Weekly troop > weekly troop ascended (good troops/epics/empowered converters) event keys > other weekly troop ascended > over buy weekly troop for a traitstone I really need > raw glory key opens
Main just mythics the troop every week regardless, has no need for traitstones, and I’m far from needing the raw glory to open mythics right now but its there if I need it. Alts mostly follow that pattern.
Your gold key gem estimates don’t take into account how many gems are given for the respecitve key drops btw. Gold keys can drop 1 or 2 gems at a time, equal weighting, for an average of 1.5 per time the gems drop. Glory keys estimates are correct at 2 to 4 at a time, average of 3 per time they drop.
The math does a properly proportioned legendary task has several times the “value” of the same gold spent by individuals on gold keys: Instead of LTs what about - #42 by Mithran. Unless you value gems several times higher than I did, this trend persists even if you have all existing mythics and you are a top four donator in the guild, but completely discounting the fact that the top donators in the guild often set the pace for the middle ranks regardless of the guild requirement. The only real reason to spend raw gold on gold keys is if you really need a bunch of minor traitstones or a common troop ascenscion quickly, since this is still way cheaper in every instance than burning a respective orb (that you don’t already have a ton of). Gold is way easier to come by in that instance, otherwise, gold to gold keys is one of the worst investments you can make (right behind inefficiently putting treasures into hoard).
However, the huge part of the equation you are ignoring is that you are exchanging a massive amount of glory for a tiny amount of gems or gold, ignoring the other drops. While most drops can be safely ignored, as it is easy to bring them to the point where you never ever have to worry about them again, mythic draws are a lot less of a sure thing. The worst luck I’ve personally experienced on any single mythic draw was spending about 4.5x the average cost to not get it, and the second worst was spending about 4.5x the average cost and getting it only at the very end. Even if you are very very far ahead, this is probably the most critical thing to consider, especially in the face of any potential economy nerfs - you should never feel safe to throw away mythic pulling resources unless you get some other major tangible benefit from them. I can pull an average of about 40 mythics with what I have on hand right now and still don’t feel “safe”, for good reason. Aside from traitstones, which dead end hard, the biggest thing you get from legendary tasks are either mythics or mythic building resources.
So, lets look at the numbers from that lens. 2600 glory keys, the approximate difference you’ll lose get in this exchange by overbuying to mostly get gold for LTs, carries an MPP (mythic purchase power, or the amount of average mythics this resource will pull) of ~.364. The average legendary task carries an MPP of 0.005323 - 0.010323 MPP, the former number being if no random mythic in the drop pool is valuable to you and the latter being if every one is. Even adjusted for best case scenario where nobody in the guild owns any mythics yet and everybody contributes an equal amount to said legendary tasks, your per-player return on investment is about 0.296 MPP for ~28.7 legendary tasks with that extra gold guild-wide. And thats an ideal scenario where everybody in your guild is doing this and nobody has any mythics (somehow). Your effective MPP would be a fraction of that - most guilds capable of hitting legendary tasks nowadays more than likely have members that have a great deal of their mythic drops already, and most guilds don’t have requirements high enough where everybody is contributing an average amount to legendary tasks (need > 1.5 mil minimum to breach the barrier, anybody contributing exactly 1.5 min in said guild is not contributing any percentage to any legendary task). Theres obviously some rounding and estimation math in there and some of this has shifted (event keys are worth slightly more), but the gulf is so big that I’m pretty confident that there is no way you are better off using this metric by buying the extra glory packs for gold than using the extra glory on glory keys. That puts other incidentals aside, of course, but test case assumes you have enough glory to piss away by converting it to gold already. For those wondering, epic tasks mostly have a worse gold to MPP ratio than legendary tasks, because a lot of their “gem value” is in the other resources they give.
The further away from the late-late-endgame spectrum we go, the more valuable raw glory to glory key becomes by comparison to gold to legendary task, in particular being the highest ratio of epic troops per mythic drawn, which at this point is actually pretty crucial for filling out any event where you didn’t dump a ton of gems to ascend the godslayer/siegebreaker all the way (or that you happened to have started after). Because of the sheer bloat on Epic troops at this point, still generally the rarity tier added to most each month. On average, for each mythic you pull with glory keys, you will obtain ~263 epic troop drops, compared to the ~111 from gem keys or ~90 from VIP keys (including the double drops). If you have a comparable amount of mythic-earning keys of any type and you were starting from scratch right now, you would, on average barely finish ascending every single key dropped legendary before Epics using the worst Legendary to Epic ratio drop, glory keys. If you used primarily Gem Keys or Event Keys (for most kingdoms), your epics would be severely lagging behind. A comparable “mythic’s worth” of glory keys also give better incidental drops than Gem Keys, aside from ingots (which do not drop from Gem Keys in any usable quantity, even over the course of months of saving). Glory keys play a pivotal role here.
So I decided to go over this again with more broad stroke estimates to show how why this is impractical. For the raw mythic chance in legendary tasks, 0.005, 30 LTs garner an average of 0.15 (random) mythics. Including all resources dropped by the combined legendary tasks, you can earn an average of about another 0.15 mythics (the total mythics you earn are roughly half the raw mythic drop for random/old, little under half can go to the new/exclusive one, small portion of that can go to a specific kingdom in the form of event keys). For practical purposes, nearly half the mythic “value” in the above would be useless to any player enacting this strategy, because those mythics would be duplicates. 2600 glory keys average mythic drops is >0.36 mythics (historical drop rate of mythics from glory keys is 0.014%, with the 4 being omitted from the in-game display due to lack of decimal resolution, and it was claimed to have not been changed at this time, so this is the number I use in my estimates). If you trust the in game rates display more, its still 0.26 to be contributed to a new mythic, which is more than the effective value you’ll get even if everybody in the guild contributes to your legendary tasks, which in an of itself is not a realistic scenario. For a scenario just on the edge of believably, if you got, lets say, ten people in your guild to regularly enact this strategy, and none of them needed old mythics (because why would they at this point?), and they contribute above and beyond the other members of the guild, your total return on investment would be 0.05 mythics worth of resources for all 10 of them (plus 20 others that did not contribute here) while each of them gave up 0.26-.36 mythics (depending on which number you trust) worth for the pleasure. The only way the “use glory to get gold to get legendary tasks” number is bigger is if you trust that everybody in your guild will follow this method consistently, everybody needs every single mythic (and somehow not epics to ascend), and you trust the in-game rate display for glory keys, and even then, its only slightly bigger.
tl;dr: Would not recommend.