Are the traitstones you can potentially get for completing challenges the same as that area’s Exploration rewards? Or does explore have a greater chance of getting Runic and Arcane Traitstones?
Explore has a 2x greater chance to get Runics than other modes, and a 3x greater chance to get Arcanes and Celestials. I’m sure someone knows the exact percentages.
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Do the challenges on the hardest difficulty you can because they’re good for souls. If you want stones do explore. There’s no comparison.
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Unless you have the stomach for grinding 50 or more matches in the same kingdom at once, I personally have not found Explore to be as good a source of Arcanes as expected. Intensive, repetitive farming in any game is a distraction from actually PLAYING that game well.
You are just as likely to obtain a kingdom’s Arcane traitstones during that kingdom’s actual Quest line as from its Explore mode. In general, usually one Arcane is likely-- but not guaranteed-- to drop from the Quest line and one is likely to drop from doing its Challenges.
Still, doing Explore is a tried & true method to increase your drop rate of Major trait-stones, hahaha. That would be funny if it weren’t so true.
it says that explore has higher chances, but you never know what RNG has for you. from my experience, there are times that i don’t get runic or arcane from explore but when i switch to challenge, i get many in short time.
For me, i like challenges better because it is very predictable. the opponents are the same every time with the same traits locked/unlocked. where as explore may contain a random troops, sometimes fully traited and high level.
explore has less clicks to reach the game than challenge, which is nice. something that adds up over time.
you can try and do which feels right for you. usually i mix the two. when explore being mean, i switch to challenge. challenge usually end faster for me. i guess it depend on if you have a fast team to use.
below are just my bad experience dealing with explore. something that i never encounter in challenge:
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In my experience, in explore, the board is always too generous with cascades and more than 4 matches than you ever need. it may sounds good, but AI is usually get the upper hand. my game get drag way too long than it should, which i don’t like at all.
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One time, in explore, my gorgotha dies by only skull damage from many cascades on normal difficulty. they don’t even cast any spell. i had to sit there and watch that going on for minutes.
I don’t use challenges because you get 50 gold, not 500 and zero xp instead of around 75-80
So basically Challenges are kinda pointless at the moment…
Guess I will leave them alone until they change them (like completed challenges increasing Kingdom power)
At least on PC/Mobile, explore is about 1/17 for an arcane on average (prepare for occasional droughts of about 80 battles, but some back to back drops as well.) Non-explore is about 1 in 50 for an arcane, but I’ve gone upwards of 400 battles without getting an arcane. I have heavy documentation for the Explore arcane drop rates, and the non-explore drop rates are an aggregate of data provided by others and compiled by @Rasper when traitstones where first introduced. These estimates are pretty much on point with the claims of 3x drop rate for Arcanes in Explore. The only scenario where Challenges would be faster Arcanes than explore in the long run is if you were able to clear a Challenge three times as fast as an explore for the respective kingdom, including loading screens and trait activations, which is not likely.