Five stars only requires finishing a single weapon. It makes sense for that to be the lowest-rarity weapon available, so here’s a quick table.
Kingdom
Lowest rarity weapon
Adana
Epic
Blackhawk
Rare
Blighted Lands
Rare
Bright Forest
Epic
Broken Spire
Common
Darkstone
Ultra-rare
Dhrak-Zum
Rare
Divinion Fields
Common
Dragon’s Claw
Ultra-rare
Drifting Sands
Epic
Forest of Thorns
Rare
Ghulvania
Epic
Glacial Peaks
Epic
Grosh-Nak
Rare
Karakoth
Common
Khaziel
Epic
Khetar
Ultra-rare
Leonis Empire
Common
Maugrim Woods
Rare
Merlantis
Rare
Mist of Scales
Rare
Pan’s Vale
Epic
Pridelands
Common
Shentang
Rare
Silverglade
Rare
Sin of Maraj
Legendary
Stormheim
Ultra-rare
Suncrest
Rare
Sword’s Edge
Common
Urskaya
Rare
Whitehelm
Common
Wild Plains
Common
Zaejin
Rare
Zhul’Kari
Rare
In total, there are 8 kingdoms whose lowest-rarity weapon is common. There are 14 whose lowest rarity is rare. There are 4 with ultra-rare, 7 with epic, and 1 (hi, Sin of Maraj!) whose lowest-rarity weapon is legendary.
Over many months of play, especially if you make it to PVP tier 1 every week, almost all of these seem manageable. 7 epic weapons requiring 36 ingots each is the worst of the lot, since we only get 3 each week from PVP tier rewards. That is 252 ingots, or 84 weeks’ worth of tier rewards. Of course, new players will also get quite a few epic ingots from post-battle awards over those months, so it won’t take a full 84 weeks. And once you run out of ultra-rare troops to upgrade you can turn those 4 ingots per week into 0.4 epic ingots.
This all seems fairly reasonable, actually. When I started doing this I expected a lot worse of an outcome for new players.
I kinda agree with you @Caglayantilsim . I want to progress with the Power Leveling in the game that is why I went ahead and upgraded one of the weapons.
The main problem as I see is that the weapons is not really anything special, then 60 Legendary Ingots feels like a lot to spend on any of them, and that even if we progress with the Power leveling. It just feels wrong.
Because we have to ask ourselves, why can’t any of the new weapons be really good? Last good weapon we got was Dawnringer. I don’t expect new Legendary weapons to be that good, but it would had felt good if we felt that 60 Legendary ingots was not totally wasted for progressing in the game.
This is interesting analysis but feels kind of depressing to me. 84 weeks is more than a year and a half. I had every kingdom 5-starred in more like “half a year”.
This is exactly the problem I see in GW. In a healthy game, power creep is a side effect of helping new players close the gap between them and endgamers at a reasonable rate. 5 stars in every kingdom represents +30 stats, so it’s important to being a competitive player. I haven’t tabulated how many souls/traitstones that cost me before, but I did it somewhere around the 6 month mark. 3 months later, I had Dawnbringer. I want that to be accessible to dedicated newbies.
Souls can convert to higher-rarity ingots, but that conflicts with other Kingdom Power goals and farming Dawnbringer.
GoW’s moves are very much “rich get richer”. With each new feature, I’m more able to keep pace with the endgamers, but people who started months after me will have to work harder to reach where I am in the same amount of time. That’s not right.
The game should be unfair to endgamers. I should be working my ass off to stop myself from being usurped by newer players who got to 90% of my power in half the time it took me to get here. Instead I’m comfy in Bracket 3, safe in the knowledge that with every release promising new players have to work twice as hard to get half as much.
It’s a lot like the real economy from the 80s to the 2000s. I don’t like playing as a Baby Boomer.
You took less time as a new player to do both of those things than I did as a late/end-game player. Heck, getting all my kingdoms to level 10 was something like 18 months for me (admittedly in a different gold economy).
One thing you or Grundulum didn’t factored, because it’s hard to properly measure it, is how some ingots will drop from gem chests. Because players will open these chests during their… career… , but unless the devs introduce ingots in Guild Chests and specially in Vip chests (to make vip levels more attractive for new customers) things can still be slow.
Anoher thing i forgot: The monthly/weekly login rewards are a steady flow of resources for new players, and the months with ingots are surely great for any player, but specially for those who don’t have competitive teams/time to farm ingots over and over.
Not all of the associated weapons in the above table are obtainable though. For instance, I have not been able to 5* Khaziel, since the epic weapon was apparently from a special event that I missed.
That’s probably the Deepstone, the associated event was several years ago. I seem to recall the devs mentioning that old event weapons would be made available again in a non cash shop way to help get around the power level limitations. Then again, I also seem to recall the devs mentioning that Raid/Invasion weapons would make some kind of recurring guest appearance in the Soul Forge. The latter appears to have been shelved in favor of cash shop offers, so the former might not hold either.
That’s better, actually. You skip 12 weeks’ worth of epic ingots, and take 22.5 weeks of legendary ingots. So you need now 72 weeks of epic ingots (6 weapons) and 45 weeks of legendary ingots (2 weapons).
It’s nice to see the lowest rarities except… most of the kingdoms listed don’t get it naturally and are locked behind events such as Ghulvania and Khaziel being two prime examples. I’m sure there are plenty of others that I can’t think of at the moment. Fine for older players, problematic for newer ones or those who didn’t get or missed out on the events with the weapons in question.
I believe that Sins of M, Ghulvania, and Khaziel are the only kingdoms for which a new player needs to complete a legendary or higher weapon to reach 5 stars. This assumes they use the soulforge to craft epic weapons.
From my experience, there’s several kingdoms which will then require epic or higher to reach 5 stars, including Adana, Drifting Sands, Glacial Peaks, and maybe 2 to 4 others. From Grundulum’s list above, looks like Adana, Bright Forest, Drifting Sands, Glacial Peaks, Khaziel, Pan’s Vale. Might be another one where a weapon below epic exists, but a new player won’t have it.
Well, regardless of the evidence supporting “maybe its possible in a reasonable time-frame starting from scratch” … I mean, Grundulum’s post looks solid enough for that …
Regardless! I have enough Ingots to upgrade one more legendary weapon. Just one! So far all I’ve upgraded ever is Divine Broken Protector, and that isn’t even all the way because its got a dumb not-really-a-bonus upgrade on it. I don’t want to burn everything I have left just for this kingdom thing, what if there’s a weapon in the next two years that I actually want to use??
Plus they’re not even particularly good weapons, plus the upgrades on them are nothing to write home about at all. 10% chance to summon a common that shares a color with it, please …