Hoard Mimic grind killed my desire to play this game

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

I have put 2000 hours into this game and have managed to grind out every achievement for it except for the Guild Wars ones (since it has been MIA for nearly a year now) and the Hoard Mimic. They recently added 2 more as well but those are not possible to get yet.

People estimate that the chance of pulling the Hoard Mimic card is 1/1000 locked behind 3 roughly 10% chances. I have put an obscene amount of time into trying to get the Hoard Mimic, but to no avail, and I’m no closer today than when I first started it. I have seen several posts on the internet say that they lowered the spawn rate of mimics a couple of months after the update dropped, which makes sense. My guild leader said he got 3 of these Hoard Mimic cards in the first 2 months, but hasn’t seen once since. I have seen maybe 10 Hoard Mimic battles total, but the card has never dropped.

Over the course of the last 60 hours, I have not seen a single Hoard Mimic. I am using a super fast e12 team (Wand, Tesla 2x, Leprechaun) and not losing any battles. I have seen plenty of regular mimics in that time, but never seen a Hoard Mimic. The last time I saw one was 2-3 months ago when i ran into 2 of them grinding explore 1s during a vault weekend.

This card has been out for nearly 3 years now, and it’s not even that good. Why can’t the devs do something to make it a little easier? Maybe attach a pity system to it or make it craftable for an obscene amount of resources? Even if it was 5,000,000 souls + 5,000 gems + 20,000 diamonds to craft it, that would still be better than how it is now. Why were so many people able to get this card a month or two after it came out, and now you can grind for thousands of hours and never see it? Theoretically, you could play for 100,000 hours and never see this card because each e12 run is a separate 1/1000 chance you get it.

If you all ready have this card, I’m sure you will not have any empathy for those that don’t have it especially if you put in thousands of hours grinding for it. I just wish they would do something to make it a bit easier since it’s been out for so long. They added the orbs of glory in the Underspire to make the 100 gold medal troops grind easier, added shiny keys in the pvp shop to make that grind easier, I just don’t understand why we can’t get something for this one.

9 Likes
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You no doubt are aware, but this maybe helpful to a player reading your post who may not be :-

“If you are actively looking for the Hoard Mimic as I was then make sure to just do the “lantern” kingdoms. The extra 20% mythstones make a huge difference to the number of ‘nul’ kingdoms (when you don’t make it to the Boss chest)
You can get a run of 8 chests doing lanterns but it is only 4 or 5 not which adds up to a lot of time doing wasted battles !”

3 Likes
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It took me 2 1/2 years to get this worthless troop because of how luck based it is, meanwhile others in my guild had 4+ of it.

I started tracking my progress and a more casual gamer, not being able to play this game for more than 1-2 hours a day, I can honestly say, grinding for this did kill any fun I once had playing it. If it wasn’t for the guild I was in, I probably would have given up and quit. With the how PvP is now and those dumb burning chests/immortals, I may still quit, as trying to get souls to upgrade an immortal is a god awful grind, but at least it isn’t pure luck and I can see progress.

My final stats for getting this:

4772 boss chests opened
524 mimic chests (10.98% of boss chests)
34 horde mimic chests (0.71% of boss chests, 6.49% of mimic chests)
1 horde mimic troop

So overall, I had about a 11% chance of getting a mimic battle after a boss fight, and less then a 1% chance of getting a horde mimic after a boss fight (or a 6.5% chance after the mimic fight). And getting the horde mimic, was about a 2% after a horde mimic battle, and then percentage drops considerably when compared to the mimic and boss battles.

Luck based troops/achievements like this, especially one that has 3 different levels of RNG/luck on it, are the worse game designs and just frustrate the player.

2 Likes
4

The shorthand I used was each Boss Chest was the equivalent of 1 gem key.

Over the years, I’ve very occasionally had RNG smile on me and get a mythic in < 100 keys. I’ve had others take thousands.

In my case, it was over 3400 boss chests before i got it but it shockingly didnt kill the collect-a-thon for me.

The Sentinels did.

3 Likes
5

I would argue that immortals aren’t really a grind because of how horribly scarce burning marks are handed out. The season immortal can easily reach a solid level with just a light grind, but the free burning marks are so few that barely any of the other immortals will hit a even modest level 4, and grinding hardcore barely has an impact compared to spending money. If you do buy the pass and hit 180k vp (which isn’t too terrible to reach within 11 weeks), it’ll greatly exceed a f2p’s grind of burning marks.

As for the horde mimic, it’s best to think of it as a ‘nice to have’ and not a ‘must have’, it’ll greatly improve your mindset.

6

They should drastically increase the drop rate for a short period of time (maybe one week) something like once a year. That would allow people to target it without playing thousands of hours and without making everyone end up with a hundred copies of it.

1 Like
7

Over 8000 boss chests without ever having got the card to drop. Only 37 hoard mimic battles in all those.
By comparison, 4 separate times I got 2 Nysha medals to drop in the same chest, including once on a regular mimic chest. Plus an instance of 2xAnu and a Nysha on one of my hoard mimics.
Was the only trophy I was missing at one point along with the only troop for quite some time until sentinels and gem dragons rng killed that

2 Likes
8

The issue isn’t “Needs A Lot Of Battles”, the issue is “Random Drop”. Changing the drop rate won’t help, unless it’s 100%, as sufficiently demonstrated by dragon eggs. The community has posted many proposals over the years on how to improve this, up to putting a once-only recipe into that forge that takes 10 Nysha medals for 1 Hoard Mimic (requiring around 30000 E12 battles on average). All of them have been ignored entirely, never even deemed worthy a response. Happy 10th Anniversary!

6 Likes
9

This isn’t a commentary on HM and it’s lame drop rate but rather a fellow guildie’s superb analysis of E12 medal grinding. It is applicable for the overall chase for the silly benchwarming shelf sitting dust collecting cheevo of a troop tho so here ya go…

Some notes about E12 medal grinding:

  • Baseline - grind kingdom L15 or lower, no Mythstone bonus gives 73 MS on average, allowing 3 runs before no Mythic fight.
  • Upgrading your grind kingdom to L16 averages 80 MS, 4-5 runs before no Mythic.
  • Chasing the Mythstone bonus with L15 kingdoms averages 88 MS, 8 runs before no Mythic.
  • Chasing the bonus with all kingdoms at L16 is where it gets crazy. Runs average 95 MS, allowing 19-20 runs before no Mythic.

Obviously you have to account for time spent finding the bonus and fighting sub-optimal matches - spell resistance, summon on death, status immunity for burn or poison based teams, etc. Those slowdowns can improve with practice as you learn to recognize problem troops, though, and it takes a big difference in seconds/match to make up for 5 empty fights just to refill Mythstones.

2 Likes
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The “average” may be 95, but the low end is 93 and that’s probably what I’d be highlighting. Which means you’d be “guaranteed” 14 runs before no mythic with the possibility of it being higher, but given the RNG horror stories that populate this board I’d try and set people’s expectations as low as I can while remaining honest/accurate.

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11

I got my only hoard mimic in Nov 2022. Haven’t gotten another. I thought waiting THAT long was annoying. The fact that people are still waiting, really sucks.

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12

Needs lots of battles and random drop are the same issue to me. It comes down to the probability, deviations from the norm, and the expected distribution of the number of attempts it will take people. With a significantly higher drop rate it absolutely would mitigate the chances of needing an extremely high number of attempts, and we know that’s something they can tweak easily (if they cared in the slightest about this issue).

The estimated current drop rate of 1/1000 stated above (based on 10% of 10% of 10%) would mean on average it should take 1000 battles to get one, but of course there will be a distribution with people taking (sometimes drastically) more or less tries than that.

At that rate, statistically you can expect ~39.4% of people to get it in 500 tries or less, ~63.2% of people to get it in 1000 tries or less, and ~99.3% of people to get it in less than 5000 tries. Of course, it really sucks if you’re that ~0.7% of people it takes more than 5000 tries to get, like the OP who is well beyond that.

Now if the drop rate of each level was briefly 50% instead of 10%, suddenly you have a 1/8 (12.5%) chance of getting one on average. At that rate you can expect ~41.4% of people to get it in 4 tries or less, ~65.6% in 8 tries or less, ~99.5% in 40 tries or less, and ~99.997% of people to get it under 80 tries. So 80 tries at 1/8 odds is almost exactly the same level of certainty as 10000 tries at 1/1000 odds. It could be somewhere in between those of course, that’s just an example.

I think that’s the real problem, I don’t think the current Dev team thinks about the math and how bad it can be for some people. They probably just think “10% chance, that sounds fine, derp, derp, derp…”. Or if they do understand that, then they truly just don’t care at all about how bad it can be for people at the wrong end of the bell curve.

So I was coming at it from the perspective of a middle ground where it would be obtained within a reasonable number of tries while still having some randomness to it (which we all know they love). I would gladly take a week were I knew if I did around a hundred rounds of E12 I would be pretty much certain to get one and be done with it. Other solutions like adding a crafting recipe would be welcome too, but it seems like cranking up the drop rate for a special event would be easier for them to implement.

Just my take.

1 Like
13

Not sure how deep to go in changing the rate but why not increase the chance for the troop during a vault event. Vault and hoard are similar so it would make some kind of sense.

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14

now its been released for a good while, must be years at this point. why not add it to the SF with a unique recipe.

15

For this special 10th anniversary milestone, it’d be nice of the Gems dev team to put Hoard Mimic and the Underspire Sentinels in the Soulforge for Thanksgiving weekend as a great way for most to celebrate.

It’d also make the people that say the Gems of War devs always makes things easier later on (more) correct. Cuz… uh… right now, I haven’t seen it for Hoard Mimic or the Sentinels…

10 Likes
16

The truth is that the Horde Mimic should never have been added to the game like this. And hopefully the devs never do something like this again.

The Horde Mimic should never have been a Kingdom troop, but a Vault troop and that is where it should have been added.

The achievement/trophy should never have been tied to getting the troop itself, but tied to getting the battle.

And there should have been multiple ways to obtain it since the devs decided it wasn’t going to be craftable in the soul forge. The main way would be through Epic Vault Key battles, as that would give you the highest chance. With a much smaller chance on a regular Vault Key battle. Then also have the same current chance from the Horde Mimic battles in explore (because it wouldn’t feel so bad, if the easier way to get it was with an Epic Vault Key), and the Gnome Room in a Deep Delve should have given a chance to reward it, since its normally an enemy troop in that battle.

And i’m sure the devs thinking process on this was that it was a long term goal geared toward “new players”. The problem is, this game can’t keep new players, they quickly realize how overwhelming everything is, for what was once a simple gem matching game, and how far behind they are from everyone else that plays, that they probably give up after constantly getting destroyed in every other mode except for the Kingdom Campaign.

Maybe had I been still grinding out for Geoff to get medals and souls, going after the Horde Mimic wouldn’t have been so bad. But I haven’t touched Explore since I finally got the useless troop.

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