My 3.26 experience

I had a lot of fun this league. It was nice to have a merc that brought my damage up to a bossing level, without sacrificing my build.

I play the same build every league, trying to push it further and further.

It is a CwC cyclone sire of shards ball lightning sprinkler on an elementalist.

If I could do the doriyani tech, I would. That -200 lightning res definitely takes my damage to the higher level. However, elementalists aren't the play for doriyani (typically).

Technically, it wasn't on me either. But having a 'buddy' using it really helped.

As much as I hope mercs can go core, I have doubts.

Most of the other 3.26 changes were solid to. I like the t16.5's, and I like some of the agency on what you can do to buff your loot drops.

It was nice to have more Zana lore.

As the weeks wore on, one thing annoyed me: town upkeep. It took a lot of time for a casual like myself to get gold to keep my town going. Even if I stripped out mining and smelting. To get a perfect set of mappers, only to have the 1% take a large investment off the board, is very painful.

Or dcing in a hostage fight to lose your entire set of mappers or shipments.

I sat on it a bit and thought what could help mitigate this. And I think a double base gold amount on drops would help alleviate the pain. I know there are a lot of ways to boost gold drops and have plentiful coffers. However, the investment is high and plenty of times, the payout is not any better than alch and go.

So I think doubling base gold amounts in endgame makes some sense.

Mercs can go core as a mechanic, but definitely not in current state.

I would just make their inventory locked. A simple change, but a significant one.
They would spawn with generic rares that have resistances, life, ES, regen etc. - sometimes a unique or two. But that's it. No equipping OP aura-style items in all of merc's slots.

This makes finding that merc with a good unique that much more impactful, even if the merc type itself isn't your bis.

A big part of what I enjoy about Mercs is finally having a use for a lot of otherwise marginal-at-best Uniques. No, I haven't used any of the apparently abusive ones, but to throw out the entire option simply because a few create OP combos is a bit excessive. ='[.]'=

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I sat on it a bit and thought what could help mitigate this. And I think a double base gold amount on drops would help alleviate the pain. I know there are a lot of ways to boost gold drops and have plentiful coffers. However, the investment is high and plenty of times, the payout is not any better than alch and go.

You have three atlas passive trees.

If you are low on gold, use one of those trees to be tapered around a strategy that produces more gold. Whether that's based around more maps -> more 16.5 maps (which are the base for the higher gold drops due to rarity on the map). Or whatever. You can pull 40k per map, sub 5 minutes, with the right map base (like city square) and the proper tree.

The fact that so many people refer to 16.5 maps and Zana as part of 3.26 is really telling about GGG's failure at clearly delineating between where League content started and expansion content ended.

16.5s, Zana, new bosses, and all memory related content are part of Secrets of the Atlas (SotA) expansion. This is already a core (permanant) part of the game.

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Seikojin#1601 wrote:

As the weeks wore on, one thing annoyed me: town upkeep. It took a lot of time for a casual like myself to get gold to keep my town going. Even if I stripped out mining and smelting. To get a perfect set of mappers, only to have the 1% take a large investment off the board, is very painful.

Or dcing in a hostage fight to lose your entire set of mappers or shipments.

I sat on it a bit and thought what could help mitigate this. And I think a double base gold amount on drops would help alleviate the pain. I know there are a lot of ways to boost gold drops and have plentiful coffers. However, the investment is high and plenty of times, the payout is not any better than alch and go.

So I think doubling base gold amounts in endgame makes some sense.

Did you play Settlers? GGG has already rebalanced gold and buffed worker recruitment to make it cheaper to maintain max level runners.

Some tips for town/gold management.

1. Prioritize farmers/duster over mappers. 50m shipments will greatly outperform mappers for overall profit. If you dont have enough gold to make it to your next play session, dont run mappers.

2. Run 16.5's. This is really the key this league. I was running T17 containment strongboxes and struggling to run mappers even half the time. Swapped over to T16.5 abyss hordes, and immediately had plenty of gold to run mappers whenever I saw they were complete.

The 200% rarity-converts drops to gold memory power makes for insane gold explosions. Save the power for naturally spawning magic packs(not monsters from strong boxes/abyss/etc). Runnning risky abyss hordes I regularly manage 200k-300k gold from a map with this power.

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Piousqd#0073 wrote:

1. Prioritize farmers/duster over mappers. 50m shipments will greatly outperform mappers for overall profit. If you dont have enough gold to make it to your next play session, dont run mappers.

Can we discuss it?

If you are talking about crop shipment, I must disagree, or at least, I must expand it for clarification.


I played settlers a lot (a lot), and currently, every now and then I play standart. I admit that I am not really aware of how long it take to make a 50m shipmment now. But since all settlers are slower, I guess almost 2 weeks to fullfil pure crop shipment, or half of it with 25kk dust, right?

So, I got some 50 m shippments back in settlers. Some had zero mirror shards and no more than 7 divs. The better i got was 3 mirror shards... Imagine it took 1 week, back in time, to be able to get 50m... the average of currency was shit when compared with mappers.

In other words, shipments are not realible sources of currency. At least, not for me.

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Mappers, on the other hand, provide me 3 to 10 divs per 36 run maps;

I use 8 mods corrupted maps with layers of Delirium. So they provide me frequently:

- Level 84 and 85 expesive cluster jewels.
- Simlulacrum splinters.
- raw div, valdos boxes and voidbor reliquary key.

Moreover, some drops out of the chart like Hinekora and my only ever Mirror.



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So, I do believe that mappers is more profitable a nd realible incoming"per hour" ... But is it "per gold"? I think that is the real matter here.



(I can be wrong, that is why i replied, to see other opinions)

Don't get me wrong, Mappers are great! They steadily pull divines, puzzle boxes, 21/20 gems, and expensive maven chisels. Ive pulled multiple apothacary div cards, a 4 flask mageblood, and hinekoras lock from mappers. But that is much less common than shipment mirror shards.

They also use way more gold/hr and require you to loot/refill.

Shipments may sometimes give back 0 shards, and that feels really bad, yes. I had my first 2 this league come back as 0. But long term, they are very profitable.

If you have gold to run em, you should definitely run both. But if you have to choose, let the mappers take a break

Personal sample from 3.26 and 3.25.

Mercenaries:
1. 50m - 0 mirror shard
2. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 1 suppress tattoo
3. 50m - 3 mirror shard, 1 suppress tattoo
4. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 3 suppress tattoo
5. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 1 suppress tattoo

=6 mirror shards

Settlers:
1. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 4 power rune, 4 divine
2. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 3 power rune, 6 divine
3. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 3 power rune, 7 divine
4. 50m - 5 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 11 divine
5. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 10 divine
6. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 12 divine
7. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 10 divine
8. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 4 power rune, 9 divine
9. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 4 power rune, 8 divine
10. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 8 divine
11. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 10 divine
12. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 3 power rune, 6 divine
13. 50m - 3 mirror shard, tattoos, 5 divine
14. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 3 power rune, 11 divine
15. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 11 divine
16. 50m - 1 mirror shard, tattoos, 7 divine
17. 50m - 3 mirror shard, Journey tat, 7 divine
18. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 7 divine
18. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 7 divine
19. 17m - 1 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 3 divine
20. 24m - 1 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 4 divine
21. 17m - 0 mirror shard, tattoos, 2 divine
22. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 2 divine
23. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 4 power rune, 9 divine
24. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 7 divine
25. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 12 divine
26. 50m - 4 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 6 divine
27. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 11 divine
28. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 10 divine
29. 50m - 0 mirror shard, tattoos, 8 divine
30. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 12 divine
31. 50m - 3 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 6 divine
32. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 6 power rune, 7 divine
33. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 11 divine
34. 50m - 4 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 7 divine
35. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 3 power rune, 5 divine
36. 50m - 0 mirror shard, 0 power rune, 8 divine
37. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 4 power rune, 12 divine
38. 50m - 1 mirror shard, 1 power rune, 7 divine
39. 50m - 2 mirror shard, 2 power rune, 2 divine

=61 Mirror Shards

Shipments are heavily reliant on financial stockbroker gameplay.

BUY DUST UNIQUES EARLY!

Current T0 prices are far too high for this to be worthwhile.
Bino - 5 div
Essentia - 7 div
Rakiata - 7-8 div
Squire - 7-8 div

I mean, fuck...

This is like 4 div per 1M dust, you need 25M so this is like... 100 DIV in dust cost alone.

This makes that 50kk ship A GAMBLE
Pretty nasty gamble if you hit 0 mirror shards which is the main currency payoff.

I expected this to happen after Settlers and Phercia T0 price hike. I was buying those uniques for 15-40c each during the first week of the league. I had 175 million dust on day 8 or so. It was a good decision. Ships rolled 0 shards two times, 1 shard two times and 3 shards one time. Final 50M dust batch was sent off with verizium bars for stacked decks. Terrible rolls on shards, but hey I paid 5% of current dust price so I didn't gamble anything.

Remember this for 3.27.

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Esubane#6099 wrote:

Shipments are heavily reliant on financial stockbroker gameplay.

BUY DUST UNIQUES EARLY!

Current T0 prices are far too high for this

You don't actually have to buy any dust. You can just send out 50 million in crops, or any combination of crops and dust that equals 50 million based on what you were able to self-farm ...