Yeah i am not aiming for a strict and exact effort=reward ratio, i am not naive, but a what now 5 or 6?? different %chance event (honestly lost track and don’t care enough to make sure)chain to determine rewards? Come on…
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During the event we’ll have an opportunity to have more numbers and data to compare too. If @KYLENATOR001 and others could also collect the results of what they obtained from the Portals we can make better assumptions regarding the odds of Troops and Treasures drop rates and maybe present more viable options to the devs.
Even if they decide to not change anything in this feature we can certainly give a piece of our minds about future additions.
Just a last side note: We sort of accepted Zuul’Goth’s crafting 
which is also full of chances to get “nothing” and waiting until you get more chances to get “nothing”… Mostly because he is not very important to progress, not even a good troop by the way. But the factions are the imminent future direction of GoW so it does requires more attention and consideration from all parts involved, the players and the developers.
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I guess we will see. I haven’t been keeping track of my rewards too much but I would use gems to delve more, especially if i get the new (and hopefully changed 3rd trait) mythic relatively cheap. I’m not gem rich enough to chase top place in these sigil events, but I would do the event for the faction progress.
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I don’t think doing high level delves like 100+ sounds very easy, or very rewarding… @KYLENATOR001, by Tuesday we will all be over 100 in delves unless we halt progress, so are own delving experiences will be a good judge on how hard things can get, and how long a delve can take.
I picture it being very time consuming to complete high level delves…
My thoughts exactly. Unless the rewards go up as the difficulty goes up (which it doesn’t seem like), there is no reason to aim for 500 until a hoard is maxed which is… well… I won’t go into detail since I made my feelings clear on that.
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Dungeons had randomised rewards when first released. We here pointed out how unfair and irritating that might be, and devs amended it.
Same may well happen here. I’d accept marginally lower overall reward for the certainty that doing extra stages did mean extra reward.
@sirrian always cited a core theme that the game should reward effort and time spent on it. Hoping he gets a moment to reiterate that and amend the Delve reward structure…
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In a quick exchange of ideas under many layers of secrecy and cryptic technology (Private Message 
) i considered the devs could have used a model to buy/craft the Faction troops with Shards. It’s ok if it would cost at least 20 shards to craft some commom cards for example, the devs could keep some randomization to the number of shards we can acquire and work out the amounts needed. Because in the end we would be at least in control of what we acquire with those shards.
For the treasures i had a quick idea too that could tackle another problem the devs perceived recently. We could just spend a bunch of gold, souls and glory to craft those, or simply spent them directly in the Hoard. It would surely provide a huge resource sink and not add the Treasure Troops that rubbed people in the wrong way.
But well, these are just quick ideas considering the actual state of things. Maybe they could spark better ideas in the long run.
I get the feeling part of managing Delve is going to be constantly tweaking your difficulty level.
What we want is to go straight to 500 and max out our renown. But think about it.
Assuming you can get there, once you get to 500, what reason is there to stay? You can’t pump your renown bonus any further, since it’s a one time totaled thing. More realistically, I bet we’re going to need a very high hoard level to even think about reaching 500.
So I bet most people are going to find a level where they can win decently and just stick there. Sure, they could get a 2x multiplier for going forward, but if you jump from a 100% to 80% win rate, what impact does that have on your treasure? When they can, they’ll move towards 500 to get a renown boost, then adjust backwards to the highest viable 100% win. If they’ve already done 500, it’s almost worth climbing all the way back down so you can wreck the level 10 opponents in less than 30 seconds per room.
This is why I’m confused that your chest level or multiplier isn’t also a function of Delve level. If I can beat a level 500 Delve in 30 very hard minutes for the same rewards as a level 10 Delve in 10 minutes with no chance of losing, I want the level 10. That seems strange to me, but I guess I get it as a design goal.
Like, stepping back from that, I know 500 is a very long-term goal. But I won’t want to make my “safe” level all the way back at 10, as I will consistently want to try and get further than my “last furthest” attempt.
It’s hard for me to say that’s not an interesting game to play if I can write this much about it.
You can only go back ten from your maximum I think, not 10 lower each time you pick it.
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@mithran what’s your analysis of these oddities in the reward scaling and value of time spent?
Hard to condense my thoughts on this, but I’ll try.
I don’t like the RNG loot… but it is tolerable to a point. Chaos Shards, in particular, should come in at a more steady rate because you need them to progress the underworld period, and you have to use them on RNG again in order to see if you can progress the underworld or not. This is the bottleneck to the entire system. I hate systems that stash things behind multiple RNG rolls as progress gates, and this one reeks of that. Ingots, souls, gold, glory, yeah, just toss those in there all randomly with a bunch of variances… irritating, but not broken. Even the fact that chest randomly upgrade wouldn’t be so bad if everything weren’t bottlenecked around the shards that are, what, at least triple randomed? Chest quality upgrades are random, number of times you roll shards are random, shard amounts may or may not have a random component, the type of thing you get from portals is random, then the rarity of the thing that you just got is also random… Am I missing anything? You can even have some variance on shards, but you shouldn’t ever be awarded zero for a delve. Especially with the way rewards from shards snowball with respect to starting from zero - by having more hoard quality and better boss chests, you’d average more shards, more shards average more treasure drops to upgrade hoard quality.
At this point (at low hoard quality) It is absolutely worth clearing rooms for the small chance at chest upgrades because your rewards tend to be garbage with low level chests. I did 2 quick runs with 1.6 modifier, level 3 and 2 chests, and ended up with 10 chaos shards and some glory, and 14 chaos shards and nothing respectively. Even if I had upped the difficulty to level 30, I’d have only been awarded around 18-22 shards from these runs and nothing else of value. You could end up with nothing for the extra effort since the upgrades are also RNG, but the point is to keep it so that it is barely extra effort. Not getting the upgrades sucks, but since you’ll be doing it a lot, it will pay off sometimes, you are highly unlikely to be constantly RNG screwed. Not nearly as bad as, say, doing a citadel run on invasions with a low stat account and getting an Orb of Growth out of it for four consecutive times. Might reevaluate when it is easier to up hoard quality to the point where it gives bonuses to chest level for just beating the boss (level 5-6 chest vs level 6-10 instead of level 2-3 chest vs 3-7).
What isn’t worth it is progressing the level of your delve to the point where it actually challenges you (or even just takes longer) until you are going for faction completion. Assuming, of course, you can’t always set aside an hour per day to play the game. A level 20 delve gives the exact same rewards as a level 100 as a level 500 after the first time you do it, and is much easier (and faster) to clear out all the rooms, and once you have taken the step forward, you can’t take a step back. A fully cleared level 20 delve takes about 7-9 minutes and usually lands you on a level 4 to 7 chest with a 2.4 to 2.8 modifier (depending on which delve and the rooms you get). Even assuming you keep up your hoard level, you will likely eventually still run into a point where just clearing straight to the boss takes this long, and will award you with a 2.6 modifier and level 2 chest still containing overall pretty bad rewards.
At this point, I know Hall of Guardians is going to remain low level and on farm status (lots of rooms, modifier and chest level usually ends higher, can hit the boss room at any time) until I am reasonably certain I can complete it or at least that the next level up is going to be just as trivial as the current one. All-Seeing Eye I might try to press forward on slow weeks just for the challenge, since I’m already denying myself rewards by picking it over Hall of Guardians. When it is time to progress delve level, I very likely won’t be taking side rooms when it starts feeling the slightest bit risky because finishing them is the most important thing for that big boss chest bonus and the ability to move on to the next one. Might revise when we have more factions and have a better idea of how long it takes to max them.
As for now, I’m not really in any hurry to get the 200 gold/5 (presumably all the way down to common and random) ingots per day and one point of life bonus, or the pets that only work for faction teams that I’ll use… lets see… never by that point because the respective delve would be maxed.
tl;dr: If you are leveling your delves, you are likely just making things harder for yourself and also potentially taking rewards off the table by getting to the point where taking side rooms is risky and/or slow. Leave the level low enough to blast through, and do all rooms until the next level up is trivial/fast, and finish the faction when you always have at least one faction you can do this in. Unless you have, like, an hour or two per day to do use it or lose it daily content.
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It is always nice when you come to the same conclusion I did. Makes me feel better about my strategic decision making.
To anyone else reading this, I highly recommend you follow Mithran’s advice. Don’t forget that we still have Faction events to do.
@Ozball, what is the interaction between event Delve levels and underworld Delve levels? If my Hall of Guardians is at level 60 in the Underworld but I complete 8 Delves during the event, where do I end up after the event? Level 60, or level 90?
Progress from events will carry over. (so 90 in this case)
Thanks for the fast response. That’s a bit frustrating. I would have preferred if the two systems were more independent.
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Is the Treasure Hoard bonus of the faction used during the Event?
Yes, the bonuses will carry over to the event of the matching faction.
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A player who spend all his treasures on the matching faction will have a big advantage compared to other players…
I thought that the Event with a starting Delve level of 20 was a fair competition to see who can get the max Delve level.
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yeah it’s frustrating. Been hearing of players getting tons of legendary ingots and I didn’t get a single one in the 3 days, completing all rooms. I get mostly glory and souls 
I thought I was doing something wrong.
I’m just going to summarize your post in bullet form because you’ve sniffed out some things I was suspicious about too. That @Grundulum agrees makes me comfy with the same decisions.
- Clearing all rooms is still worth it. You won’t feel the bonuses on individual delves, but if you could compare a player who does 1,000 delves with only 3 rooms and a player who does 1,000 with all rooms, the “all rooms” player would have a LOT more stuff.
- Chaos toenails suck. You have to win a dice roll to even get them. Then you have to win a dice roll to get treasure. Then you have to win a dice roll to get a quality upgrade. Barf.
- You get a one-time renown bonus for pushing ahead in Delve, but then all future attempts take longer. It seems smart to keep it low-level until you’ve pushed your Hoard level/quality pretty far.
The high-level hoard stat boosts are pretty insane. This seems like a long game. Rushing to reach Delve 500 ASAP seems like it costs you more, in the long term, than sticking with 30 or 40.
I want that shiny +1 ingot daily too but let’s face it: that’ll be like 200 common ingots, 150 rare, and you’ll be lucky to get 1 legendary/mythic per year.
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The main issue is if you’re doing the Faction Event, you will keep the Delve Level of the Event if it’s higher than your current Delve Event. So if you want to keep a very low Delve level, you will have to skip the corresponding Faction Event…
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