Earning Glory as a solo player
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,702 Guardian
TL;DR: You can earn Glory running Map 1 or Map 2 as a solo player in an alliance of one person. This generates reasonable rewards that increase based on your prestige, but it is perhaps surprisingly respectable even for low prestige players.
As most of my gaming career has been in MMOs, I've often experimented with seeing how far you can get playing completely solo in a game that typically rewards playing in groups/guilds/alliances, sometimes in extremely high value ways. I started my play here solo as well, although I was eventually swept up into an alliance. Everyone knows alliance rewards are generally well worth it, if you can find an alliance that doesn't drive you crazy and is fairly active. But what if you're a player that literally wants to play all by yourself. You don't even want to be in a "chill" or "retirement" alliance, you just want to keep to yourself and play the game solo.
That's certainly possible, and if that's your preference that's cool, but does that mean sacrificing all the rewards that alliances gain? In terms of quantity, yes. But if you're willing to get a (dis)proportionately small amount of rewards for being solo, but you still want to get something, that's possible. I've been screwing around a bit with a very low account I created last year when Kabam announced they were giving the store away during Summoner Appreciation Eon. This account is just level 36 and has a prestige of about 2200. His top champs are a 4* 4/40 Hulk and a 4/9 Colossus (yep: I ran out of ISO at level 9). The fact that he actually has two 5* champs already (Taskmaster and Vulture) is a testament to how the rewards are "a little different" than when I first started. But still, this account is nothing a dedicated player couldn't roll up and level up in a couple weeks probably.
The question I've been working on was: how much Glory could this account earn all by itself. Answer: not a lot, but some.
First of all, how does a solo account earn Glory? Well, nothing stops you from making an alliance and only putting yourself into it. Which I did. You're still 100% solo, but now you're also able to run alliance events. Actually, you're able to run AQ. You can't run solo AW, because AW requires a minimum number of players (I think it is five). But can you run AQ with only one player?
Absolutely. The obvious first option is to run Map 1. Map 1 has three paths, so you're never going to complete the map fully. But you can go from start to finish, and it only takes 17 energy to do it. As you get three energy to start and 24 energy over a full day, even with a full eight hours of sleep it is still doable. You lose three energy overnight (not eight, because five carries over in your energy bar), so you have 27-3 = 24 energy. Really, 23 because you can't use the last energy point you get because one second later AQ ends. Still, plenty of energy for Map 1. What about the links you say? What about them. They are hardly meaningful on Map 1: any average to above average player should be able to plow through them. What's more, since you're technically failing the map every day, unlike with a normal alliance your solo alliance AQ will actually get easier throughout the week, as your rolling prestige will drop every day. This also lowers your points, but eh, you're a solo alliance.
With just 2200 prestige and just doing map 1 five days I ended up with about 400k-ish points. Not going to win any awards there, but that is 80 glory for peak milestones and 300 glory for rank rewards - I wasn't even in the bottom rank! 380 glory a week is about 1520 a month. Not great, but not horrible either. You could buy 7200 T2A fragments or maybe 2250 T5B fragments and 3600 T2A fragments from the Glory store. Or, probably more appropriate to a 2200 prestige player you could buy two full T4B catalysts every week or 5 T1A cats or some combination of the two. That's not chicken feed for not a huge investment in time. And if you get busy and skip a day or miss a day, no one is going to complain. It isn't like you can get kicked for inactivity.
Can you do better? Well, you could run Map 2 but you run into an odd problem: you can't actually complete Map 2, as in you can't reach the boss. It takes 25 energy to solo from start to boss on Map 2. If you sleep eight hours, you'll only have 24 energy. You'll miss out on killing the boss. However, this actually generates more points anyway when I tested it: I actually managed to get about 800k points doing this, which meant while my rank was still the same (or rather, my rank bracket was still the same, my rank of course went up) I reached the 500k milestone, and I now got 100 + 300 = 400 glory. And remember this is at 2200 (starting) prestige. A higher player will of course have higher prestige and get more points. But 1600 glory a month is 1600 glory a month.
If you do Map 2, my recommendation is to swing far right for the first two stages to knock out the +health node towards the boss. It just makes that fight shorter, and since the other nodes aren't that bad shortening the fight is the best thing you can do there (at least, I think that's the path with the +health node).
Can you do even better? Obviously, you can try Map 3. Map 3 has some pluses and minuses. First: it is a harder map. This is the first map that in my opinion the links you're going to have to plow through might actually matter, at least for some players and some small rosters. The good news: up to Map 3 the opponents don't have SP3 unlocked. This is very helpful. The bad news: Map 3 is the first map that starts locking champs in AQ out of other content and vice versa. If you're also doing solo content, you can't use those champs in AQ. Meaningless for high tier solo players, meaningful for lower or starting players. The weird news: you can solo all the way to the boss in Map 3, or at least maybe do so. Although this takes 25 energy on Map 2 (assuming I've counted correctly), it only takes 24 energy on Map 3. It is still very hard to do without, say, moving in the middle of the night, but it is theoretically possible, at least for the first four days. Just move forward one node during that middle of the night bathroom break or something to get one more energy move in.
I have yet to try to do Map 3 for an entire week yet, but my guestimate is I would have reached about one million points and maybe rose one rank bracket (I ended up at 21911 when I had about 800k; 21000 would be the next bracket higher) which would have ended up earning about 250 + 350 = 600 Glory. That's a substantial jump up from 400, and now we're talking about 2400 glory a month.
This is a respectable amount of Glory for a solo player with a tiny roster. If you're a semi-retired high progress player taking a break from alliances altogether I would not be surprised if you could earn 1000 glory a week doing this.
You could keep going, and try to do Map 4 or Map 5 solo, but I think you're in diminishing returns territory here. SP3 gets unlocked, so things like Power Gain nodes become important, and finding the right path through the maps starts to become problematic. Unless you're really looking for a challenge, this seems to be more work than a solo player is likely to want to expose themselves to. But who knows: maybe someone will try it and post their results. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this (I thought about it years ago, but only decided to actually try it around the end of last year), so I'm curious if there are high progress players out there that are doing this instead of lounging in a retirement alliance, and if so how much glory are they farming out of this. I wonder what is the record for most Glory earned "solo" in the game?
I'm sure many are thinking "this is silly: just join an alliance, it is way better." And yes, finding a suitable alliance is in general way better. So why bother with this crazy exercise? Well, I often read forum posts that talk about what the game "forces" players to do. It forces players to spend cash, it forces players to play in a certain way. I wanted to see what was possible if you defy a fundamental convention of the game: you have to join an alliance to get alliance rewards.
This only considers glory, and what glory can buy. It does not address map crystals as a primary source of catalysts. It isn't a complete picture. It is just one small part of the resource system addressed in a possibly absurd, but doable way without being forced to do it in the conventionally obvious way.
I remember when: I remember I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
And when you're out there, without care, yeah I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough, I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
As most of my gaming career has been in MMOs, I've often experimented with seeing how far you can get playing completely solo in a game that typically rewards playing in groups/guilds/alliances, sometimes in extremely high value ways. I started my play here solo as well, although I was eventually swept up into an alliance. Everyone knows alliance rewards are generally well worth it, if you can find an alliance that doesn't drive you crazy and is fairly active. But what if you're a player that literally wants to play all by yourself. You don't even want to be in a "chill" or "retirement" alliance, you just want to keep to yourself and play the game solo.
That's certainly possible, and if that's your preference that's cool, but does that mean sacrificing all the rewards that alliances gain? In terms of quantity, yes. But if you're willing to get a (dis)proportionately small amount of rewards for being solo, but you still want to get something, that's possible. I've been screwing around a bit with a very low account I created last year when Kabam announced they were giving the store away during Summoner Appreciation Eon. This account is just level 36 and has a prestige of about 2200. His top champs are a 4* 4/40 Hulk and a 4/9 Colossus (yep: I ran out of ISO at level 9). The fact that he actually has two 5* champs already (Taskmaster and Vulture) is a testament to how the rewards are "a little different" than when I first started. But still, this account is nothing a dedicated player couldn't roll up and level up in a couple weeks probably.
The question I've been working on was: how much Glory could this account earn all by itself. Answer: not a lot, but some.
First of all, how does a solo account earn Glory? Well, nothing stops you from making an alliance and only putting yourself into it. Which I did. You're still 100% solo, but now you're also able to run alliance events. Actually, you're able to run AQ. You can't run solo AW, because AW requires a minimum number of players (I think it is five). But can you run AQ with only one player?
Absolutely. The obvious first option is to run Map 1. Map 1 has three paths, so you're never going to complete the map fully. But you can go from start to finish, and it only takes 17 energy to do it. As you get three energy to start and 24 energy over a full day, even with a full eight hours of sleep it is still doable. You lose three energy overnight (not eight, because five carries over in your energy bar), so you have 27-3 = 24 energy. Really, 23 because you can't use the last energy point you get because one second later AQ ends. Still, plenty of energy for Map 1. What about the links you say? What about them. They are hardly meaningful on Map 1: any average to above average player should be able to plow through them. What's more, since you're technically failing the map every day, unlike with a normal alliance your solo alliance AQ will actually get easier throughout the week, as your rolling prestige will drop every day. This also lowers your points, but eh, you're a solo alliance.
With just 2200 prestige and just doing map 1 five days I ended up with about 400k-ish points. Not going to win any awards there, but that is 80 glory for peak milestones and 300 glory for rank rewards - I wasn't even in the bottom rank! 380 glory a week is about 1520 a month. Not great, but not horrible either. You could buy 7200 T2A fragments or maybe 2250 T5B fragments and 3600 T2A fragments from the Glory store. Or, probably more appropriate to a 2200 prestige player you could buy two full T4B catalysts every week or 5 T1A cats or some combination of the two. That's not chicken feed for not a huge investment in time. And if you get busy and skip a day or miss a day, no one is going to complain. It isn't like you can get kicked for inactivity.
Can you do better? Well, you could run Map 2 but you run into an odd problem: you can't actually complete Map 2, as in you can't reach the boss. It takes 25 energy to solo from start to boss on Map 2. If you sleep eight hours, you'll only have 24 energy. You'll miss out on killing the boss. However, this actually generates more points anyway when I tested it: I actually managed to get about 800k points doing this, which meant while my rank was still the same (or rather, my rank bracket was still the same, my rank of course went up) I reached the 500k milestone, and I now got 100 + 300 = 400 glory. And remember this is at 2200 (starting) prestige. A higher player will of course have higher prestige and get more points. But 1600 glory a month is 1600 glory a month.
If you do Map 2, my recommendation is to swing far right for the first two stages to knock out the +health node towards the boss. It just makes that fight shorter, and since the other nodes aren't that bad shortening the fight is the best thing you can do there (at least, I think that's the path with the +health node).
Can you do even better? Obviously, you can try Map 3. Map 3 has some pluses and minuses. First: it is a harder map. This is the first map that in my opinion the links you're going to have to plow through might actually matter, at least for some players and some small rosters. The good news: up to Map 3 the opponents don't have SP3 unlocked. This is very helpful. The bad news: Map 3 is the first map that starts locking champs in AQ out of other content and vice versa. If you're also doing solo content, you can't use those champs in AQ. Meaningless for high tier solo players, meaningful for lower or starting players. The weird news: you can solo all the way to the boss in Map 3, or at least maybe do so. Although this takes 25 energy on Map 2 (assuming I've counted correctly), it only takes 24 energy on Map 3. It is still very hard to do without, say, moving in the middle of the night, but it is theoretically possible, at least for the first four days. Just move forward one node during that middle of the night bathroom break or something to get one more energy move in.
I have yet to try to do Map 3 for an entire week yet, but my guestimate is I would have reached about one million points and maybe rose one rank bracket (I ended up at 21911 when I had about 800k; 21000 would be the next bracket higher) which would have ended up earning about 250 + 350 = 600 Glory. That's a substantial jump up from 400, and now we're talking about 2400 glory a month.
This is a respectable amount of Glory for a solo player with a tiny roster. If you're a semi-retired high progress player taking a break from alliances altogether I would not be surprised if you could earn 1000 glory a week doing this.
You could keep going, and try to do Map 4 or Map 5 solo, but I think you're in diminishing returns territory here. SP3 gets unlocked, so things like Power Gain nodes become important, and finding the right path through the maps starts to become problematic. Unless you're really looking for a challenge, this seems to be more work than a solo player is likely to want to expose themselves to. But who knows: maybe someone will try it and post their results. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this (I thought about it years ago, but only decided to actually try it around the end of last year), so I'm curious if there are high progress players out there that are doing this instead of lounging in a retirement alliance, and if so how much glory are they farming out of this. I wonder what is the record for most Glory earned "solo" in the game?
I'm sure many are thinking "this is silly: just join an alliance, it is way better." And yes, finding a suitable alliance is in general way better. So why bother with this crazy exercise? Well, I often read forum posts that talk about what the game "forces" players to do. It forces players to spend cash, it forces players to play in a certain way. I wanted to see what was possible if you defy a fundamental convention of the game: you have to join an alliance to get alliance rewards.
This only considers glory, and what glory can buy. It does not address map crystals as a primary source of catalysts. It isn't a complete picture. It is just one small part of the resource system addressed in a possibly absurd, but doable way without being forced to do it in the conventionally obvious way.
I remember when: I remember I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
And when you're out there, without care, yeah I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough, I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
57
Comments
This is awesome
You know what I haven't tried yet? I haven't tried starting Map 7 with a single prestige 2200 account. I'll probably just get vaporized on the first fight, but then again who knows? I wonder how much points a single fight would earn at that prestige with the Map 7 multiplier, and I wonder how the fight scales or doesn't scale. I mean: who'd be crazy enough to even try? No alliance would do this just for giggles, unless everyone in the alliance was equally crazy and was willing to give up an AQ day just to see what happened.
Or, the alliance happened to have only one vote.
I forgot to mention it, but this is something applicable to all alliances not just these strange ones. Never run the easy mods; always run at least the middle ones because ironically (at least in my opinion) the middle ones are easier, while adding almost no difficulty; at least most of them.
Optimist and Pessimist theoretically add difficulty, but only if you get hit a lot. Soft block is not a big deal when dealing with maps well within your ability to complete. And role reversal in some sense adds no difficulty at all - it just reverses class relationships. The only middle modifier that has any real difficulty attached in my opinion is Feats. Of course if you can run the hard ones, better yet.
Have you tried to run Map 3? It seems harder, but not overwhelmingly harder, but I haven't actually reached the Nameless at the end yet. Is there a specific sticking point that makes Map 3 not worth it for you?
However since Kabam has recently hinted that they will totally do away with the daily rewards format gradually n introduce objectives only format, then only creating such multiple accounts n going solo might not be such a bad idea.
72 hour events will be pretty impossible to get rank rewards, but you could very well score the first 1/3 of the milestones with strategic play. Over 1/2 of them if you really targeted them.
He always came with something new. Nice analysis pal . Keep it up
To be frank, I would literally rather play solo than do that. I'm literally incapable of doing that to other people. As long as they are there, I'm going to be thinking about them. I'm going to be compelled to open communications with them. I'm going to have to figure out what the others want to do.
There are people who probably could do that. I'm not one of them. As I said, people play in different ways because of their own personal reasons. I'm in an alliance. It is a chill alliance, and one in which I'm in contact with the other players and try to generate consensus about what to do. I try to look out for them. I don't know any other way to play except solo. Fortunately, I don't have to be solo. But if I couldn't find an alliance of people like the people I'm playing with now, I probably would be solo. I couldn't be in an alliance of random strangers doing random uncoordinated things. I need to play with more purpose than that, even if it is alone.
I'm not saying your idea is bad. But it is bad for me, irrespective of rewards, and I'm sure it would be to some fraction of the players. But if someone wants to run that experiment and report on what happens - the random alliance - honestly I'd be curious about what happened.
I have 5 in my alliance, 2 of us are fairly active, 2 accounts log in daily but not active in any real way, one hasnt logged in for weeks.
Gotta give this a go, probably map 2 because Glory is handy as heck to have, even if its not much its still more than nothing.
Very interesting post
Not that bad...