[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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hankinsohl wrote:

40/40 in Breach League

IMO, I think that Breach League is insanely more challenging than previous leagues. 10,000 maps as a solo player is insane, IMO. Yeah, I could do that, but would I have fun doing so? Absolutely not.

Endgame grinds? Equally stupid, IMO.

40 Guardian kills? Maybe. If there was a group for this. Haven't seen any though. Solo.... 40?... maybe... but not if you have a job/family/other interests... and not fun even then.

10 uber kills?... WTF?... 100 regular Atziri kills was a pain in the butt... those generated about 6 to 8 complete uber sets... assuming 100% success in uber kills, you'd need to work regular Atziri maybe 20 to 40 percent more times just to get the full Uber sets.... which, meanwhile, a bunch of other players are after, making this challenge ridiculous

100 Uber Izaro kills... just great. That'll cost between 400 to 500 chaos for the Goddess Sacrifices assuming 100% success... not to mention how long that will take you just to do the runs... oh, and how long will it take you to generate 400 chaos?

100 Breachlord kills... not happening unless you group... check out global 820... I've never, ever seen anyone post a Breachlord kill group

Fulfill 300 Prophecies in a Map - this one is OK, I think - a pain in the butt, but doable.

Alright, so, a couple things here.

Carl touched on this in Lioneye's Watch podcast. There needs to be a subset of challenges, aka four challenges for the push to 40/40, that are intentionally geared towards the hardcore player who really wants that extra thing to do and that prestige of having done the thing.

The second function of this, which he sorta touched on indirectly, is that by having the difficult / grindy things in the challenge pool, it also provides a goal, inspiration, motivation, however you want to call it, for players to push themselves to become better in order to achieve those things.

So there can't be a full set of 40 challenges that are completable (sic) for the average-skilled, solo player. Although I will note all the challenges can definitely be DONE solo, and aren't anywhere near as group intensive as you seem to be considering.

You also seem to be neglecting the notion of trading, and given you haven't specifically said SSF, I'm guessing you're making your remarks in the light of trade being open.

* Guardian Kills - I have 10/40 and I haven't even been actively farming T15s yet for T16 drops. You can also buy these maps if you need to. Guardians take about four hours to complete if you have a reasonably fast build to do it. And the map drops from running these alone will go a long way to funding Breachstones or Offerings.
* Uber kills - Definitely the go-to option if you want to save the time-intensive nature of doing Izaro or Breachlords. Also the most profitable to fund literally anything else. It's a skill-check though, to be sure.
* Izaro - Boring as hell, but you should be able to farm up at least 50 Offerings yourself if you're also pushing the 10,000 map tiers challenge.
* Breachlords - You'll probably get ~25-50 yourself here as well otw to 10,000 tiers.
* Prophecies - Again, something you'll get a lot of done just pushing map tiers.

Which brings me to:

* 10,000 map tiers. Assuming 10 minute maps, two hours a day (12 maps a day), which is a SUPER casual pace, running T9 maps will get you 8,964 tiers done, accounting for 83 days spent mapping out of the league. Now throw in an extra two hours each weekend-day, averaging out to 2.5 hours per day, per week, or 15 maps per day, that's 11,205 tiers done in 83 days of mapping T9 maps exclusively.

Now of course you'd have to compensate for having to build up to T9s in the first place and run some T10-12s probably to make that compensation, but you get the drift.

The real key here, casual or not, comes down more to skill level. You can very reasonably farm 40 Guardians, 100 Breachlords and 300 Prophecies putting in 2-4 hours per day. Guardians will contribute 640 map tiers on their own.

Also, I think you misconstrued this challenge. It's map TIERS, not maps. Hence 40 Guardian runs = 640 tiers towards the challenge (T16 * 40).

The issue is affording to buy the Breachstones, Guardian maps, Offerings, Silver coins, etc., which does require knowledge-mastery and planning in order to come up with one build that can do all that content, with reasonable speed, particularly farming the gated content and/or exclusively high-tier maps in order to be able to afford buying the missing pieces you need.

But, it is doable. Completely solo.

I typically finish 40/40 in a league with about 14 days /played, or 336 hours, or an average of 3.73 hours spent per day across a 90 day league period, but that's not accounting for the fact that I'm afk or alt-tabbed or whatever in my hideout for an hour out of every eight hours.

So you have to chop off at least 42 of those hours. So call it 294h, or 3.25 hours per day of 90 days required to 40/40 at a reasonable pace.

Am I a skilled player? Sure. Not the best, but good enough. And I guarantee you I'll hit 40/40 solo, if I decide to go for it. Which I probably will since I'll be trying to do Shaper myself for the first time, which requires Guardian kills and as such will net me 2/3rds of end-game grinds (Prophecies accounted for here).

But now I'll draw your attention back to the start of this reply:

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There needs to be a subset of challenges, aka four challenges for the push to 40/40, that are intentionally geared towards the hardcore player who really wants that extra thing to do and that prestige of having done the thing.

In other words, 40/40 is meant to be quite a bit less reasonable than 36/40.

It is not intended for casual players to be able to complete, but rather crosses the threshold into the serious / hardcore section of the player base.

And I don't think there's anything ridiculous about that.

Ah... I didn't know that the devs were, by design, making 40/40 much more challenging with the goal of retaining players. Will that actually work though - or might it prove demotivational and actually reduce participation? We'll see.

My prediction is that 1/5th or so players will make 40/40 this league as compared to previous leagues.

Regarding trading - I did not discount that possibility. But in previous leagues you could buy a map and then group with 5 others for grinds. Maybe that sort of thing will happen later on this league - but so far I've seen no groups for Breach Lord kills or Guardian kills.

Regarding the map grind - I timed a Tier 10 map the other day - I looted all drops and vendored them. Took me about 4-1/2 min or so, but a lot of that was vendoring.

If I were to tackle 10000 map levels solo without going bonkers, I'd change my mapping style - pick up nothing except jewelry, maps and obviously good stuff and maybe some good bases - goal is no vendoring except once every 2 to 3 maps. I could probably get clears down to 3 min or so.

Edit - forgot about Breaches... if you do all Breaches you find in maps, I don't think you're going to be finishing them in 3 min.

But, meh...

There's a point where something transitions from challenging but kind of fun to a job - and I think challenges this league have reached that point.

So I'm probably going to go ultra casual (see my point above about possible player loss due to demotivation) - for fun, I'll just do my own challenges. Kill Shaper; kill all the Breach Lords; kill Uber; somehow get a pure Blight build to be fun and end-game viable.