2 hard fights today at Hall and 1 low 20 at ASE. I learned not to click so fast next time.
Once you pick one you are stuck with it.
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If someone decides to use the farming method so that they can continually farm shards, you only need one farming faction. You could level up the rest as far as you are able.
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But what’s the point of that? They use the same energy, so “advancing one at the side” is just working against the farming strategy, and apparently working against it without actually offering anything in return from what i read here.
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For example:
The player that wants harder, challenging fights
This player may decide to have one farming faction that they go back to farm once they can’t advance any longer because the enemy stats are too much or because they just don’t have the time for long fights.
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The reason to level up the other factions is to go for the renown rewards.
The gold and ingot bonuses are trivial, even when considering their annual income boost they aren’t exciting. But.
Some of those bonuses are permanent stat increases. Right now we know 1,000 total renown is +1 HP. Eventually we’ll know how much renown is +1 Magic. Then all the endgame players will fight really hard to have… basically zero impact on their play.
Basically:
This mode will get you to a fully upgraded weapons chest in “a long time” whereas that used to be “forever”. When you get there, this mode is going to seem like hot garbage because “it drops a lot of ingots when you’re lucky” is the big pull.
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So does this fictional person want harder and challenging fights or not? 'Cause apparently when the fights get hard he decides to farm a low level delve instead 
On a serious note though, i understood that i still think the mode should make me want to advance above all.
Advancing the delve and increasing its difficulty should be my primary goal set by how the system rewards it, and not just because i personally decide i want a challenge, that is my point.
And that’s why right now it seems like a massive fail if farming delves low level is basically giving me the same as working my ass off in high Level delves, aside from a bonus stat point that doesn’t matter anymore and is btw also reached fairly easy without too much advancement in the delve.
I see your point. However, I don’t see it as a fail. For people that don’t have hours upon hours to play GoW a day, they can still “slowly” progress the Underworld. And to be clear, that will be seriously slow progression if you mostly farm low levels. However, if a person takes the opposite route and powers through delve levels with smart teams, they get the benefit of progressing much faster with faction renown/total faction renown that eventually rewards stat bonuses/daily ingots/milestone ingots/etc.
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“Hard” is a tough thing to describe in Gems of War.
Divines is “easy” because it does so much damage so fast. But I still have “hard” games with it every now and then. All it takes is a board with more skulls than gem matches, or an arrangement that doesn’t favor Ishbaala, Mercy, Divinia, or any of Divines’ tools. But that’s not really “hard”, it means I had bad luck.
Scaling monsters are “hard” because you have to do more damage to kill them and they do more damage back. If you have bad luck, it’s multiplied vs. scaling troops. I can let an opponent’s Divines get a good cascade and usually survive. But every time level 200 Raid Boss teams get a 4-match I cringe, knowing it could be my last turn. Again: this is more “luck” than “hard”, because sometimes my only move is “give up an incredible board to my opponent”.
The “hard” people want is “a game where a lesser player would have lost, but through my superior knowledge, strategy, and experience I won.” The more random factors affect GoW play, the less likely this will ever happen.
I have always stated, and will always state, we can’t get an honest “hard” while free turns exist. So long as teams can be designed to receive 2-3 turns with high probability, it is impossible to claim this is a game of strategy.
Chess is thousands of years old and still being studied. They haven’t even released any new content for hundreds of years. How many ways can you get a free turn in chess? What part of chess introduces random new pieces to the board? Those elements don’t exist because you can’t make plans against them.
“Scaling stats” just makes the game take more turns to complete and raises your loss rate. That’s not “hard”. That’s tweaking the odds on a slot machine.
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Well 1000 renown is easy enough to get, you probably don’t need to advance in a delve at all and just do it by hoard level (needs 200) since you get to upgrade your hoard level just as fast with low level delve as with max advanced delve apparently.
And since you have a month worth of time per faction after the Initial two, it sounds quite easy to get to that “milestone” renown for the delves bonuses aswell. So that progression isn’t much slower at all. They will fall behind temporarily in the duration of a month for that faction, but should be able to catch up eventually by later in that month every time.
The only difference between stay farming in lower level and going higer is just extra multiplier (x1 and x2), the reward from both level are still random.
From my experience, I could get 87 shards from Delve Chest level 7 by challenging myself in higher level and get x2 start up with 3.75 multiplier in the end, that mean base shards drop at that level could be 23.2 shards.
If you could do the same in lower level, you would get -1x less from reward, so your shards will be 23.2 x 2.75 = 63.8 shards. That’s almost 20 shards less, or one average Delve attempt.
So while farming on lower level might be safer, that 1x different could mean a lot when you’re able to gain higher level Delve Chest on different level. So I think pushing higher could stil earn you more resources on average, if you can still manage to beat all the rooms.
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I only see one thing dangerous about this concept: Someone gets stuck in a Delve level so high they risk being defeated every now and then which ends his chance for better rewards.
Basically, someone is playing the Delves at the normal level for, let’s say, 20 days, and another players always plays increasing the Delve level during these same 20 days, surely enough this other player will have some benefits (and desconsidering any luck/investiment with treasures for now) but his Delves takes more time and can even end in a loss.
Both players are at the mercy of luck for treasures that can or can not drop allowing investiments in the Hoard to boost stats and bonus in resources. It’s wildly variable, but assuming both players manage the same upgrades we can imagine the second player is now able to beat his Delve without problems by now, but this time he won’t keep pushing the challenge further. Meanwhile the first player decides to play at increasing difficulties, so he is now earning more rewards due his bonus from the hoard he can even reach the same Delve level of the second player and will get more rewards for his patience. That’s something i’ve been considering…
Here is a giant kitten to distract us from all this serious talk.
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You need 4,000 total renown for +1 Life, not 1,000.
And for the +1 Magic it seems to be unlocked at 44,000 pts (at least 18 factions).
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That’s the good part of this mode for me. Timewise, that 20 extra shards (1 portal opening) isn’t worth the extra game time of really high levels for me. Yet, I can still gather resources on a level that matches the amount of time that I have to play.
Also, because of the RNG nature of the chests, you are never even guaranteed to get any particular resources that you need. The guy that does level 200 may get crap rewards today while the guy that did level 30 could have gotten good ones.
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So basically sitting on low level for 12ish days of a month and then actually progress the remaining 17 for maximum profit, got it, great system…
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Do we know for sure if your treasure multiplier even applies to the chest rewards? This is one of my open questions. If that is the case it’s a decent argument for sometimes moving forwards, and definitely a good argument for avoiding the -10 level choice. A multiplier on Chaos Shards is valuable.
Problem being it’s clear that sometimes I will get 0 Chaos Shards. I lose even more if I take the +10 levels and that happens. I think there is a firm argument for not progressing at all until you reach quality 10.
Yes. Ingots come in at predictable mutlipliers to tell me that all rewards are also whole numbers and all rewards are rounded after each reward. For example, if you get 3 legendary ingot drops with a 2.7 modifier, you get 9 legendary ingots. With a 2.5 modifier, you get 9 legendary ingots. With a 2.45 modifier, it would be 6 legendary ingots. Predictably, every time.
I also have enough data now to say with relative certainty that chest level affects how many drops are rolled. I threw away 6 delves at level 1 and 2 so far. Every delve at level 1 was a single drop of a single piece of loot multiplied by the treasure multiplier. Every level 2 delve had only 1 or 2 distinct pieces of loot which came in predictable amounts after I accounted for the room modifier.
The reason people are having so much trouble with shards is that they can drop in mutliple distinct values across the same chest. And each drop is multiplied by the treasure multiplier and rounded. However, in going through my data, every single level 5 chest I’ve gotten so far has been able to be explained by having exactly 5 drops each time with shards in base quantities of 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Lets apply what I have learned to all the other chests posted here
@timeknight got:
Level 7, 3.75 modifier, 87 shards, 75 glory, 1500 souls
Level 7 chest, so I’ll assume 7 drops.
3.75 modifier, so we know what our base drops were
Single soul drops usually come at a base of 200. But hoard quality 2+ grants 2x souls, so lets use 400.
Single glory drops usually come at a base of 20 (the 2x multiplier doesn’t come until hoard quality 5, which he hasn’t reached yet)
I’ve seen shards drop in base quantities of 3, 4, 5, and 6 to account for every possibility so far in a level 5 chest. With this multiplier, that means 11, 15, 19, and 23. You can reach this in 5 shards drop.
So, he more than likely got:
- 1x 200 souls (x2 from hoard quality), 1x 20 glory, 1x 3 shards (11), 1x 4 shards (15), 2x 5 shards (19 ea), 1x 6 shards (23)
For a total of 7 drops.
@Santandrix’s other drops:
level 6 chests, 4 ingots, 62 shards, 15400 gold
level 5 chest, 56 shards, 15k gold
level 5 chest, 2 ingots, 28 shards, 4000 gold
We weren’t given the multipliers, but we can figure them out from the gold payouts and information given in the post:
15,400 gold is a factor of both 2,000 and 4,000 (possible gold drops, depending on hoard quality), with 3.85
15,000 gold is a factor of 2,000 and 4,000 with a 3.75 multiplier
4000 gold is only a factor of 2000 and 2.0. This leads me to believe that no only did he play a low level repeat delve, he also chose the “lower level” option and started at 0.5 modifier, as All-Seeing Eye tends to cap out around +2.0 modifier for all rooms cleared. And that he hasn’t upgrade his hoard quality in All-Seeing Eye yet.
Our base drops were:
- 1 legendary ingot (4), 2k gold (15.4k), 3 shards (12), 3 shards (12), 4 shards(15), 6 shards (23)
- 4k gold (15k), 3 shards(11), 3 shards (11) 4 shards (15), 5 shards (19)
- 1 legendary ingot, 2k gold, 3 shards (6), 4 shards (8), and 6 shards (12)
So far, I’ve been able to apply every single chest drop I’ve gotten to this methodology and get expected results. Which is most of my delves across 4 accounts since the patch released.
Recommend getting that hoard quality up in whatever delve you are going to play (farm) the most. Those extra guaranteed chest levels is going to amount to a lot of loot. Short term, you could get more raising the quality of the one you are actively progressing, though, but by the time you’ve hit your first hoard quality upgrade, you are likely just about walled on forward progress for that delve and won’t likely get enough “more” treasure that it was worth it when you’ve regressed to farming same-level delves. Also, I’d stop upgrading hoards at quality break-points that give modifiers to boss chest level upgrade, though that ingot multiplier is tempting. This will give you the most loot in the long run.
Edit: typos
32 Likes
I wish I could give more than one “like” for a post. This is very good information, thank you very much for expressing it.
I’d figured out so far that quality was very important, but it wasn’t as clear to me if multipliers affected chest loot. That it does means there is a good reason to do as many rooms as possible.
1 Like
Here are the base values that I’ve come across. Have you found any other base values @Mithran?
| Resource | Base Amounts |
|---|---|
| Shards | 3, 4, 5, 6 |
| Legendary Ingots | 1 |
| Mythic Ingots | 1 |
| Souls | 200 |
| Glory | 20 |
| Gold | 2,000, 4,000 |
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