So, let me preface by stating some facts. People occasionally get a bit pitchfork-y in the forums when anyone directly mentions resource farming. I get the reasoning behind it, but I can guarantee you Kabam is aware of this particular method of farming, and if they are surprised by the math behind it, then we have much worse problems to deal with. That being said, I fall into the 0.1% of people in the world that enjoy data and spreadsheets, so here we go.
TLDR: L1 revives can cost 13.2 units apiece if you manage things correctly.
For some time during my run as a Summoner, I knew that some people farmed resources somehow, but didn't really know what it cost and didn't think it could really be worth it. I play for fun, and try my best not to grind too hard at things like arena if I can help it. I learned after a while that the potion farming consensus has been pretty solidly set on ROL, but revives is something that I knew far less about. I occasionally would peruse random lower-level quests to see if anything was available, but often didn't have great luck and would have rather used my energy elsewhere. Then I found myself facing the Abyss Carina's challenges and found a much greater need for revives than most anything I had previously faced.
I came across advice that suggested looking into 3.2.6 (the Thanos chapter) and that is where I will be discussing revive farming today. I recorded (as best as I could) every run that I took, as well as the major rewards that I recieved (in revives and full energy refills) and added the into this spreadsheet:
Let's look through some of the notable numbers and assumptions here.
- First, every path from start to finish is 41 energy. There are 6 paths and a variety of items that show up. When you see the energy cost of 61 for two items, I have assumed that they are on different paths, so the Summoner should be able to go down the shorter of the paths to get the first item, then restart to fully complete the path with the item further down. On average, one of the items should be on the first part of the path, so I just took half of the total energy cost, although it is often a little less than this, or items can be found on the same path.
- I did not include small energy refills but they really would improve the model as they show up fairly often on paths you already are taking.
- For the total, I assumed that all of the full energy refills gathered would be recycled into more farming.
- I calculated the total unit cost if you bought energy refills and used those (as well as the acquired refills through farming), and not the free energy built up in your account.
- You can almost receive one revive every single run averaged out. This is pretty nice to know.
Building up any significant stack of L1 revives this way still has the drawbacks of expiration date and the need to budget appropriately before starting the difficult quest as your champions cannot farm if they get stuck at a certain section. This is one of the biggest reasons why I think that farming like this should be allowed and doesn't have a crazy impact on the game. The previous farming method that Kabam changed literally resulted in people obtaining a theoretically infinite amount of energy based on the input energy. Refills on this quest are much less common and are not abusable in the same way. The 13.2 unit cost/ revive also really fits well within the economy of the game. You have to be willing to spend the energy on it, and while a revive has value beyond the health that you can heal up by it, the proportional health increase/cost of an L1 revive and an L2 revive is reasonably comparable. It is a bit cheaper to buy the refills and farm the L1 revives, but often for difficult content, a larger health pool can pay dividends in allowing a different and less risky playstyle. It also incentivizes not using suicide masteries because you always start with such low health.
Also, I'll add an RNG disclaimer so that someone doesn't immediately hop on and complain that their drop rate is not the same. I gave it a fairly decent sample size but RNG is RNG. Learn some math and then come back
Hopefully this is helpful for those who are not super aware of how farming works, and please leave all the unreasonable complaints somewhere else. Thanks.
Also, if for some reason a Kabam employee thinks this is ridiculously exploitable, come to the community and explain your reasoning and allow for discussion. It's been this way for a while and snap decisions make nobody happy.
