**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.

Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.

(Almost) Everything you know about ISO is probably wrong: Part One: Gold cost(s)

For the past few months I've been looking at ISO in the game. Where it comes from, how much it takes to level up champs, etc. And while my investigation isn't over yet, I've learned a lot about ISO that upended many of my assumptions about ISO that I always took for granted, even though the facts were in plain sight. I'm going to try to dump them out as I organize them, and rather than dump them all in one gigantic post (which would overload the forum limits anyway) I'm going to break them up into small bite-sized pieces. I don't know how may parts this series will eventually encompass, but here's part one.


How much gold does it take to use ISO?

I think most players know two things about ISO. First, using class ISO is cheaper when it is used on the corresponding class, and probably that using class ISO is horrible when it is used on the wrong class. But is that actually correct, and if it is to what extent is it correct?

Here's something you can do. You can simply ask the game how much gold it takes to use every kind of ISO brick, from the basics to the class bricks.



This is what the game says each brick costs if you try to use it on a champion. It isn't obvious until you actually run the numbers, but something to notice is that the gold ratio for all the basic bricks - which is the gold cost per unit ISO - is actually not identical. Tier 1 basic bricks are actually slightly cheaper to use than tier 6 basic bricks. A player would go cuckoo using tier 1 basic bricks to level up their 6* Hercules, but they would save about 1.25% of their gold costs doing it.

Conversely, while basic ISO bricks cost more the higher you go, class ISO bricks cost less the higher you go. Tier 2 class ISO bricks (I didn't have tier 1 bricks to test and I think they only drop from 1* dups, so almost no one else has them either) cost 1.12 gold per ISO, which is over 5% more expensive than tier 6 class ISO bricks.

Interestingly, this means every gold cost chart you've ever seen out there is wrong (and probably in more than one way, but that's another article). It is impossible to say how much gold it will cost to level something up, without specifying which bricks you're using. Not just in the Basic vs Class sense, but also in terms of which tier bricks. Of course, beyond a certain point most players will be using tier 5 bricks for the most part, so it is possible to estimate the real world costs fairly close. We aren't talking about ISO costing twice as much or half as much. But, if you're nit picky, gold costs depend on ISO brick tier.

Is using the wrong class ISO worse than using basic bricks? Yes, but barely at top tier bricks. Tier 6 basic bricks cost 1.053 gold per ISO while tier 6 class bricks costs 1.06497 gold per ISO. So wrong class tier 6 bricks cost about 1.1% more gold to use than basic tier 6 ISO bricks. That's more, but not catastrophically more.

The whole "wrong class is worse than basic" rule arose in the early days of the game when we were more likely to be using lower tier bricks. If we compare tier 3 bricks, then wrong class bricks would cost almost 4% more, and that is a much larger gold gap. But basics get more expensive going up while class ISO gets cheaper going up, and they almost meet in the middle. Makes me wonder if tier 7 ISO bricks will actually break even one day.

The class discount is definitely a thing. Because you get 50% more "value" out of using matching class ISO, the gold ratios are vastly better for appropriate class use. That rule is definitely true. But even though many players already do this just to preserve their sanity, here's another rule I haven't seen anyone mention (if they have, I just haven't seen it). When you are overflowing on ISO, sell the small ones, save the big ones. The big ones not only take up less inventory and stash space, they also cost less to use.

This rule is backwards for basic ISO bricks, but the difference is small enough that the tule "sell the big ones keep the small ones" might be impractical for the benefit. But if you are someone literally scraping by on gold, this does technically save about 1% gold.


TL;DR:

1. Different ISO bricks cost (proportional) different amounts of gold to use. The difference is not gigantic, but it is in some cases noticable. Higher class bricks are cheaper than lower tier class bricks. Lower tier basic bricks are cheaper than higher tier basic bricks.

2. It is better to use matching class ISO rather than basic ISO. However, the penalty for using wrong class ISO drops to a very low amount when using higher tier bricks. It is about 1% difference when comparing tier 6 bricks.

3. Always use matching class ISO whenever possible. This rule is still absolutely correct in all cases.

Preview of part two:



We're off to the races.

Comments

  • Hector_1475Hector_1475 Posts: 1,770 ★★★★★
    Ideally, all Basic ISO should be sold for Gold and only Class-appropriate ISO should be used for level-ups. These two simple rules go a long way, in maintaining your Gold. That's about it.
  • This is an awesome read , especially for those who face shortages in these resources.
  • AdevatiAdevati Posts: 437 ★★★
    K00shMaan said:

    Ideally, all Basic ISO should be sold for Gold and only Class-appropriate ISO should be used for level-ups. These two simple rules go a long way, in maintaining your Gold. That's about it.

    Ideally you have enough Gold to invest all of your ISO into your Champions. I can't remember the last time I sold an ISO brick and I still have 80M Gold.
    Same. I have 55m+ gold. Haven’t run out in years. Run out of iso all the time. I also still have like 500 T3C crystals to pop for gold if I need it.

    I don’t know what I’m doing wrong to have never had an issue with gold and only iso.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,558 Guardian

    Ideally, all Basic ISO should be sold for Gold and only Class-appropriate ISO should be used for level-ups. These two simple rules go a long way, in maintaining your Gold. That's about it.

    Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as that as most people short of gold also have limited supplies of ISO. This means while this is still a good idea, it is less of a strategy and more of a dream. To actually implement this requires additional resource management work, which is one of those things I had intended to cover elsewhere, but one thing that more resource management-minded players have been doing to implement the "always use the right class ISO" goal is to save Nexus crystals and stock up on 4* or 5* dual class crystals, so that they can be used to have a really good chance of getting a burst of the right class ISO when they need it, without having it expire inefficiently.

    Meanwhile I've been actually using a lot of basic ISO for rank ups more recently, because I have effectively unlimited gold but my rank up pace has accelerated (in part due to the much higher availability of catalysts from places like the BG store) to the point where I regularly run out of the right class ISO. Selling basic ISO gives me more of what I don't need at the expense of getting rid of a bottleneck I can't easily replace. So while I recommend and actually lived the rule "use right class, sell everything else" for years, it is now a rule I no longer follow due to changing circumstances.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,558 Guardian
    Adevati said:

    K00shMaan said:

    Ideally, all Basic ISO should be sold for Gold and only Class-appropriate ISO should be used for level-ups. These two simple rules go a long way, in maintaining your Gold. That's about it.

    Ideally you have enough Gold to invest all of your ISO into your Champions. I can't remember the last time I sold an ISO brick and I still have 80M Gold.
    Same. I have 55m+ gold. Haven’t run out in years. Run out of iso all the time. I also still have like 500 T3C crystals to pop for gold if I need it.

    I don’t know what I’m doing wrong to have never had an issue with gold and only iso.
    If you're doing the same thing, you're selling the thing you're running out of to get more of the thing you have a lot of. This is problematic. When you have a lot of gold and no ISO, you need to rebalance your strategy. Switch back when gold gets uncomfortably low, switch back again with ISO runs out.
  • AdevatiAdevati Posts: 437 ★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    Adevati said:

    K00shMaan said:

    Ideally, all Basic ISO should be sold for Gold and only Class-appropriate ISO should be used for level-ups. These two simple rules go a long way, in maintaining your Gold. That's about it.

    Ideally you have enough Gold to invest all of your ISO into your Champions. I can't remember the last time I sold an ISO brick and I still have 80M Gold.
    Same. I have 55m+ gold. Haven’t run out in years. Run out of iso all the time. I also still have like 500 T3C crystals to pop for gold if I need it.

    I don’t know what I’m doing wrong to have never had an issue with gold and only iso.
    If you're doing the same thing, you're selling the thing you're running out of to get more of the thing you have a lot of. This is problematic. When you have a lot of gold and no ISO, you need to rebalance your strategy. Switch back when gold gets uncomfortably low, switch back again with ISO runs out.
    I never sell iso nor did I ever. I do have a few alts that I send Lunar New Year envelopes every year. Maybe that is funding my level ups.
  • allinashesallinashes Posts: 777 ★★★
    I also saved my login crystals before Paragon and opened them for specific class ISO in addition to hoarding 4*/5* shards and nexuses for ISO. After Paragon, I just open them for the 6* chance.
  • JerryJiverJerryJiver Posts: 102
    Interesting analysis, great work. 2 questions… is there a good reason from a game design perspective why kabam wouldn’t make the value:gold ratio simply 1:1? And why would the ratios be different for basic vs class, let alone be different for different size bricks or the same type? I can’t come up with a good reason for any of these decisions
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,558 Guardian

    Interesting analysis, great work. 2 questions… is there a good reason from a game design perspective why kabam wouldn’t make the value:gold ratio simply 1:1? And why would the ratios be different for basic vs class, let alone be different for different size bricks or the same type? I can’t come up with a good reason for any of these decisions

    I can't come up with a good reason for Basic ISO to get more expensive. Class ISO getting cheaper could be considered a reasonable discount for using bigger bricks. But my suspicion is that there was some thought going on originally, but that line of thought was lost over time and successive work on ISO costs either tried to extrapolate previous work incorrectly, or changed the thought to something else resulting in strange numbers.

    It *suggests* the ISO economy is not as rigorous as we might have otherwise assumed. Which is a potentially useful piece of information moving forward.
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