Before You Ascend, consider this:

2 months: 1 tabard?
I think you’re doing better than me!

Receiving a 4* mat definitely comes with
a shot of serotonin

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Really?
Man, what did we do to deserve this? My friend got 4 of them this morning… Some people in my alliance also reporting every now and then. It’s like we’re cursed or smth. :man_shrugging:t2:

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Sometimes RnGeesus is in a mood…

I’ve seen the lightning in a bottle, pulling two 4⭐️ mats off a 14⭐️ Titan.

But… drought and 4* mats, also go together like
alcohol and bad decisions.
There’s no escaping that reality.
Hence the importance for taking your time when consuming them!! The 4* mats, that is…

If you wanna chug a beer that’s on you

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I don’t know what you guys are complaining about, I regularly get a couple of 4* AMs a month!

The Six Rare Quests

Rare Quest Basics

A new rare quest comes around approximately once every two weeks and remains for just one day. Each one consists in five stages of progressively more difficult enemies.

Rare Quest Rewards

The rewards for completing a rare quest are two separate rare ascension mats, awarded to those who complete the 4th and 5th stages. More common ascension mats are rewarded on the earlier stages (such as Training Manuals and the like).

So really all that anyone needs to do if they want to max out 30+ legendary heroes, is… either spend $50,000 or play the game for 12 years or so. :laughing:

Obvious exaggeration of course. Doesn’t actually take that long. But it does take a long… long… long… long… longggggg time.

Or a whole lot of money. :grin:

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It’s not that black and white.

If you are a player with no/few maxed 5*s then there is a real loss of opportunity that will be felt if you let 2 months go by. We all have 5*s that we ascended that we regretted or we no longer use, but at some point in time most of them were used in one form or another. I regret my Justice but if I look at it objectively I did get some use out of her at a time when I didn’t have a full yellow mono team available, so she served her purpose. There is also Azlar, who I got almost no use out of - but at the point I got him I didn’t need him and I had spare mats. And one day when I have spare barbarian emblems he may come back into the fold.

The 2 months that you don’t maximise what you have in your hand will lead to less raid cups (lower raid tier rewards), lesser titans, lesser challenge event rewards, lesser tournament placings etc. etc. Which all will get reflected in less 4* mats and other loot that would otherwise help you to progress. Also, and probably most importantly - it will mean less fun. This game is absolutely a marathon and not a sprint, but you should maximise your enjoyment day to day as much as you can while you are at it, otherwise there is no point in playing.

Metas will come and go, true, but most likely less frequently than materials will come and go.

It also depends on the type of hero. A support hero, a healer, or a hero with a unique non-damage based skill can generally be sampled accurately with repeated use at 3.70, and their eventual value can be extrapolated. A damage dealer however is much harder to guage - at 3.70 their damage will be far less than at 4.80, and at 4.80 it will be far less than at 4.80/20. So with these guys some sort of leap of faith will always be required.

I don’t advocate rushing in either. You need to assess what your current roster is, what gaps you have, what your PVP and PVE goals are, how many minimum mats you have, how many spare mats you have, feedback from the community and yes test run a hero at 3.70. But a blanket 2 month rule of play testing a hero at 3.70 is counterproductive in many circumstances.

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If the person that is holding back the ascension has more ascended 5☆ and more important a real solid bench of maxed 4☆ . Then, i think that the loose is not that big as you point. A single 5☆ cant change completely your player condition unless its a broken one like Telluria or an obvious pick, in wich case its not a clever move to restrain of giving the mats.

There are heroes like Justice, Khagan, Azlar, Isarnia that arent as impactful in a roster. If you slow the ascension of those for a couple of month , a player would be still able to achieve the same things that after the ascension. Im considering a player who has a deep 4☆ roster.

Absolutly agree with this. People here on forums try to maximize the heroes they have, to pick the best ones and follow the advise of more experienced players. I usually do this way and i find enjoyment in what i do.
However, i have known too many people in former spanish alliances i played where they even didnt know this forum, or heroes tier list. They simply ascended what they like and enjoyed that hero and the playtime.
At the end of the day, its a game and no one has the recipe of how every person has to play. Each one plays the way they enjoy the most.

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This is most true!
I tried to encapsulate this. By explaining the different positions we can find ourselves in the game. And as usual… wound up with too many words…

Thanks @Lexxtarc. I tagged it.

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I think there are 3 buckets of 5* heroes

bucket 1: no brainer, max this hero out asap. includes heroes like Drake and GM

bucket 2: situational heroes that fill a need to a developed roster that should be maxed if needed. I put all season 1 snipers and vivica in this bucket but there are hotm and challenge event heroes that fit here too

bucket 3: only max these heroes for fun or if you’re bored and curious. this includes heroes made obsolete by the game for the vast majority of game play modes, like horghall without a costume.

I think understanding which bucket a hero fits into is often really difficult, even for vets, but reading this forum isn’t the answer. the only answer is to play with the hero or raid against the hero and see for yourself.

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This is true, but when I say “dry season” I mean the time when the game doesn’t give any valuable gifts for being a good boy. :joy: The quests, I guess it’s available for all, so it doesn’t make a difference how fast can each of us make progress.

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I know, I was being sarcastic in the first part. :slightly_smiling_face: The guaranteed rewards are great, but you need a lot more than what they give you in order to just finish one hero. So it does get very frustrating when you go weeks or months without pulling X ascension material from other sources.

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What can one do… I’ll keep embleming my 4s. :tipping_hand_man:t2:
And occasionally ascend a 5
. Good thing is that I managed to grab handful of solid heros, so my main defence team should be decent.

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Easier to emblem 4s anyway. And a fully emblemed 4 is about as good as an average quality 5. 4*s are still my main bread and butter, until I’m able to pull and finish more 5s. Which could be a long time, but it gives me something to keep striving for.

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Keeps you relevant. :yum:

It doesn’t have to be so disastrously expensive.
The most valuable deals are the ones where the gem value are 200 per dollar. That’s twice the value you would get for a mountain of gems!
And all those deals are the cheapest ones! Sometimes they’re just a buck.
Usually it’s $1.99 for 400 gems. And sometimes there’s maybe even some extra tokens pull tokens for various portals.

Not only are those bargains cheap, they are abundant. You can wrack-up a decent amount of pulls for a pittance.

The trick is… no different than the main theme: be patient and not spend the gems! Let them build up. Along with your regular pulls:
image

And then when you wanna finally give chase you can try this:

I’ve already spent beyond my limits for this game. No more for me. I am fully free to play going forward.

I have never seen a deal ever where I got 200 gems for $1 USD. Average price used to be 300 gems for $3. Now it’s 300 gems for $4.

But that’s only for 1 summon.

Remember the summoning odds.

I’m not spending hundreds of dollars to summon heroes in this game. Or any game for that matter. Going forward, I will get whatever I can get for free (mostly from TC20, probably), and I will have to be content enough with that.

I don’t know when it suddenly became normal and acceptable (and not absolutely ridiculous) for people to spend hundreds of dollars on a mobile phone app. Perhaps around the time that people started spending $20,000 to buy an umbrella stand, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a banana taped to a wall… I don’t know. But somewhere along the way, the world lost me.

Years and years I worked, hoping for maybe a 2% raise each year, having to settle for a 1.5% raise instead… meanwhile, the price for playing video games went from $50 to $500 seemingly overnight? When did that happen? And we’re not even talking full 3D virtual reality games here, we’re talking about a match 3 game on a tiny handheld device, with a screen roughly the size of an original Nintendo Game Boy (and the graphics aren’t even a whole lot better).

I don’t get it, myself.

I mean, I get that it’s a fun game. I just don’t get how it’s supposed to be worth that much money. :man_shrugging:

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They are all I look for. I’ll tag you when I see one. The .99 cent ones aren’t all that common. But 400 gems for $1.99
I bet…any day now!

During S2 and S3:
it is always the day 1 offer

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And that is in United States currency? Because I recently complained that I remember gems used to sell normally 300 for $2.99 USD, and now it’s 300 gems for $3.99 USD, and everyone here told me that has always been the price.

No need to tag me, as I won’t be buying them anyway… but you can tag me anyway just so I can see it for myself. :grin:

EDIT: current offers I have on my screen…

100 gems for $0.99 (one time purchase only)
400 gems for $4.99 (apparently the new “normal”)
300 gems + ETT and a couple of junk battle items for $2.99 (only 2 in stock)

etc.

EDIT #2: also I have come to think of gems in terms of ‘Dawas’.

300 gems is equal to 1 Dawa.

Of course, 300 gems could also potentially give you a legendary hero along with a bonus HotM… but 70% of the time, it’s going to be a Dawa.

$3 for one feeder hero seems a bit expensive to me. This game is pretty much outside of my acceptable budget range.

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I think when you look at this it makes more sense if you think of it as a hobby outlay, rather than looking at the specifics of the hobby. If E&P is your only hobby and you spend a lot of hours on it every week, and it brings you joy/solace/comfort/companionship or helps to make covid a bit more bearable or even just effectively kills boredom then I would say its quite reasonable to spend $100/month on it. I mean if you compare that to going out and getting drunk frequently, it is cheaper than that and arguably better for you. Or you could race cars for a hobby which would run you into the thousands.

If you casually play a bunch of mobile games and you spend $100/month on each then that seems less reasonable to me as it becomes less about a dedicated hobby that you invest in (invest meaning money going in, fun coming out). Although if you have that kind of disposable cash lying around then it is entirely your perogative to spend it however you want to.

A fine line that everyone has to walk in all of this is that the money you spend should not be regretted, regardless of what actual outcomes you get out of spending that money. If you regret, then you are spending more than you should

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I do get that, that’s what several people have told me…

But I’ve been a gamer most of my life, and I’m used to spending a lot less than that on video games. Including ones that I play for years. I’ve always argued that video games yield the “best bang for the buck” in terms of entertainment per dollar.

Apparently game companies agreed, and decided that they should be charging a lot more going forward.

I get where you are coming from. I would traditionally try to avoid paying full price for a console or PC game, and would only download mobile games that are free or at worst still less than $5.

But for me personally those games would not provide nearly so many hours of entertainment for me that this game has, and so the cost/hour over the course of 2 years for my entertainment is very easily justified for me (although I would never - ever - share that amount with my wife). Or that would be the end of E&P for me. Possibly the end of everything.

E&P has outlilved my typical phone app lifespan (usually no more than 6 months) and in a format where I can get daily doses whilst doing other things or between doing other things (with job and household responsibilities including 2 kids I no longer have the luxury of being able to physically sit down for long stretches at a time to immerse myself in a console game).

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I play Warhammer 40,000 competitively as my main hobby. It’s price equivalent to racing cars :joy:

So maybe that’s contributing to the thought process I have which is paying for your hobby is just normal. I spend a lot of free time on this game because I need to have something to do. I can’t sit idle. So if I’m spending around 4 hours a day in the game there comes a point where I’ll spend on it. Not every deal, I’m not made of money, but the ones that interest me for sure.

But everyone is different and everyone is essentially right. Spend, don’t spend…both fine choices, pick whichever you like.

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