Balance Between Guilds

[fair lance]

How do you feel about the balance between guilds?

I was talking with other players about this while playing last night, and I would be very interested to see what others think.

[fair lance]

We had specifically brought up the differences between Towers and Memory Hunts, and how the latter appears to vastly outclasses the former in terms of Materials Farming, while also granting high orns, making it an extremely lucrative and much more appealing option for late game general mat farming. @cunning venture pointed out that it's much more exploitative based on our napkin calculations, and I really cannot disagree.

An hour of couchable memory hunts compared to an hour of farming towers puts the lack of comparison on display (assuming full boosts to both). My experience is that a single memory hunt drops an assortment of 200 mats and a little over 1m orns, and I can do about 50 of those in an hour if I focus on it, putting the total at around 10k mats per hour, averaging out to a little over 150 of each mat. And if you don't have a couchable hunt, you can make a new party until you do.

Towers by comparison are only giving like 18 mats per floor, and if you can manage four 50 floor towers in an hour then you're looking at 3600 mats/hr or about 60 of each mat every our. Memory hunts are 2.8 times more efficient at farming mats than towers based off these rough figures. Considering towers are intended to be endgame content and memory hunts are now available starting at T3, this really does seem extremely exploitative to me.

I will give the caveat that towers offer initial utility far beyond just mat farming, but after they've been maxed out and you've gotten everything you can from them, this is kind of all that's left it seems. I do think that this is not necessarily a good balance to have, especially given that there are other things I haven't mentioned that make this even worse.

[copper basalt]

Been thinking about this abit too and I think that the intended limiting factor is use of a DM to start a memory hunt, but with the current guild costs it's extremely cost effective to just buy them from the guilds. My suggestion is to make DM's much more expensive in other guild currencies, especially ones that are very farmable like Anguish and Towers.

[fair lance]

Forget anguish and towers, you can farm more than enough coral at T7 to buy 10 every hour.

[copper basalt]

Oh yeah I always forget fishing is a guild. That too

[cunning venture]

Thank you for this thread @fair lance . I ve been thinking about it today too and IMO it indeed creates some big unbalance and issue for the game. Run tower/anguish/fishing* to buy DMs shouldn't IMO be the go to for powerAL
Don't have much time to talk about it those days but I really like @copper basalt idea indeed

[copper basalt]

I think the cost per DM is reasonable from Monument and spelunking since they a bit more difficult to farm.

But literally since the discussion yesterday and thinking about the numbers myself, I dumped almost all of my guiild currency into DMs. Just seems too overpowered

Especially when you consider recollection effectively makes each DM worth 1.5 of itself

Only semi-related, but I also think this is another reason we need an updated leaderboards. This would not have flown under the radar so long if the players using this method were actually placed in the top100

[fair lance]

I personally have been buying DMs for a bit for getting orns, but I never really considered the mat farming potential until recently. I don't necessarily think that the price needs to be increased, I'd rather see the mat payout decreased personally. I do like what DMs offer in terms of the GPS aspect and I don't necessarily think that nuking something that incentivises it is good.

[cunning venture]

Mats not linked to the % increase reward bonus maybe ?

Increase orn/gold but not increase the amount of mats*

[fair lance]

I think that's fair

[copper basalt]

Another solution that would probably be more controversial is to make it so it can't be couchable or at least make it a lot more likely that it is not couchable. Even since the advent of 'couchable' I'd think a supermajority of players do mostly couchable.

Its supposed to be GPS content and I enjoy GPS content but I cant remember the last time I went out for an amity walk without knowing in advance it was an S tier amity

[fair lance]

I feel that if you kept the rewards as is and made it non-couchable, that definitely would also work. If someone wants to hustle to maximize Memory Hunts, more power too them and honestly I think that kind of play should be incentivised.

As long as it can be couchable though, it'll be exploitable and as such will be exploited.

[fair lance]

I think that the singular biggest issue in this entire thing is fishing though. The fact that it basically maxes out returns at T7 and stays above everything else until well into the endgame is most concerning.

I love fishing, but the lack of any dynamic change in earnings makes it prime for exploiting. As long as it's static, it'll either be too good or not good enough. At this time, it's definitely too good, but just nuking rewards would create another problem.

At least with anguish and towers, you really have to build into a point where the ability of farm DMs becomes concerning. In this regard, fishing truly stands alone.

I also feel that this should be talked about with refineries in mind. I'm not one who uses many refineries, so I cannot really personally talk about them, but if mat farming is being discussed then they probably should be taken into consideration as well.

[fair lance]

Doing math from this perspective, to look at it as orns and mats/hr from fishing converting coral to DMs.

T7+ earns about 5.3k coral/hr, a DM costs 500 coral, and can do 50 DM/hr. Given that, here's the breakdown:

5.3k coral/hr > 10.6 DM/hr > 15.9 DM/hr

~3hrs fishing gives 1hr worth of DMs to run from recycling

1 DM > 1m orns + 200 assort. mats

50 DM > 50m orns + 10k assort. mats

Figuring this takes 4 hrs in total to achieve, this works out to:

• 12.5m orns/hr
• 2.5k assort. mats/hr (40 of each mat)

Looking at it this way, fishing for DMs definitely look a lot less exploitable, but if you were to do this with say towers or anguish farming, it's definitely back into that highly exploitable state where you farm DMs for mats while still raking in mats. Anguish farming throws loads of ort at you, using that to feed refineries and then spending PoAng on DMs just seems like the most efficient way to shoot out loads of mats.

[fair lance]

This perspective*

I know that really high players can farm absurd amounts of PoAng every hours, well over 500, or over 20 DMs/hr (30 after recycle). Not sure what the exact rate of orns/mats per dungeon is, but that's at least 28 dungeons/hr at Ang50. I don't know what the figures actually are, but this just looks stupid high if done like this.

And that can be done effectively indefinitely like fishing, which is the really scary part IMO

[modern light]

Orn farming may be a concern for low-level players. I don't see how mat farming is a concern in a world with grand market and refineries.

It does however illustrate why I was adamant about not awarding bonus XP for trash legendaries, @heady geode

[indigo wraith]

whats the calculation on DM btw? how is 20 -> 30 after recollection?

isnt the avg prangs per dungeon at a50 without events is 15?

saying 500 prangs per hours is -> 500/15 = 33.3 dungeons / hours
which is ~108 secs per 1 a50 dungeon without menu time

[fair lance]

I'm forgetting the terminology rn, but because you can keep recollecting it makes each DM worth the sum of all recollections down the line. Since it decays by 66% each time, you get:

1 + 1/3 + 1/9 + ... ≈ 1.5
As such, if you keep recollecting, each DM is really 1.5 DMs.

[fair lance]

For this, I have an old pal that's farming ang50 horde dungeons and they tell me they're getting ~18 PoAng/dungeon at 2 min per dungeon, which comes out to 540/hr.

[indigo wraith]

ah yeah.
i recalculated it and thats true, my bad 👍

probably lucky, its 2-4 bosses on floors 16-25
which avg at 3 bosses for 10 floors -> 30 bosses, at 50% chance each to drop prangs -> 15 proofs

per dungeon

2 min per dungeon including menu/UI loading time and WV travel seems too fast, but might be possible

[fair lance]

I mean I trust the dude, dude has multiple top 100 global accounts 🤷

[indigo wraith]

18prangs/dungeon with medusa at the current event may be possible, idk though, never calculated it

[fair lance]

I don't really do anguish farming myself, am but a simple fisherman, so I can only trust other's numbers

[indigo wraith]

coming back to your original post,
As far as mat farming goes between towers and fishing, i didnt see you mention tower shards which.. can also be used to bought mats (of your choice, which is important) 👍, also the higher AL you have, the more tower shards you can farm from them

[fair lance]

I didn't break down tower shards largely because it is much more limited in that you can't indefinitely run towers. Compared to fishing and Anguish Farming, there's a much more definitive limit as to how many towers you can clear. It isn't realistic to expect to find or be able to find enough towers to just continuously run them like you can the other two. Like, yes, tower shards are good, there's just a limit to what can actually be accomplished. From what I've calculated though based on my own experience, towers are more efficient, it's just that limit that makes them bad by comparison IMO.

[modern light]

Few people have any interest in doing more than 5 towers per day

Towers are very accessible in endgame

[modern light]

Why do you say 1-4 bosses? It's 2-4, right? Average 3. Average 15 prangs per non-event dungeon.

[indigo wraith]

right, from the way i see it, anguish cant be run indefinitely too, using the previous calculation if you need (40) 28 dungeons per hour doing horde boss and want to run dungeons indefinitely, you'll need 56 dungeons to run horde boss indefinitely (no spelunking event), which is.. most likely not possible to find 4 spots that has 56 normals (1 where you're staying at, 1 your OT button, 2 other location from you home WV (1h per WV CD, means you can have 2 WV to travel to in 2h))

and i think towers being limited is a good thing

• tower, most lucrative, but limited
• anguish 50 horde boss, lucrative, but less limited
• fishing, less lucrative (and non-scalable), but indefinite

[indigo wraith]

oh right 🤣

ill update the calc, thanks!

[fair lance]

I don't make the rules, and I don't go hard in the paint like others do lol I do know that they have multiple great dungeon spots though, plus if you share with others you don't personally need to find 4 great spots

[indigo wraith]

well, with 1/2 alt, i guess a50 farming is indefinite anyway

[modern light]

Can you do ang50 in party? Doesn't foresight kill you?

[indigo wraith]

i guess not a50.. damn foresight (my alt would die)

[fair lance]

With enough ward and ward regen, anything is possible

[modern light]

Even if you find a way to do it, efficiency goes way down

[indigo wraith]

yeah, and base HP

true, but i think it'll still be better/slightly better than fishing

[fair lance]

On proofs alone, not including the inherent mat gains of it. Which is something they might be looking at since I messaged them to try and get an idea to share a similar breakdown to what I did for fishing

[indigo wraith]

atm, as far as balance between guilds goes, i'd rather see changes prioritized on the prices of mats (and maybe items) from other proofs first..
56 proofs of sparring for 35 elstone? 173 proofs of rememberance for 102 lightstone?

[heady geode]

I never wanted to award bonus xp for trash legendaries, just situational legendaries.

Also, very random place to ping me about that lmao

[modern light]

One of the main proposals was to award bonus XP for all legendaries (including trash). I think the breakdown in this discussion explains why that would derail the system.

Anyway, doesn't matter. If I'm not making sense, feel free to ignore.

[ebon tree]

Probably DMs shouldn't be guild buyable really.

By limiting the number of DM you can get per day, and having them as a potential tower reward, it would shift your focus back to towers, with memories being something you collect up slowly and spam when you get a couch hour.

Maybe increase the memory rewards by a little bit to compensate for the nerf.

[cunning venture]

I like this idea too. Point is to avoid something that look like more of an exploit than an intended game mechanic

[copper basalt]

I like the idea of DM being buyable sox if you want to farm a good amity you can spend other currencies for it. But it should be a big net negative in terms of mats you would have otherwise bought.

Another option would be to make a different item that you can memory hunt for amity but that gives no other rewards and to make that buyable in shops

[potent quarry]

Leave everything as is with the seers guild and remove couchability from being a possibility. That's the real exploit with amity hunting. The intention behind it was to get people off the couch and getting up to play the game

All nodes will be forced to spawn 250+m away from players location. This is going to be disliked big time 😅😂. That is the real exploit to the guild though.

[cunning venture]

I would be ok with it 🍻

What if we started with a suggestion at least to point this thing ? It always has some collateral damage (not the ability!) but well, I m use to it I guess

NF stated 2024 is a year to polish guilds. They started with some good results on some guilds, I guess the topic of this thread fits perfectly with it

[unborn stump]

I thought the same about monuments then they were given a 1 hour cd and became top tier couch content! Haha

[cunning venture]

<@&909795548754739221> Big Yoshi told me it's fine to ping so I hope it is 😅

[sand pond]

Right at the start of a new event?

[copper basalt]

Will summarize some of my overall thoughts for benefit of ORN Reps

With full memory rewards, DM are an exceptionally good supply of Orns/Mats. If you buy DMs directly from farmable guilds (fishing/Anguish/Tower) you are coming out very far ahead in terms of mat value, even if you roll only T1 materials, you are still likely coming out ahead by doing a memory hunt. If you find a couchable hunt, which is easy with alt accounts, you can do around 50 hunts an hour. Many accounts have been shown to have very high AL using almost nothing but the Seer's guild, now that this is public knowledge I expect this to become way more common.

Ideas for Potential Solutions:

1. Remove Couchability from Amities. This would make it exceedingly difficult to farm the 50+ an hour that some are able to do now. In exchange, the rewards can actually be increased.
2. Heavily increase the cost of DMs from guilds that are extremely farmable.
3. Remove DMs from guilds and repalce with a consumable that lets you do a memory hunt that only results in an amity, no additional rewards.
4. Introduce a buy-limit to DMs from guilds.

[oblique flume]

As a person who loves amity hunting i hate this so very much

[cunning venture]

3bis. Don't link amount of mats from memory with the % bonus from pet/amity/gear.

[ember pagoda]

How much of this is actually problematic though?
Taking the reply's math into account, which considers Fishing as the source of DMs, you're spending 4 hours to get 12.5m orns per hour (which is pretty bad considering endless rates) and 10k random mats, which averages 160 of each material, costing 5.3k coral. In comparison, using Solarite as a cheap yet frequent asc mat, and Cortanite as an expensive mat block, this amount of coral yields specifically 165 Solarite or 63 Cortanite. Also for comparison's sake, 160 of every material on average is about 52 to 56 refineries' daily output, meaning that 52 to 56 refineries output the same as 3 hours of active fishing gameplay.

Taking Anguish into account instead of fishing, to get one hour's worth of DMs (35 or so, due to recycling), one would need 35 x 25 = 875 Proofs of anguish, which, at an average of 15 proofs of anguish per dungeon (a bit more during crimson festival), is ~58 dungeons. The amount of dungeons one has access to is the main limiter to this speed, but assuming 2 wayvessels with 15 normals each (fairly generous), that's 3 hours of anguish (assuming instant dungeon clear speed, you only need to wait on WV/DG CD), so it is actually similar to Fishing in terms of anguish speed. It has the inherent bonus of giving extra materials, but none of them are relevant except Ortanite, because it refines better; as well as EoG rewards, which while they can be good, the fact that you won't be running Hard makes them not particularly interesting.
Again, as with the previous comparison, this many DMs is ~160 of each material, aka 52 to 56 refineries worth of output. However, 875 Proofs of Anguish equals 2187 Solarite or 833 Cortanite. If you're blocked on any material in particular, there's absolutely no doubt that you'd rather directly exchange Proofs of Anguish for them, rather than go the roundabout DM route.

Of note, Cortanite, tied with Lyonite and Ortanite, are the most expensive materials. Any other material will have a higher conversion ratio

TL;DR:
I personally don't see what everyone else is seeing in terms of DM profitability, comparing it with other lategame sources of materials (anguish/refineries)
Not personally acquainted with towers but could also do comparisons

[ember pagoda]

Also, thank you for the summary, it does really help.

[copper basalt]

I think that comparison is lowballing on the materials a bit, I'm earning between 200-250 mats per DM. So about 10k an hour if were assuming 50.

[ember pagoda]

that is the rate being used

3 hours to gather materials to buy the DMs, 1 hour to use the DMs; so ~2.5k materials per hour of effort

[cunning venture]

25 anguish (nearly) equal 25 cort buying it directly (as an exemple)
25 anguish convert into DMs is 300+ random mats = 5 of each = way more than the amount you can get from buying directly mats with PoA, and this only taking into account "annoying" mats, as it's 5 of each for each DM

[ember pagoda]

25 pranguishes is ~24 cortanite or ~72 solarite
getting 5 of each material isn't a bad rate, but a lot of the materials you get aren't necessarily needed for ascension - many materials you end up getting from multiple sources and end up getting plenty of piles. Not to mention that most ascension blocks happen as a consequence of the rolls directly piling on one specific material.
Also, the amount of materials per DM keeps getting changed. It started at 200, then 250, now 300+, not sure what to believe anymore 😅

[copper basalt]

Difficult to break down the exact math without knowing averages of what materials are worth, but if we assume the average 'mat locked' material is 5* then anguish farming 30 dungeons an hour, which is pretty generous, for 450 prangs is 900 specifc mats, whereas DMs will be 5k 'general' mats. Granted, there is set up, some of these are useless mats, some won't push your 'current lock' , but will help future proof against further locks. On a long enough timeline, DMs are by far more profitable than 30 Anguish dungeons an hour, which is currently one of the best ways to get mats and requires a huge investment into the character.

[ember pagoda]

I understand that getting a very widespread count of materials helps prevent future blocks, but as it stands, even if you're blocked on three different materials for one ascension, you're better off buying those specific materials individually, rather than casino-ing for the others

Even moreso when refineries already fulfill the purpose of giving a flat "every material". But that's a whole other beast

[cunning venture]

(it's because I take into account you Can recycle)

[ember pagoda]

Even without refineries, both Towers and AW also help with the random materials

[cunning venture]

We re on this topic too on other suggestions threads 😋

[ember pagoda]

My calcs were also taking that into account. 50 DMs, but only gathered 35 DMs worth of pranguishes

You can't just add recycling into the DM output, because that creates a false Mat/Hour

[cunning venture]

It's not to point a player in particular, but to give an idea of what is duable, (most likely combining DMs and refineries but DMs take a good part in this kind of results)

[ember pagoda]

Unless that person is getting DMs from another souce that hasn't been under scrutinous calculus yet, I don't see that being more worth their time than pure anguish

The other source that comes to mind is towers (ignoring that they are level 11 on tower guild), but that's 5000 shards per DM, meaning ~7DMs per full tower.

so 5 50F towers for 35DMs

[cunning venture]

As long as DMs gives better results than buying directly mats in guild shop, it's IMO an issue, especially when you have some guilds allowing to buy them without any link to your current character progression (fishing)

[ember pagoda]

with the added bonus that the five towers combined give ~125 of every material

which is already 3x more than the amount that the DMs will offer

[cunning venture]

End of floor rewards? It's more like 18/50F = 90 I would say but agree

[ember pagoda]

I have yet to see any reason for buying DMs rather than the mats directly

[ember pagoda]

Was taking Fux's numbers on it #1192387945013968946 message , but I didn't confirm them myself

[cunning venture]

Because combining each "annoying" mats will result in higher amount. Short term it seems better to buy directly the one who is currently blocking you, but in reality, long term it seems way better to buy DMs than buying directly mats

(sorry for my english it's quite hard for me to be clear and I hope it's understandable)

[ember pagoda]

imma run through each material individual, I'll hit you back up in a bit

[cunning venture]

As it's X cort + X Realm ore + X solarite + X nightstone + X fogstone + X.....

And for players who would like to "use/exploit" it , I would say that there are more mats that could matters than "usual" player maybe

[modern light]

I believe the exact expected amount of mats from a 50F tower is 854.5 (disregarding that some floors don't give mats).

But it doesn't make sense to compare random mats with selected mats.

[cunning venture]

It does, as if the amount is important it really matters in the long run IMO

[modern light]

For random mats, you're competing against refineries.

[cunning venture]

Exactly, and as refineries is a debatable mechanic IMO, DMs is maybe a debatable mechanic too

[modern light]

If refineries are scrapped, I agree.

That's a big If.

[cunning venture]

Want to powerAL, combine all those things (refineries + DMs). And it's IMO maybe an issue for the game

[potent quarry]

I think there's too many things coming up determine if it's really an issue. AL 2.0 and if refineries are going to be re-worked would need to happen before seeing where the seers guild sits

Looking at the stats of that account, it still doesn't really add up to how he got enough DMs to pull off level 89 seers guild and have under a year play time

It's not towers obviously and the anguish level isn't all that high

[cunning venture]

It's anguish mostly

[oblique flume]

there was a time before guilds too

[cunning venture]

BUT not anguish dungeons

World farming boss on high anguish

[potent quarry]

But 185 AL is insane still at those stats. The RNG would be impeccable lol

[ember pagoda]

Okay so I got that done

Some materials might be up to discussion if they're yellow or red

But the Not Bad Materials to Roll is about in the 45% ish range

which is more than I expected

[cunning venture]

You re a beast !

Since we (with several players) talked about it, I checked many endgame players profile menu, and it's clear it's already a well know mechanic for at least several players

[ember pagoda]

This means that of the 50 DMs worth of materials, aka the 10k or so materials:
3225 of them will be Shoppable materials
2258 of them will be fairly easy to acquire materials
1774 of them will be cheap currency materials (equivalent or cheaper than solarite)
2741 of them will be expensive currency materials (more expensive than solarite)

of the 825 required proofs of anguish to purchase 50DMs, one could afford 2187 Solarite, meaning that you can actually get more materials of that tier by exchanging tokens directly

[cunning venture]

And as always, just like what happened for refineries (at start just several players understood how crazy they are), I m expecting (and seing) this DMs thing being more and more used while we re here trying to understand if it's an issue or not for game balance.

[ember pagoda]

meaning that the only tier that is actually worthwhile is the last tier

The last tier is anywhere between Solarite and Cortanite, but 825 pranguishes isn't nearly as much as 2741 of the other materials

so yes, in the grand scheme of things, DMs are quite good

[cunning venture]

I agree

[ember pagoda]

Though there is one unfair thing I just noticed, which is that we shouldn't be comparing the DMs to the raw 825 pranguishes

since it does take 1 hour to turn those pranguishes into materials

whereas people could be running another 1 hour of anguish dungeons

[cunning venture]

Agree

[ember pagoda]

the fairer comparison rate would be 825 pranguishes' worth of DMs versus 825 +1hr of pranguishes worth of guild shopping

which under previous assumptions, was 15 normals' worth, which was 225

so 1050 Pranguishes

[cunning venture]

All those things has to be taken into account, as it requires most likely at least some adjust on the price of DMs in each Guild shop

[ember pagoda]

doesn't change the math a lot, getting low rolls on the DMs is still less worthwhile, the high rolls are still pretty good

1050 pranguishes is exactly 1000 cortanite. Neat.

[cunning venture]

IMO, what several players are doing for efficiency with this DM thing is more tower related than anguish related for max mats/hour efficiency

[ember pagoda]

Anyhow, if we convert the "cheap materials" from DMs into "expensive materials" at a 2.5:1 ratio (Solarite to Cortanite conversion ratio), you get that DMs give about 3450 "expensive materials"

versus Anguish's 1000 "expensive material"

DMs are getting a little bit of a benefit of the doubt here because most things in the expensive tier aren't as expensive as cortanite

but to be a little rough around the edges, the final conclusion I reach is that DMs give about twice to thrice the value of anguish, spread throughout useful materials

[cunning venture]

Agree, but even if it's not a 3.5 multiplier it's most likely still a huge one I guess

[ember pagoda]

However

It being spread around is a downside

because when you are cort blocked, you are not nightstone blocked, for the most part.

(just as a rough example)

It does help with future blocks, but not ALL of the "useful materials" will actually end up being useful

so I'm actually leaning closer to the x2 rather than the x3, with that in mind

[copper basalt]

As an upside to DMs too, no extensive gearing requirement, unlikely chance of failure, no WV/Dungeon Cd limitation

[ember pagoda]

all that being said, if DMs are deemed problematic, either halving their material reward or doubling their guild shop price would work fine

the latter would be less punishing to the earlier players who are obtaining naturally sourced DMs via daily rewards, oracle temple, runeshop, etc

[cunning venture]

Agree, that's why I talked about in the long run. And most bénéficial for powerAL is to combine those things (buying mats directly to avoid some long blocks at some points). But IMO amount of mats/ DMs seems too high

[copper basalt]

Also, DMs do award proof of remembrance, so 200 memory proofs per 50 is the equivalent of 100 prangs.

or is it actually 4 per hunt?

Ill edit

[cunning venture]

I agree with this. It would be fine IMO to stop linking mats from DMs with the reward multiplier available for memory hunts from amity (100% reward) gear (trialing) pets...

[ember pagoda]

No, that's too punishing

If you remove mats from the multiplier, that's going to be a ~x5 reduction

[cunning venture]

True

[ember pagoda]

whereas a x2 reduction works fine, and a x3 reduction is already overdoing it

[cunning venture]

Seems fair to me

I m sure you ll keep doing some good calculation and come with the "right" multiplier 🙂🍺

Maybe issue with it being still too good for early AL players ? As contrary to some guilds linked to your character progression (anguish, tower), it will maybe still remain OP for early AL players using other guilds (such as fishing) ?

[ember pagoda]

I'm afraid I've reached as far as I can go with number accuracy

Past this point it's all speculation

There are too many variables

In the end, I think that maybe DMs are too strong, BUT they are competing with refineries for the same job - and the optimal ascension path requires a steady flow of all materials plus specific blocked materials

if Refineries fill the random materials path, then material selection from Anguish is likely powerful enough for those two combined to be beating DMs for efficiency

Towers also help with random materials, as well as raiding and AW

On the other hand, if Refineries get changed or removed, then DMs could fill their place, in which place they are likely a strong replacement

Lastly, all these points are moot if Ascension gets changed

[delicate plank]

Anguish is probably too rewarding on the high end of play

[cunning venture]

Agree. But we had same thing with refineries and there are still here, so maybe it could be good to bring this DMs thing to NF and see if they want to do something before AL2.0. ? I don't know

I have to go for now but thank you very much for joining here and for helping a lot regarding this topic. It's always really nice to have such nice talk !

[copper basalt]

My personal thought is Anguish is exceptionally rewarding, For DMs, even if its non-specific, to have something that gives, arguably, a much greater benefit, is alarming.

[cunning venture]

I totally agree yes

[simple siren]

Just popping in to throw out there than Refineries and Mnemonics are unlocked well before Anguish. Not sure how much y'all wanna consider their usage prior to unlocking Anguish.

[ember pagoda]

The mnemonics' resource output only becomes silly once the player has 2 100% memory rewards amities, which requires, at the very minimum, either a VERY lucky low tier player, or a tier 10 player that follows community amity hunts

A player also needs a vast amount of mnemonics which requires them being purchased from a guild, with Anguish, Towering and Fishing being the most accessible ones

Fishing is available early though

[simple siren]

Fishing kinda sucks early game for Coral though.

Gets better at T5 for Embered Snapper

[fair lance]

If you only look at it one AL at a time, then direct buying mats is best yes. I'd argue that you cannot though due to the uncapped potential of ALs. One could absolutely get mat blocked by cort a few ALs in a row and then not see it at all again, but because they focused too much on cort they then get blocked by some other mat. I understand that refineries do also provide a similar role, but I can't stress how absurd +50 refineries sounds when compared to a few hours or fishing a day by comparison.

You would need to get 12k ort every day and be collecting and reloading every 12 hrs to achieve similar results, not including the setup of getting 50 different refineries set up onto one or two different spots. How much time would all of that take by comparison? I do not know what this kind of setup demands for time to keep running, but I would think that one would probably be better off splitting it to buy DMs and Mats directly from shops and not even messing with trying to upkeep such a system.

In my mind, I really see it being most exploitable by layering all 3 methods on top of eachother. Anguish Farming for splitting PoAng between DMs and Mats and then feeding whatever bulk junk you get into refineries, even if it isn't ort. Using DMs offsets worse mats for refining, and it still leaves open the use of PoAng for Mats directly.

[fair lance]

The biggest benefit isn't going to be from new fish going into T5, it'll be the new line for less time between casts. I'm still getting probably over 1k coral/hr on my alt at T4, so it's definitely not negligible earnings.

[simple siren]

I will have to keep that in mind

[fair lance]

For reference on what tiers get what, could probably make a nice little graphic of it somehow

I haven't actually timed the T3 line, but I am guesstimating that it averages 1 catch/min, about ¼ of what you could expect from a mighty line. Other maths looking at partial earnings and whatnot from my T10 testing also leads me to estimate that said catch is worth ~80% of what it would be at T6 or higher, which does come out to ~20% so yeah 1k coral/hr at T3 sounds right.

[simple siren]

That's 4 Mnemonics per Hour right there 🤤

[fair lance]

2 DMs/hr* but yeah still very lucrative.

[fair lance]

I was able to get in a good 30 min of memory hunting and paid a bit more attention. Here's what I was seeing:

• I cleared 33 memories in this time, increasing the hourly rate from 50 to 66
• I was getting between 40 and 80 mats per node
• • it did appear to average close to 60, which is 50% higher than my more conservative figures before
• I had exceedingly few nodes that did not drop any mats
• I was able to gain 45m orns, which is a rate of 90m orns/hr

Using the new rates, I would likely get more like 20k mats/hr instead of the initial conservative estimate of 10k mats/hr.

[modern light]

Keep Emerald Restoration in mind.

[fair lance]

You're right, had forgotten about that tbh

I wonder what the exact buff is that emerald restoration gives, could it be 50%? That seems awfully high tbh

[copper basalt]

I think Emerald Restoration is between 10-20%. When normally hunting my max mats are in the high 70s. The most I've seen so far with restoration was 92.

But around 16 more hunts per hour is huge

[royal root]

fully buffed mnemonic hunting is 26 to 79 mat for each of the 4 memories. 2x 100 reward amity + trialing + elisyan pet. 5-15 original mats with no buff, x2x2x1.1x1.2.

emerald restoration buffs that to 30 to 91 mats so it's 10% buff.

[ember pagoda]

30 to 91 seems more like a 15% buff than a 10% buff
26 * 1.1 is 28.6
26 * 1.15 is 29.9 (30)
79 * 1.1 is 86.9 (87)
79 * 1.15 is 90.85 (91)

[royal root]

might be, or might be rounding dunno

but pretty confident those are the ranges for mats with and without event

[vernal juniper]

driving?

couch hour?

[copper basalt]

I think it was couch hour

These are drastically less efficient if you actually have to move

[vernal juniper]

also the supply of dm's are rate limited

& you're translating that into a fishing buff? where the % of times you dont get fish decreases?

[karmic totem]

This makes sense

Flooring at the end is Orna's style, so applying all the multis and then flooring makes the most sense

(this also makes order of multis obsolete, thankfully enough)

[copper basalt]

So assuming all rolls being equal the expected is 210 mats per hunt non event.

[fair lance]

Couch hr yeah

[fair lance]

Wouldn't it be 264 mats/hunt? Should average to 52.8 mats/node across 5 nodes, no?

[copper basalt]

The 5th node doesnt give mats

[fair lance]

Could've sworn i got mats from it

[copper basalt]

I'll run one real quick to double check

Just orns and the amity

[copper basalt]

But with 16 more DMs per hour and 5% more mats per DM, were looking at almost 40% increase on John's previous numbers, which were already pretty nice. Not to mention the 250 proofs of remembrance you'd be getting per hour. I will note that now there would be additional setup to acquire the extra DMs.

There's also events like phoenix and the current where you have additional memory hunt buffs.

[fair lance]

Alright then, so then to rerun the calculations:

210 mats/hunt at 66 hunts/hr => 13860 mats/hr, or 44 DMs with Recollection in mind.
That's ~240 of every mat per hour, plus around 78m orns

For fishing:

44 DMs = 22k coral ≈ 4.2 hrs fishing

For Ang Farming:

44 DMs = 1.1k PoAng ≈ 73.3 dungeons

For a comparable refinery output:

~17k ort input across 72‐78 refineries would yield a similar output of mats

[potent quarry]

But you either have to farm for those DM's or wait for the daily DM which takes time so it makes sense the output is higher than the others. You've already invested a lot of time into getting the DMs

There just needs to be bot detection implemented into the game tbh. No point in nerfing something for the majority that don't exploit amity hunting (outside of couchableness). The very questionable accounts would likely be gone as well as many others lol. A lot of things are possible, but not humanly feasible

[copper basalt]

The point is, lets say you had 1.1k Anguish tokens. You can either spend them on 2750 solarite (or equivalent value). Or you can buy DMs and spend one additional hour and get (multiplying Johns numbers above with new factor of x1.35 based on Grkn8r22 testing and Konqs numbers):

4353 Shoppable Materials
3048 Easily Acquired Materials
2394 Mats cheaper or equal to Solarite
3700 Mats more expensive than Solarite
260 proofs of remembrance
70m orns

In comparison to one additional hour of anguish farming and keeping the initial prangs, say you can do 30 dungeons in an hour at 15 proofs per dungeon and 1m orns per dungeon, you'd have

1550 (including the intial 1100) prangs
30m Orns
Assorted EoD rewards and Mats from killing enemies

I think its easy to see why DMs are very strong. The only real caveat is that you're not able to target a material, but over a long enough period, that doesn't really matter with the returns you'll be getting. Not many people are abusing it now, but I think with discussions over the past few weeks, its going to become more and more prevalent. It is drastically outperforming 50 Anguish dungeons, which is considered one of the best ways to ascend, and I think 30 anguish dungeons an hour is very generous.

[potent quarry]

Keeping all of that up on a consistent basis is highly, highly unlikely though. Guess if you're playing with a mouse or something it would be easier, but the time invested is still pretty high. I think if an actual bot detection system were in play a lot of these issues would be resolved or at the least reduced greatly. Removing the possibility for couchable nodes would be enough to make it be less rewarding

Or at least make it so nothing is fully couchable

[copper basalt]

Yeah I'm of the same opinion. Bot detection is definitely important and I think changes to coachability are very warranted.

[potent quarry]

I think removal of full couchability would solve it for the most part. At least on par with the other guilds even if you have to walk just 10m - 15m to hit another (I still want bot detection though 😆)

[copper basalt]

I view all this as a situation similar to refineries where something is drastically more effective than even the highest level of farming while being not particularly fun

[copper basalt]

100% agree. I also really hope there is good spoof detection in place for conquerors guild launch

[potent quarry]

Agreed. I know the ones that fly in rank get caught, but I'm sure there's patient players out there going undetected

[royal root]

kinda envious of you guys being able to do 50-60 mnemonic per hour, here in HoA reaching 40 requires perfect memory position , and usually it's 25-28 per hour with focus

[karmic totem]

yeah our celestial classes cost 10x as much though

[royal root]

5x but yes

speaking of balance, monument guild mat prices are simply wrong

50 proof for a mnemonic, 7 for a night stone lol

[vernal juniper]

"balance" discussion without context makes very little sense. so monument guild is cheaper -- players are encouraged to do event content! isnt that how you'd expect?

[green cosmos]

DM still requires a lot of gameplay time. Yes, you can get more overall (though I'm stuck on the same 3 mats over and over again). I wouldn't compare it to rafineries, which requires 1/10 of time spend.

[royal root]

no I am saying it's too expensive. mnemonic price is ok, mat prices are bananas , absolutely insane

[modern light]

Community quest reward is way over the top

[green cosmos]

Yes?

[indigo wraith]

good time to burn mnemonics

[frail bronze]

Yes.

[karmic totem]

And this is before Shrine of Asherah comes back

[modern light]

Thanks for acting quick, Odie

[karmic totem]

Looking like a 25% bonus now

[indigo wraith]

insta nerfed

[karmic totem]

you'll get one of the amounts on the right if you have max buffs

[modern light]

Oh, that's a clever way to calculate the exact buff amount

[karmic totem]

oh no I found the exact buff amount first, this is purely for showing you guys

[modern light]

You didn't do that by solving x*y*z = a, where a is the amount of mats you got, y is all your known buffz, and z is an integer in [5, 15]?

[karmic totem]

Nope, just felt it out and it made sense so I rolled with it

I solved for variables when I figured out the formula for enemy Def/Res, though

[modern light]

Alright 🙂 Then I think you just inspired me how to calculate it exactly next time we have an unknown memory booster.