Woohoo, got an arcane stealth from the 5th forest of thorns challenge in less than 25 tries. Warlord 2.
I am jealous, I am working on this one now. Congrats @Machiknight!
-Razlath
yea now I can fully trait a glade warden. I just want to say I’m going to be pretty annoyed if they nerf the crap out of true shot with how hard it is to get these trait stones.
Yeah. I know that one of the devs (I can’t remember which one) said that they would tread very carefully on future nerfs because they were aware of how much work was going into prepping troops now.
Hopefully they can find something for True Shot that keeps it good, but tones it down a little. The 50% to 75% damage when bypassing armor sounded plausible, but possibly a pain to code. After all if you did 50% of skull damage when someone had no armor left you would probably be (rightly) annoyed. So the damage would have to check if they have armor before decreasing the damage. Seems like most of the suggested fixes have a similar little “gotcha” baked into them.
-Razlath
I do not think the issue is with the trait, but with the normalization of the troops.
A good way would be to lower the attack of troops with True Shot.
A Centaur with 18 attack would not be able to 1 shot most troops.
If you also lower their armor and HP, they would be frailer and be killed faster.
Bonus from the kingdom and the +5 to all attribute from level 15-20 had the effect of normalizing the troops.
Which, in my own opinion, is the main issue we are seeing now.
The only attribute that was not raised as much is Magic.
Because of that, the units spells are a lot weaker than their physical attack.
Who cares if a spell inflicts 10 damage to a unit! Any basic troop will inflict ~20 damage on a skull match!
5 Likes
This is 100% spot on, and the real issue with all the teams we see so much of. Goblins, true shot etc.
20 Challenges, Jousting Lane (Swords Edge), Difficulty: Warlord IV
Nil: 0
Minor: 9
Major: 8
Runic: 2
Arcane: 1 Arcane Blade
Celestial: 0
Not surprising, but it appears Warlord IV guarantees a traitstone drop according to these results.
Which is to be expected what with all the time spent to win this difficulty of battle, but nice to know nonetheless.
What’s more interesting is how it seems to up the chance of a higher rarity drop!
Though more research is obviously required to be certain.
Correct. One of the Devs indicated that at Normal it is 80%, and 100% at Warlord IV.
However the percentage rate drop of various types is still unclear (what we were hoping to achieve from this thread).
From my own stats, at Warlord IV…
No Traitstone: 0%
Minor: 50 - 60%
Major: 30 - 40%
Runic: 5 - 10%
Arcane: 1-3%
Celestial: <1%
I haven’t seen a significant change at lower levels of difficulty, but it avoids the chance of no drop.
However, could be random chance, but I’ve noticed some Kingdoms seem to be more lucky than others…
FoT, Khetar & Whitehelm seem to have been easier (in my experience) to farm the challenges for the Arcane traitstones.
Khaziel on the other hand, seemed to take forever to finally get a Deep Arcane to drop.
Sorry, forgot to reply there! I play in either Normal or Warlord (2 I think?), but I didn’t think of making separate spreadsheets at the time, so the results are kind of jumbled together. Sorry. 
Alright, my statistics so far:
100 PvP invades, normal mode
no traitstsone: 15%
minor: 51%
major: 24%
runic: 6%
arcane: 3%
celestial: 1%
20 Karakoth Challenges @ Warlord II
Nil: 3 (15%)
Minor: 10 (50%)
Major: 5 (25%)
Runic: 2 (10%)
Arcane: 0
Celestial: 0
I’ve now played more than 100 karakoth challenges and yet to get a Death Arcane
Just did another 40 Magic Rocks Challenges in Karakoth:
20 at Warlord II
Nil: 2
Minor: 14
Major: 4
20 at Warlord IV
Minor: 18
Major: 2
The last results look particularly improbable. I wonder if Karakoth is working correctly or has been adjusted. Any others with experience in the past 12 hours?
have you tested the warlord 3 mode ?
It’s still drop runes at this level
Not particularly. The devs have said that the higher difficulties don’t give a higher chance of a rare stone, just a lower chance of no stone at all. Assuming the chance of a minor is 50% and major is 25%, the chance of this is about 1 in 10,000, so you were very unlucky but not improbably so.
I think I throw my statistics in here. 167 MAtches all played on Normal:
40 Nothing (24%)
73 Minors (43,7%)
40 Majors (24%)
11 Runics (6,6%)
2 Arcanes (1,2%)
1 Celestial (0,6%)
I’m not sure how you derived those stats, but in any event 1 in 10,000 is certainly what I would call improbable. 
However, I’m more talking about Karakoth…I have done some ~200 challenges and selectively another number of PvP battles there without an arcane traitstones showing up.
To do a quick comparison, I moseyed on over to ‘Dire Straits’ in Maugrim Woods and did 20 challenges at Warlord II level:
Nil: 1
Minor: 13
Major: 4
Runic: 1
Arcane: 1 (swamp)
Celestial: 0
This is closer to a normal result, although perhaps I was lucky to get an Arcane instead of a second Runic.
Also, one of the Devs indicated there was a ‘slightly’ higher chance of getting better traitstones at a higher difficulty level. I’ll try and track down the quote and copy it here.
My farming in both Darkstone and Divination Fields, I saw around 1 Arcane per 200 matches. Mostly playing at Warlord I or Normal.
At one point I farmed 30,000 souls from one Arcane drop to the next. Now I didn’t keep count of the matches, but probably over 300, during that same time, 2 Celestial.
In all the matches I’ve played since the patch came out, I had gotten zero arcane stone drops. Then, in the past four days, I’ve gotten two. Oh, the vagaries of RNGs, we should be well familiar with this by now.
celestial was about 1 in every 200 for me chaps.