When can we expect Infernus in soulforge? I need it asap, cuz i’m getting my first 4k dimonds this week and i have no patience 
also gw next week, i’ll just die from waiting 
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The current rule is “if a thread lasts several months and gets a few hundred replies, the devs will force-hack the troop into soulforge for Christmas”, so let’s get going. We’ve got 8 months to go.
“Sometime in 2018” we’ve been told the soulforge will go through all mythics/legendaries before repeating one, but there hasn’t been much mention of it yet. Technically 3.3 was a 2018 update but I don’t think “it wasn’t in the only update this year” is a valid complaint given the timeframe of “sometime in 2018”.
It has to be a really focused thread though. The last one was for Pharos-Ra, so it only works if EVERYONE wants Infernus.
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I really don’t need more Infernuseeseses but you have my full support!
™
Soulforge started rotating troops from the 2nd week of January.
There are 27 mythics and having 4 per week gives about 7 weeks to rotate the pool. So worst case if a troop is at the start of a pool and end of the next is about 14 weeks.
Infernus was last seen 8 weeks ago. So it could appear any week now, and is certain to turn up in 6 weeks, assuming troop rotations do not change.
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Good to hear this, but in all honestly, there should be always available paths to some of the more universally usable troops. The average and max wait for a mythic isn’t long for a mythic yet but the average rotation time gets extended by one week every 4 months. And legendaries are still pretty bad and getting even worse. One of the basic reasons for soulforge to exist in the first place is the increasing difficulty to be able to pull stuff randomly from ever-increasing pools, and soulforge suffers from this same flaw that will eventually overtake it entirely. Please consider a long term solution to this issue, such as scaling the number of troops that appear each week with the number that are currently in the game, having certain troops appear at fixed intervals in addition to the rotation (such as every current kingdom legendary/mythic), or just doing away with the rotation entirely (diamonds still can’t be “farmed” in any significant quantities, and there is no reason for two time bottlenecks if the first one is already a relatively fixed length).
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If the Soul Forge had to cycle troops, I wish it would cycle by color. That way it would cycle all troops faster without worrying about when new troops show up…
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Just putting this here so that he will appear next week in the forge. Positive thinking infers positive results. 
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All the troops should be craftable all the time. Players are farming diamonds and wait for a random number of week to be able to craft the troop that they want…
If it’s not possible to put all the troops in the Soulforge either:
- add some filters in the Soulforge
- leave only the Summoning Stones + 2 links to the Troops screen with a filter for “Legendary troops only” and “Mythic troops only”. And when one select a troop add a button “Craft” aside the “Upgrade” button so one can craft directly the troop from the Troop screen.
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Are you confirming that the troop rotations are not random? If so, this would be new and would have been a VERY exciting patch note.
If not, then your statement is false because of the nature of random numbers. “Certain” is not true. “Probable” is true. You believe it’s improbable that Infernus won’t show up within 6 weeks. The Pharos-Ra thread that ended with the devs forcing Pharos-Ra into Soulforge as a Christmas gift is evidence it isn’t true. That thread also contains a promise that the previous paragraph’s “the troops rotate” is a planned change to the Soulforge.
In short: I’m really excited for when this bit of information resurfaces (Yes, I keep the link on speed-dial because I’m so excited for when it happens):
I think the way you describe Soulforge is how it should work, but unless there’s been a ninja patch that is not how Nimhain explained it to us.
Hey ClifyA, I’m glad to see an official statement for this matter. Do you know if the same is applied for legendary troops, or this is exclusively for mythics?
I’m not sure that there isn’t a third option. It could be that they are essentially running a repeating “draft” of the mythics. In other words, starting in the 2nd week of January, they randomly selected 4 mythics from the pool every week, removing each selected mythic from the available pool for the following weeks until all mythics had been drafted once. Then they could begin again with a random order, except that no troop could appear in the soulforge in consecutive weeks. That would allow for the possibility of a troop being in the last or second last week of one draft and the first or second week of the next draft (two weeks apart). Similarly, if a troop was drafted first in one draft and last in the next, they could be up to 14 weeks apart. If that was the case, the third instance would come up no more than 6 weeks after the second. The tricky part is figuring out where we are in the cycle.
I pulled the soulforge history from Taransworld and did a couple quick checks to see if my theory would work:
- I ran a quick calculation of when each troop was repeating. The average was about 36 days, the longest wait between repeats was Wulfgarok who took 10 weeks to come up a second time (From January 18 to March 19). Five different troops came up two weeks apart.
- I tried running a “draft”, starting with the list of available mythics at the 2nd week of January, removing them from the list according to the order they were available in Soulforge and seeing if any repeated before the list was empty. I wasn’t sure whether the “second week of January” meant the week starting January 8 or 15, and tried both options. Neither worked perfectly, but neither was a total flop either. The week of January 1 was distinctly weird since they either manually adjusted the troops (or had some kind of Y2K bug when the year rolled over), and I’m not sure how they are dealing with newly released mythics (do they go directly into the Soulforge or is there a cooling off period?; do they go into the current draft when eligible or do they just go into the next cycle?).
Even with some unanswered questions and using my best guesses on this, the second time through the draft worked perfectly. If I’m right, the 3rd draft started the week of March 26, so anything that has come up since then won’t repeat again until at least May 7th or 14th, and maybe as long as 5-6 weeks after that.
So, if my assumptions are correct, Infernus should be in Soulforge in one of the next 3 weeks.
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What you described is mostly what I meant by oversimplifying as “the troops are not random”, I meant “we won’t see repetition until all mythics have been visited”. I think this is what people interpreted the vague “improvements” to mean.
If it’s already happening, I think the devs did themselves a disservice by not announcing it.
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After going through my exercise, I’m convinced that it is happening. I have a couple of edge cases where I can’t tell if a troop was at the end of one draft or the beginning of the next but I don’t have any cases where something happens that I can’t explain. With a couple more cycles, i should be able to determine where the cut-offs are and what they are doing with newly released troops.
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Hmm, yeah, it is hard to tell. I’m glad I edited this because my original dissent was stupid and misguided.
We can ignore the first week of January because the weekly update didn’t happen on Monday and that made Soulforge really wonky. So let’s stick a pushpin in 8 January 2018 and use Taran’s World data. It’s been 14 weeks, so we should’ve seen every troop at least twice and at most three times for a scant few troops.
If @CliffyB is correct, then he’s right and we should see at least 6 weeks between repeat starting at that date.
Infernus showed up on 22 January and 26 February, 5 weeks apart.
5 March and 26 March: The Worldbreaker. There’s no way you can fit 6 weeks between 21 days. That’s 3 weeks.
Death has showed up 3 times, 5 February, 19 February, and 9 April. The first two are only 2 weeks apart, which is the shortest allowed repetition since… I think November. That’s just barely within range to think maybe a draft “transition” happened the week of 12 February or 19 February, which is a reasonable 6-7 weeks from 8 January.
Voice of Orpheus has only showed up once, on 9 April. This is not super suspicious as it’s only existed for about 11 weeks. That’s not enough time to guarantee 2 appearances yet.
Lots of other spot-checks and I’m still not 100% convinced, but there isn’t enough data to draw where I think the transition lines are then cross-reference that. I guess if I looked at Legendaries I could tell better, but it’s a lot of work and they have a different period.
So hmm.
A few things:
- I think that there are weeks when one draft is finishing and another is starting where there could be troops from both drafts. For example, I think February 12 has the last two troops (Yasmine and Gard) from one set and the first two troops in the next (Gargantaur, appearing for the first time, and Elemaugrim).
- I’m guessing that new mythics are getting added to the draft pool at the beginning of each cycle as long as the cycle starts at least 4 weeks after they are introduced. Very few examples to look at yet, though, so hard to say. Vorph would fit with that, as with Champion of Anu, who appeared April 2nd in Soulforge after being released on March 2.
- By my reckoning, Death is showing up in the 2nd last week of the first draft and the first week of the 2nd draft, so that doesn’t present a problem for me.
- The first week in my cycle (January 8, which I’ve already said I’m not sure about) is the one where all my trouble-cases show up. Worldbreaker is there, plus appears again 3 weeks later (so he needs to not count). Wulfy appears there and then not again March 19 (so he DOES need to count). Gard appears there and then again in February 12 and March 5 (so he needs not to count). Aurora appears there and not again until March 12 (so she has to count). Why would the first week of their draft include only 2 troops? I don’t know. If I assume that it does, I’m good for the next two drafts so far. If I get any exceptions to my expectations in the next two weeks, I’ll know I was wrong.
- For science, I’ll go ahead and predict the next 8 mythics to appear in the Soul Forge: Doomclaw, Gard’s Avatar, Gargantaur, Infernus, Jotnar, Ketras, Queen Aurora, Wulfgarok. How’s that for a disprovable hypothesis?
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Yeah for (1) that’s what I meant. If there are 27 mythics and we have… 4 per week, that doesn’t divide evenly so one week has to have “early” repeats. That and I forgot once the “repeat” happens, a troop can appear anywhere, so it’s possible that there could be some troops 2 weeks apart, but if that happens then the next appearance should be at least 5 weeks after the first. We don’t really have enough data to find that pattern since we know pre-January and pre-mid-November the Soulforge behaved differently.
Agreed on the other points, especially (4). 8 January makes sense as the first week, since a lot of the weeks at the end of 2017 and start of 2018 had some bonkers situations like “We forced Pharos-Ra inside” or “we accidentally forgot Monday happened”. It’s possible the “trouble cases” were bugs in the algorithm that got noticed and patched.
Again, it all hinges on seeing more cycles, and if we throw out all pre-January data there’s no significant anomaly to definitively disprove it.
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I’m having some fun with this, so I’m going to keep tracking for a while and see if I can nail the cycle down firmly. It will be a slow process, but that’s fine. If my expectations for the next two weeks are way off, then I know I’m out to lunch.
For someone like the OP or Awryan, who are looking to craft specific mythics, being able to nail down at least a rough timeline of when it could (or definitely won’t) appear could be really helpful.
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Thanks for taking the time to puzzle this out. Feel like doing it for legendary troops? I’ve been sitting on 1600 diamonds waiting for Sol’Zara and Chief Stronghorn for what feels like forever.
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Honestly, I’m not particularly keen. My method and spreadsheet are pretty messy since I was making it up as I went. I’ll think about it, but I’m quite busy at work these days and I already feel bad about the time spent on this little project.
I’ll say this though: with 67 legendaries on-hand, we won’t yet have completed one cycle since the rotation started. That means that Sol’Zara shouldn’t appear for at least another 4 weeks (since she has already appeared in February), but Stronghorn should appear in one of the next 3 weeks (maybe 2 since a few of the legendaries may not have been available in this draft).
Edit: Forget what I said above, there are numerous instances of Legendary troops repeating between January 15 and today (Carnex on Jan 22 and Feb 26; Gog & Gud on Feb 5 and Feb 19; Highforge on Jan 29 and Apr 16; and I could go on). It may mean that Legendaries are still random while mythics are in rotation, or it may mean that my assumptions on Mythics are completely wrong. Given how nicely things worked out for me on the mythic side, I would tend to believe the former, but that means there is no guarantee that your desired troops will ever come up again, or certainly not in any predictable timeframe.
@CliffyA: Can you confirm that Legendary troops are also in rotation now, or take back to the team that it would be really nice if they were? (and probably with a larger number available each week so that it doesn’t take up to 8 months for a troop to roll around a second time?)
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Sorry we didn’t officially announce this.
The Soulforge was adjusted earlier this year so that mythics are now selected from a pool of troops that is only reset once it is empty. This ensures that we rotate through all troops evenly. At 4 troops per week it takes about 7 weeks to empty the pool and start again.
For further details on these changes you can read more about sampling without replacement here:
https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/parker/sampling/repl.htm
Based off of some historical data, we know what is still in the pool. We can therefore be certain that some troops will appear within a time range, before the pool resets, but otherwise we have no control or knowledge of what specific mythics will appear.
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