Hi all, I’m not very familiar with the gameplay of the Underworld…haven’t bother with Delves because I haven’t got the time. Only play Delve Event for the rewards. I’ve read about how one should not go too high a level otherwise the yield will be bad (i.e. strike a balance between delve rewards and daily rewards from faction reown)
Here are some of my questions:
Which Faction is the best to invest my time & treasures? Are there any existing list (just like how we should prioritise kingdom upgrades?)
How do I use chaos shards? (are the drop rates the same everywhere or should I be upgrading some stuff before using more shards?)
Your best bet especially if time is an issue is to get a level 20 delve that you are able to full clear quickly (target of ~4 mins, if possible, but the faster the better) and that has a decent potential ending modifier up to Hoard Quality 10 and keep it there forever. Invest treasure there first while going for 100% quality upgrade chance where possible. Run that delve at level 20 for your daily delves when you don’t have much time or until feel like pushing other delves. Don’t do the faction event for this delve at all or run away from the level 30 boss every time you reach it in the event. You can set up multiple farm factions if you want before pushing them too much, but you should focus on just one at first, preferably one you haven’t leveled at all.
There is a bunch of research out there on which is the “best” one to make your farming faction in terms of average modifier for a full clear, but I prefer having access to a comfortable/fast team and not-obnoxious layout or potential rooms over a very tiny amount of ending modifier because it makes it much more likely I actually do my daily delves instead of skipping them. For example, Sea of Sorrow has good modifiers, but I don’t really like the color restriction all that much for my fastest teams. Primal Rift also has good modifiers and has colors I like more, but it has that stupid common room that can roll Dust Devils. Warrens boss drops arcanes, but its always Arcane Light. Don’t pick something with 8 rooms as your farm faction (All-Seeing Eye), as you occasionally land below a 2.5 modifier after the boss, which is a significant break point for ingot drops (4 per drop instead of 6).
The only thing that differs for shard drops from faction to faction are which four troops are in the pool, and treasure drops are universal. Hoard Level or Quality has no bearing on their drop rates. Use shards to open portals on factions where you want the troops, because you can use the treasures anywhere you want.
Renown rewards have breakpoints every 100 Renown. So you don’t need to worry about clearing every single level with a pure faction team: just levels 100, 200, 300, and 500. (400 gets skipped because the reward is a few copies of the faction pet. But not enough to advance in rarity, so there is no mechanical bonus for clearing that level with a faction team.)
I advise against rushing to level 500 with a non-faction team, then discovering you can’t earn the 100-500 points for beating level 500 with a faction team. That is a lot of rewards to be missing out on because you didn’t know you could permanently dead-end your Underworld advancement.
Functionally speaking, the renown rewards for every faction are identical. To get stat points from renown, you have to get significantly far in multiple factions, so the order doesn’t matter. There are different individual pets, but the impact those pets have on the game are so trivial I don’t think anyone considers them worth ranking.
Chaos shards are worth “the most” for a new faction when you have 0 troops from that faction. After that, they’re worth “the most” in whichever faction you have the fewest troops ascended to mythic. After that, the only thing chaos shards are “worth” are chances at more treasures, which aren’t useful unless you intend to raise a hoard level.
Faction rewards are a long game, and set up to be a trap for people who want to get everything as quickly as possible. The rest of this post is effectively part of this answer.
There’s two different kinds of rewards in Delve. I don’t think people place enough importance on maintaining access to both. I don’t think it’s obvious to everyone.
The reward you can accidentally neglect is ingots. You need an awful lot of mythic and legendary ingots to max the weapons in this game. A level 20 Delve is very easy to beat and you tend to average 4-5 legendary and/or 2-3 mythic ingots per run with a quality 10 hoard. (I mean this in terms of “on average”, not literally.) You need more than a thousand of each. If you raise the level of the Delve, it will take you longer to win, which means you spend more time and effort to get the same prize. That’s not smart.
Two caveats:
You only need one faction locked at level 20, as there’s no difference in the reward pools.
Delves with more rooms or more higher-level rooms have higher overall chest/reward multipliers, they are better to keep locked at 20. (Sea of Sorrow is mine, others are slightly more optimal but I “feel like” I win it faster.)
The more obvious rewards come from renown. When the last faction releases in a little less than two years from now, some stats will be +4 and I think Magic will sit at +3. As of right now, it’s not even possible to get +1 Magic. So you can afford to take your time, because the other renown-related rewards are trivial. By the time you’ll be able to contemplate leveling up your farming Delve to get a 2nd Magic boost, odds are you won’t care about losing access to the ingots.
In short: don’t rush. Take your time. The longer we wait, the more power our available troops gain. It will be much easier to reach level 500 next year than it is this year.
Yeld does NOT get worse the higher you go in faction delves. A delve level 20 has same resource pool as a delve level 500, with the same hoard quality.
The only difference is that the higher you go, the harder it gets to fully clear a delve (thus you’re starting to miss out on the chance to get level 10 chests). A level 500 delve is almost impossible to fully clear (as in clearing all the rooms).
Thanks for all the information. I’d say Sea of Sorrows seem to be a popular choice to keep low? I brought it up to lvl 40 alr sadly. Currently the highest I pushed with the time I have is Dark Pits lvl 60. I don’t like rooms that can change my troop order (like dust devils, Cedric) in Delves (P.S. I’m only lvl 300+)
Generally speaking, it makes sense to either keep a Delve at 20 or push it as far as you can (if you feel like it) for Renown (although this isn’t necessarily something worth chasing feverishly). Farming a Faction anywhere in between, at say 40, is a no bueno, not worth it (unless you have no other options).
If you have a Delve/Faction at level 20, go with that over Sea of Sorrows.
If Sea of Sorrows is your lowest (at 40), make do with that until a new Faction comes out, and then keep that one at 20 (imo).
It definitely is a shame that there’s no going back for players caught unaware in this fashion. I think it would rank pretty highly in the “things I wish I knew before…” category.
I feel like “yield over time” is an important factor. If I give you $5 for an hour of work, and another person $5 for ten minutes, you “made the same amount of money” but I’ll bet you feel shorted.
So, too, goes Delves, which is kind of what you pointed out. In the time it takes you to clear a level 200 or so Delve, you could’ve cleared a level 20 and probably played 10-15 PvP matches. So technically you get “paid more” from a level 20, because you can do more per unit time.
The goal with delves is to get as much renown as possible from each delve while keeping only 1 delve at lv 20 for farming. I suggest for you to keep The Warrens at lv 20 because it’s the only delve currently that pays out arcane traitstones for killing the boss room and as a beginner you need heaps of arcanes for all your troops.
Focus on 1 delve at a time. Get hoard quality to 10 before you begin each delve for maximum rewards. This will get you more chaos shards per delve (also more of every reward)
Increasing your hoard lv will increase your troops’ stats and make your battles easier but don’t worry about increasing this too much because it costs tonnes of gold and you are probably still leveling your kingdoms. Just get quality to 10 as that is far more important for you.
As a starting goal I would try and get every delve to lv 100. Some delves you may be able to go a little higher but when you reach a point where you are losing battles it’s better to just move on to a different delve because you get basically no rewards when you lose.
The Tuesday faction events are great and if you clear every room as you go you should be able to unlock all event rewards and get to lv 90 with a tier 1 purchase in the shop (only 30 gems) This will greatly speed up the process of getting all your delves to 100 and get some other loot as well from the event. Don’t forget that when the event faction is your farming faction you must not progress the delve or it will also progress the level of your farming faction.
As for where to spend your chaos shards, I would suggest getting at least 1 copy of each of the troops from each faction. After that spend them wherever you want doesn’t really matter too much.
Once you have all delves at lv 100 (or as high as you can go) now is when your farming faction comes into play. Use your 3 free daily scrolls here at lv 20 should only take 10-12 minutes and you can save the shards for the next new faction that gets released so you can get it’s hoard quality to 10 straight away before starting the new delve event.
