I don’t want this to be a “rant” or “pity party” post for myself. I’m actually looking for guidance and answers as to why exploring trait stones are sooooo painful for me.
To begin with, I absolutely loathe grinding for anything. Especially for trait stones. I like a challenge and the rewards to be worth me continuing to explore. However when I play 5 battles and get 5 minors in a row, that is disheartening and feels too much like grinding.
Not only do I feel like RNG has it in for me, but to add insult to injury, the game starts to lag at about 20 battles. This will continue until it gets to the point that I have to reset the game. I have researched the forums for answers to this problem and have turned off all internet assist programs. This helped all but Explore. Why? The one thing that is already painful is not helped at all. Annoying!
As with anything I “complain” about, I like to offer solutions. I don’t know much about coding or the complications involved with changing said codes. But here it is at any rate. Is it possible to incorporate the following?
Normal and Hard mode: keep the drop rates as they are.
Warlord 1 & 2: reduce the chances of getting minor and major, or increase the chances of Runic and Arcane
Warlord 3 & 4: Take out the minors, reduce the majors and increase Runic drops
I don’t know if my suggestions are possible or feasible. I do know (IMO) that getting minor and major stones on Warlord IV is a punch to the Family Jewels.
Can someone help me preserve my blood line? Please? My sanity is already gone and I don’t even miss it now.
As for the lagging. Am I stuck with this? Is there something else I can do on my end?
Thanks for your time.
Eternal Elder
P.S. I haven’t said (typed) this much in a month or two.
Hello there, i can sympathize with the pleads, it takes hours of farm to get a single Arcane Traitstone, but i believe your way would make it too easy. Given that, i don’t think devs will ever consider to do what you suggest…
Maybe a system where you get increasing chances to find stones until you get one, then back to normal. That way the farm would be less frustrating and less erratic.
@Volk thanks for the input and you’re probably right about making it too easy to get the stones. Any ideas about how to reduce the lag?
@Justin, I have many teams that I use to explore. Some fast, some not so fast but fun. I’m @ level 1090 and tried a number of solutions to help me get the stones I need. It would probably be less painful if the game would stop the lagging and I don’t have to reset so much.
If you are looking at your individual drops closely enough to notice five minor stones in a row
The main problem is to get the rarer traitstones at any speed close to reasonable, you basically have to make it a grind. A super fast one shot explore team with bombots ore the like can get about 4 arcanes per hour. You need an average 90 second team (including load times) to get an average of a couple arcanes per hour. An average three minute explore team brings that number down to an average of one per hour, and applying this to my bad streak drops, you could easily go four or more hours without an arcane.
Being pretty much completely maxed out on kingdoms now, if I do explore now, I just usually go into full on “farm mode” and use the fastest team possible for about an hour or so with something on in the background as a distraction. Trying to “have fun” in this mode has turned out to be tantamount to be wasting my time. I usually leave my “for fun” teams for PvP now, taking appropriate difficulty matches, because I’m not bothering watching any numbers go up for stuff like gold and glory. Watching arcane numbers climb at the glacial rate of one per hour (or less!), especially since I track every arcane drop from explore, makes me feel like I’m wasting my time, while literally wasting my time in PvP is at least engaging if I’m using weird teams and I don’t have to worry about the numbers, and at the end of the day the extra gold helps pad out donations for weeks where I don’t get to play much even if the time is not being super effectively used.
So yeah, unfortunately, as it is now, it kind of has to be a grind. Grind or wait for an arcane pack (or open a ton more gem/glory keys for runics). I’m glad “grind” is at least an option, because without it, we’d only have “wait” (as with most things in this game, which is actually kind of terrible) and Explore grind beats the heck out of Challenge grind.
Unfortunately, I can’t help with the lag issue. I run into the same problem. It does seem worse with Explore, but otherwise, I have been unable to determine the common linking factor on what is causing the lag. Pretty sure there is a memory leak somewhere in the chain of actions used to explore specifically in addition to whatever minor leaks make the game lag over what is usually a much longer period of time with other modes.
Eh, can’t say I agree with this logic either. I believe the request was less about making higher rarity stones faster to get, and more about making the higher difficulties, which you generally have to at least some effort into clearing and take much longer, into better balance so you don’t have to take quite a big hit in your overall rewards if you decide you want your grinding to be at least somewhat engaging. And of that much, I tend to agree. Even having double the chance of both arcane and runics on Warlord IV difficulty would not greatly impact the maximum speed at which either could be farmed, as you have to cut through twice as much total hits, and most speed strats are predicated on quickly charging and clearing to the point where a second pass is usually going to take significantly longer. You would be gaining the 30-35 seconds of load time and trait animations you would have otherwise had to sit through every other battle, but I can’t see how that would be a bad thing.
One thing though… if any stone type needs to have a reduced droprate to make room for higher rarity stone drop rate increases at higher difficulty, it is Major stones. These still have a basically broken drop rate - 1 for every 2 minors in battles/Treasure hunt, about 1 major for every 3 minors from gold keys, and no minors at all from Glory Keys, while you only need 1 for every 4 minors in the game and most of the major stones usage are on mythics and guardians or it would be even lower than that. Despite what their rarity tier would have you believe, they are, by far, the most common stone, even for those that started after the guild patch where everyone got a huge amount of glory keys. Everybody requesting any kind of stone drop rate adjustment/minigame/direct trading etc. seems to ignore this. Some people still need red minors. Some people still need all color minors. Nobody needs Major stones.
@Mithran thank you for taking the time to be so thorough with your response.
Also, thank you clarifying that I would rather play Explore on Warlord IV but not get so many minors. Majors I could deal with. It’s a shame about the lagging as it is only compounding my frustration.
@Sirrian: I know y’all are well aware of the lag issue, but is this something that can be fixed? Maybe it’s already in the works for a future update? If you’ve already addressed this, then I need to work on my search skills.
I get that you want less lower rarity trash, but I still don’t get why you’d rather have Majors than minors though. Majors are, and likely forever will be, useless. You get between 1.5 and 2 times as many as you need through the course of every single possible source than you need to trait any given thing relative to every other stone rarity tier. Because of this, half of the time you get a major stone, it might as well just be nothing. If you look at your Major stones you currently have relative to how many are needed to trait every possible thing in the game, you probably already have much more than you need for every single color.
I decided to check just how many extra Majors I have at this point. I have a total of over 4200 extra beyond what I need to trait every single troop currently in the game, including all classes, mythics I dont have, guardians, etc. If majors stopped dropping completely, right now, based on the amount of extra majors I have in my possession, given even color distribution with an average of two troops per week each needing an average of 12 major stones each (to fully trait, commons need 12, rares 10, UR 14, epic 8, legendary 10) AND assuming I got every mythic troop to drop and wanted to trait those as well (64 major stones each), I would need over two years worth of troop releases before Major stones before became an issue. And I still need more minor reds, not to mention about a couple hundred of each runic, just to finish stuff that will actually get me kingdom points.
Checking my low level account, which is entirely post-guild patch, I have just under three times as many minors as majors of any given color currently. I’m in a casual guild and likely only to get about 40 battles in per week, so most of these stones are from gold keys. This is already way too many majors, especially since I wont ever see any mythics. I’ll run out of minors traiting any given thing I have long before majors become an issue, unless I decided to go straight for guardians, which at this point would literally be months of farming just to cover the runics.
I get that there is a psychological component tied to rarity in that it presents as getting the “worst” drop over and over again for playing the highest difficulty thing, but majors are, in pretty much every sense, the worst drop. They will continue to be the worst drop for all players at all levels, so long as the drop ratios and relative stone costs remain as they are now.
Sorry for the derail, but I feel more people need to know this. Also, on the off chance the devs take the suggestion to heart, I’d rather not anybody be asking for more Majors or favoring Majors over even minor stones.
I’m sure it is a psychological thing. I play a lot. I average about 1,000 trophies/week. This is all between PVP and Arena.
I even play Casual PVP on Warlord IV. Not Arena though. I may have lost my sanity, but I’m not suicidal.
I don’t consider a well thought post to be a derail. It’s informative and I appreciate your time invested. Thank you.
@Eika I listen to my mix on Pandora. My brain is not coordinated enough to watch anything other than the screen of my PC.
FWIW, I think the idea of giving a buff to drop rates on certain stones based on the difficulty is a great idea. Even a minor one like +5-10% on Arcanes on Warlord 4.
I have to Restart Gems of War every 30-60 battles when doing explores.
There has to be some memory leak in the code somewhere that they havent fixed.
So what I typically do is… Every Hour just after collecting the Tribute, I will do explores for about 45 minutes, then restart Gems and wait for next tribute. Rinse and Repeat.
Usually end us getting 1-2 arcanes and 4-6 runic per hour.
Thanks y’all. I have had good runs and bad, I guess I was more frustrated with the lag. It seemed like whenever I reset, I was starting all over with the drop rate as well.
