Delve Treasure rates are really crap

Feature Requests and Game feedback
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Searched and found a topic from 2019 but nothing really after that. No idea how things have changed since then, or IF they’ve ever changed.

I just used up 10k shards, cause I have a single delve left I wanna clear. Thought I’d make it easy on myself (haha easy. Good one) and up the hoard as much as possible before actually trying.

What I got was laughable:

28 KCrowns, 33 GLamps and 4 (yes, FOUR) STreasures.

Wtf is this rate really? I’ve had this issue since I started delving seriously and Frostfire Keep, potionless, took ages and a Hoard of 353 to clear for me. Considering most of the delves are basically (like the rest of the game) about RNG, you have to rely on hoard levels. Getting merely 4 Sacred Treasures from 10k shards is truly shit.

Now I only have the one delve left, so soon I’ll be done with this crappy part of the game, but I still don’t belong to the “If I had to go through it, others should too” stupid crowd. I would love for this to change so others can actually also finish this. There’s plenty other stuff to do and even if you reach a point of “there’s nothing left” then zoom out and think: How much time have you put into this game. Was it worth it? Did you enjoy it? Cause games aren’t supposed to be chores but fun. That’s the main thing about them. You should also be able to just leave a game and come back in weeks, months or years without being totally fucked.

Anyway, I digress. The main point here is about treasures. They honestly need to fix those to be more common (the rarer ones that is). Remove the first 3 as they’re totally useless past level what, 50? Even Chalices are getting to be extremely low value when you level to 100. Past 100 Chalices are REALLY not worth it. You’re basically just sitting on those shitty ones cause they’re useless. After 150-199 even King’s Crowns are gonna be crap in terms of value and many delves, especially old ones, require high hoards or simply waiting for the day to sit there and just plow through the floors like a brain dead person (I just did the 4 last tuesday faction assaults ones back to back. Fuck that was the worst. At least the weekend ones can be divided on 3 days).

I’m curious; How do other people use treasures? Does anyone bother with the lower level ones even? Maybe I’m just a scrub and you all do Hoard level 100 potionless EZ?

PS: I get the real reason for anything in this game is money, but can’t they at least try and make things enjoyable without 100% focus on economics? Maybe even just 90/10?

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One thing that I’ve seen suggested is that Chaos Portals start working like Guild Chests, in that faction troops stop dropping after you obtain 4 of each at mythic, like Guild Guardians.

This seems like something relatively simple to implement as they already have a working example, i.e. guild chests. However, I remember hearing something about it being difficult due to the way that the portals are set up (probably related to the fact that there is one pool of troops for each portal). Either way, this would make the most sense to me as the only reason to use shards after getting troops to mythic is to get treasures.

While I know people will say “what’s in it for the company if they make it easier to get better treasures?” and there’s no answer to that. Factions are gold/gem sinks so the harder it is to get good treasures, the more likely people will do what you did (spend a ton of gems/$$ on Tuesday assaults to finish frustrating factions) or end up using bad treasures because that’s all they have, which in turn costs a lot of gold.

Would it be a huge quality of life improvement for players if faction troops stopped dropping after you have 4 mythic and all treasure rates are doubled? Definitely. For illustrative purposes, this is what a “doubled” drop rate would be (based on current rates):
13.6% coin purse (C)
44.6% ring (R)
23.6% chalice (UR)
11% crown (E)
5.4% lamp (L)
1.8% sacred treasure (M)

I.e. for 10k shards, you’d expect an average of:
9 ST, 27 GL, 55 KC and 118 PC

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I don’t level anything past 100. I’ve done around half the full faction clears at 500, never with potions.

Anything I can’t get done that way in reasonably short order goes in the “leave it the F@%$ alone” pile. I don’t have the gold or the sanity to expend on attempting such nonsense.

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@blindnighto
Yes many have suggested this cause it’s the logical step. Especially cause you not only have zero use for more than 4 troops, but delve troops are usually untouched outside of a delve. They’re 90% useless with very few exceptions. Heck even in PF runs you sometimes don’t use some troops so they get absolutely zero use.

@Shimrra
Yeah I too went with the “leave it” but then started doing potion runs. I also realized potion runs are actually “decent” in that the RNG isn’t as extreme. Still, they’ve made delves and I assume they’ve also can stand behind the idea that you SHOULD be able to do them potionless (someone said potions came in later so there’s that for the few first ones at least). Also it stops at 100 for faction points. I also make an assumption here that hoard 100 should be the minimum doable. Still, GL doing delves like Frostfire Keep PF 500 potionless with Hoard 100. You’d need RNGeesus sitting next to you for that to happen.

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Believe it or not, Frostfire Keep is in my aforementioned pile with a high score of 250.

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Working 100% exactly as designed.

Fun Fact: The current drop rates on higher-tier treasures are actually higher than what was originally designed.

The farther one raises their hoard, the more “worthless” the treasures become. This is intentional and is not going to change. The devs want to push players in that situation to buy the lamp offers in the daily deal shop that show up almost every other day as the optimum method for progressing high-level hoards.

As a F2P game? Unfortunately not. The economics is the core foundation of how the game stays financially afloat. Any methodologies that don’t involve spending money are going to come with red tape to make those methodologies painful, annoying, or undesirable to encourage players to spend money and/or premium resources.

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Straight-up this.

Raising any Hoard past, say, 199 or so (and only for those with the richest of the endgame accounts) is a sucker’s gambit, because the law of diminishing returns ensure that it’s cost-prohibitive to do so.

And by “cost” I don’t just mean gold — I mean your limiting reagent, Sacred Treasures (and I guess Genie’s Lamps).

Anyway — this in turn makes it so that getting one faction done at such a high cost limits your options everywhere else. It stretches your resources too thin, so it’s a mistake.

That is, for at least as long as factions are still being added to the pile. After that, it will be interesting to see what happens, but things should level out to a similar situation as traitstones where, for all intents and purposes, income outpaces goods on which said can be spent; ie: your chaos shard sink will suddenly have a finite bottom.

This could be a game-changer. Every week after that point, there is a faction assault to net more shards and, therefore, more Sacred Treasures. No rush — they’ll pile up, especially if daily sigils are used to farm rather than pound against the difficult 500s. It’ll just be a waiting game — increase a hoard every time you have the gold and 5 elephants. You’ll eventually get there — everyone, in theory, could, if people were willing to spend the gold (gems can save you a bundle of gold, but :man_shrugging:).

Would I like to see Guild-Guardians-style portals? Of course.

Would I love to see higher rates of treasure drops? Abso-fruitly.

But I don’t see either happening, especially so late into this game feature’s development cycle. But I am looking forward to the dying days of the game mode, where it might be “easy” to get a glut of high-value treasures over time such that they pile up like ingots.

I might even spend the gold to make every delve one-shottable through the Tuesday assaults, at that point. An investment to be sure — but one that would eventually pay off gold-wise, and which would get me the orbs a lot faster week after week…

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Thing is, I “almost” got there with having 21-22k shards and just the one delve left. So I thought I might as well try to make the delve as easy as possible cause A) they fucked the rotation so no idea if it takes another year for it to rotate back and B) it’s the last one aside from any new ones and the new ones are 100% done with gems and potions. Not gonna add to the headache lol.

That said, 10k gave me 4 treasures. the lamps are also decent but below that they’re basically useless and the diminishing returns you speak of is exponential.

That said, the fact that hoards CAN go up to 999 is a false end. Sure, you can, but who actually has the resources to do so? Even end gamers with 100k+ shards who have absolutely nothing to use them on. Can they use it to get to 999? What’s the point of that limit?

Don’t get me wrong, I like that it’s basically “limitless” but the diminishing returns being exponentially worse each time means two things:

A) They never really meant hoards to go up too much. 353 for Frostfire Keep is my highest and each increase costs 400k+ gold and is like, 2 levels a turn. That’s insane for a limit that is up to 999.

B) They introduced potions so that some delves would ONLY be viable this way (except really hardcore people who like to say “no, never, I WILL manage!” and waste their time instead (Basically, me -.-).

Now regardless of their intentions, which are quite clear, their execution is horrible and since there’s already been an “increase” in treasures (I saw some old post and @Lyrian also mentioned this in his “Fun fact”) there’s no other explanation than pure greed and basically malice towards players almost.

At any rate, I’m soon done with this so for me it’s not really the worst, but since they did the rotation change some people might get royally fucked here. Remember that Rope Dart took 1y and 5 months to get back into rotation (Pridelands). Imagine waiting that long for one delve…

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The recent dev Q&A implied that there isn’t going to be a planned end to delves anytime soon, if not ever.

As the devs announced that the plan going forward was to expand the Krystaran map instead of creating a third map, this design choice allows them to potentially keep releasing new kingdoms and delves perpetually. In hindsight, it’s also a reasonable way to assist newly released kingdoms to catch up somewhat with existing kingdoms that are already Power 20+.

On the other hand, the more kingdoms that are released, the longer it will take for each kingdom to get another turn at being the event kingdom of the week. That will serve to slow down Power stars creep as the kingdoms are already racing to Power 25 already, which also has implications for Power levels that will require raising kingdoms to Levels 17/19 for the faction level boost for delves (although players could still do this voluntarily.) Also, there’s the likely possibility that the newer kingdoms may very well require cosmetic pets to meet the lower pet Power roadblocks. Salty has alluded to this in her own way on streams.

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Thanks for that info — I missed that, being one who can’t make the streams!

Definitely changes my outlook, if there is no “bottom.”

Whether or not there would be an effective bottom for me would depend on how frequently they added kingdoms and factions in the future.

One a month I could probably easily handle, at least on the Underworld side of things (dunno if I’d have the keys, if they added a lot of troops at once, though :joy:). But more than that? Probably not…

…but I don’t think I’ve ever seen new content released at that rate, so. I guess I’ll worry when we cross that bridge — but not before :sweat_smile:

Also @Anthrax I basically agree with the entirety of your last post — I was also a hardcore-purist for delves, and I’m upset at the rotation change. Eventually I brought factions to 199, did my math, and realized it wouldn’t be tenable to do some completions without potions, so that’s when I bit the bullet and started just knocking them out during release weekends, and using gems to “catch up” on the few I’d not completed (including Frostfire).

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I’ve hearda bout the “new kingdoms Soon ™” business and yes, it’ll make it even worse. I guess it’s just by design then so that newcomers are even more inclined to spend real money on the game. Quite clever tbh so not gonna be too harsh here.

At any rate, it is what it is, but the treasures are still shit and they need to fix that. Especially if they want new people to see an “end in the tunnel” even tho this is a gatcha/casinao/whatever kinda game where you’re supposed to constantly rotate in and out.

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I’m personally thinking that the game is moving towards standardizing around the ten-week (or 11 if you count the off-week) cycle.

It’s not that hard to bring into reality from where the game is now.

The game currently has a six week event cycle (in no particular order):

  1. Vault
  2. Raid Boss
  3. Invasion
  4. Arena
  5. Bounty
  6. New Faction

Eventually Tower of Doom will enter the rotation making the cycle 7 weeks.

The game is entering the time of the year where there are two updates where a new game mode should be announced (the gnome thing with 5.6?) That’s 8.

Maybe the lesser modes (like Arena) get run twice a cycle. And so on.

Anyways, I can see the faction changes pointing towards a future where a new kingdom is released every 10 weeks, ties to the Campaign theme being run, and where that kingdom’s faction is released that same week as the New Faction Weekend. Probably not that hard to tie all that together narratively with whatever the Campaign story is at that given time,

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It’s expensive if you want to max all delves RIGHT NOW. But if you’re patient eventually delve hoards will get a 100% boost from kingdom levels. So basically a hoard of 200 becomes actually 400. Albeit a few years away though.

If you can’t wait that long then also remember we only have 5 delves left so after they are done the shards and treasures will truly start piling up as you wont need them anymore for new delves.

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Maybe it’s just me but having to think of this more of a “years down the line chore” is not enjoyable at all. Just my take on it. Who knows what I’m doing in a few years or if I’m dead? These types of games “never end” and I get that it’s a perpetual money machine, but there’s a certain limit to that as well.

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Couldn’t agree more. If the goal is not achievable (think Nysha medals, or imperial deeds/books as well) that is just Terrible design, and you’ve lost me.

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It kind of baffles me as to why the Medal upgrade system was designed as the main, new Soul sink for end gamers when allowing Delve Treasures to be converted upwards in the Soulforge could have covered a large chunk of it much more easily and to better player reception :confused::person_shrugging:.

As has been covered, even with Sacred Treasures, some of the higher Hoard costs are immensely prohibitive, so it’s not like the intended Gold sink’s purpose would be defeated. Currently, it’s at extent where players largely don’t even bother (which does negate the intended Gold sink), in favour of the Potions/Gem sink, I guess – maybe that’s preferable to them.

Instead, the Medal upgrading and trickling out Deeds for the Kingdom upgrade system have allowed them to artificially draw/stretch out the end game at roughly a pace of their choosing without adding in too much other new stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t be so baffled :woozy_face::stuck_out_tongue:.

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