I calculated this during the first bounty event and my projections seem to hold, but I decided to go over this again anyways. Note that the following assumes a player that is able to trivially complete any of the battles with a two bounty troop team by the end. If you are struggling to complete the toughest battles with 1 or 2 bounty troops, it might be worth tuning the battle you repeat so you actually have more score per battle.
Even assuming you complete the hardest stage available every time, win almost every battle, and have mythic prior bounty troops, buying a shop tier gets you about one more possible reward tier (shop tiers 1-2 combined count as 1, and what I will be using as a baseline here) and using three bounty troops instead of 2 on the final stage gets you maybe 1 more reward tier. The final reward is just out of reach even with completely perfect play and several wins with 4x bounty troop on the last one unless you frontloaded a t6 or got a t5 and orb’d the bounty captain to mythic. So, assuming even these best case scenarios, you can look at every reward teir 15+ as analogous to x number of gems in shop purchases + y of your time, and the possibility of a single reward above your current tier (does not apply to the last one, and if you lose even a single sigil you might not make it) as z of your time.
Mythic Bounty troops probably won’t apply to a lot of you this month, so you’ll need to spend more to get to access to even earlier tiers. But due to the way the amount of points requires for each tier increases, the first few reward tiers will always be fairly trivial, and the last few are too far apart for small tweaks in your score/battle to impact outside of the next one. And due to the way ascensions and drop pools work, you also are not likely to get another ascension on a non-bounty captain troop by simply buying shop tiers. Purchasing a shop tier late is even worse, because you lost a ton of battles with a potentially higher modifier. Thus, you don’t move up your highest possible reward tier by more than a little by investing in the raid shop ever, unless you don’t have any bounty troops or the means to get them, and your best return is always to frontload the purchase before starting the event.
Regardless of how far you have ascended previous troops, if you want to maximize rewards for both time and gem investment, I’d almost always recommend:
- t2 purchase (so you can unlock a new troop right away, even if it is only a rare)
- t3 purchase (again, up front) if you are going for that valut key (YMMV on its actual payout)
- 3-4 unique traited bounty troops for as long as you are comfortable/it is easy to get a bit of extra score
- 2 bounty troop team, the fastest one you can manage while being safe, on repeat, on the hardest battle you are able to clear, until you are out of sigils or reach a reward milestone where it is clear you wont reach the next (you’ll be between r14 and 16 depending on how far ascended your previous troops were and how many battles you lost, between 15 and 17 if you did a t3 purchase)
You’ll always need to put in gems to reach the end of the rewards. If you still want to maximize orbs for time investment (for whatever reason):
- t6 purchase, trait and ascend before you start playing (you won’t reach all the way with a t5 except under ludicrous circumstances, and the loss of early points may require you to do a t7 purchase to bridge the gap)
- mythic traited bounty captain always on the team
- 3 or more bounty troops to buffer some score
- 2 bounty troop team, the fastest one you can manage while being safe, on repeat, on the hardest battle available, until you are out of sigils or reach the final rewards (this will net you 1-2 minor orbs and 2 more major orbs than you would have with a minimum more time expenditure, but having spent over 1000 more gems)
I tried to represent this with colors in this table:
Modifier needed shows the minimum amount your total score from all play needs to be modified assuming you play every possible battle at the highest stage available and get every possible valraven while purchasing that tier in the bounty shop. Assuming perfect play/all valravens/hardest level played green is trivial to reach with 1 or 2 bounty troops, yellow is trivial to reach with 2 (t6 assumes one is the mythic captain, which is a x12 for one troop), orange requires special circumstances to reach with 2 (such as using 3-4 troops on early rounds and good valraven RNG), light red requires more multiplier than you’d have access to unless you orb’d the captain or continually used 3+ troops (again, with perfect conversion of sigils), and darker red requires everything ascended all the way and 4 bounty troops all the way up to battle 20, and then for most of those battles (highly, highly improbable) and the darkest red is literally impossible because you won’t have enough sigils. Keep in mind that, again, this is assuming maximum possible score and all valravens - a slightly higher multiplier and using more bounty troops in earlier fights affords just a bit of leeway on what your final modifier needs to be and how many losses/misses you can take.
I could chart out the in-between tier shop purchases, but it pretty much just involves shifting the t2 graph’s color ranges down one for each reward tier like I said before - you’ll need higher relative multipliers to reach the same relative tier with the sigils you have available, but you’ll be more likely to have those multipliers - to a point. Similarly, losing a few times just shifts it up 1 (though having a Valraven and losing can cost you over 3 battles worth of score - a few of these “experimental” battles can kick you down a couple rewards for the t2 purchase, since you have such few sigils to work with to begin with, unless you commit to the slower/occasional loss/higher total score team and win enough to recoup the occasional lost bird).
tl;dr:
The event would give many people impression that maximizing your score per battle allows a wide variety of rewards to be on the table or not, but this only really applies if you are struggling to complete the battles by including just 1 or 2 bounty troops. What really matters is your shop purchases, previous bounty troops ascensions, and how much time you are willing to spend, and you generally fall within a narrow range of possibilities.
- Figuring out the highest reward you are willing to spend for and frontload your purchase, in simplest terms:
– A t2 purchase gives you a baseline of r14-16 pretty easily, while unlocking the bounty troop a month before it goes in chests
– Your shop purchase “buys” up to one additional reward tier per shop tier purchase (after t2)
– Your time/optimizing to maximize bounty points (assuming near perfect play) buys up to one additional reward tier (and does not apply to the final reward tier, unless you also orb the captain to mythic)
– Gambling with an “optimized” team and losing a battle, a valraven, or both a few times can cost you a reward teir, unless you commit to eeking out a similar total score with said team occasionally taking losses but getting more per battle to recoup, which costs you time. - doing a few battles with 4x bounty troops, then use the fastest/safest team you can with your two highest bounty troops total modifiers is the best way to maximize both time and gem investment.
- doing a few battles with 4x bounty troops, then using the safest team you can with your highest 3x bounty troop modifiers is the best way to maximize gem investment (but again, to the max of maybe one extra reward tier at the cost of a lot of time)
- This doesn’t apply if you are struggling to complete the highest available battles just as they if you are using 1 or 0 bounty troops. If this is the case, you might actually benefit from going to lower stages with more bounty troops so you can actually get the most score out of each sigil.