So I have like a small handful of traitstones and can not upgrade any of my cards at all. The most I’ve got is 5 earth and 5 fire and the game wants 12 of those plus other stones I don’t even have to upgrade a card. I thought these were more of an advanced thing so I didn’t fuss over it but in story mode I’m running into AI troops that all have traits unlocked on their cards, seems a bit unfair as it’s likely going to be a few weeks before I’m even able to upgrade one of my cards with how low a drop rate I’m getting on these stones (so far I’ve gotten one from a PVP match and none from story mode quests, yes I’ve gotten some from chests, but again it’s random as heck).
You’re not, it’s been screwed up. Traits are appearing way too early in quests and challenges. Its already been ‘fixed’ once (reportedly a lot better) but its still off apparently.
Part of it too comes from the problem with any new resource / ability added. If you started today you wouldn’t see those traited mobs until you had fought quite a few battles and thus had a chance to trait your own mobs.
However, because we have already played all the battles behind us with no chance to get the appropriate number of traitstones we are left feeling underpowered. It will balance out in time, but for now it just feels off because we didn’t have a chance to progress “normally”. Just think of all the battles you have fought to this point, and then imagine even a third of them giving traitstones back. You would probably have your base team fairly well traited by now.
Feels like if that was going to be the case than there should have been some “back-filling” of traitstones? I already feel a bit bummed that this game presented itself as only really needing one of each card so I salvaged any dupes I had over the course of the past year and now we need 5 copies of each one to upgrade them.
I don’t disagree, some kind of traitstone pack based on level would have been nice. Certainly not required, we will catch up soon enough. But it would certainly have been nice.
It is further exacerbated by the bug which allowed peeps iron keys to be converted into gold keys over again each day for a couple days. Those who already had tons of keys sitting around got an even bigger jump on others who didn’t have those kinds of resources. So now we run into people in PvP who have traits they wouldn’t have had without that bug and our decision to spend or save keys was completely invalidated because the math changed from 1 iron = 2 gold + 1 glory to 1 iron = 4 or 5 gold + 1 glory. It wasn’t intentional, so nothing to be done about it, but it doesn’t make it any more fun to deal with.
All in all, it is a temporary shortage which will soon fall away. Just keep pushing the battles and the gold chests. Try to focus on kingdoms which give the stones you are after. Focus on your core team and don’t worry too much about others yet. I am sure we will all be sitting around some day laughing at how strapped we were for traitstones back when they were first released.