Testing Explore - Traitstone farming Teams and results

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Curious what others are using to plow through Explore to get Traitstones quickly. For me,

Emp Khoravash
Valk
Astral Spirit
Mercy
Leonis kingdom banner, all are full trait.

Astral Spirit sets up Mercy and usually removes first troop, Mercy does her thing to fill valk, and she fills everyone. It plays out pretty fast, still get souls and Emperor puts everything on lock down.

Still it’s litterally HOURS of play to make any real quantity of arcanes in my experience. Here’s the log:

1 Runic blue
2 minor green
3 Runic blue
4 * Arcane Swamp *
5 minor green
6 minor green
7 minor blue
8 minor green
9 Runic green
10 minor green
11 minor blue
12 * Arcane Swamp *
13 minor green
14 * Arcane Swamp *
15 minor blue
16 minor blue
17 Runic blue
18 minor blue
19 minor blue
20 Major green
21 Major green
22 minor blue
23 minor blue
24 minor blue
25 Maj blue
26 minor blue
27 Runic green
28 minor blue
29 Runic blue
30 minor green
31 * Arcane Swamp *

This is the most I’ve seen in the fewest games from the 3 logged sessions I recorded. Ironically, no Celestials dropped in that time either.

My present goal has been to try and get last trait for plague…need 12 Swamps and 12 Venoms… I had neither. Explore right now can be stingy to surprisingly reasonable at times. In the first 14 games above, Arcanes were dropping and it felt good - for once!

Over the course of trying to acquire 12 of anything, it takes multiple sessions over what seems like days of play right now… or perhaps binge playing during a day? I’m not sure if RNG alone will get you 12 in a day… even a crazy full twitch stream day of play… maybe… I’m not that guy though.

I logged the results of my most recent 31 games where 4 swamps were earned. Figure your avg time to play from kill to kill - that includes close out screen, getting dumped out, jump back in, and repeat in-game and record that kill to kill time. Do this a number of times. You’ll also need a few log sessions as all sessions are not equal. With enough data, you can come up with an average kill to kill game time. From my data, it seems celestials drop around 30-40% of the time - when it could have been an Arcane. LUCKILY, in this particular session, I did not get any of the celestial drops. Honestly, that was an anomaly for the 3 sessions I’ve logged. Last night, I received 3 celestials and only 1 swamp all night… it was a bit disheartening and annoying… so, all that time was lost… I didn’t log those results.

Because I’m not a machine, life and interruptions happen, not to mention one can get bored doing this… i had around 4-ish hours in the above session. Anyone more focused could reduce that time I’m sure. Last night I did the same, maybe longer, and received 1 arcane and 3 celestials… so that was a significant loss of time. Considering I need 24 arcanes… the time hit feels increadibly long… and it’s for one card I don’t even know if I’m going to use much.

I get the ‘prized resource’ and ‘if you want to go faster spend money’ arguments. However, this is a free to play game, dev’s have time metrics associated with any particular progress and task I’m sure. There should be ways to reasonably push forward and earn what you are after toward goal progress if you want to put in the effort and time… so I wonder, is this reasonable? Note, you earn no gems or glory or trophies for your guild in Explore. However, you can make gold, souls of course traits and level up your toon. It seems like a fair balance in reward spectrum. I also like that I seem to get an increase in Runics in this mode. Overall I’m pleased with the mode and its value in the game if I can fit a valkyrie into the team. I like the option to work toward the arcanes I need, vs. having no real option.

Challenges were essentiall the same thing, only far worse and with no variety in the encounter, even more boring. So explore feels like a good move in the right direction… I wonder if it is enough.

The road to getting a single legendary, much less a hard to come by Mythic card, full traited, is no small ‘time commitment task’… and that’s even with reasonably fast teams between time to kill.

I haven’t done the math, but when you consider ~8 hours with celestials and arcanes dropping that earns you 5 perhaps 6 arcanes and 3 celstials… when needing 24 arcanes you are looking at upwards of 30+ hours - and that’s just for the last tier of a mythic card. I’m not sure if that drop rate is practical in the end. On the other hand, maybe my experience isn’t reflective of the norm… or perhaps its right on the money with what they are after here.

If Explore is really just for when you need 1 or 2 arcanes, okay… I get it… but that means the game really has no reasonable way to work toward the arcanes you need, other than back to PvP, use gold, invest in guild, get gems, save for VIP and hope for the best…

I wonder if the Celestial was pulled out in general - and put into its own kingdom… maybe apocalypse? LOL… well whatever, but it could be put elsewhere - if that adustment alone would improve the drops for Explore enough to cut down the time to earn.

So what are you using to farm traitstones?

Have you recorded your kill to kill time over a number of games? If so, what is your average time - kill to kill (on normal)?

What kind of drop rates are you seeing?

Have you farmed for a full legendary or Mythic yet in arcanes? If so - what was your experience?

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I went all day the last days without getting a single one. Today in a few hours I got enough Arcanes to finish Lion Prince, Manticore, AND Khorvash - 5 stones in all.

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I doubt that explore mode is supposed to be significantly faster than grinding glory for whatever’s available in the weekly rewards. I haven’t run the math on that, and I’m sure others are much faster at collecting glory than I am, but I would expect that the method where you are able to choose which color traitstones you’re farming for would have a lower rate of return than the method where you have to wait for the appropriate week.

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i have a team for pvp and aa team for explore.
Pvp team is
Burning bones
Jarl fire mantis
Valkyrie***
Giant spider***
Keeper of souls
Explore team is
Deamon pact
Sun and moon (sorcerer*)
Dokkalfar
Giant spider***
Terraxis

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I’ve logged the battles between every Arcane drop for 62 drops so far using the class battle counter. These are broken up with some PvP battles when I do my weekly run, which were accounted for in the totals. So far, I’m closing in on a 1/15 drop rate for arcanes. Results over each data set generally ranged between 1/15 and 1/17. Since I have seen what I consider to be an abnormal amount of small streaks even given this huge data set, I’d be tend to be more inclined toward the 1/17 as the actual rate. Several Celestial stones also dropped, but were not recorded because they are essentially useless to me, and runics or below would have taken far too long to record considering just a few seconds to jot down notes would seriously hamper my farming speed. The longest drought between arcane drops for me thus far was 65 battles, with some other unfortunate streaks such as only getting 3 over a 100 battle period, but also streaks in the other direction such as getting back to back stones, or multiple in just a few battles. My current count as of right now is 62 Arcane drops out of 957 battles, and thats counting the 12 battles it has currently been since my last arcane. Counting every PvP battle as well, I’m 63 for 1203 since Explore has launched over all battles, which is still about 1/19.

Yes, thats multiple sessions over multiple days (weeks, in fact). Probably an average of almost a couple hours a day over 19 days. But most 1 or 2 hour sessions usually leave me with something to show for it, so progress can be made in the form of Arcanes each session. This is also in addition to Glory packs, which have netted me roughly 70 stones in the last 3 weeks, but with Explore, I can actually choose which ones I want. Unlike challenges, where the norm would be no measurable progress, and even PvP, where I would need 100 battles to get maybe a couple of a specific stone that I had no control over from randoms (probably Summer arcanes, TBH) and maybe two 1 or 2 more at some indeterminate time in the future from glory packs. I should note that spending my time in Explore hasn’t significantly hurt how many glory packs I can get each week by all that much either (though I have increased my play time a bit since it launched).

I generally take Valk/Mab/Rowanne/Mercy for quick clears, but I will use other things depending on the kingdom. For example, true damage is quite effective in Khetar since most of the troops from the base challenges have fairly low life. AoE/Split Damage combo seems to work well from with the heavy hitters (Rowanne, Bul’Tauros) since Explores usually have low enough hits for a single split to finish them off after an AoE most of the time.

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It all depends on timing, really.

If I need arcane blades, which were in last week’s event and I missed it, it might be months before we see them again.

I’m finding Explore to be extremely lucrative. I’ve fully-traited probably a dozen legendaries and the Priest hero class since Explore was introduced, some of which I had been trying to trait for 2 or 3 months.

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Ive so far farmed 3 differently arcanes:

4 Arcane Blood = About 1,5 hours.
4 Arcane Swamp = About 2,5 hours.
3 Arcane Light = About 3 hours.

So totally about 7 hours for 11 arcanes. One arcane every 38th minute or in every 25th match if its about avg 1 minute 30 seconds per match, with waiting time included.

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A dev made a similar connection to glory.

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I only tried to farm traitstones once before explore. The experience was so disheartening I gave up before I had all the stones I needed (& I only needed 3 of them…)

I farmed enough traitstones through Explore to trait Mercy. I started with six stones so I needed, I think, 8? Six or eight? something like that. It wasn’t so bad.

The thought of farming up enough traitstones to kit out a legendary from scratch doesn’t appeal, but I can imagine going back if I need a less daunting # of stones.

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Explore brought me back to the game. Weird i try to leave it and it drags me back in.

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I enjoyed the Explore diversion so much that I’ve started playing Arena again.

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