Yea, it’s a pain but hey, once you get it done you NEVER have to play with the faction team every again.
I’ve got into a routine with these faction release weekends.
On Friday, I do most of the heavy lifting, takes the majority of the day: unlock, level hoard, use the 3 reg delves for that reward boost, then do the event to lvl 300 (do faction @ 300 for legendary pet at 500).
By the time I’m at 290, there’s already team suggestions for pure faction so I spend a few minutes prepping for the future as well.
On Sat, try to do a few runs toward 500.
On Sun, get to 500 throughout the day. By 10pm EST, set up to do last pure faction run. Knowing this typically takes an hour, I usually hit bed time when completed.
I’m not so young that I need to go out partying on Fridays and I have 2 kids and a house, so weekends are busy. It has worked out pretty well so far. Of the ones released, I only have to catch up on 8 (but those will require higher hoard lvls).
If using potions, Thrall/Marilith/Angry Mob/Bogstrider (P/R/G/Br) is the best thing since sliced bread. Makes me wish we had one of those troops for Yellow and Blue.
Even without potions, a good hoard and a hoard bonus of 50%+ will mean getting rid of most gems with each cast. They’re great troops, which I had completely underestimated until recently.
I don’t know how people do it in one day either (although planning to try it myself on certain impossible factions (Lyrazra and Frostfire)). It all comes down to how many tiers you buy, and whether or not you do all the rooms.
As people mentioned, having certain troops helps speed it up, but the biggest speed boost is ignoring rooms. The worst delves right now are 5-room delves, requiring a minimum of 5 (rooms) * 50 (49 floors + 1 extra pure faction run at 500) = 250 fights. Over a weekend, that amounts to about 84 a day, except that the earlier ones take much less time that the others, so it probably looks like 125, 80, 45. What @canadademon said is pretty much my strategy too, getting as much done on Friday so that the weekend will be more chill. But that’s not for everyone, what with work, family and other obligations.
So if you want to max a new faction, it comes down to a few things:
If you don’t care about leaderboards, increasing your payout (glory, souls, gold, ingots and chaos shards), or simply don’t have the time, but you have enough gems laying around, you can just skip rooms and buy yourself more sigils in case you weren’t lucky to catch enough ravens (1910 buys your 4 tier 7s and 27 sigils, for a total of 33 sigils over the weekend, requiring you to find 9 ravens). This options means you’ll be doing at most 250 battles over the weekend, assuming you don’t die during any run.
If you don’t have enough gems, and are not planning on paying out of pocket, accept that you won’t reach 500. One of our guildmates saved up the aforementioned 1910, then played enough treasure hunt to scrape together another 200 gems because he needed another tier. So that’s a ton of treasure hunts on top of grinding the faction to 500, i.e. not ideal.
Figure out what works for you and set a schedule. If the team you’re using is taking forever, see if someone in your guild or the forum can help you with a better/faster team. If you only really have time to play on Sunday, consider if that’s how you want to spend your Sunday. Will it be harder to complete the faction without potions? Yes, but that doesn’t mean you should kill yourself grinding out those floors and write off that weekend which should be relaxing by doing something that stresses you out (assuming here, although you never mentioned you don’t like doing the faction weekend, only that you haven’t completed one yet).
For Fang Moor, I purchased 7 Tier VII potions, fought full clears on 20, 30 and 40 because they were fast. I went straight to boss after that (still 5 fights each level), and finished with enough sigil for 2 attempts at 500 with pure faction, which was perfect as first attempt failed.
Those troops are great for when using potions. Even without potions, Angry Mob or Thrall explode between 37-42 gems depending on my delve hoard and Kingdom level for me. For my level 300+ alt, 12 gems doesn’t quite have the same effect.
Just realized that it’s not a team made up of those 4 troops… Was trying to figure out how that would do enough damage to be useful for the last 15 minutes.
Last I checked, those two destroyed gems. If they exploded gems, they would be only half as effective to higher level players, but could become more useful to lower level players.
Ok, that’s great for you, but, although I’m 55 and have no kids, I do have plenty of other things I want to do which don’t require spending hours on this game.
I want a game I can pick up for a bit of a diversion., play for a while, enjoy it, then put it down and get on with something else.
GoW doesn’t do that, it demands your time if you’re going to play it properly (which I tend to like to do), so I have to either give up the time or just ignore certain segments of the game.
I dread having to do a Yellow/Blue faction event for this very reason. We definitely need one of those beforehand.
For those that don’t know, these troops destroy random gems scaling with magic (not explode), meaning that you can destroy the entire board every turn on delves with enough magic bonuses from treasure hoard, kingdom levels, medals, etc.
Funny that. When I was starting out, the only delves I can do to high levels are the blue ones - given that Forest Troll + Gobtruffle basically walk over them reliably. Yellow though, yeah those are a pain.
Yes makes it so much easier - HKI auto kill, have curse from EoE etc.
On Yellow and Blue you can go Shahbanu, both will cover HKI and whilst the start will be harder to get going, once HKI is full, you are away. The slight drawback is encountering Dwarves without Curse, so you might have to consider a troop that makes Shahbanu more difficult to loop, like TMQ or Vash or something / or EoE making 2 none Shahbanu friendly colours. Some other options maybe, depends on colour options. You can check the delve run and if no Dwarves on the way, possibly okay to skip curse and just lose the one colour on Loops.
III lvl (Golem / Tome of Evil / Void Portal / Sacrificial Priest);
Obvious strategy: waiting, until Priest do all work and not killed yourself first. I was lucky and it worked.
IV lvl (Dire Wolf, Cu Sith, Warg, Fenrir);
This room was more stressful, because Cu Sith and Fenrir eventually reached 1000 attack, so i tried carefuly remove skulls and keep both Emperinazara’s at full mana.
Boss room:
Be ready for the very long battle. Main task at start is try fill and cast Emperinazara’s for initial survivalbility. Do not give green mana to the enemy if possible and keep collect 4-5 matches. You can lose first 2 slots many times, but try to keep alive your second slot which already could buffed. When all your troops wiil reach 1000 life, then a victory is a matter of time. In my case almost all work did Kobold Magi.
I’d put Tinker Town in easy considering how many people I’ve heard have just done it on the first try with a max hoard of 100 and no potions, myself included. I suspect Emperinazar falls under the same category, maybe a bit harder; haven’t gotten there myself yet so I couldn’t say for sure.
