Efficient Unit Grind in the Arena (1640 units/week, <2hrs/day)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,844 Guardian
TL;DR: One hour 40 minutes per day, six days a week in the arena, translates to 1640 units per week, 85,280 units per year. This counts all the units from arena milestones, and the average units you get from arena crystals. This requires a sufficiently large roster which a lot of players are approaching or already possess. Players will smaller rosters or even less time can still get a big chunk of these rewards because doing less actually generates proportionately better rewards. There's no penalty for not going all in.
It has been a while since I looked at the arenas, and ever since mastery profiles were added to the game I've switched my arena grinding behavior from chasing 5* and 6* champs in the arenas to grinding for units, looking for the most efficient way to do so (given my own playing time and style) and I thought I would share where I am at the moment, first to show what's possible for a relatively short amount of time, but also because this turns out to be applicable to more than just players like me. As the title suggests, I'm going to describe how I earn about 1640 units per week grinding less than two hours a day for six days a week (no Sunday grind).
The above image is a typical cycle. My absolute best numbers so far are 33 rounds in the featured, 43 in the basic in the trials, but these numbers are more typical (the necessary rounds vary slightly depending on whether I lose a fight here or there, and sometimes I end up just under the final milestone and need to do one more round that is mostly overkill). I get these numbers running 7s only in the Featured, 6s only in the Basic, and ranked up 4s in the Trials. I run recoil masteries for the most part, and I use the Sigil arena express mode, and the combination of the two results in about a 90s arena round on average. So with 116+44+34=194 total rounds, that comes out to about four hours and fifty one minutes of grind time, which we're going to round to five hours. Over three days that is one hour forty minutes per day, less than two hours per day.
For that grind time, I get all the milestones in all three arenas. That's 540 units right off the bat, 270 in the trials, and 135 in each of the other two arenas. But I also get 65750 battlechips from milestones from all three arenas as well, and battlechips convert into units via arena crystals. On top of that, I also get battlechips for each round of arena I do. The net battlechips per arena depends on the rarity of the opponents in the arena which varies. To estimate this, let's assume that my opponents are mostly 7s in the featured, 6s in the basic, and 4s in the trials mirroring the champs I bring in. In that case, we can calculate the BC per match based on the BC per fight victory and the BC bonus for winning the match. Assuming I win all three fights, that would be 540 BC in the featured, 480 BC in the basic, and 375 BC in the trials. Summing all this up we get 149330 BC total including milestones and arena rounds per arena cycle.
The average number of units you get from arena crystals is 1875 per million BC (it doesn't matter which crystal you buy, the average units per million is the same). So we can convert 149330 BC into an average unit haul of 149330/1000000 * 1875 ~= 280 units. This brings the net units per arena cycle to 820 units. If we do this twice a week, we get 1640 units (we also end up with about one million gold using the same tally including arena crystal conversion).
If we estimate a month to be four weeks, that's 6560 units per month. Just as an aside, the total units in monthly EQ between contender, proven, conqueror, and uncollected is 621 units. Which means a player that grinds arena as above and also explores those maps can get 7181 units per month with relatively low effort. Contender, Proven, and Conqueror are all maps you can autofight (with sufficient roster) and Uncollected is either capable of being autofought or trivially beaten with a tiny bit of attention. The actual amount of player time required to explore those maps is relatively low on their own.
If we extrapolate this to an entire year, we get 1640 * 52 + 621 * 12 = 92732 units With a bit more effort, one hundred thousands units per year is achievable without resorting to non-stop grind.
Now, to do this requires a fairly sizeable roster, and even at just an hour and forty minutes per day not everyone has that kind of extra time to grind (there's other things going on in the game, AQ, AW, BG, that take up time as well). So what does this mean for everyone else? What if you only have half the time to grind, or even less? Actually, putting in half the time doesn't return half the results, it actually returns *more* than half the results, because there is a diminishing returns to the grind, even a grind that is taking less than two hours a day.
Consider: it takes me just 78 rounds to get all the milestones in both the featured and the basic arenas, but 116 rounds to get them all in the trials, even though that's the same amount of units: 270. So let's see what happens if I cut the grind down to just those two arenas. In that case, I'm now only spending about two hours *total* per cycle (three days) which is now just 39 minutes per day. That is less than half the original time. In that case, I would be getting 270 units from milestones and 76330 BC, which converts to about 143 units (on average) for a total of 413 units. That is 826 units per week, just about half the 1640 originally calculated for only 40% of the original time.
What's more, if I was spending less time per session grinding, that would mean I would be using fewer champions, and thus using my higher rated champions more often. This means I would be scoring more points per round, and thus gaining milestones faster. In fact, because I tend to grind more rounds in fewer sessions, I'm actually not doing this as efficiently as I could. If I spread my grind out over more time, doing fewer rounds per session, I could probably reduce my overall time spent even more. Even the milestones in the arenas are front-loaded: it is easier to get the earlier ones than the later ones, so someone who was spending even less time than that and not getting all the milestones would be getting an even higher proportionate return on time invested. If 40% of the time generates 50% of the rewards, I would not be surprised if 25% of the time generated 35% of the rewards or more.
Conversely, if you don't have the roster to do this now, then this means the more time you put into it, the more acceleration you will get out of it. Rosters grow over time. I'm at the point where roster growth will only have tiny incremental impacts on my arena performance, but someone with a much smaller roster has a lot of headroom to grow. Every new champ and every new rank up is going to be adding points and speed. This does get better over time.
Lastly, consider the amount of available units compared to things like big sale events. 92732 units is essentially 30k units to spend on three different events, theoretically completely free to play.
PS: if anyone is interested, the amount of gold that gets generated from the arena if you're grinding all the milestones in the matter I describe above is about 112.6 million gold per year. That does *not* count the gold in monthly EQ (that is an additional 60 million gold).
To summarize. less than two hours a day six days a week generates 1640 units per week in the arena, 85280 units in a year. With the units in monthly EQ, that's 92,732 units available to players from game play alone. A completely free to play player would not have the Sigil arena express setting and might take a bit longer, but slightly more than two hours per day without arena express (but with recoil masteries) is probably still reasonable. Doing less than that still generates good results. No arena express and only doing one hour a day would still generate more than half that amount of units.
PPS: this rate of return of units per time spent is almost three times as much as I calculated for myself back in 2020 under the original arenas. Back then I was calculating about 58 units per hour. These numbers represent over 164 units per hour.
It has been a while since I looked at the arenas, and ever since mastery profiles were added to the game I've switched my arena grinding behavior from chasing 5* and 6* champs in the arenas to grinding for units, looking for the most efficient way to do so (given my own playing time and style) and I thought I would share where I am at the moment, first to show what's possible for a relatively short amount of time, but also because this turns out to be applicable to more than just players like me. As the title suggests, I'm going to describe how I earn about 1640 units per week grinding less than two hours a day for six days a week (no Sunday grind).
The above image is a typical cycle. My absolute best numbers so far are 33 rounds in the featured, 43 in the basic in the trials, but these numbers are more typical (the necessary rounds vary slightly depending on whether I lose a fight here or there, and sometimes I end up just under the final milestone and need to do one more round that is mostly overkill). I get these numbers running 7s only in the Featured, 6s only in the Basic, and ranked up 4s in the Trials. I run recoil masteries for the most part, and I use the Sigil arena express mode, and the combination of the two results in about a 90s arena round on average. So with 116+44+34=194 total rounds, that comes out to about four hours and fifty one minutes of grind time, which we're going to round to five hours. Over three days that is one hour forty minutes per day, less than two hours per day.
For that grind time, I get all the milestones in all three arenas. That's 540 units right off the bat, 270 in the trials, and 135 in each of the other two arenas. But I also get 65750 battlechips from milestones from all three arenas as well, and battlechips convert into units via arena crystals. On top of that, I also get battlechips for each round of arena I do. The net battlechips per arena depends on the rarity of the opponents in the arena which varies. To estimate this, let's assume that my opponents are mostly 7s in the featured, 6s in the basic, and 4s in the trials mirroring the champs I bring in. In that case, we can calculate the BC per match based on the BC per fight victory and the BC bonus for winning the match. Assuming I win all three fights, that would be 540 BC in the featured, 480 BC in the basic, and 375 BC in the trials. Summing all this up we get 149330 BC total including milestones and arena rounds per arena cycle.
The average number of units you get from arena crystals is 1875 per million BC (it doesn't matter which crystal you buy, the average units per million is the same). So we can convert 149330 BC into an average unit haul of 149330/1000000 * 1875 ~= 280 units. This brings the net units per arena cycle to 820 units. If we do this twice a week, we get 1640 units (we also end up with about one million gold using the same tally including arena crystal conversion).
If we estimate a month to be four weeks, that's 6560 units per month. Just as an aside, the total units in monthly EQ between contender, proven, conqueror, and uncollected is 621 units. Which means a player that grinds arena as above and also explores those maps can get 7181 units per month with relatively low effort. Contender, Proven, and Conqueror are all maps you can autofight (with sufficient roster) and Uncollected is either capable of being autofought or trivially beaten with a tiny bit of attention. The actual amount of player time required to explore those maps is relatively low on their own.
If we extrapolate this to an entire year, we get 1640 * 52 + 621 * 12 = 92732 units With a bit more effort, one hundred thousands units per year is achievable without resorting to non-stop grind.
Now, to do this requires a fairly sizeable roster, and even at just an hour and forty minutes per day not everyone has that kind of extra time to grind (there's other things going on in the game, AQ, AW, BG, that take up time as well). So what does this mean for everyone else? What if you only have half the time to grind, or even less? Actually, putting in half the time doesn't return half the results, it actually returns *more* than half the results, because there is a diminishing returns to the grind, even a grind that is taking less than two hours a day.
Consider: it takes me just 78 rounds to get all the milestones in both the featured and the basic arenas, but 116 rounds to get them all in the trials, even though that's the same amount of units: 270. So let's see what happens if I cut the grind down to just those two arenas. In that case, I'm now only spending about two hours *total* per cycle (three days) which is now just 39 minutes per day. That is less than half the original time. In that case, I would be getting 270 units from milestones and 76330 BC, which converts to about 143 units (on average) for a total of 413 units. That is 826 units per week, just about half the 1640 originally calculated for only 40% of the original time.
What's more, if I was spending less time per session grinding, that would mean I would be using fewer champions, and thus using my higher rated champions more often. This means I would be scoring more points per round, and thus gaining milestones faster. In fact, because I tend to grind more rounds in fewer sessions, I'm actually not doing this as efficiently as I could. If I spread my grind out over more time, doing fewer rounds per session, I could probably reduce my overall time spent even more. Even the milestones in the arenas are front-loaded: it is easier to get the earlier ones than the later ones, so someone who was spending even less time than that and not getting all the milestones would be getting an even higher proportionate return on time invested. If 40% of the time generates 50% of the rewards, I would not be surprised if 25% of the time generated 35% of the rewards or more.
Conversely, if you don't have the roster to do this now, then this means the more time you put into it, the more acceleration you will get out of it. Rosters grow over time. I'm at the point where roster growth will only have tiny incremental impacts on my arena performance, but someone with a much smaller roster has a lot of headroom to grow. Every new champ and every new rank up is going to be adding points and speed. This does get better over time.
Lastly, consider the amount of available units compared to things like big sale events. 92732 units is essentially 30k units to spend on three different events, theoretically completely free to play.
PS: if anyone is interested, the amount of gold that gets generated from the arena if you're grinding all the milestones in the matter I describe above is about 112.6 million gold per year. That does *not* count the gold in monthly EQ (that is an additional 60 million gold).
To summarize. less than two hours a day six days a week generates 1640 units per week in the arena, 85280 units in a year. With the units in monthly EQ, that's 92,732 units available to players from game play alone. A completely free to play player would not have the Sigil arena express setting and might take a bit longer, but slightly more than two hours per day without arena express (but with recoil masteries) is probably still reasonable. Doing less than that still generates good results. No arena express and only doing one hour a day would still generate more than half that amount of units.
PPS: this rate of return of units per time spent is almost three times as much as I calculated for myself back in 2020 under the original arenas. Back then I was calculating about 58 units per hour. These numbers represent over 164 units per hour.
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i'm doing an experiment myself this month to see how many units and battlechips can be grinded. might make a thread about it.
As far as information to note goes: My account is Valiant with 2.6m rating and I’m fully ftp which means no sigil for express arena. Definitely not a massively developed account but not too small either. I do have suicides which in my experience makes a huge difference in time saved.
I haven’t done nearly as thorough of a job tracking my unit gain as you have, but I can explain the basics of my routine and how much it gives me unit wise.
My grind takes around an hour a day which is a pretty reasonable grind, definitely does not feel too excessive or draining. It’s split into two 30 minute sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening. Only exception is when the arenas reset (at 1:00 for me) and I’ll do a session of my 4* and build a streak in each 6* arena with my 6* r1s. Every session I do 7 rounds in the 4* arena, 6 in the featured using all 7*, and 5 in the basic using my 6* champs. I point this out because to do this grind you would only need 18 7*, 15 6*, and 21 ranked 4*. You don’t even need that many 7* because you can use some of your ranked up 6* in the featured arena instead of the sevens for just a few less points.
I’m able to finish to reach milestone 9 in the 4* arena, finish the featured arena in 43 rounds and finish the basic in 29 or 30 rounds. It’s 7 separate grind sessions per each arena reset. I end up finishing the basic arena on my 6th session and thus on my 7th can do more rounds in the featured to catch up and finish off the milestones.
This ends up amounting to 774 units per week from only milestones. Battlechips I do not track as closely, but I open mine at 500k chips which takes around 3 weeks to acquire, and on average land anywhere in the 800-900 unit range.
So, what are the final totals monthly? Well a month is not exactly 4 weeks, it’s 4 weeks and some change. There are also 2 arena cycles per week, which times 4 weeks would be 8, but I like to add 1 more in my calculation as there’s a bit more than 4 weeks in a month. So in total we have 9 arena cycles per month. Thus, 774 units x 4.5 weeks = 3483 units per month from milestones. Now when adding the battlechips, at on average about ~850 per three weeks it’s around 1150-1200 per month tho it depends on rng. I’ll go in the middle and say 1175 for the final number, which amounts to 4658 units per month from an hour a day of arena alone.
As far as gold goes, idk how much I get but I haven’t had gold problems since I started doing arena lol.
TLDR: I do about half of DNA’s grind which is about an hour a day, and here’s what it amounts to monthly:
3483 units from milestones + ~1175 from battlechips equaling 4658 units per month from an hour a day of arena.
I don’t know how much gold I get but since doing arena I’ve always had enough.
I go through 2 runs for featured arena. A run of to 15 6*s to get streak then go with 7s. Second run is only 7s to hit the 12M mark for 135 units.
For the other 6* arena, I do 2 runs of my top 15 6s to hit 4M for another 135 units.
I only hit the 1.5M in the trials for 130 units, which is 400 per arena set which is comes to 800 per week. With daily objectives and some of the lower EQ and other sources, I pretty much average 1000 units per week without using chips. Not quite the full grind, but not tedious either. Enough to hit July 4 and cyber week unit deals, plus extra for other deals.
If we add 1200 units from calendar and 25 x 182 = 4550 units from at least half the 22hr milestone events we get 92732 + 1200 + 4550 = 98482. If you can get the units from level up most of the time (which only requires 31460 points) that’s 100,000 units in a year for nominal effort.
You could do it with fewer if they are ranked up and are willing to sneak in one or two 6s, or if you can squeeze in one additional session. 24 is pretty safe if you do six sessions over three days.
If we allowed 5* champs then players using 4s would run into deathmatches more often and require them to use higher ranked champs to avoid them. Worst case scenario, allowing 5s might make 4s too dangerous to use at all. And no, they can’t easily allow players to use them on attack but prevent the arena from sending them against other players. If you can use them, someone else will see them in their deathmatches. That’s just how the arenas were designed to work at the beginning of time.
I don’t mind using 4s in that arena if it means players with smaller rosters can get more benefit out of that arena before they are ready to move up to the 4-5-6-7 arenas.
Those are both very useful anecdotes for players with either less time or smaller rosters, which I think is an important part of all of this. It is a common perception that if you are not a hard core grinder the arena is not for you. I hope this encourages players to approach the arenas as more of a useful resource that players can tap at their discretion. Do what you can, when you can, and get what you can. Half of what I’m getting is still a lot. Even half of what Nemesis and AzKicker is getting is still useful.
Being fully F2P myself the arena is where I get 95% of my units, and the numbers really do add up and get crazy when extrapolated over lots of rounds.
I’m already at around 20k units towards July 4th, and my goal is 36k. Based on my estimations I’ll either just make it or be slightly short, but still 15-16k units in just under 2 months is very very good.
When you think about the amount of progressing players who’ve been stuck in act 6 for a year +, this is 70 free extra revives for them to use in content. Or it’s another 9 banquet crystals if they choose to go that route. Either way, amazing rewards for the time spent which is less than 10 minutes a week. Also @JT_Supreme this would fit your requirement of under 10 minutes of effort lol.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
Or is the score tied to the rank and level and not the champs rating?
Actually, one thing that I think does not affect points is class advantage. I think your points are calculated based on your team’s PI and your opponent’s PI but doesn’t factor in PI changes due to class advantage/disadvantage for specific match ups. The rest of it should, but it’s been a few years since I last looked at that specifically.
100 minutes a day for 6 days is 10 hours a week, to gain in essence $60 worth of IG currency/goods/ what have you. In my past life of a salaried employee maybe I'd get away with a third of that between meetings or on business trips, but as a contract guy now, spending an hour to make $6 instead of charging $200 is not ideal. I appreciate the heads up to the community that you don't need deep pockets to gain units, but alternatively kids, if you work real hard and save your cash wisely, you can dump it into high yield savings like this one
and, if you're like me and have several of these, you can skim off part of the thousand in passive monthly income to buy whatever you feel like. Or, you know, buy whatever with the $100/hr I keep from the $200/hr I bill.
So, when people talk "Whale" or "Pay to win player," in the end we're people who choose to pay because we're able to choose to pay.
Find me a side hustle that has those same parameters and I’ll consider it.
And to be blunt, I don’t need a side hustle to just buy units. I could at any time choose to simply buy however many units I want. I choose to grind for them, because I choose to play the game to see where my efforts take me. It’s part of why I play the game at all.
People often say this game is like a job, but it’s nothing like almost any job. With MCOC, you are your own boss and your own singular customer. No one tells you what to do. No one forces you to do anything. No one else decides if you’re doing the right thing or doing it in the right way or generating the right results. You, and you alone, decide what to do, how to do it, and whether or not you are generating acceptable results.
I’ve been an employee. I’ve been self employed. I’ve been a consultant that has embedded myself in literally every industry and workplace situation that exists. There is no job like that anywhere on Earth.
I would not do arena for someone else for 600 hours a year for $9k or even twice that amount. I probably wouldn’t even do it for ten times that amount. I already have a job. MCOC is not it, nor would I ever want to turn it into one.
I start by sorting in reverse rating order (lowest to highest) and doing 7 rounds. Then I flip sort high to low and continue on. This gets me past the infinite streak threshold and I work through the line up, then on recharge I go from top to bottom again and that’s usually enough now. In the past, I would need to do a third pass through or even a fourth, but not anymore.
I think spending is often characterized strictly in terms of means. Some people can spend and some people can't spend. But that's not the only factor that goes into spending. I have the means to buy everything. Literally everything. I don't, because I don't want to.
Buying everything would take all the fun out of the game, for me. There has to be something to play for, something to strive for, something to work towards, or the game isn't really worth playing for me anymore. So there are things I buy, because I can, and there are things I reserve to do in the game, so I can see how my efforts bear fruit.
Certainly the game needs spenders, and as I said i do spend. I don't think spenders should look down on the free to play players nor should the free to play players complain about the spenders. But I think there's also an alternate angle here where we shouldn't be questioning what people grind or spend on, separate from the question of spending at all. Grinding is sometimes a necessity, and sometimes a choice. Player choices should, in general, be respected.
My comment simply illustrates how much resources you’re wasting by doing 600+ hrs of mindless arena farming.
For basic arena I was able to hit the same rounds using 5 stars ranked 5. I am perfectly fine for only 4 stars in summoners arena as it keeps our other rarity champions fresh and use for other arenas. Will try the featured arena now using 7 stars for first time to test out myself.
Even when I was a poor twenty year old, I was aware of this. Now that I'm a not poor fifty+ year old, the notion that I lack time management skills because I'm wasting time doing arena is something that I struggle to come up with a good reply to, beyond: if you know, you know.
In any event, if anyone reading this actually feels that the time spent doing arena would be better spent finding a side job, then I think they should in fact do that. But for some of us, possible the majority of us, the notion of finding a second job to pay for stuff in a mobile game is either laughable (because it would be completely unnecessary), or ludicrous (because they were already doing as much work as they could to begin with, and the time they manage to allocate to playing a game would never under any circumstances be spent doing a job).
Also keep in mind that most people here are not older men who are doing very well for themself. I’d imagine that a 20 yr old you would’ve love to have an extra $6500 disposable income per yr and still reap the rewards that you would’ve gotten if you spent that time in arena.
From a strictly financial perspective, you shouldn’t just stop grinding arena and spend the time earning more money, you should stop playing the game altogether and spend the time earning more money. But most people don’t make life choices strictly on those terms.
I have yet to meet someone who says they absolutely enjoy arena. But I have met people who are perfectly fine with it as a past time. It is about as enjoyable as fishing is, except I get a guaranteed reward from arena grinding. And it is far more enjoyable than golf and costs way less for probably a majority of people.
Progressional games are as much about satisfaction as fun. Parts of it are fun, and parts of it are just part of the game, just as dribbling is a part of basketball but no one thinks it is especially fun to do in the middle of a game. It is satisfying to me to sit back, relax, and grind a ton of units over time. It is satisfying to me to figure out the best way to do that in the first place. It is satisfying to me to share that information for the people who want it and would benefit from it. But these are justifications for something that doesn’t really need a justification. If you don’t know anyone that finds grinding arena satisfying, that simply means you haven’t met enough people yet.