For those who don't know, Kabam recently turned on a new feature called autocomplete that will "autocomplete" one daily event, costing you quest energy and giving you rewards consistent with that event. The events in question are the Proving Grounds events that give basic catalysts (or fragments) and the class versions of those events that give class catalysts (or fragments).
Autocomplete doesn't actually "do" a path or anything. You can think of it as just exchanging energy for rewards. The question is: is it worth it to do. And as it turns out, while looking at this I discovered something else: the events themselves have been changed. At least, I know for a fact that the T4B one has changed rewards. I haven't checked every event, but this one I caught from memory.
As of right now, this is what you get, and what the energy costs are for these events. Note: I'm only showing the catalyst rewards themselves: I've dropped the ISO, XP, and Gold rewards.
Note: T4B event also awards 320, 400, and 470 T4B fragments in map chests.
There is a lot of weirdness in the autocomplete rewards. The autocomplete for T1 class is pretty good: it costs 20 energy and gives three T1C catalysts: that's how much you'd get doing full exploration manually which would cost 22 energy. On the other hand, T2C is awful: it awards one T2C for 30 energy, but manually doing full explore costs 25 energy and awards two.
Interestingly, the T4B event is awarding more shards. Full exploration used to award 2840 shards: 650 for completion, 1000 for exploration, plus chests of 320, 400, and 470 for the easy, medium, and hard(er) path. Now it is awarding 900 for completion and 1800 for exploration. The chests appear to be the same. The new total is 3890. It takes 90 energy to fully explore, which means you can average about 43 fragments per energy point. Autocomplete is giving 1320/50 = 26.4 fragments per energy point, which is less. But the average for the original expert proving grounds was 2840/90 = 31.6 fragments per energy point. So autocomplete today is giving about 84% of the fragments per energy point than the Expert Proving Grounds was giving previously. That's not bad if you have extra energy at the end of a month.
For the record, the T4C costs 87 energy to fully explore and gives 1800 fragments for a return of 20.7 fragments per energy point. Autocomplete gives 760 for 55 energy which is 13.8 fragments per energy point. That's not great.
I think one that many players are interested in is the T3C one, since that one is notoriously stingy at times. Manually exploring costs 50 energy and gives 1960 fragments, which is 39.2 fragments per energy point. Autocomplete gives 760 fragments for 40 energy which is 19 fragments per energy point. That's very low relatively speaking.
Autocomplete is, in terms of catalysts per energy point, actually just about equal to or better than running the map for T1C, T1B, T2B, and T3B. It is worse everywhere else, although given the time savings it might still be a good thing to do, especially for players that run multiple accounts and probably don't use all the energy in those accounts.
Here's a table that calculates rewards per energy point. I've bolded where the autocomplete is either better, or close enough to be about even:
T2C seems odd to me: it costs way more than it should and returns way less than it should. Only two autocomplete options cost more energy than actually fully exploring the map manually: T2C and T2B. And T2B is forgivable as it gives four T2B catalysts -
more than if you did full exploration (you'd get three). T2C gives half the cats for more energy.
And seriously, the autocomplete reward for T3B is one T3B catalyst and 2680 fragments. It only takes 2800 fragments to form a full catalyst. Who decided to give 95.7% of a catalyst?
I should really run every single event and factor in the chests, but to be honest I was only willing to do that for the T4B, just to confirm they were the same as I remember. I don't think the chests materially change things for the other events, and would if anything swing things more towards manual exploration than autocompletion.
