Best Of

Also max limber is a necessity.

I did not have the whole team. Thank you

Same issue as you, with a comment from Kabam Rex acknowledging it. It’s apparently something they’re aware of, but no word on if it’s something they consider a bug and are planning to fix yet.

Wouldn’t be too shocked if they didn’t. Kabam’s old content tends to behave very weirdly because it was made before they solidified their terminology and game rules. Abyss and LoL are particularly infamous for it because they were also designed to be extremely hard content and Kabam has never really looked it over and redesigned it like they have for, say, story content. I mean, in your screenshot the Fateseal itself isn’t even working right; if it was, Heimdall wouldn’t have those Fury and True Strike Buffs active alongside it.

Speaking from experience, there is nothing in game worth $50.

Dr. Zola

I'm not. I'm waiting for regular Maddie to enter the titan in a few months. Please don't spend anymore $ on this. The "first edition" is just a money grab. You don't really need it.

Crystals are RNG and RNG is not a guarantee. The only guarantee is that you'll regret that you spent so much money.

"Aren’t they all comparable because you can buy the same items?"

No, absolutely not. I already mentioned one counter-example: if you can buy a 4* crystal for 2000 units or 120 Essentia, that does not mean 120 Essentia is worth the same as 2000 units.

In your example, you're presuming one currency and two stores with two different prices. If you could spend Essentia in the Essentia store and in the Mysterium store, then yes, you should buy from whichever store has the lower price. Essentia is Essentia regardless of where you spend it. But a better example would be seeing Optimus for 10 Euros on Amazon and 1000 Yen on eBay. Which one is better? 10 is smaller than 1000; is the 10 Euro price better? You wouldn't actually compare the raw numbers. You'd seek to convert one currency into the other. 1000 Yen is (at current exchange rates) about 5.42 Euros. So actually its the 1000 Yen price that is better.

So how do you convert X Essentia into Y Radiance? There is nowhere you can do that. You can't pick a common thing to buy, because that does not allow you to convert one currency to the other. If you did not know the exchange rate between Euros and Yen would you simply pick something you can buy with both currencies and use that as the comparison? If we pick Big Macs, a Big Mac averages about 5.5 Euros, and about 500 Yen (as of today when I checked). In Big Macs the 10 Euro Optimus is about 1.8 Big Macs and the 1000 Yen Optimus is about 2.0 Big Macs, so the Euro price is lower.

So which would you trust: the exchange rate or the Big Mac comparison, because they disagree? The exchange rate, I hope. But not because it is in any way more standard or "official" but rather for the practical reason that the exchange rate represents something you can actually do. You can actually convert Euros to Yen and vice versa at about that exchange rate. You cannot use Big Macs to do the same thing. There's no practical way to leverage the price of Big Macs to buy Optimus from Amazon or eBay. Neither of them take Big Macs as currency.

Even in the real world, currency exchange houses and McDonalds disagree on the relative value of Euros and Yen. The reasons why Essentia and Radiance can have wildly different valuations is different than why Euros and Yen do, but it happens for the same fundamental reason: the Japanese economy determines the price of Big Macs in Yen while the European economy determines the price of Big Macs in Euros, and while there is some connections between the two they operate independently enough that there is no unifying valuation between the two currencies when it comes to the McDonalds menu. The Essentia and Radiance economy is even more disconnected.

There is one thing that unifies the Essentia and Radiance currencies: player time. It takes X amount of time and effort to earn 1000 Essentia and Y amount of time and effort to earn 1000 Radiance. The only way to replace Essentia or Radiance is by expending that effort. So in a real sense, the one common "resource" you can use to compare the value between them is player time. Player time is the mother currency from which both Essentia and Radiance get traded in for. But that exchange rate is different for every player.

The big problem I have with the AI analysis is that it compares Essentia to Radiance, but you can't do that using the price of anything. The problem is that the other currencies - Glory, Artifacts, Loyalty, and Tokens - are directly convertible into Essentia. Whether you use Glory or convert the Glory into Essentia and then spend that, the player earns the same amount of Glory either way (or rather, earned). However, there is no conversion between Essentia and Radiance. Radiance can be just as easy for a player to earn, or it can be incredibly difficult for them to earn. I would never, in general, recommend to a player to buy anything in the Radiance store they could also buy in the Essentia store, unless they were a player with a huge influx of Radiance. And that's not most players.

The AI (probably) gets the math correct, but it makes a mistake I've seen players also make: thinking economic equivalences are transitive. In fact, without a normalized source for both currencies, it is not legitimate to compare them. More simply: the AI says if a T7 cost this much Essentia and that much Radiance, then those two amounts of currency can be considered equally valuable. But that's not true because the trades are only one way. You can convert Essentia into T7 and Radiance into T7, but you cannot convert T7 into either currency.

I think it would be more obvious to players by way of example. Remember that 2000 unit 4* crystal the game used to sell to players? I don't know if that pop up offer still comes up these days, but suppose it does. You can also get 4* crystals from the Mysterium store for 120 Mysterium. Therefore, 120 Mysterium = 2000 units. A 5* Nexus costs 200 Mysterium. 200 Mysterium = 2000 / 120 * 200 = 3333 units. So if you see an offer for 5* crystal that costs only 1000 units, that's the better deal, right?

Clearly not. One-way deals are not necessarily, or even intended to be, symmetric. The Radiance cost of a T7 depends on how hard Radiance is to get, and what the relative value of a T7 is within that context. The Essentia cost of a T7 depends on completely different Essentia economy factors that completely ignore the Radiance economy, because there's no equivalence between the Essentia economy and the Radiance one. In fact, that's the reason Essentia and Radiance exist - specifically to allow those two economies to be independently balanced with no regard for what things cost between them.

I looked at three comparison points between Glory and Essentia previously: that analysis is here:

That analysis seems to agree with the AI analysis when it comes to T2 Alpha. For T6B, kinda. Looking at the price curves (see the analysis) the Glory store is cheaper initially, and the break even point sits at about 2 full catalysts. The Glory store discount is small, and some players might say it is negligible, but it does exist and the AI should have recommended buying low quantities from the Glory store first, or at least acknowledged the edge was small but existent. The last thing I looked at was T4CC, which the AI did not analyze.

Always be careful when trusting AI, because AI often doesn't apply the right context to math. This is a problem humans have as well, so it is no surprise that humans do not always prompt AI precisely with quantitative questions, and the AI itself sometimes makes the same mistakes that people make in its training data.