Do let us know if you succeed at ASE and share your team/treasure level. I’m wondering how much do we need to level up in order to make it possible.
For sure, although there’s a good chance I make an honest attempt at the next faction before ASE.
ASE is definitely the hardest due to the great synergy the boss room has. I’ve never resented a troop that fills it’s self more.
I for see them having to lower the difficulty though eventually. People can’t get their faction to 2k renown without beating delves at 500. And there’s simply not enough gold in the economy to support guilds and everyone getting their Factions to 1k level. Specially with a new faction coming out every week. Things will balance out over time.
I’ve come to learn the hard way, the more synergy the faction team has, the harder it actually is (yay mirror matches). So I guess I should be thankful that most of them don’t have great synergy lol.
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My personal thoughts on the matter are that in 4.0, delves are really still in a “proof of concept” phase. Yeah, there are three (and soon to be four factions), but there’s no overarching need to work on delves or carrot to chase with delves… yet.
Something’s still missing. On the previous dev Q&A stream, the devs did tease that there was something coming down the road. Perhaps, that is what the call for beta testers (next week???) for 4.1 is about? After all, wasn’t 4.1 supposed to be about guild management QoL improvements? Further concerning, is that the existing event schedule is now known to be reworked to accomodate one more event type. If this event type is the missing piece of delves/underworld, the question asked by the OP is about to become a lot more relevant.
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Eh wot? How did I miss that?
Salty talked about on the Monday stream that beta was coming soon-ish, as well as the reveal of whatever the new event type is on the next stream.
Came completely out of nowhere.
Sounds like whatever is coming in the revamped event schedule requires 4.1.
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This is my stance when it comes to what kinds of adjustments might happen for factions.
We’re not getting another kingdom for a year. That tells me factions are the star for 10-11 more months. It might be too hard to max out Hall of Guardians today, but the design of the feature was made with 11 months from now in mind. This time next year, people will crunch numbers and try to figure out the “right” order to tell newbies to go about maxing these. It won’t be the chronological order. Hall of Guardians might turn out to be one newbies are advised to leave at a low level for farming.
I feel like this feature was made and balanced with that world in mind. I don’t feel like the devs cared if it was possible or easy to max every faction as it releases. That doesn’t make strategizing and trying to figure out if you can violate expectations wrong. But it makes my expectation of difficulty tweaks very low.
Same time, it’s not my style to lead this kind of pack. I like resource hoarding, so for me the best strategy is to postpone renown for later. I think that’s also part of the dev design for this mode. Where some people see a flaw, I see a mode that changes roles as you progress.
I play the game on both my phone and console (yes, I love this game). I’ve had more people quitting over the new expectations and I think the delve vs guild is slightly to blame. The terms ‘chore’ and ‘expectations’ were in every goodbye post. My console guild, while still almost full, does not even get past 7 on the tasks. I am okay with this since we need to have people focus on their individual progression… but the delves put an extra strain on trying to progress on that level. I’m 1066 on the phone and 1222 on the xbox… and I have put aside personal progression for the guild because the gold is spread too thin.
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The problem at the moment is two-fold.
- The incentive for raising treasure hoards past 100 isn’t in place yet. Post 100, raising treasure hoards is extremely expensive. Right now, the only incentives are very marginal, a faction pet, 90+% chances for common or rare daily ingots, and an odd stat point or two to life and armor. Not very compelling. Something will come down the road as incentive to invest millions of gold per faction as a carrot on the stick. That’s practically a guarantee.
- Delves are vastly more time-intensive than other daily activities. Unlike sigil events, where each daily allotment is 4-8 battles (depending on valravens and ignoring purchased sigils), full clears on delves require 24 or 27 battles. Even at entry level 20, one is looking at 30 minutes for a speed clear, and 45-60 minutes for normal pacing clears. At higher delve levels, speed clearing isn’t possible, so the time requirements become even greater. Further, daily delve sigils are “use them or lose them”. That creates an significant pressure on players to invest large quantities of time to delving an not to other game activities.
When a sufficient carrot is presented, the pressure to play delves and invest large sums of gold into Hoards instead of LTs is going to boil over for many guilds. That will be the danger of delves being a guild killer, and might come with the upcoming 4.1 patch.
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I wouldn’t say Delve is a guild killer, but I would say every event as a whole is starting to become guild killers. “The straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Tuesday: Faction Event
Wednesday: Pet Event
Thursday: Class Event
Friday: Weekend Event
Everyday: Raid/Invasion/Guild Wars
In theory, daily events are awesome. More things to do. In practice, its currently dangerous as you’re almost expected to participate or feel like you’re missing out on what others are getting and falling behind. However, those that participate are also losing out as these events don’t generate gold worth noting.
Delves are dangerously close to be the symbol of guild killing though if it happens.
- 3 Sigils a day become a symbol of participate or miss out encouraging players to participate in Delves.
- Delves take a long time under normal situations.
- Delves don’t give a worthwhile amount of gold.
- Delves require a large mass of gold to do well.
- Most players were already short on time and gold before Delves became a thing.
Basically, time spent on Delves is less time getting the gold that the Devs wanted a sink for in the first place. On top of the lost time, any gold spent on Delves is gold no longer available for the guild either.
The best solution for most people is to pretend Delves don’t exist, which actually causes players to lose out on a lot of Legendary or Mythic Ingots as well as new monthly troops.
I haven’t played Delves in a week (mainly because all 3 factions are at 500. The incentive to play it doesn’t exist. 1x Treasure at Delve 500/that difficulty isn’t worth it.) and I’m just not inspired to farm extra gold right now because I’m just going to lose it all anyways.
I just don’t think the gold sink for the 0.1% with 200 million gold was really necessary to impact everyone else.
(Worth noting that October/November is completely jam packed full of quality (depends on the person) games for consoles. Mega Man 11, Forza Horizon 4, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Call of Duty Black Ops 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefield 5, Fallout 76, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Soul Calibur 6, Darksiders 3, Warriors Orochi 4, Hitman 2 and other titles I may miss including all PS4 exclusives I have no clue about. The tempation to switch off Gems of War and not come back is quite high right now.)
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I wish. I’ve done CK 500 with a non-faction team and I am on track to do ASE 500 with a non-faction team. Highest I’ve gotten with a faction team is about 220 in ASE.
(Ugh I didn’t want this as a direct reply but you can’t change it after you post it apparently.)
I feel like @skb31’s post has much wisdom contained in very short statements.
The people least happy with Delve are the people who want max renown, max hoards, and mythic everything yesterday. Most people I talk to have picked a level of participation they like and either see it as a chore
I don’t forsee new mechanics showing up to make us want to max our hoards. In fact, I don’t see the people complaining sticking to level 100 and waiting. Instead, that argument is really, “I am going to do this because I have to max anything I can, but I wish I felt like there was a better reward for it.”
Here’s my advice: don’t do work if you aren’t getting paid. If you think the gold you’re considering spending on your hoard would be better spent on your guild spend it on the guild. If you think what you get for leveling your hoard doesn’t pay you back, stop looking at its level.
10+ years of online gaming has taught me players will spend ridiculous amounts of effort filling up a progress bar for the sake of filling it up. That’s the carrot. The game says, “Oh, your hoard isn’t at level 1,000. Would you kindly spend some gold?” And something about that appeals to you. You spend the gold, even though you don’t want to. It’s almost like the games we play use psychology against us.
You don’t have to buy every tier for every faction event. You can get all rewards without buying a tier, and if you mess up a Valraven only tier 1 is required. I don’t think we should treat “placing top 10 on the leaderboard” as how everyone should play.
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Agreed. That’s a balancing act for the devs as a part of game balance.
Mechanics? Agreed, probably won’t happen. Now, the “I wish I felt that there was a better reward for it” part, that’s almost assuredly going to happen in the future.
Exactly. And that’s why there’s going to be a carrot in the future. To make the grind logically “worth it”.
Guilty as charged, on multiple fronts. Though, as I’ve aged, I’ve backed off considerably on that type of mentality. For some the carrot will always be “because I can”. However, those people will always be in the minority in terms of the total server population. For everyone else, there’s going to have to be a tastier carrot put into play at some point.
My gut tells me that at some point there will be mudflation to introduce chaos shards into the economy quicker to facilitate pushing factions past 100 (wasn’t there a chaos shard chest picture posted in the spoiler thread recently?). That would bring up a interesting scenario. Right now, it is easy to say that hoards stop at 100 because chaos shards are scarce commodities. Consider a scenario where chaos shards are as common as gold keys (essentially all-but-unlimited for a well-seasoned player). At that point, would players just sit on tens or hundreds of thousands of shards in their inventory? Or would players feel the compulsion to invest resources towards a long-term prize, if the only constraint was the gold costs to add treasure to high-level hoards?
It already happened. Higher Hoard Level pass 100 mean you will have easier time farming at higher Delve Level with lower risk, which in turn, give you higher Delve Chest level and more rewards.
I don’t think any reward tied directly to go pass Hoard Level 100 will ever happened. Billion golds and thousands Treasure doesn’t seem like a goal that any players can participate.
While as a company, they would want more profit, but they also have to do so while balancing the system, so that every players can get what they want in reasonable time, without dividing players’ base too much.
So far, all the “carrots” are achievable in a duration depending how active they are as a individuals and guild progress. Zuul’Goth’s is 6 month to 2-3 years. But if Hoard Level 1,000 become a goal with extra reward, it would be 10-100 years, hardly a reasonable time.
Also, Chaos Shards is actually plentiful enough if you’re using it wisely. Tying it to Hoard Level won’t be necessary.
That would be rewarded tied directly to get maximum Total Renown Point. They have discussed on stream it might be a spacial pet. (multiplying Total Renown Stats Bonus?)
Yes, they would, until spending again once a month for new Faction. Chaos shards might never be as common as Gold keys, that would make playing Delve battle aiming to get them no longer necessary, which will be a big Underworld failure.
Just for the record, I am both:
- sticking to level 100 to reliably grind, and
- complaining
Curmudgeonly and proud of it!
IMO it does not have to be a guild killer. If you want everything right now to keep up with people that do not work then yes you are going to run out of time. If you are patient and do the required rooms to get the renown then you are looking at 30 min a day tops. Tuesday is sometimes a problem if you work that day. Fortunately I will be off this Tuesday so I will be able to do a little more. I do like delve. Raid and invasion with the constant growth and wisdom orbs to me are more of a guild killer.
Thank you for all of your views on the topic…I still think this will become a problem when we get an increasing amount of underworld kingdoms…It may not affect the top guilds much,but those at a lower level will be.