Considering we have many maps with different difficulties, I was wondering what would be the best way to farm the resources in the game. I took a scientific approach and attempted to make my results comparable. Before we get into the analysis, I first want to share my stats so that you can reproduce those results for yourself. Then, we need to look at which resources are farmable.
Too Long / Didn’t Read
Focus on a talent build and gear set that maximize critical chance and damage, as well as attack speed (see below),
Choosing the appropriate map depends on what you want to farm and your damage output (Gold vs. Glory/XP),
The previous map is better for gold if you can run with Shadow run and/or oneshots using Unstoppable compared to a normal run on the hardest map,
You can force shadow run to trigger at all time (see conclusion).
My current stats for the analysis
You can skip this section, though you might be interested in my gear and talent build.
Talents:
I have unlocked all 62 talent points from reaching level 50 and unlocking all 12 talent point glories. If you do not know what glories are, keep grinding! Just consider that the results might differ for you a little bit.
I chose an hybrid build that maximizes attack speed based on critical damage. Critical hits increase attack speed for the berserker. The skills from the Assassin works well for that purpose as well. The skills increase the chance of critical hits and the exceeding damage triggers shadow run. Higher damage can also trigger Unstoppable for a full run or Blood Hunger to launch the next attack.
Talents (see explanation below):
Berserker: 1–5/3–1/0–4/1–(5,5)–3/0/3–1/2/1–1
Assassin: 1–5–2/5–5/1–5/1–3/1–0/1/0–0/1
The Talent tree above reads from left to right and represents the in-game Talent tree from top to bottom. The trunk of the tree is represented by dashes “–”. Talents on the same level in the talent tree are separated by a slash “/”. Levels where you have to choose between multiple talents are in parenthesis and separated by a comma, for instance the weapon specialization in Berserker depends on your own gear. You’d either invest 5 points in Mace Enjoyer or 5 points in Average Swords Fan.
Skills:
I currently have 138 strength, 34 agility, 126 wisdom.
Gear:
I use a gear set that maximize attack power and hits and minimize defense or lifesteal. Equip anything that would boost your overall attack power and has stats like Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Multi-Hit Chance. I have unlocked most gears from dungeons and some from raids.
Glories:
I have unlocked all glories except the Deadly Quests.
Upgrades:
I have bought all upgrades at the exception of Key to the City, and the missing upgrades from the Deadly Quests.
With this gear and skillset, I have the following stats (see the Gear menu): - Attack Power: 8.92M
Crit Chance: 33.5%
Crit Value: 163.5%
Gold Multiplier: +10%
Multi-hit amount: 3
Multi-hit chance: 9%
Dodge Chance: 4%
Attack Speed: 142%
Total Gains Level: 2565
What to farm and what to consider?
Apart from pieces of gears, there are three main resources you want to farm:
Gold for upgrading approximately anything,
Experience for reaching max level (currently 50) and unlocking features locked behind levels (e.g. maps)
Glory for unlocking new features in the Glory system (more on that in another post).
Not all maps will work best for each resource. For instance, the amount of glory per kill increases with difficulty. Consequently, your current highest map is best for getting glory. However, stronger monsters take more time to kill, thus decreasing the output.
Easier maps will likely one shot monsters thus triggering shadow run and unstoppable.
Another element to consider is the codex level. Higher codex level brings difficulty which might slow down a run, but will also increase the amount of reward.
Headsmashing Analysis!
In this analysis, I compare the best map with the one just before that, at equivalent cost of codex level. At my current level, that would be Dead End lvl 15 with Dead Front lvl 17 (the best I can currently get for the two maps). There seems to be about 2 lvl difference for the same cost from two consecutive maps.
To compare the two maps, I counted how many kills I could get over 60s. I also calculate the weighted average gold, glory and experience over 10 kills. I repeated the 10-kills observation 3 times. It seems that over 10 kills, I most often spawn 8 normal monsters and 2 elite monsters. I calculated an average amount for normal monsters and elite monsters, then used for values for the 10-kills weighted average. This will be used to calculate average rewards. Because glory amounts are note reported in the codex and kills happen fast, Glory was assessed visually based on the value of a random elite and random normal.
Dead End (lvl 15)
Average elite gold: (301 + 324 + 334) / 3 = 320
Average normal gold: (296 + 307 +311 + 306) / 4 = 305
Average gold: (8 * 305 + 2 * 320)/10 = 308 Qi gold/kill
Similarly for glory and experience:
Average glory: 510 Glory/kill.
Average experience: 65Sx exp/kill
On the most difficult map, the chance of activating shadow run is lower, so I compared normal runs without shadow run and runs with shadow run activated.
Normal run: 14 kills/min
- Gold: 4242Qi/min or 70Qi/s or 4Sx/min
- Glory: 7140 glory/min
- Exp: 910Sx exp/min
Shadow run: 40 kills/min
- Gold: 12 000 Qi/min or 202Qi/s or 12Sx/min
- Glory: 20 000 glory/min or 1.2M/h!!
- Exp: 2600Sx exp/min or 2.6Sp exp/min
Dead Front (lvl 17)
On the easier maps, shadow run is always active, often running at full speed depending on the maps. The easiest maps also have untouchable activated.
Similarly, I get the following results:
Average gold: 180Qi gold/kill
Average glory: 125 Glory/kill.
Average experience: 10Sx exp/kill
Shadow run: 58 kills/min
- Gold: 10 440 Qi/min or 174Qi/s or 10Sx/min
- Glory: 7250 glory/min
- Exp: 580Sx exp/min
Conclusions
Because Shadow Run is harder to achieve on the most difficult map, we will first compare the Normal run on Dead End with the Shadow Run on Dead Front. The Shadow run on Dead Front (lvl 17) generates 2.5 more gold but only 1% more Glory and result in 37% less experience.
On the other hand, we can activate shadow run (SR) on Dead End (lvl 15), Dead End SR generates 1.15 times more gold than Dead Front SR, 2.75 times more glory and 4.5 times more experience. That’s about 2.8 times more gold, glory and experience than the equivalent Dead End normal run.
Now, during this experiment, I came across an interesting mechanic: how to activate Shadow Run even when it seems it won’t. To activate and maintain Shadow Run, all talents need to activate to generate the maximum damage output possible. However, building the synergy is harder with tougher monsters.
Nonetheless, it seems that Shadow Run activation can carry over to other maps. If you teleport to a lower map where you can activate Shadow Run at full speed, chances are it will remain activate once you teleport back to your best map. That is because talents are still active. However, I assume you might need to have good enough stats to be able to maintain it. To test that, you can stop tapping for a few seconds and wait that all talents deactivate. Now switch to an easy match and start tapping until you get to full speed (with or without unstoppable). While you are still running, teleport back to the hardest map. The character will stop on the first monster, kill it and start running at full speed. The speed might be slightly lower than on easier because your damage output is lower, but overall, it is much better than running at normal speed.
If it is interesting to you, I can also expand my analysis to include the 3rd and 4th toughest maps and the easiest map. It seems they might trigger Unstoppable more frequently, which could increase the number of kills per minute. You can let me know on the official Discord.