Sentinel drop rate has killed my fun, done spending money until fixed

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My goal in this game has long been to get every troop, eventually fully leveled, etc. I spent most of last calendar year catching up in the mythics, playing a ton, and getting down to merely a handful of troops I was missing. I was already setting my sights on my next goal - medal all troops - but then the sentinels were added to the game.

Since then, I’ve opened a staggering number of sentinel rooms and gotten none. Because of the way these troops are awarded, that means I am literally no closer to having any of those troops than I was six months ago. It’s infuriating. And it’s about to be the only thing keeping me from realizing my original goal.

I get mad while playing every week now, and I’m not enjoying the game at all, simply because of these troops and the impossible roadblock the devs have put between me and my one goal. I can’t believe there are people out there that actually have multiple sentinels. I’ve never seen one, spending 150 gems per day, and if I got one this week that would still imply I’d be looking at many years before I could expect to have a reasonable chance at having all six. It is unreasonable, and it needs fixed.

Until I at least hear that there are plans to change this, I can’t see why I would continue to spend money on the game. Of course, that means I’ll fall behind in mythics again, starting with Amatiel. That means another year to catch up again, which just makes me angry all over again - but the alternative is to give them money in hopes they’ll do something. As far as I can tell, they haven’t even acknolwedged there’s a problem, so that seems like a foolhardy waste of my time and money.

Barring some change, I imagine that this whole debacle winds up driving me out of the game within the next couple of months.

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Absolutely agree with you there. The sentinel drop rate and lack of dupe protection is an absolute disgrace. I have gone free to play until this is fixed. No more campaign/kingdom passes, ring of wonder etc. Hope more people do the same until devs sort this out

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Developers of these sorts of games do this sort of thing by design. They provide you with this sort of target that requires an excessive amount of time and effort (and often RL cash spending) as a way to keep you playing their game, rather than finding that you’ve “finished” everything there is to do and wandering away to a new challenge over a new horizon.

This is one of those things that’s unlikely to change for a long time, if ever. Especially as the lack of sentinels isn’t really blocking very much. And I suspect that an awful lot of people would simply stop playing the Underspire altogether once they acquired all six different Sentinels, perhaps as many (or even more) than are prepared to do as the OP suggests and quit the game (or at least stop spending cash) over the extremely low drop rate and the lack of duplicate protection.

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Totally agree, makes absolutely no sense to make the drop rate that low. And at least time to adjust it looooooooooong ago.

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We will get an Underspire rework in 2030 with an increased sentinel drop rate, but we will have to spend 500, 1,000, and 1,500 gems for daily torches. We also can randomly encounter a gnome thief that can steal all of our torches and lanterns.

It will be renamed “Uberspire,” and we will have to fight all the cosmic dragons along with Stellarix at level 500.

Subject to change…:rofl:

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:joy:
A gnome thief!!!
Hahahaha!

But hey, why getting frustrated because of NOT finding a troop which isn’t useful? The brown Sentinel is not to shabby imo, but the others …?

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That’s not news. We all know the tug-of-war nature of games like this. The developers have to walk a line: with no (or too little) new content, we grow bored and leave. With too much new content, players grow overwhelmed, can’t keep up, and leave. With content that is too easy to obtain, it’s just a grind to get it, and players leave; if it’s too difficult to obtain, players complain, with more players complaining as the difficulty escalates, etc., and eventually they get mad enough to leave. Or they just stop having fun. And leave. By design the game designers have to perpetually find the right amount and difficulty and time investment necessary to keep players invested and playing.

They missed the mark here, and by a lot. There is no road map - reasonable or otherwise - to acquiring these troops. You can only max out your allowed participation each week, and that’s it. Numbers suggest that you might get, what, one per year at that rate? With no duplicate protection, does anyone here think that you’re likely to get all six before the game hits end-of-life? Sure, some will have them - some undoubtedly do - but the most likely scenario is that you never will.

It isn’t unreasonable for me to point this out, and I don’t think I’m alone in being frustrated. It’s not pointless to complain, either. Devs of this game and others have responded to overwhelmingly negative feedback before - especially when it’s rooted in entirely reasonable concerns. And, for what it’s worth, I did not suggest everyone quit the game, or even stop spending. I said I am no longer enjoying the game, that I get mad and frustrated every week, and that I’ve stopped spending because of it. Because they’ve put other troops behind paywalls, that will probably lead to more frustration and my eventual exit from the game entirely.

By the way, it will change. Of course it will. The whole point of introducing difficult-to-obtain items in a game like this is to set those items in gamers’ minds as having high value due to scarcity. Having set a reference value, they can eventually introduce a new mode that has as a possible reward some other item that gives you a new chance at this scarce item. And you’ll pay gems (and money) to play that new mode, or to pull that new loot box, or whatever, because of the perceived value of the item that was set in your mind when it was nearly impossible to obtain. That’s what the other Underspire rewards are: it used to be nearly ludicrous to think you could get every troop to gold elite level, but now, if you spend another 150 gems six times a week, you can make significant progress toward that goal. You might even get there.

So the point here, the point in users within the community letting the devs know that this is too far, too unobtainable, that they’re really not enjoying things, it’s not just about this set of sentinels. (Although it is about that.) It’s also about next round of development, and how unobtainable the next set of troops and weapons are. How are the devs to know when the community objects if we simply don’t? Should we simply stay silent and only post to criticize those who do?

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Lo habia dicho en otro hito … llevo 3 años jugando gems con mucho esfuerzo y el juego en este momento es una basura 100% y ojo que solo me faltan 7 tropas y cero comunicacion con los jugadores de los devs … es bochornoso el estado de gems of war.

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Right now, the ~1% drop rate is so abysmal that I won’t even bother spending any gems on Underspire to try for the sentinels. If the drop rate were changed to something more reasonable, say at least 10%, then I’d be more willing to invest gems to try and get them. Even if such a change were to be made, I’d still hate the fact that it’s dependent on RNG, but at least it wouldn’t be nearly as depressing as it is now.

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I enjoy playing the Underspire as intended as it was released.

These dead end battles are actively making the experience much worse.

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If you find the brown one not shabby, then its a good sign that they’re actually worth using. (can’t force people to use things)

Purple Sentinel pairs very well with Bane of Mercy, and the Green/Yellow/Blue Sentinels have good troop typing (Elemental/Dragon/Giant). Green happens to be extra useful since Curse + Entangle prevents follow up skull hits.

The Red Sentinel is the only one that is underwhelming, but that’s because Cursed + Burn combination while taking up the first slot isn’t exciting and daemons aren’t good currently.

The thing that people might not catch is that its “explode a column” and not “destroy a column”. Exploding a column is worse for direct mana generation and making 8 gems isn’t the most exciting, but on an 8x8 board, you’re exploding away 3 of the columns, so those 8 gems have to go to the other 5x8.

They’re giant gems, so if it connects, you’ll get a big gain of mana. The sentinels also self-loop.

You can see these Sentinels go crazy sometimes in the Underspire if you let them cast…

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100% agreed, what makes it so much worse is what insultingly awful prizes you pull from nearly every chest.

Last week I saved all the treasure rooms for last. Fool that I am, some part of me was looking forward to seeing what they contained.

Minor traitstones.
Minor traitstones.
Torches.
Minor traitstones.
20 shards.
Runic traitstones.
Trinkets.
One single badge of Yasmine.
Minor traitstones.
20 amethysts.
Torch.

With absolutely no exaggeration I can say the returns would have been better if I’d just spent that time Rowanne-blasting level 1 explores. And it wouldn’t have cost upwards of 1000 gems to access such slap-in-the-face “treasures.”

On an unrelated note, I’m also dead sick of every second or third room being a Doom or Ultimate Doom. Just because they didn’t bother weighting appearance rates and there are so horribly many of them on the roster. I slog through more Dooms in a week of underspire than in a freaking Doom event.

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Yes, I agree that most of the rewards from the Sentinel chests stink.

But I also have a different perspective on my “spending” on the Underspire. I don’t view it as “spend 900 gems to access such slap-in-the-face treasures”. Rather, I view it as spending 900 gems to get the rewards from the seven dragons, at which point I use whatever leftover torches I have to poke through dead ends looking for whatever might drop from those battles and chests. (It’s possible I could finish the Underspire in a little bit less, but I prefer not to take chances and to therefore have to spend 300 on Sunday to “catch up”.)

To me, the worthwhile rewards are still what the dragons drop, in particular the Medium and Major orbs of Glory which I’m still feeding into my non-elite mythics. And the whole spread of what I receive from those seven dragon bosses is still worth the 900-1050 gems to me.

To me, the sentinels and their “rewards” are simply a little extra thing to do on the side once the main part of the Underspire is done, as opposed to pre-Sentinel when I’d complete the last dragon and then not even step into the mode again. If I get something great – and I have acquired one Sentinel – that’s a nice thing. If I don’t get anything wonderful, I’m not really wasting enough time or effort to care.

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DONT! HELP! THEM! WITH! CRAPPY! IDEAS! It’s like you give a “paid air” idea to the government. One day one crazy mind will make this “improvement” :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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Exactly what I think, Kezef, I’m just not able to put it in words (english isn’t mothertongue).

I play underspire for the golden Orbs - and everything else is an Extra; better than a dead end before.

And sometimes it’s a nice Extra:)

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You wouldn’t mind sharing your data set (as, I’m sure, you wouldn’t have come up with such claims if you didn’t have one to share) to quench the curiosity thirst, would you?

Unfortunately, I haven’t encountered a justifiable reason to pay more attention (either from personal experience or guildies murmuring), so it’s only this week with any numbers - 8 Doom rooms out of 126 available (1 Doom every 15 rooms); otherwise, one will simply have to trust my gut feeling that other weeks (on two accounts) where roughly the same. It surely would be extremely obvious if I suddenly started encountering a doom every second room (or even every fifth room) instead of every fifteenth room, wouldn’t it?

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It shouldn’t actually be that high, or anywhere close to it. Not over really large sample sizes. I’ll concede that I’ve seen tendencies towards seeing the same room several times in a single day’s playing session and the possibility existing that the RNG that selects rooms is gorked in some way.

But when I think about how many possible “rooms” are in the Underdelve database? It’s a bit more than you think and the odds of running into a Doom shouldn’t be that high. By my estimation, there are 12 separate rooms including a Doom that exist; there are also 76 rooms drawn from faction teams and a few dozen that come from delves/Tower of Doom that aren’t unique to a particular faction.

So if I’m trying to “rough guess” a number, it’s probably around 10%. Meaning you should see a decent number every week if you play through the Underspire, especially if you purchase torches on a regular basis. But you shouldn’t be buried under an avalanche of them.

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The drop rates and the rewards of sentinel rooms are a joke. Mostly useless rewards like minor traitstones.

No Treasure guardian troops to be found, this is beyond pathetic and disgusting.

I understand that the rates are low to get these troops but not like that.

At least if you are not getting the troops, then give a good rewards.
No matter what we say and complain, no changes happening.

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@Kafka

Just charge 200 $, £ or € for each copy of a Sentinel and make them only available for 1 minute each month. That means you have a chance to buy one every 6 months. Still easier and probably cheaper than now …

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Unless you meant $200…