Haha, thanks - my own stupidity, though, so I’m not even mad about the horrible run.
But yeah, delves have so little to do with skill and are just RNG that takes a looong time. Not only the rooms and with that the danger, but then also the chest. I always cleared all rooms so far and this horrible run got me a level 3 chest while I had before gotten a level 7 one. That alone is ridiculous enough. But then the rewards inside of the chests are… yeah.
On one hand, it’s good that delve level/multiplier doesn’t seem to affect shard drops, as that keeps it newbie-friendly (let’s be honest, it’s hard for even a midgame-player who has some but not all legendaries and maybe 1-2 mythics to clear any delve deeper than maybe 40-50). But at the same time… it’s just not worth it. If I don’t derp, I need 15-20 minutes for one delve, so up to an hour for all three. If I get 3-4 chests out of it, I’m already glad at this point. And that’s just such a waste of time. I had a lot of time this week, but going forward, I dunno if I will continue to do all delves because I just don’t have that much time every day for this and I don’t feel like I’m missing much if I don’t do it…
I think they actually do. The best I got is Delve Chest level 8, with 3.7 multiplier. And that drop me 120+ shards. So higher Delve Chest level might got a higer chance to drop shards, and multiplier make that amount bigger.
And by that, Hoard Quailty also increase your Delve Chest level once you beat the boss. For Hoard Quailty level 10, it’s +4. So if you max that, you are garantee to get Delve Chest level 6+, even more if you beat all the rooms, and if you’re lucky to get Delve Chest Level 10, you might get 200+ from almost every Delve runs.
So, you might want to donate your Treasures to hoard now if you can. I don’t think the perfect walkthrough will ever happened, due to Delve’s complicated, random nature.
The more I read about this, the happier I am that I slow-played my Delving. It sounds like this mode is a honeypot that can ensnare players and stall reasonable progress.
Edit: I guess the question is, “what is reasonable”? From the current setup, with the inability to go back ever, I infer that the devs intended the faction events to be the primary means of advancement. Except for the fact that progress during the faction event carries over to your actual faction, and the level increases in the event whether you win or lose. Which means that if you buy and use a bunch of sigils on losses, you can wind up at faction level 200, having earned no Renown whatsoever (since you only get Renown for winning), and disallowed from going back past level 190. So you never get the Hoard quality bonus for beating the boss, or lots of chest increases for beating rooms, or…
That was a mistake in the Helpcenter. In fact, you need to win to level up.
I would swear I read that in an Ozball post and not the help center, but that is good if true. Still not ideal, but better than I feared.
You’re talking about delve chest level, not delve level. I have not noticed any increase in a delve 70 chest compared to delve 20 (in fact, I was luckier in the first days). Fact is that you will have to stop sooner or later at a level, given how you get three attempts a day to get shards for treasure pulls, but the numbers of factions will increase. So why not level your hoard quality to 10, but stay at delve level 20? For the ingots? The Renown? Nah, not worth it if I get ingots from delve already.
I dunno, I wish someone would make a list with five good combinations for each of the things you named:
Or something like that. And maybe 2-3 combinations for someone who wants to go a middle route. I dunno. There’s too many possible combinations and my brain is fried trying to figure out the decent ones.
I think that make sense. If you will progress 10 level higher no matter what, players could just buy 50 sigils, enter and run away everytime to reach Delve Level 500, in both the event and actual Underworld.
If you only progress when you win, that mean you have a skill deserved for that. Still though, beating 3 rooms to progress faster will still be a thing, and that could be a bad thing if players are not careful.
So my plan to play the event is use my best counter team for each level, and try to clear all rooms before progress higher. Leaving some rooms behind might risk losing Valraven. (Or Valraven rate is calculated in the number of your battles instead of locked in a predetermined room?) That way I won’t fall into the progress block in actual Underworld, and actually help me progress faster based on my hoard level’s help.
If you mean that, you’re corrected. Whichever Delve Level you’re in, your starter max multiplier will always be 2.0, so choose to stay at the level you’re comfortable beating all the rooms might actually give you more rewards than go higher and unable to clear all rooms.
I said that and then Ozball appeared to tell us “heh that’s wrong” and then the Helpcenter was fixed.
This Valraven seems totally crazy… If you get one by Delve, it means you have unlimited delving so that means less than 1 by 9 battles… I don’t really understand why putting Valraven which gives an extra Delve (which is huge and time-consuming).
I’m expecting taking tier 4 to get the exclusive weapon that means 6 sigils + the 3 free sigils so already 9 delve to do. I guess that the Valraven gives only one sigil but if I get let’s say 3 other sigils from the Valraven, that will be 12 delves… 2-3 hours? 
But my plan is surely to stay at the same level as it’s impossible to level down a Delve and I want to keep a Faction with a Level 30 just in case. Still I’m not sure ifwe are going to get a Faction Event on tuesday and the new Faction Event on Friday…
If you don’t mind the random chance of a chest quality upgrade, then I don’t see why you need a special combination. It seems safe to me to add low rarity treasures to a hoard, in whatever combination you like.
High rarity treasures will increase your hoard level more, for a given chance of a chest quality upgrade. So there may be a risk of raising future gold requirements too quickly. And perhaps there may be some benefit to saving high rarity treasure to use after your hoard is high level, so that when it’s expensive to add treasure you can add a few very rare treasures to get a lot of xp and a high chance of quality upgrade.
So if I’m not missing something important, it seems that adding junk treasures to the hoard now won’t be regretted because you chose the wrong treasures or wrong combination. Of course you might regret adding treasure to the faction you chose. But hopefully if that happens it won’t set you back very much.
I don’t know if it makes sense to add high rarity treasures to a hoard now. If I got a high rarity treasure myself, I’d probably wait to see other opinions before using it. But I have added low and mid rarity treasures already.
I don’t mind the RNG. If that’s the main concern for you then sorry for going on and on. 
So my question is: Why care with leveling your delve at all? I get that you get Renown and that you get a bit more gold and a random ingot per day and apparently some stats from it. Okay. Good. But, as @Razzagor at pointed out to me before: The ingot is random. Like in PVP. We all love our common ingots?
So yeah, stats. Obviously, getting permanent stats is important. Everyone loves stats. But there’s absolutely no preview beyond 4k points giving one life. I can live without that. Now, if there’s lots of magic in the mix, things might change. But since I was not provided a list showing me that, I’m not gonna ruin my delve levels anymore. For me, the main point of delve is right now getting the troops and upgrading them to mythic, as usual in this game. And I would like to get my ~14 shards in less than 20 minutes, that’s for sure…
I dunno, I really enjoy delves. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made this thread. The whole concept is amazing. But between the very little shards (and the fact that there’s no “open all possible chests” button), the amazingly random RNG in it all and the fact that the rewards are just not worth it, I just… don’t see any reason to invest so much time in it and level my delves up, which seems totally counter-intuitive. And yes, I’m very grateful this was explained to me because me being a derp obviously didn’t get it at first.
Thanks for your long post! And no, I don’t mind the RNG. Thing is, I read that 5x mythic treasure is supposed to be the best thing ever. Except you kinda waste a lot since 2x mythic already gives 100% quality. Yet it is still considered the best because it apparently saves you a lot of gold in the long run. And I don’t really understand, but I know I don’t have gold to waste, so I am basically sitting on a not-very-big pile of treasure that includes three legendaries and just do nothing with it because apparently using 5x mythic is what I want and that’s not happening anytime soon. So I sit. And sit. I’m way too scared of not being able to meet my guild’s requirements anymore if I mess this up to risk anything at all.
Since I decided to keep all delves at level 20 for now, I don’t even need the hoard level. So I suppose my goal is to get quality level 10 with as little gold cost (which means also little exp? Maybe? I don’t get it, as I said…) as possible.
@Sheba, some math. You need 9 quality upgrades (not 10, like I originally thought).
If you only use 5 Coin Purses at a time, that’s a 25% chance to boost your quality. So you should expect to do this 36 times to get to quality 10 (or 180 total Purses used). I ran my code for this, and you can expect to spend roughly 1.5 million gold in this manner.
Edit: got bored, did Gold Rings. A million Shebas will average 18 tries to get the 9 upgrades, and it’ll cost 800,000 gold to use their 90 Rings.
If you only use 5 Priest’s Chalices, it’s a 100% chance to boost your quality. You’ll only do it 9 times, using 45 Chalices, at a total cost of 385,000 gold.
If you only want to use Sacred Treasures, you’ll need 18 of 'em two at a time, and it’ll cost you 300,000 gold. (Edit: it also gets you to Hoard level 133, so you get full Renown bonuses too!) So this winds up being cheaper than Purses or Chalices, but you need 18 Sacred Treasures.
You get:
- every 250 points: +10 gold/day
- aside every 1000 points: +1 random ingots/day
- aside every 4000 points: +1 skill point (skill point coming in this order: life, armor, life, armor, attack, life, armor, attack, life, armor, magic so the +1 magic for 44,000 points)
So at 4000 points you should get: 120golds/day, 3 ingots/day, +1 life
Yeah you certainly should aim to quality level 10 as soon as you can. Don’t care about golds as you can do it in 10 times. The main issue should be the treasures…
So to summarise, the best strategy early on is for your first 9 hoard increases to use exactly 100% of quality increase, which could be:
- 2 sacred treasures
- 3 genie’s lamps and 2 coin purses
- 4 king’s crowns
- etc.
After that, there might be some merit in timing exactly which treasures to use when, with some more detailed maths behind it, but getting to quality 10 is worth so much more than the gold spend that it’s irrelevant aiming for anything else initially.
Sadly, I have not been following the above advice to date, but I can start now.
The corollary of this is that it’s better not to use any sacred treasures together, but combine them with lower treasures to get to 100%, so optimal batches up to quality 10 would be things like:
- 1 sacred treasure, 1 chalice and 3 rings
- 2 genie’s lamps, 1 chalice and 2 rings
- 1 genie’s lamp, 2 crowns and 2 rings
- 2 crowns, 2 chalices and 1 ring
- etc.
What if you started with 5 coin purses, then switched to another rarer treasure?
Once you have a high hoard level, it seems to me that adding more coin purses will be quite expensive. But I don’t understand why it’s bad to use purses today, with low hoard level.
You are risking your gold investment on only a 25% chance to upgrade the quality of the hoard. It isn’t cost effective.
Ooooooh thank you! Now that is immensely helpful! Obviously I want to use Sacred Treasures then - 300k is still my whole income of a week, geez, that’s so much - and the rest of the treasures can just chill in my pile or something. Getting 18 is… something, though. Guess that will not happen for a really long time. I also wouldn’t mind 5x Chalice, I guess, given the rate I’m getting treasure at it will absolutely not be more than one upgrade a week or so, so the extra 85k would spread out and a mixture of both would hopefully not throw the math off and make a completely ridiculous cost.
Wish we could change our treasure in the soulforge now… like fusing 5 of a kind into the next higher rarity or something, I don’t know.
But thank you so much! 
Given that I don’t have anything five times except for the rings and 800k is ridiculous, I obviously did well not upgrading anything.
Hmm…interesting and a bit sad but still… I do get some renown just from doing hoard upgrades. It will take a loooooong time, but I guess I will get at least a few points every now and then.
Also I wish there would be a tooltip of those stat increases in the game, just like there is a list of the faction-based rewards. Thanks so much!
I don’t think I will ever mix and match as that throws the math off and I am bad at math, obviously. It’s likely best to stick to one kind of treasure per faction, maybe?
It is risky. But without trying to do any math, it seems more cost effective to me if we start with coin purses or rings, and only use rare treasure when our hoard level is high. Also seems we will raise our chest quality sooner, since we aren’t waiting for the rarer treasures.
Unless you are “unlucky” enough to have 3 legendary treasures.
Maybe it will be best to put our low rarity treasures into the newer, low hoard level factions, and put our higher rarity treasures into our old high hoard level factions.
So as a faction ages, it might be better to start giving it better treasure.
But again, I haven’t tried the math.
The math shows that it’s more cost effective to use higher rarities with a guarantee to get 100% quality. This holds until you max the Quality level at 10. The chalice is a good sweet spot since they aren’t an extremely rare drop.
Has anyone figured out the most cost-effective use of the legendary ones with 100% quality upgrade guarantee? Because I have three of those…lol.