[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Yesterday I finally decided to try out the new(ish) stash tabs; I bought a currency tab, an essence tab and a divination tab.

I put off buying the currency tab for a long time thinking, "What's the point?"

Wow! What a mistake on my part!

The currency tab is fantastic. It's a huge time saver. Just about every imaginable orb fits into its own slot in the tab. Orbs stack to 5000. The tab can hold full orbs as well as orb fragments. It also holds chisels, sextants, and breach-league splinters. The tab even holds scrolls.

Now, after vendoring rares for orbs, I can quickly clear out my inventory by opening the currency tab and clicking on all the items in my inventory. No more searching through several tabs to find the one that's for scrolls or chisels or... well, you get the idea.

I cannot recommend the currency tab highly enough.
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The essence tab is also quite nice. It organizes all your essences into one tab. Due to the huge number of essence types and levels, this is impossible to duplicate with a regular stash tab (well, the new quad tab would have enough space but you'd need to manually organize the essences at least once to get it started and then you'd have to spend more time organizing things once stack limits were reached.

I really like the new essence tab and also recommend it.
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The divination tab is... well, I guess OK. I used to have a dedicated tab for cards and once the stack limit was reached I'd just move the stack to the far left. Once a few complete stacks were available I'd head into act 4 to turn them in.

The new divination tab doesn't really improve on the above functionality. It does have huge-sized representations of each card though which is sort of nice. But you need to pick various sort options to get the tab to display what you want - e.g., full stacks, or stacks you currently have cards for.

Moreover, if you're working to complete several sets of cards (e.g., for the challenges), there's no way to flag those particular sets as being of special interest. You'll need to separately track the sets you're interested in, in some other fashion.

The divination tab is by far the least useful of the 3 new(ish) tabs I bought. I'm not sure I'd even purchase this tab now that I know its limitations.
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One tab that doesn't yet exist which I think would be super nice is a map tab.

I keep all the maps I find and use low-level ones for the chisel recipe. I like to organize my maps by level. As a result, I end up with 13 or so tabs just for maps and another tab for map fragments (Atziri, Izzaro, etc.).

One tab to organize all of that would really help.

The currency tab is so clutch. I bought one immediately when they were released because currency was taking up 3-4 slots for me in Standard and rapidly was taking at least two in temporary leagues.

If stash tabs weren't so clutch for GGG's bottom line, I'd say that a currency tab should be default for all new players. Even then, I'm kinda thinking it should still be the case. It'd probably go a fair way towards player retention. I'd consider it an investment in the future.

Problem is, they'd have to retroactively award all existing players with a free tab or points equivalent. And that'd hurt.

With the way they've reorganized how Essences work in end-game (you can only get T3+ in maps), I don't really think it's necessary for temp leagues. You can get away with one regular tab for it. It's QoL, for sure, makes organizing easier and a time saver, but it's nowhere near as clutch as currency tabs.

The div tab I think is more for showing off the art than anything else. I think out of all the new tabs released yesterday, this is the most useless. But you get one tab free with the bundle, so this ends up being the one. It's still nice QoL, but much like the Essence tab I think it's more useful for Standard players than it is temp league players.

Like you say, it improves the least on functionality.

As to this:

"But you need to pick various sort options to get the tab to display what you want - e.g., full stacks, or stacks you currently have cards for."

It's really no different from regular tab sorting. In a way, it does save time for the slightly more compulsive people (like me), who always needed to separate completed sets into a different corner of the tab, which is the QoL portion for me. Like you say though, for challenges it does make it slightly more onerous.

The quad tab is the biggest one for me, bar none. Most of my run tab space is quickly consumed by map drops, so I create a map dump tab I use to cycle my drops into.



This is basically what my run tab looks like. I come out of a map, throw crap in immediately, then as stacks build I'll shift them off to the currency tab. Slight time saver.

The left-most few columns will fill rapidly with maps. Which I end up cycling into a map dump tab, which also fills very quickly.

Now, I have 4x the space to throw maps into and not worry about having to cycle them into individual map tabs. Allows for chisel recipe and immediate ctrl-f finding of whatever tier I want to run. Love it. Easily worth getting the whole bundle for.

Remarks on Specialized tabs
Currency - One of the best things you can buy in the store. Borderline required. In standard went from over 5 tabs of currency down to the one, and in challenge leagues about the same space comparison (but less relevant as I own to many tabs for a challenge league). At least since then I have become better at trading up my currency as well.

Essence - A pure convenience tab in my book, but really helpful too. It is just intrestring this was released the same time they changed the drop restrictions on some of the Tiers of Essences. Having a dedicated slot for each essence and the 5,000 stack limit are very nice for the ctrl+click. There is less thinking required when transferring essences from your inventory, and a longer period of time in between the need to vendor up. The tab also allows you to vendor up the essence chain right from the tab, which is such a bonus feature. (Maybe we can sell to vendors from tabs one of these day too). Compared to a regular tab there is less individual space vs a higher stack count and convenience in the number of clicks required to make it look nice.


Divination - More than convenience, kinda. I am a collector, and this is perfect for me, but I will only use it in standard. For selling, redeeming, and challenge completion a normal tab beats this one in its current state. If the 'view option' setting can be saved, this will likely change. From the view of a collector this is great I go from this view:

To a view with the actual card art, which is admittedly the whole point in trying to collect them. (Tthe cards are set up alphabetically, and the scrolls and fragments are place holders from the last time I sorted it).

Quad Tab - Not for me, I own too many tabs for a challenge league, and I should not buy more space to enable my hording in standard. I completely see Serleth's point about having a greater space for dumping maps. I've just adapted to keep my map tabs set up in a specific way and I force my self to deal with them when I vendor from a map. It might waste more time doing it my way, but it might off set the time with not having to go back to sort maps later. It is just part of the process for me. Rare UN-ID maps stay in the dump tab, but the rest of the maps go into tabs sorted like this:

Sorted by tier and alphabetically. There is enough space for 4 of each kind of map, and if I have a 5th I just 3:1 or chisel. Shaped maps did add a wrinkle to this, but they just live in my 'M!' tab along with Unique maps, fragments, and Offerings.

Not sure if this is a help to anyone, or beneficial, so it can live in this spoiler.