I was wondering if there is any hope of a trait stone rebalance in the future?
I have been playing for a few months now, am level 566 and have realized that no matter what I do I never have enough minor red or purple trait stones.
The needed amount of the minor traits to the major ones is really laughable, its almost like the major stones have no real use. You need to use a few on the second trait for cards but that’s about it. So I end up having around 300 of every Major stone and less than 50 of the prestated minors. On the flip side I have 370+ blue minors, almost 600 yellow minors and over 300 of Blue and Brown.
So I don’t know if it’s that the character colors need rebalance to use the colors more evenly, or that the stone usage needs to be more Balance but I have about 300+ of all majors and that number just keeps rising. Maybe they major drop rate should be lowered and the Runic and minor stones need a boost, or a better randomization or rune color drops or a combination of all of these.
I’m sure all of this is impacted by the cards I use regularly however it is an interesting trend I have noticed and hopefully it can at least be addressed here. I just know that when I finish a match and get a major I roll my eyes exasperatedly and I’m way more excited when I get a minor with the current game set up.
Minor reds are a problem for everyone. Until they aren’t, at which point you have everything.
One of the problems with the color imbalance is that more red are needed period. This part of it may actually be intentional, where given a purely random drop distribution, one color is more needed and therefore more valuable than the rest, giving more of a slope between “not having enough to trait ever single troop” and “having enough to trait every single troop”. This is less of a “problem” since keys give an even distribution over time, and you can still target farm to make up this difference if you want to accelerate your gains.
The other is that, especially from PvP, distribution is decidedly not even. You’ll see less reds than anything, usually mostly yellows, due to everyone camping out in Whitehelm, which is the least needed color as of right now. This part I sincerely hope is not intentional, although it has been brought up several times. The most common idea put forth is that you have some kind of influence over what sort of traitstones you can get to drop from PvP (much in the way that pre 2.0 revenges did). Yes, you can still farm challenges or explores, but the huge imbalance over drops in PvP and the fact that basically every other player in the game is choosing your drops highly increases the chance of you getting a “useless” stone from a battle.
The Major vs Minor imbalance is caused by the glut of glory keys, making them far more common for everyone from early-mid to endgame players than gold keys, and these keys spit out greater traitstones like no tomorrow. Coupled with the fact that you need much less greater stones than you do minor for any given set of traits, you’ll always have a ton of extra major traitstones.
This end of the problem is not so easily fixable, because the issue here is less that you too few minors, and more than you gained majors too quickly because you spent a lot of glory keys. The majors kind of need to be on the glory key drop table, if only to slow everyone down, so don’t expect this to change any time soon. Since it has been this way for quite a while, major stones have been devalued to the point of “useless” at near every level of progression, which is where they will remain no matter what the drop rates from battles are adjusted to going forward because you simply already have too many of them. Changing the relative amounts required for traits to eliminate bottlenecks would simply accelerate traiting for everyone, which might not be the best idea long term.
Couldn’t it be helped if on the 2nd and 3rd traits you only needed Majors or on the 3rd trait it was just majors, runic’s and arcane’s?
Also thank you for eloquently pointing out that I’m not alone with this issue.
It could, but as I stated, traits were rolled out with these costs so they’d take a certain amount of time to obtain. By shifting the cost of something that is being obtained at a rate similar to what the devs probably expected (minors) onto something that has flooded the economy probably faster than they initially expected (majors), end result is that everyone just ends up traiting faster than initially anticipated with resources that they already have - no extra time or effort needed. The relative gain rate of majors vs minors also varies greatly based largely upon how fast your guild is at gaining glory keys, something that would be difficult to balance for new players to avoid slowing them down at this critical stage when they want them to get hooked in. At this stage, it will probably be runics or arcanes, maybe even a celesital if you are really unlucky for your first legendary.
Note that I wouldn’t be against this happening, I just don’t think it will for those reasons. Given the way drops work, something has to be a bottleneck, and for a lot of people the main bottleneck still what week it happens to be (arcanes), which, thankfully, Explore gives a viable alternate option to hunt for. Similarly, I could see them potentially adding a better way to actually obtain minor stones somewhere down the line, if it were decided the minors bottleneck is actually a problem long term.
The OP has been playing for several months and gotten to level 500. I’ve been playing for almost a year and I have the same problem.
@Mithran has some sensible responses–there are good arguments against making things easier–but “everyone wants everything instantly” is a pretty silly argument here.
I assume the shortage is intentional and if so, eh. Their house, their rules. But I’ve honestly never played a game that was QUITE so miserly about progression.
I would agree that the dial could be turned back in that regard some, but I was simply alluding to the fact that typically people have something frustrating happen to them in the game, and they come here to voice their opinion for change. Even if they gave the people what they wanted in that regard, there is no guarantees that it would happen any faster for said person. You’re right, there’s an economy in this game that mostly has to remain the way it is. They can change it some, but not completely. There are a lot of statistics and charts, etc. that they have to go by. Which says such and such numbers keeps this person engaged and playing the game for long periods of time. I know you know this, merely just pointing it out. So i’ll end just saying if someone comes to the forums to complain about something, typically it is because you had a problem getting something and would much prefer to get it sooner. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but sooner. People don’t mind trying hard or grinding for something, but some like to grind harder than others, so it’s a balance.
R Kelly-“I don’t see nothing wrong with a little bump n grind.”
I think part of the problem with a lot of people is being bottlenecked by the supposedly “common” resource. The “drive people to spend money” thing doesn’t really track as much with minor traitstones, as they are not offered often for money. Arcanes, on the other hand, are a more sensible bottleneck. The readily available colors change weekly, they are frequently offered for money as part of a pack (but never more than about a third of the types at a time), and with Explore, you can grind away at them as well and get them at a reasonable rate, unlike pre-explore where you could easily waste a couple hours and come up empty handed. When hunting Arcanes via Explore, each one still feels like some sort of progress, whereas farming minors, each individual gain is too small to feel impactful.
So, we have this supposedly common resource, that just kinda trickles in, and there isn’t really a good way to accelerate it no matter what you do. The best way to farm extra minors is to farm challenges, and that, well, kinda sucks. Gold keys also drop them, but you need thousands of gold keys for enough minors to trait a single given legendary. Minors from the glory troop packs also cycle weekly, if you want to spend thousands of glory just targeting minor stones, and there is also the ludicrously overpriced minor traitstone pack that is only occasionally available, which gives you 20 of each color, when you need 78 of a specific color for a single legendary.
Looking at the relative drop rates, though, it has to be intentional. Just counting battles, you get a minor stone about twice as often as a major stone, on average. However, you need 3.5-6.5 times as many minor stones depending on the troop. The real question is, are you getting too few minors, or too many majors? Is the minor cost absurdly high, or is the major cost absurdly low? An easy way to correct the imbalance would be just to raise the major stone cost to an appropriate level without lowering anything else, but I don’t think thats the kind of change people want here.
Personally, I don’t think anyone would complain if minors were given a x1.5 drop rate of their current amount for Explores (shrinking the major drop rate for Explores to almost nothing), just giving a slightly more effective way to target them. As it stands, if you start with zero of all stones and are going for a dual color legendary farming just Explores, you’d likely have your Arcanes before you have your minors (and every other type needed several times over)(cit). Without explore, Arcanes would be the main bottleneck, but minors would be the second one. With the proposed boosted drop rate for explores, Arcanes would be once again be bottleneck there, too (and again, starting with zero across the board), but not by a huge amount over minors. They can be supplemented with weekly troop packs and arcane bundles for those that wanted to accelerate their gain. I believe this to be actually closer to the original intention, where you can slowly build your way up on the bottleneck stone types through use of Explores, but can also pay your way if needed. Simply put, it feels better to get arcanes to drop than it does to be watching your minor count, and the drop distribution should probably reflect that.
Traitstones from maps should have the same rarity ratios as battles everywhere except Explore, but split between all six colors, which would make it actually one of the worst modes for trying to collect a lot of one of a specific type. The other would be PvP, where you have no influence on your opponents kingdoms other than repeatedly refreshing, hoping that someone set a home kingdom that can drop your color, and possibly taking lower difficulty options just for stone color, which kind of defeats the purpose.
people will always complain, if they make minor easier to get , then people will complain about runic is to hard and keep complain about something else, personaly i don’t have any problem to get them but it depend what you are doing when you play and how long you play, i don’t expect to get same ressource then someone who play 5x my time
edit and the stone drop from pvp are random their home kingdom doesn’t affect what color is droping
