Locked and Loaded (Weekly Event Post)

After 10 or so battles (Elspeth+Rowanne+Kraken+Aurai, didn’t took long really), I only had 7 snotgems, so I was a bit disappointed… Maybe I have to be more patient.

I had one event stone after my first nine battles. Sometimes RNG works in your favor, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I just back out and open a gold chest. It refreshes the opposition. I think it took me around 2 hours.

Yes you do.

I’d guess you’re wrong and LOTS of us will finish the event in the 1st couple days. Seriously? Sub-optimal? None of the events are designed to be optimal in any way. They are meant mostly to push you in different directions than the norm. Even the PvP events usually have you picking & choosing specific battles to find what you’re trying to kill.

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Exactly.

However, this event is right up my alley as I’m focusing on explore for Arcanes right now and Khaziel has stones that I need. They wouldn’t be my top priority, but nor are they a waste of time for me. 150 - 250 explores in Khaziel as the price for a week’s worth of rewards is hardly a price at all for me.

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What I call sub-optimal is that an event working only in Explore mode forces you to play one kind of game only. It’s not bad per se, when you tie it to a broad objective, like a number of victories, killed enemies, or even a specific color.
When you tie the event to a specific enemy type, you restreint the game to a specific kingdom, in this case Khaziel. This game mode is not exactly rewarding, especially if you storm through it with a tailored team. Add to this that I can’t seem to generate a lot of dwarves from Khaziel (but that’s probably the RNG being naughty with me at the moment), and that my even more specific situation is that I recently grinded Khaziel for Arcane traitstones, so I don’t really need them.

I sampled it this morning, grinding it optimally for 20 minutes, and got 15 snotstones. I couldn’t go faster than sacrificing Aurai, casting with Rowanne, skip, explore again. That’s more than 4 hours full time to have the 200 stones required to complete the event. My numbers are flawed, because the sample is not large enough, but as a dedicated player with some optimal team, I find this long and boring, so I “suppose” it may feel the same for others, and reflect on the total number of players.

LOTS of players will complete it, yes. AS MUCH AS MANY players than the usual events running through PvP AND Explore modes, I don’t think so.

Yes, I’ll do it, because I love the game, and been loving it for the last 3 years, but I don’t remember an event being so limited and boring than this one. And don’t try to start me on Treasure hunt events, I LOVE treasure hunting, and I would do it all day if the rewards were “optimal” :grinning:.

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Put the event in Darkstone, and it would be exactly my position. But it would be boring as hell too. :wink:

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Opening mail works too (even if mailbox is empty) :slightly_smiling_face:

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Khaziel is not the only place to farm - I also visit Adana & Stormheim. All 3 are close to each other. If all three are empty I visit my Guild which refreshes.
(Actually I have more luck in Adana.)

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I wasn’t aware that worked, mainly because it wasn’t refreshing the hourly tribute. Thanks.

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Am I the only one finding it upsetting that people complain about an explore-only event? Because I don’t remember me complaining about all the events like “Kill 500 enemies in PVP”, “Kill 200 Stryx in PVP”, “Kill 250 red enemies in PVP”, “Kill 200 monsters in PVP” which are FAR more common than explore-only events or explore-and-PVP events. And I hate them. I hate PVP. I hate it so, so, so, so much.

But I didn’t complain because heck, it’s a new event every week. And sometimes they’re obnoxious even outside of PVP (hi, summoning) or I like them but others don’t (hi, Treasure Hunt). Different things for different tastes.

And because of that, it upsets me that people here are actually complaining about explore-events. If every killing event would be made into PVP-and-explore, heck, I would love that because it would make everyone happy and let people play what they like to play.

But actually asking to get rid of the event mode you don’t like is pretty mean towards those who love that mode but hate the one you like.
Just grind through it or ignore the event. Just like I do when there’s PVP events which make me want to flip a table every damn time.

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Speaking of events, I just noticed that the event stone counter now appears first on the events tab. Cool! Figured that would require a code update, but apparently not!

Edit: crap. I should have taken a screenshot. I swear that the event stone counter was first, but now it’s back to last. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I have no problem with Explore only events except one thing…

These are usually Explore AND PvP. Bit of an odd choice to limit it for this one event.

I don’t really care though, I fly through it easily with Sunbird.

Also… I believe you can do PvP events in Casual, which should make your life a lot easier.

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I’m one of the nice ones that will put up a 4 monster (or other) team on kill monsters in pvp week. They should all be pvp/explore.

But if you dont pay pvp, you should be able to elspeth/bombot through the easy casual pvp opponents.

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I saw it too.

It happens when you finish some part of the event. Then after a new “hourly reset” when you collect tributes it moves back to the last spot.

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That could be said for every PVP-only-event as well, then.

Not sure what casual PVP you guys have, but even on normal difficulty, casual PVP is rough. And if you need to kill a specific type of troop, you can’t just always go with the leftmost/easiest match, so casual PVP, even when not adding any difficulty on top, can be just the same hell as normal PVP. I actually often have more problems winning in casual than in regular PVP; it’s like the leftmost match in regular PVP is very often someone very weak while in casual, it seems far more adjusted to my level (which is sadly not the same as my troop count or playing skill, which are both much lower than my level, lol. Doing nothing but explores raises levels very fast…)

Still, I appreciate everyone who sets matching PVP teams for the weekly events… and, outside of these events, a 4x Fire Bomb defense.

I think the devs and the players see things a little differently there, and that’s why people are grouchy. There are a lot of ways to play GoW, and people like different aspects.

The people who shoot for competitive PvP are hit the hardest by explore-only challenges, because PvP ranking depends on “number of games played”. So if a player takes a few hours to focus on Explore, they feel they’ve lost some amount of chance at a high PvP ranking.

Other people just prefer one or the other between PvP and Explore. PvP offers more variety, or at least more challenge, and offers some rewards you can’t get from Explore. Explore offers better chances at rare traitstones, but not everyone’s always chasing that goal.

So many players see events restricted to Explore or PvP as something that forces them to alter their playstyle in a “not fun” way to get the rewards.

I think devs see it a little differently. I think to them it’s more of a difficulty slider that lets them offer better rewards some week if they pick an Explore kingdom with a low rate.

But it doesn’t work out like that to players. The rewards are nice, but “I do a thing I don’t want for 200+ encounters” is a very big cost to most players. For me, that’s a couple of days of Explore matches. Maybe the devs WANT the events to take a couple of days to complete. That doesn’t seem in line with how most of them go.

Personally I don’t think too hard about it. The rewards are usually very nice, but I don’t want to do things I don’t find “fun” in order to get them. I tend to play a lot of PvP at the beginning of the week, then try to grind out Explore matches for the rest.

I also agree with @Sheba though this is a sort of different thread: “Casual” PvP isn’t an answer to “I can’t handle ranked”. Maybe it is earlier on, but I’m somewhere past level 700 and for a long time Casual has been more or less the same kinds of teams at the same power levels for less rewards. I guess it’s nice to be able to refresh the battles for gold, but it doesn’t feel different enough from ranked for me to want to lose trophies and glory for doing the same work. None of my teams can beat stuff on higher difficulties, so that doesn’t compensate. It’s frustrating how many people act like Casual’s some kind of low-difficulty way to grind out a quick 200 PvP matches with zero effort. It’s still a chore for someone who doesn’t like PvP.

I guess - as an explore player who doesn’t even play for the traitstones but for the non-challenge (because I just want to relax and not-concentrate when playing this game) - what I find the most crippling is the time difference between PVP and Explore.

Killing 200 dwarves in Explore is fast. Sunbird/Fire Bomb/Fire Bomb/whatever clears three battles a minute. Yes, I might not have four dwarves in every battle - something I can adjust in (casual) PVP by refreshing during PVP-events - but I am still a lot faster because the average PVP match takes 2-5 minutes, depending on difficulty and board luck. So killing 200 whatevers in PVP takes me a LOT longer than killing 200 whatevers in Explore does. So it’s not just not-fun for me, it’s also very long-lasting not-fun.

The worst events for me are the “kill 500 enemies in PVP” ones because those obviously cannot even be made much faster at all since the type of enemy doesn’t matter. It’s just 125 PVP matches (assuming I don’t lose, which is a ridiculous assumption, given how often I get to pick between three Psion/Ragnagord/Famine/Whoever battles…). Assuming I would need two minutes per battle because I suddenly turn into a genius, that’s 4,1 hours.
I finished this week’s explore event in a bit more than an hour, blazing through it with Sunbird. No comparision. By now, I’m basically having already double the needed snotstones, despite not being able to play yesterday and not exploring in Khaziel anymore, but in Broken Spire, Wild Plains and Leonis where there are random dwarves ever so often.

Casual PVP is definitely good for the PVP events needed to kill a certain type of enemy because of the refresh option. Other than that, casual has no appeal to me over ranked. It’s definitely not easier. Still basically all opponents are meta-teams, full of fully traited mythic troops.

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