3.3 altered the gem economy. Prior to 3.3, mid to late game players generally argued that treasure maps lacked value. Now, unless I’m missing something, treasure maps are the best repeatable source for gems in the game. How do treasure maps rate in terms of return on investment compared to other game modes in the 3.3 ecosystem?
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Well, let’s break down what would make them “significant”.
Tier 2 or 3 doesn’t feel oppressive for a somewhat-not-casual player. That’s about 250 gems. I say it doesn’t feel oppressive because I’ve been used to about 480 gems/week for a while now, and giving up half of that is about all I’m willing to give.
The next tiers are 250 and 350 gems, so let’s make that our target. Treasure map has to represent 250/week or 800/week to make a big difference for an Average Joe.
I play about 2-4 hours per day, let’s spitball that to 3 hours. That’s 21 hours/week. I probably spend about 10 of those hours on raid/invasion, PvP, and grinding out whatever snotgem requirements are present. So 11 hours are available for me to farm with treasure maps.
To reach 250/week, I’d need to get 22 gems/hour out of Treasure Maps. For 800/week, I’d need 72/hour.
I don’t have any reasonable basis for how many gems/hour I can get out of Treasure Maps because I find the mode boring. But 22/hour seems reasonable and 72/hour doesn’t. Still, even if it gets me one more tier, I can’t see myself grinding nothing but Treasure Hunt for a week unless the reward is Infernus. So in my personal assessment, that means they’re still worth 0. But if you run numbers for your hours/week and really like Treasure Hunt, your mileage could vary wildly.
Keep in mind that following that path means I’m not getting the same rewards I’d get out of PvP or Explore, but it’s fiddly because you get most of those currencies from Treasure Hunt anyway. My guess is I’d get a glut of glory but miss out on a ton of gold and I wouldn’t get precisely the arcane traitstones I want.
I’d rather PvP for gold to buy gold chests than to play Treasure Hunt, ever.
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In the video below I make 1 gem each minute.
So in a normal day I make 1440 gems. That’s 10080 gems in a week. Treasure map is the best.
BTW, this is super accurate max statistics, top A grade Harward class super-science. Don’t try me.
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I am going to sacrifice one hour of my life (i’ll probably want back) to proof your number Bolatsi I sure hope I get 60 gems or more or I’ll be a sad panda and you’ll have to break out your big math brain to explain why! lol
Also I’m thinking 8 hours a day max (for sanity’s sake) = 480 gems a day max with 1 a minute x 7 days for the week gets you about 3,360 gems for a week of grinding treasure maps for 56 hours. With those numbers $99 for 1500 or more gems is almost tempting lol
Cheers!
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I promise minimum of 60 gems / hour. I guarantee. It will happen. It will. Believe in me. Trust me. You will get 60 gems.
excuse me while I’m coughing a little bit here in between…
But honestly I just happen to like playing treasure maps while listening to music or podcasts. It’s relaxing. And you get a fair amount of rewards from it if you make constantly over 100 moves and at least 1 vault. But if you don’t like treasure maps in the first place, I think it’s not the game mode for you.
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My problem with it is “make consistently over 100 moves” is a thing more or less based on how good your intuition for the mode’s been honed. For me it’s more like 45-60 moves per game. I could practice for hours and probably improve that. Or I could play other game modes that I’m already good at.
That makes establishing a baseline “income” off of Treasure Hunt hard. I can name a team that will grind out about 4-6 traitstones per hour. I can name a team that will get 10k souls per hour. I can name a team that destroys PvP and makes about 100k gold per hour. For some reason none of my troops get me 100 moves in Treasure Hunt. 
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Great post. That is the art of treasure hunt. I usually need 2-5 matches of ~60 moves before my brain totally get the mode of playing treasure hunt, if I’ve been playing a lot of PvP or explore beforehand. When I get used to the mind set needed in treasure hunt, I start to get better results. It’s mainly brain-dead reflex stuff (as on video) since I’ve played the mode so much.
But also when you master treasure hunt it really gives you help in playing PvP since you understand the dynamics better (well, with the current explode-based PvP not so much…) and see extra turns you didn’t see before. To get good scores in treasure hunt you really need to see the cascades and make 5-in-a-row and 4-in-a-row from dropping objects. It’s essential.
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Do you focus on creating particular types of chests to maximize gems, or just get as far as you can to concentrate as much value as possible on the board?
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The main idiotism that I see people mentioning is to stop at certain chest type for max gems or max glory. That is not wise. The thing they are forgetting is the probability. When you make a vault, the end product, you have 100% change of making something useful. It’s either 5 gems, 40 glory, 6 glory keys or 2 gem keys. All of those have value for every player, since all can be used to get a Mythic troop for example. But when you have only the red chest, it has a possibility to contain 50 souls, which at least for me is not useful at all.
The only strategy I have for maximizing profit is to not 4-match or 5-match green chests or higher. All the lower value icons should be tried to 5-match at every situation. This is my way of maximizing the profit / time.
On the other hand I try to play reasonably fast, although if I have a huge game in play, that I have a possibility to make a personal high score (current 360 moves), I start to play slower and focus on all moves. Otherwise I just focus on the podcast I’m listening and relaxing in my sofa with ps4 controller in hand and tapping my 100 - 200 move matches.
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I hope you’re not calling me an idiot…
Good advice though and everything you say makes sense to me. My best TH is probably just an average game for you (I think my record is around 140 or 150 moves and 4 vaults, but that was a while ago).
Not specifically, It’s the people who see a certain youtube streamer as the best source of knowledge about everything… He knows a lot, and does a lot good for the players, but at least in this case I’m not so sure if he’s the main guy to listen. Just my two cents…
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I think there is something to the idea of stopping short if you are trying to maximize glory per hour, but in every other circumstance, or if you are concerned with maximizing rewards generally, your advice is correct. The handful of players that are real masters of TH (like you), operate at a different level than the rest of us.
I’m guessing your results will vary, as your ability to Treasure Hunt and the RNG will both have a say in what your ultimate rewards will end up being, and be sure to take a picture after your transformation into that “sad panda” is complete, for posterity and such.
As Bolatsi has mentioned in a previous post, consistently vaulting is really the way to maximize your rewards from Treasure Hunt, even with the RNG dictating what it is you ultimately earn.
For me, an entirely F2Player that has an account that is no Guild, no PvP, no Arena, no Dungeon/Soulforge, and is essentially reliant on the Treasure Hunt mini game for all resources, I have a low level Hero (37) currently, with all kingdoms at 5-Star (and a bunch of other things I won’t express self-satisfaction for 
).
Oh, and as I type this, I see there are new posts, so if I may add, like Bolatsi, I, too, play Treasure Hunt reasonably fast, not necessarily focusing on chest type for reward output. Even with a start of only eight turns (no Guild), I manage to consistently multi-vault, and that’s where the true rewards are for me.
I don’t really focus on number of moves, though it’s logical to have the likelihood of better rewards from a Treasure Hunt with a higher number of completed moves. I focus on vaults, then vault placement, focusing on the bottom row, making life easier and such. My quickest vault was 36 moves. My quickest two vaults were made in 54.
Frequenting these forums, I’ve noticed that the growing sentiment is that Treasure Hunt is trash, with players accumulating thousands of maps, as they don’t feel it’s really worth the time or effort. And, they have a point.
Like Bolatsi mentioned earlier, Treasure Hunt is not for everyone, that is to say that it doesn’t necessarily appeal to every player and their gameplay style. I like matching stuff and zoning out, so it’s fun for me. And, hey, if I’m going to get rewarded for it, then bonus.
Unlike Bolatsi, I am not Mensa, as my test results lean more towards psychopathy. 
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so I ran my test. I usually do around 80 to 100 moves in Treasure hunt but I thought I’d go as fast as possible to get in as many TH’s as possible in an hour and to also (probably) reflect the average players results (which i do not think is what Bolatsi is even remotely close to if he gets 100 to 200 on average I’d say he is in the vast minority).
Anyway here are my results both as an average and as a total and now I will go off to try and change myself into a sad panda for about 60 seconds 
edit - I played 19 matches I probably could have done 20 if I had not been logging everything in the spread sheet as I went along but close enough methinks for the exercise.
Cheers
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Hard math is going to be extremely subjective on this since it depends on how fast you can go in other modes and the opportunity cost in lost gold matters much more the more people are still contributing to your guild’s tasks and how well you can perform in treasure hunt without having to pause to think. An endgame player in a guild where others are still contributing gold to legendary tasks is more likely to have their time be worth a lot if everyone is playing PvP than if everyone attempts to play treasure hunt.
The main issue for me, regardless of how “worth it” they are, is that they are disconnected from the game’s reward-feedback loop, which is an important motivator for many people (including myself) both consciously and subconsciously. You play treasure hunt to get resources to unlock and upgrade troops and kingdoms, and having troops and kingdoms do not in any way alter your experience within treasure hunt, which leaves treasure hunt as flat unless you like treasure hunt more than the main game, in which case everything facilitates getting more maps to play more treasure hunt. As I’ve said many times, I’d rather not have an economy where playing Treasure Hunt over and over and over again is dominant strategy, because that would lead me to burning out and quitting because I would be playing “not Gems of War” to get the things I wanted to use in “Gems of War” which then I wouldn’t have time to use because I’m too busy playing “not Gems of War”.
I would mind this much less if Treasure Hunt were intended as a high-rewards, low time commitment, extremely limited entry distraction you might play 1 or 2 times a day, but even my alt account has more maps that I could conceivably ever use without wanting to quit forever. It would be fine as a few times per week distraction (hence all the requests for multi-mapping, even if the reward-multiplier doesn’t even go up much).
Even at 60 gems per hour, the prospect of playing treasure hunt for four hours straight to buy a single T4 raid shop purchase or a few VIP chests is something I’m obviously going to balk at, because thats almost a full weeks worth of playtime for me (still figuring out how much time I want to spend on raids, but prior to this I was averaging about 5 hours per week). If the economy shifts to a point where I actually would need to do this in order to fulfill basic collection requirements, I probably wouldn’t last long.
tl;dr: Treasure Hunt is always going to be completely terrible for anyone who doesn’t legitimately enjoy it. If you do, good for you. If you don’t, short term only for short term rewards, otherwise avoid it, no matter how much rewards you are promised. (If you have stats on your guild’s average weekly contribution and your weekly contribution, your PvP opportunity cost could be calculated in terms of LTs)
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All good points Mithran as usual. I know TH is the usually the event when it is a weekly event that my guild grumbles the most about for sure. I know I really don’t enjoy it despite being ok at it. That said the hour I just spent will be ‘good’ for me now to the next time I have to do them for a weekly event
Cheers
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I’m a compulsive PvP player and treasure hunt is essential for me to relax. @Bolatsi I appreciate your analysis, though my best still didn’t exceed 200 and three vaults.
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I did a 1 hour stream for comparison. I might do some more of these 1h streams for more reliable statistics…
total reward summary incoming…
Bolatsi is the map master. Thankfully not, nor ever, a competitive event.