Currently it's 290,000 to get level 25 in Dungeons. It's possible if you do all 15 every week at around area 7900. Buy a few extra runs and you don't need to go that deep on average.

The FAQ states that this is late game content. So you need to go deep to get better rewards when it comes to Points and Coins. Same with the Idol Bonus.

They are looking into making the idol buffs work on the dungeons. But needs to be balanced. They might look at it this week. Was talked about in the stream on Thursday.

AFAICT, the Dungeon is meant to replace Free Plays, at least for "end game" Idol acquisition. As I calculate it, a max area run on a Free Play with max Boss Idol bonus, the most idols you'd get is:

9.9 T

Whereas a run to Area 6,000 on a Dungeon formation with the Idol bonus would give you that much if you have at least:

552 T idols banked

I disregard Idol boost effects like Challenger's Glory since I expect that they apply to both.

So the only reason to possibly go back to Free Play is for either chest runs or because you finished with the 15 Dungeon runs for the week and don't want to pay Coins for extra runs.

My concern is for the players who get to the point of playing the Dungeons but only reset once or twice per day. I would be inclined to have the bonuses increased for the first 3 to 5 Dungeon runs in a week and then they taper down as the player gets to a 15th (or more) run in a week.

I would also like to see an Idol rate of 0.05% per 500 Areas with a cap of 1% for all Dungeon runs that don't have the Idol bonus effect. Dungeon runs would be better than Free Play at ~1.5 Q idols and if run to at least Area 6,000, but still direct real Idol farmers to the randomly selected formation.

I also ask/wonder: when would you pick the +10% coin bonus? Even a player that gets to Area 10,500, they only get 55 coins and the +10% gets them 5 more? Really, this is Integer Math at its worst.

tl93

Having done an idol-bonus dungeon with idol buffs active, I can tell you that the idol rewards from dungeons are NOT affected by idol buffs. The way it works is it just takes whatever you'd get from levels, talents, etc, applies the idol buffs, then adds the dungeon reward last. I made less than triple my current idols with a 1.95% reward, and that's on the BEST formation. If I were to try to farm idols using dungeons, I'd have to hope for the idol reward to be on the right formation EVERY time. On less useful formations, I'd be lucky to hit 1.35% and get BARELY double what I get on free plays, optimistically, and with far more confusion involved.

If idol buffs affected the idol rewards, THEN I'd agree that MAYBE it would be worth it. Maybe. But the lack of consistency is awful. The fact that it's totally random which formation gets the idol reward means that it's entirely likely that the reward will keep being set on a terrible, terrible formation. There's only, maybe, 3 formations where I could make more idols per run than on a free play. If the buff lands anywhere else, I'm making less. The consistency of free plays was a comfort, but the way dungeons are now is just stressful due to their unreliability.

For your question: I largely haven't really cared where the rewards are in dungeons because I always do "Jungle Journey". I make more coins and exp in an un-buffed JJ run than in any other buffed run. There's no point in doing other formations because this one ALWAYS gives significantly more. The only reason I would do another formation would be for idols, maybe, but then I'm sacrificing a ton of exp. And as I mentioned before, as is the entire purpose of this thread, that's a big deal.

I like the JJ formation, but I do NOT like how dungeons operate right now. This is a new mechanic, I expected it to have some setbacks. Community feedback is to correct those flaws. The massive time-sink aspect and the utter randomness aspect are the two biggest flaws.

I've been consistently playing for over 1600 days and have 4-quadrillion idols. How much "stronger" does someone have to be for these flaws to not be as big of a deal? It seems to ask WAY too much of players, unless I'm not understanding that there's an entire class of upper-tier players resting comfortably in the multi-septillions.

My average free play payout was about 15t, and I also don't manage to get as far as you in JJ. What formation do you use?

My original post already agrees with your 162.5k exp. Not sure where anyone pulled "290k" from. I'm curious what math Vin used to find that.

I'll try to prioritize the idol reward runs. I just HATE the randomness of it all. What endeared me to the game originally was it's consistency. I liked being able to do the same thing and get the same results.

The purchasable 50% buff and the challenge 25% buff, typically.

And that's an...interesting formation. The randomness of Jiao, Mindy mimicking THREE crusaders, none of which are Twins or Milgrid, Drosen instead of Wrena, Rabbit instead of Slis, and Mycall isn't even in the formation at all. And no Jorgnak or Xyg? That is a WACKY formation.

Yes, an average of 903 points per run is my goal.

I find it odd that you wouldn't be able to hit area 6 K on most formations. I hope you have all max-able Talents maximized, I still have 2 more Talents to max. Also, you have all legendaries and enough crafting materials to have your legendaries at least to L8 and L10 in several, none of my legendaries are above L10.

My most recent Playing it Old School (#15 of week 1), I was able to get to Area 6,268 and got 825 points.

As I said, in Week #2, I got 14,813 points which averages to 988. Even in Week #1, without the communities formations, but with picking some +10% point bonus runs, I got 12,662 (average 844). Combined I'm solidly above the 903 rate and at 916 per run. Perhaps I was lucky this past week, but I'm not worrying yet. The only thing I worry about is not getting too many Free for All runs. If I get those, then I may run Jungle instead. If you are more worried, then run Jungle anytime that the +10% points falls on Jungle.

As for the Jungle formation, yes it is quite variable, but RoboRabbit's capacitor gets filled up and can sustain the damage dealt to monsters. Jungle is my favorite since it is the one that I get the highest DPS and Area beaten, but this formation is not pretty to watch. I just can't argue with the result.

I don't love randomness, but even the Jungle formation is consistent enough for me to get 7,333; 7,363; 7,303; 7,372 in the 4 times that I've run Jungle since using the formation. These runs yielded points of: 1,331; 1,345; 1,316; 1,350. That's 5,342 points in 4 runs.

In the end, I wonder why 4 Q idols is not able to get you to Area 6 K on most Dungeon runs. While I am inclined to think that I am at the "low end" of endgame, I am confident that if I can do 10 weeks more as I have for the first 2, then I will do well in the Dungeon have 2 or 3 Q more idols at the end.

My checklist for players who are wondering if they should (seriously) play the Dungeon would be:

1) 500 T idols banked
2) Legendaries in 80% of the slots of the best crusaders (>95% should be feasible)
3) Crafting material to get most of those legendaries to L8 and all the rest to L5

I'm not going to say that meeting this list will let you unlock the Taskmaster with points, but short of having those idol buffs running, you would get idols at least as fast and shortly faster. If it is enough to unlock the Taskmaster, then I doubt that it will seem likely in the first month of the Dungeon.

As I asked in the announcement thread, I wonder how many points the Taskmaster will cost in the shop, since 903 points is per run is required to unlock it that way and 21 coins is how many a player gets if they get 905 points, so that would be 3,805 coins (after adding the 25 from L9 reward). Hopefully the cost will less, but how much less?

> 2,500? Seems high compared with other items.
> 1,000? Seems low compared with how many coins it is possible to get, but still high compared with other items.
> Lower? That would mean almost everyone would get it.

tl93

Good to hear about talents and legendaries, but I've not seen Wrena in any formation and neither Jorgnak, though the latter may be too recent to hit the places I check. Still, if you have 10 in all other legendaries, or at least the ones in the formation, then you should be able to get my results or better.

As for the points, it is a progression. There is an ramp at 3,500 and another at 5,900. Within each region appears to be constant:

1,500 - 1,900: 1 point per 91.45 areas, R-squared 0.9844899, poor due to how few data points I collected
1,900 - 3,500: 1 point per 3.81 areas, R-squared 0.9999971, much better
3,500 - 5,900: 1 point per 2.10 areas, R-squared 0.9999930, almost as good

The coins also ramp, though not as large a ramp, FWIW.

In Week 3 news, I got Dungeon Crawl as my first crypt formation and at one point tried Xyg instead of Alacrity in my previously used formation and I got beyond area 7,097! Not as far as Jungle, but 2.1% idols and 1,219 points. Currently I've got Under Fire going and I think I have a better formation than I was using the last time I ran it: in Week 1.

tl93

You haven't seen WRENA in ANY formations? Where are you looking? It's well-known that she's the best DPSer by far. Hence why I was so shocked by you using Drosen. Her amulet, by itself, puts her LEAGUES above every other crusader. Mine is level 15, which gives roughly e12 just going from 14 to 15 alone, last I remember. Current buff overall is about e88 from just the one skill.

Not saying my formation is better, but I am legitimately curious how it compares to your Drosen formation. https://imgur.com/a/WTl4Aoi I'm mid-run as I took this, so the numbers won't be end-of-run exactly.

Wrena has been beaten since Jiao came out.
Have a look at Jungle Journey comparisons here: https://imgur.com/a/Wd3Y0HO