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Thanks, a visual glitch hides text between triangular brackets I guess.

As for “no space for a new game mode”, note that in about April, the Class event will no longer be on weekends, and they have stated it will be replaced (that may be around 5.1 or so).

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I am shocked that the new challenge system does not offer deeds at one of the higher tiers (7/8/9/10). I’m not a beta tester, so I don’t know what any of the challenge tier rewards are. Seems like this would have been the perfect patch to also introduce the new currency through the challenge rewards.

I think Eric’s concerns could be legit - if deed flash offers are done recklessly, especially early in the transition to them. If the devs keep the lid on flash offers relatively tight, and wait until players have a chance to max out some kingdoms, the effect would probably be small.

Re:elimination of guild wars, I hope not, that would be a major mistake. Get rid of invasions, which are basically boss raids with no partial credit, before you get rid of GW (the most competitive mode in the entire game).

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I just wonder why kingdoms must be single colored when we talk about deeds. They are 2-colored, so please let us spend both green and purple deeds in Zhul’Kari, for instance.

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While I’m not sure about “advantage” for the game proper stats would impart (the one-shot threshold for Guild Wars does confer an advantage, but that is a very specific break point for one player to have an “unfair” advantage over another). Better tools beat better stats 8 days a week. With identical tools, first turn advantage still has a distinct advantage.

Personally, I think the bonuses you get from leveling to 15 are rather pathetic. Stat bonuses in scaled content are relatively minimal and usually having a bunch more stats equates to “I can use the fun team for one or two more rounds before I switch to my scaling team”. Even the hoard stat bonus might not even let you reach a break-point for not getting one-shot (or if you aren’t getting one-shot, not getting two-shot). This certainly isn’t any kind of long term “solution” for the pure faction team viability… it might make a few viable ones a bit less painful, but most faction teams still play like either “pray you get the right gems to fall” or “throw this out and hope”. Stat bonuses for homogenous teams only matter if the team was already synergistic or the stat bonuses are monstrous, not seeing a ton of that really. For PvP… well… I frequently crush 14k point meta teams with my account that only has +4 life +10 magic +6 attack from kingdoms and nothing from guild or renown.

Theres also the nagging matter that Level 15 kingdom stats are very likely to increase score bonuses, and gold payouts in PvP are still score-differential based, and matchmaking still offers you opponents well below your score, so…

However

I think what people are reacting to is that “progress” is the main measure of “winning” in Gems of War in general.

The problem is twofold:

  • The only “gameplay” way deeds will be offered (for now) is through Adventure Boards, which will be the same for everyone.
  • AB interaction is akin to a “second login bonus” by the time you hit midgame - anything important in the daily section you can close out in a few minutes. Long before you can even finish five star kingdoms, in fact.

These two factors combined will make it very obvious when someone already at endagme paid to accelerate their kingdom level past anyone else. Also, this is offering “progress” to people beyond that which there is any in-game avenue for.

Whether or the stats you get confers a competitive advantage in a specific mode, deeds for cash that puts players that pay distinctly “ahead” in progress for an extended period of time above players that don’t spend cash is going to come off as “pay to win”. Because it applies directly to the main “goal” of the game, affects gameplay (however small), and free players can’t have it (yet).

Flash offering them for gems would be a different matter though. Yes, beyond a certain baseline, an offering for gems would just translate directly into having to spend cash for some players, but this isn’t even remotely the same. Guild obligations (and grabbing the weapon-of the week) aside, you have a choice on whether or not you want to spend gems on any of the incentives. And while endgamers might view a gems-for-deeds offer as compulsory (so they can “keep up”) and earlier players might find it attractive (since you don’t need troops to get that set of stat bonuses, just a bunch of deeds and gold), the gem costs would have to be absolutely exorbitant for this to equate to “pay to win” above any set of purchases that already exist. Veteran players would find a way to have those gems without cash purchases. Newer players would have to further budget if they didn’t want to pay… but I see a lot of less experienced players just kind of throw gems at things that they could afford not to, so, maybe that isn’t the worst.

Back to what I said before about tools beating stats - most of these “tools” are also frequently sold, and people are mostly ok with that. Believe it or not, one of the reasons for this is that they are actually cost-prohibitive. But the main reason is because they aren’t offered to the “paying customer” before they are offered to everyone else. Imagine if instead of legendaries being in event keys when they are “released”, that they go into event key pools when they go into other pools a month later (meaning you could get them in the next kingdom event like 9 months down the line)… but they kept selling them for cash. Imagine that was the case for even a “bad” legendary, like this week’s Gruz the Undefeated. How would that make most of us with complete collections (plus or minus a Zuul’Goth asterisk), feel? Now what if it was a good legendary, or just something that looked fun?

Thats what putting out deeds for cash above what anybody can earn through in-game means is flirting with. Yeah, I know, “other games do this”, but it is line that I hope does not get crossed here. And all they have to do to not cross it is make sure in-game means can continually equate or surpass purchases.

So… as for the “one year” projections… I was going to do this earlier and in my AB data thread, since I known about “deeds” this for a while and was waiting for the announcement, but I got busy. But lets take a look at projections for what it will take to get everything to level 15 with just AB deeds counting just Imperial Deeds as bottleneck.

We need 104 imperial deeds alone to get every kingdom to level 15. Imperial Deeds are stated to only be in legendary and mythic adventure boards.

In my data collection thread, legendary boards were found to have an appearance rate of roughly between 5.5% Lets round that up to 6% for a best-case estimate. The boards are then split between one of three types, with gems recorded being slightly less frequent than the other two. Salty stated on stream that the frequency of the 100 gems board would not be reduced for this, so we have to assume at least a 30% chance for “not deeds” in the legendary slot. If we split the chance of keys and shards evenly, deeds will have a about 23.3% chance to appear on legendary. Unless legendary board appearance rate is significantly buffed, that is an upper bound of about 1.4% chance of deed legendary board per slot, conferring to an average of about 1.25 imperial deeds per month from legendary boards.

So, mythic boards always trended below 1%, but lets round up for the sake of argument here. Mythic boards are currently shared between two task types, keys or shards, found to be split about evenly. If a third task were added, also evenly split, we’d have a 33.3% chance to earn two imperial deeds every time a mythic was rolled. Unless mythic board appearance rates received a significant buff, this equates to an average of about 0.6 imperial deeds per month for mythic boards.

Based on these projections, through boards alone, it will take approximately 55 months (almost 4.6 years) to gather enough imperial deeds for 34 level 15 kingdoms. Just the imperial deeds. There is still the possibility of getting color bottlenecked, which is sure to prove even more frustrating.

But… theres a chance they might increase the appearance rate of these rarities boards, or that deeds will comprise a higher percentage of them. So lets take a look at what it would take us to get 102 imperial deeds in a year.

If every legendary board at the current legendary board rate gave deeds, that would give us 5.4 imperial/mo high estimate. If every mythic board at the current mythic board rate gave deeds, that would give 1.8 imperial/mo high estimate. At 7.2 imperial/mo, it would take about 14 months and change to get 102 imperial deeds. Thats sort of a year if we all had really good luck with some minor flash offer supplementing maybe… so… if they doubled mythic and legendary board appearance rate (reducing common and rare souls and stones appearance rate I guess would be the best possible outcome), and 100% of this rarity tier increase went to the new deeds tasks, and we got better than average RNG, then we might be nearing full level 15s in “about” a year. Somehow, I don’t see this happening.

Either that, or a new game mode has to enter in the next couple patch cycles that absolutely dwarfs the amount of deeds offered by AB. And it still has to be limited entry, because it is pretty clear they don’t want deeds to be farmable. Level 20 teased as a future extension to this system on stream will likely have increasing costs, so deeds would have to be much more available for this to even be a possibility in the next several years. However, since level 20 is also their current plan to prevent deeds from eventually becoming worthless… well, if its even possible to attain level 20 on everything at any point and deeds don’t have another use, then the currency is still effectively dead at at that point.

However, if flash offers are indeed what is intended to take us even close to the “one year” mark, then flash offers would be most of where deeds are. And yes, I would see that as a problem, regardless of how impactful the bonuses you get from it are.

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Because it was said on stream that the color of deeds needed for a specific kingdom was based off that kingdom’s gem/mana mastery color.

As pictured, Zhul’Kari uses green for its gem/mana mastery. Therefore, the kingdom will use green deeds to level up. There’s never been a dual color gem/mana mastery in the game, as far back as I can remember.

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Going to throw my two gold of thoughts on your comments as well as my personal thoughts on my perceptions of the devs’ design decisions here,

Depends…

If you’re looking at it from a PvP perspective right now, I can see your argument. I’m tending to look at this as as precursor to future metas. I could easily see the devs starting to release new troops that are specificly designed to be used in kingdom-specific teams, especially as in a few more months there will be a class for every kingdom for the hero(ine) to participate in those teams.

Also, there’s the little matter ( hinted in the Minifernus picture above and briefly mentioned in passing on the stream) where Kingdom Team Bonuses align with the primary stat of that kingdom. Broken Spire is a Life kingdom, so… meh? But what about those kinds of numbers applied to Attack or to Magic, in normal PvP? That’s a lot more meaningful than some life and armor points. We will see, if kingdom teams become meta once again in the future.

There were a bunch of ways the devs could have tackled the delve problem, but their choices here are clearly and intentional design decision.

To me, the clear intent from the inception of delves is that players were expected to invest 200, 250, 300 treasure hoard levels or more into every delve to be able to full clear it. Most players are stopping at 100, when renoun stops be rewarded to players for investing a treasure hoard. For the new system to be of significant value, players have to invest a lot more than just the first 100 levels in each faction’s hoard.

That said, the constraining factor here still is chaos shards. Unless a player is full clearing daily delves, and intensely clearing every Faction Tuesday and New Faction events, there isn’t enough chaos shards flowing into the average player’s account to even make this a remote possibility. And even if that was the case, the fact that only crowns and higher and meaningful past 100, and realistically only lamps and statues past 125-150ish make this an almost impossible task to achieve still. Either shards need to be more common, or treasures need to award more hoard xp to avoid be obsoleted in the first 100 levels of raising a treasure hoard.

Agreed. It’s a tool to further encourage daily logins by player. FOMO for deeds on the AB is going to be a very real thing.

The AB is going to be retooled. So, you (or someone else) is going to need to redo the data collection. There is a task for Epic, Legendary, and Mythic deeds of every color. So, six of each.

Hence, the devs’ attention to the matter (IMO). Many times, people discuss how the game is moving ever so closer to that line of being P2W. Selling deeds for a temporary advantage is not just walking up to that line, but it’s jumping on top of that line and attempting to tightrope walk it. They’ve handled the situation well so far, given that it’s going to happen hook or by crook. As I’m not a serious PvP’er any more, I don’t think this is going to affect me much (for now; future, we’ll see…). But for those in competitive guilds, I really wish the best outcome in this situation on this for all of you.

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@en9nhcet is 600 levels ahead of me.
So he has +6 to stats that I don’t have.
6 kingdoms at level 15 would offset his advantage.
Currently, I feel I can be just as successful as @en9nhcet in this game.
Folks who are freaking out about these minor stat boosts are over franking reacting.

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Thank you for starting a thread regarding this @EliteMasterEric.

(Having all of this feedback in one place is also very useful for me to collate and show the devs.)

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I’m almost tempted to not take any kingdoms to 15 so in a years time I will be getting much more gold in pvp for the cost of only a couple of each stat.

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Maybe this is why they’ve hinted that a PvP revamp is coming: they understand we know purposefully holding back will give us an advantage so now they’re motivated to take it away.

I’ll try to summarize Lyrian’s post in my own words:

Delves were badly designed. The devs expected players to spend gold and resources far beyond the point at which diminishing returns happen for every Delve. Players, instead, are stopping at the point where they stop getting rewards. The devs could have chose to add new rewards to entice players to progress. Instead, they’ve introduced a new system that costs a new, “free” currency to get rewards that seem pretty powerful. These will multiply the faction hoard bonuses and (hopefully) encourage players to slow their LT progression in order to obtain power. Also the currency will be available for sale should any players wish to gain months of progress for dollars. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

I wish they made cosmetic clothes for heroes instead. That should be cheap as heck to produce and I’d spend stupid money on it. I’m not buying any deeds out of spite because this system stinks.

In the past, the devs have resisted simple features like “let guild leaders see sigils spent” for events to help them manage requirements on the basis, “We don’t want to expose how much money players are spending”. After deed flash offers are available, it’ll be clear to anyone with half a brain exactly how much a player is spending on them.

That was the same with ingots: when devs added it in the game, it was quite difficult to get them and we were needing so much them, it sounded like an impossible achievement… And then devs added Delve and it’s now super easy to get ingots.

Devs are just trying to add new things to do in GoW so we don’t get bored. I think the issue as usual is that some players want to level up everything within two weeks after the release…

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The other problem I see is for future new players. For example a new player in 1 years time will NEVER be able to catch up even if they play for 8 hours a day. It’s already an almost impossible task for new players to reach/catch up to endgame players.

It seems apparent with all latest updates to the game the #1 focus of the devs is to make daily play essential. We used to be able to basically just play on weekends and get pretty much everything, now if you miss a day you will be falling behind.

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I’ll get the magic to 15. The rest to 13 most likely. Unless I end up with a litany of deeds/imperial deeds… Then I’ll take the rest to 14… I’ll let others be the guinea pigs on raising the rest and seeing if it causes a deduction in gold and PvP scores.

Level 11 and 13 are the same?

They stack.

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