The main example is of course Bounty, but it surely extends to any rewards with an Orb/Major Orb of Chaos.
There are numerous win-win scenarios possible if the devs wanted to explore them and really listened to the player base (which they claim to do, despite mixed signals on many occasions).
One of these scenarios is getting us players to spend more Gems, by offering a minimum certainty that our effort/investment is not rewarded with Frustration, while still staying within the gatcha philosophy.
Last Bounty several of my guildies skipped buying tiers because of previous experiences with double Major Orbs of Growth as final rewards, so I was wondering if others felt similarly.
I’m generally pretty laidback when it comes to the turbulent ebbs and flows of good/bad RNG in this game. I accepted long ago that it’s basically a casino game with pretty art and fun explosions. [And yes, I’m good with that since I like pretty art and exploding all the things.]
However, nothing grinds my teeth or irritates me more than playing Bounty and getting a growth orb. It is extremely demotivating. I know several of my guildmates stopped playing Bounty for this very reason since there is also no guild related reason to play Bounty.
I really wish they would consider making at least one reward be a guaranteed good orb. They could even rotate between a couple of the more useful orbs. No one will convince me that a guaranteed minor ascension orb every once in awhile is game breaking.
Honestly, no. I currently spend enough gems to max out events like Bounty and I’m going to continue until I can craft Zuul’Goth. I’ve accepted that I can get an Major Orb of Growth or 2 but I’m still willing to take the chance, because I want to get it over with.
Once I get Zuul, I doubt I’ll spend as many gems on events. In that case, removing Orbs of Growth might affect what gems I spend.
I basically play Bounty for the vault keys now. Usually two purchase tiers will get me enough for two vault keys and a bunch of other goodies. I don’t typically go past battle tier 14-16 or so.
No, because they’d just replace them with Orbs of Wisdom and traitstones are more bloated than ever.
But actually mostly because I don’t have time or desire to play most events, even though I have plenty of gems to do so.
(I might actually do more full bounty runs if I were guaranteed to move closer to any long term goal after them, which generally means “get an orb of ascenscion”. A gamble of my time and gems and I still might not move any progress bar, plus usually limited weekend availability, is enough to make me not)
This, basically. Removing Growth orbs from the pool wouldn’t guarantee an increase in Ascension orbs.
Ascensions are the orbs that will take the longest to “outlive their usefulness”. Growth and Wisdom orbs have always been useless to me, and I would wager, to a lot of endgame players. We already had huge stashes of Souls and Traitstones when they were introduced.
It could be argued that Clans orbs are at least moderately useful too, since guild seals can be used to try for the new release Mythic each month, but anyone sitting on a massive stash of seals would find them useless.
I don’t think GoW will ever stop introducing new troops, and because of this, Ascensions will continue to be considered the most valuable orb out of the current selection of orbs.
I can still use Wisdom, but never really had a use for Growth: by the time a player has enough firepower to get through all the reward stages of an event, s/he surely has enough souls to obviate the need for Growth, thus the inherent irrelevance of the reward.
In the dev stream they said they intended Orbs of Growth to be a bad prize from chaos orbs lol.
The elite level system indirectly buffs Orbs of Growth, since we now have a new use for souls (besides troop upgrades and the soul forge). Nobody should be using souls for the higher-level troop upgrades anymore, with the stocks of Orbs of Growth endgamers are sitting on.
Orbs of growth might see a comeback in utility, with the advent of elite levels.
After enough players have drained their soul stashes raising (or trying to) elite levels, greenies may get relevant again. One major orb of growth can save the souls for almost one elite level after all.
Also, orbs of growth are more relevant than ever to low/middle players, due to the overall nerf on soul farming that the new explore brought forth.
I’d say, instead of removing then alltogether from bounty, simply remove all chaos orbs and add 4 guaranteed orbs instead to the rewards; one green in the begining, one clan and one wisdom in the middle zone, and one blue in last reward tier.
That’d be win win for everyone, including for the economy, as you MUST spend a set ammout of gems to reach tier 20 rewards.
I’d like this change, but it wouldn’t coax more gems out of me.
There’s three ways you can spend currency in an F2P:
Something that lets you play more.
Something that lets you play faster.
Something that lets you play better.
The shop tiers mix up the three. I hate playing without the explosion effect, and the enchant-at-start smooths out things. But most of the tiers are more about letting you play more by giving you more sigils. As-is, I have a hard time spending all of my sigils in every event. Life got busier, and I’m a happier person, so it’s not as appealing to sit down and burn 4 hours to try and eat up a lot of sigils.
There are two things that’d make me spend more gems:
Give me more gems for free. Duh.
Give me something that makes me progress faster.
I’d pay a lot of gems for an effect like “50% chance to kill the first enemy, even if it’s a Tower” from a potion. Or I’d pay a lot of gems for “use your affiliated hoard boosts” in a class/bounty event. Or maybe the equivalent of Fireball/Heroism Scrolls for other events. Those would let me move a little faster, which is what I really desire.
But that’d make the leaderboard even more crazy, so I’m not holding my breath.
That said, I’ll accept anything that makes ascension orbs drop more frequently. As-is, by mid-Saturday I’ve usually given up on an event because the concept of the grinding it’d take to finish a bounty event if I’ve been busy is soul-crushing.
Mathematically, growth orbs, in terms of use value once you have reached “enough to get Zuul”, are garbage always. At no time and at any stage of the game where you’d earn a chaos orb does the opportunity cost of earning one growth orb come even close to the value you’d have gotten using that time directly to farm souls. Actually, by “midgame”, using my weakest account for reference, in the time it takes me to navigate to and level a troop to one below max and then navigate to and spend orbs I could have earned over 300 souls. If I calculate the time difference cost of using the soul farm team versus just clearing said battle for other purposes, the time cost to set up the orb means I could have earned more souls than it was worth by using a soul farm team for a few easy battles I was already going to do. The one exception is the event reward 5(portal 3) free (and fixed) Greater Orb of Growth from Invasion(/Raid), which is both low enough that more casual players (even those in somewhat casually paced guilds) can get and enough of a benefit as to offset the opportunity cost of earning it. At “midgame”, I can still toss those on a mythic and be satiated that something of value was gained. That one should stay where it is.
For everyone saying Growth orbs tie indirectly into the elite level system… not really. I also have math to show why unless several medals are handed out for almost nothing every week, it is highly unlikely that elite levels will ever result in any kind of soul scarcity for endgamers (and absolutely not any time soon), and why if it does result in soul scarcity, growth orbs just aren’t very helpful anyways. The medal bottleneck is just far, far more prominent than any potential souls one. Remember before delves and ingots just came out when people were freaking out because it would take “5.5 million souls” to convert enough common ingots to 55 mythic ingots for a full weapon upgrade without considering the scale of needing 550,000 common ingots in the first place (at the time, 550,000+ PvP battles, significantly more than most players lifetime totals)? Think that. Greater orbs of growth are still more useful as inventory decoration, normal orbs are not even worth the effort they take to set up to get the max amount of souls out of them.
They aren’t ever going to remove them, or allow them to be changed into other orbs. Wisdom and Growth just need other functions period, and these functions can’t be tied directly with dead-end resources. Doesn’t even need to be huge, just enough to move them from a 0/10 to a 1-2/10 on the prize scale for everybody. If they don’t get an alternate function, then both stones and souls need to not dead end, then maybe “not spending some stones” or “not spending some souls” would sound appealing… but that would be way more difficult to pull off in a meaningful and balanced way, because those resources aren’t gated, and they are a lot older and more bloated. Right now, I literally can’t spend them if I wanted to.
This bears repeating separately. I’ve also done some basic calcs and I completely agree that unless several medals are handed out for almost nothing every week, it is highly unlikely that elite levels will ever result in any kind of soul scarcity for endgamers.
IMO…it’s the red chaos orb that needs to go. Especially in event leaderboards.
I know, I know…there are a bunch of you on here that love the RNG “surprise” part of the game. Let’s face facts, you’re a sucker if you spend real money on a chance at a maybe. What does money get spent on? Diamonds, guild keys for gifts, flash sales containing specific objects, weapons, and our favorite Deathknight Armor. As gamers we will (should) be spending our real money on the guarantees.
Currently for event leaderboards it’s what I call “checkers or wreckers”. You either get the power orb or don’t waste your gems. We see about 10 every event investing around 10,000 gems chasing the power orb and then a huge drop off. What id you knew what the orb would be for the top 5, top 10, top 20 and so on. You would be more inclined to spend to your desired orb. This in turn would make someone in the top 20 spend to get the orb they want in the top 10 which will feel more attainable. So instead of spending 3000 gems they’ll push to 5000. If there just 500 gems shy of that next level to get their orb, they’ll pull out the credit card.
No way, no how would that happen for a chance at a maybe.
