**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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There is literally 35k gold in ALL of Act 5. That’s it. And there isn’t much more gold in Act 4, either. Or Master and Uncollected monthly EQ. So if you’re Conqueror, Uncollected or early Cav, it could be very tricky to find gold. You just don’t have the same options (assuming you’re not an arena a grinder). The addition of a bunch of gold in Incursions last year definitely helps, but I can easily see how that wouldn’t be enough.
That being said, if you’ve been Cavalier for more than a few months, or if you’re Thronebreaker already, it seems to me there is lots of gold out there. There is a ton in Act 6 and the Variants. Plus Act 7 and The Abyss have decent amounts as well.
I haven’t been below 10 million gold since I completed Act 6 in November. But early last year was rough. I was constantly selling every bit of basic ISO and occasionally selling class ISO as well. Now I can’t get enough ISO.
Left to our own devices, most of us would probably play the game the same way forever. And our bottlenecks would probably stay the same forever. But progress forces us to change things. The kinds of content that challenge us change, the kinds of rank ups we do change. And because of that, our bottlenecks change. The way most people eventually resolve a bottleneck is that they progress in the game enough to where that bottleneck disappears and another one takes its place, because the way we spend resources changes.
That's why it is always dangerous to assume the problem is with the game. There can sometimes be actual resource imbalances that the players cannot address, but usually the imbalance is one many if not most players escape by simply pursuing the resources where they exist rather than expect them to come to where they are playing, and even if the player doesn't change their preferences for game play the game itself eventually forces them to change how they play, and the bottlenecks shift around. If we're not careful, shifting the resource imbalances to address one group's bottlenecks could easily compound them for other players elsewhere.
This might sound flippant, but there's a fundamental principle at work here. The devs are constantly trying to balance the desire for players to be able to play the game how they want to play it with encouraging people to play a wide range of the game modes. If every game mode contained all the rewards of the game, there would be no point in doing anything other than playing the one game mode a player wants to play. But that can encourage burn out: it has been a historical, not just theoretical problem (cf; Dungeons 1.0). Individual game modes are thus deliberately designed to not be "self sufficient." AQ has catalysts, it doesn't have as much champion shards or crystals. Arena has shards and battlechips, it doesn't have much catalysts.
*Most* of the grindable gold has been in the arenas. They've added gold to other game modes like EQ and side quests, but the bulk of it is still in the arena because they don't want to add so much gold to all other game modes that they make arena grinding pointless. So while they did sprinkle gold throughout the game, especially at higher tiers of difficulty, the last time they decided to address the issue of gold they dumped a ton of gold into Incursions.
In general, when the devs perceive a resource imbalance, they are less likely to scatter those resources everywhere and more likely to put them somewhere for the players to go get. Players have to meet the game in the middle, because while the devs might put resources in multiple places they won't put them everywhere. There's two places to grind gold at the moment, and the players have to pick one. In my opinion, a gold resource suggestion that sounds too much like "put it within reach of what I'm already doing so I don't have to change what I do" is unlikely to gain much traction with the devs, because the principle of putting rewards in specific places for the players to deliberately go get is something that is very much entrenched in the way the game is currently managed.