I’ve been playing since early 2015 and would describe myself as a late-game player. My wife has been playing about as long and I’d say she’s more mid-to-late. We play every day and have a guild that balances activity with a casual feel. We get the elite campaign pass each time a new campaign comes out, since it supports the game and the goodies are nice too.
But boy there are a few things that would make my life easier as a late-game player. This focuses mainly on resources that I’m overstuffed with.
1) I have way too many souls and I keep getting way too many more.
Souls used to be a major challenge. But after I got Dawnbringer, I started gaining souls at such a ridiculous rate that getting back to 1M was easy. I’m now sitting at over 7M and would probably have over 10M if I disenchanted troops.
The Soulforge does not act as a sink for souls, because it relies on also spending other resources that are much rarer and I never have enough of them. There is no recipe in the Soulforge that takes souls alone. The same issue exists with medals: they’re very hard to earn, so even though you have to spend a lot of souls when giving troops their elite levels, the 10K/20K/30K soul cost is a drop in the ocean for me at this point, whereas what I really need are medals.
It would help to have something to spend souls on in the Soulforge that took souls alone, and converted them to some other resource. The cost can be relatively steep; it won’t matter to late-game players and will give mid-game players more interesting strategic decisions, while giving early players something more to look forward to.
2) The treasure hunt is a fun mini-game that’s wasted on poor rewards.
I loved the treasure hunt when it was introduced. I still love it. But I hardly ever play it, because as an investment of time it’s terrible. The reward structure makes sense only for early-game players, whereas for mid- to late-game it takes way more time to earn anything than players can earn any other way. So most of us are sitting on thousands of treasure maps we’ll never use.
We need, and have needed for a long time now, a system of tiered treasure hunts where players can spend more maps at a time to get higher-tier rewards. The cost multiplier per tier can be relatively steep here. If spending 10 maps got you a tier where you could get some jewel shards, gem keys, medal tokens, pet food, maybe vault keys or cursed runes from vaults, it’d be awesome. For 100 maps maybe you could get even better rewards. (These are rough suggestions only; I recognize the need for balancing and keeping rare things still relatively rare.) This not only gives players beyond the early game a reason to enjoy this mini-game again, but also makes treasure-map troops much more useful.
Consider how the arena was changed a while back. I never used to play the arena at all if I could help it after the early game, but the new arena offers an interesting benefit: three extra daily reward offers, with discounted prices. I still don’t play arena all that often, but now and then if I want to try for a different reward offer I’ll give it a shot and see what comes up.
3) Low-level delve treasures are worthless.
I also have a glut of all the treasure items from common to ultra-rare. They’re very easy to obtain through chaos portals. Because the gold cost to upgrade a faction’s treasure hoard is based on its current level and does not scale down with the rarity of troops you sacrifice, there is basically zero value to sacrificing low-level treasures that don’t meaningfully add XP to the faction hoard. (I mean seriously, no one is going to spend 150K gold to not gain even a single hoard level.) I don’t have much of a problem with the gold cost as it is, but something has to be done to make these worthless treasures meaningful.
My suggestion: Add Soulforge recipes allowing upgrades to the next rarity, like we already have for traitstones. For example, 5 of a certain treasure troop and 100 souls could bump the treasure up to 1 of the next rarity. This helps get rid of two common resources at once, while also encouraging players to sink more gold into their factions with treasure troops that actually do something.
Speaking of the Soulforge and treasures, the current recipes for converting the worthless orbs of growth to equally worthless lower-tier treasures are a joke. I like the idea that went into them but they fall short in execution. Really both recipes should produce higher-tier treasures.