Trait Stone rebalance

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.

*Cit:

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