This post is to detail the grind of E2P players (does not include the atlas elite). This also came out to be longer than expected, I italicized the main point at the end of each category if you don’t feel like reading it all.
When I first started playing this game, usually about an hour of game-play per day allowed me to grow at a steady pace, and to stay competitive, at least E2P “competitive”. Now War Dragons has become an endless grind that literally makes me feel like an hour of game-play per day is simply not enough. PG is changing war dragons from “casual phone game” to a game that requires more dedication
than your actual life.
Lets look at all the daily tasks I would need to do to make steady “progress” these days (also keep in mind even if you actually do this everyday, the progress you make is still slow).
1. Egg tokens: even with the discount changes to plat, saph, garnet and emerald tiers, egg tokens are still a resource that’s hard to come by and you need a ton of it. Doing about 10 egg runs per day will get you maybe 1500 daily tokens give or take, and lets average each run to about 2 minutes. (average runs counts the time in between as well, such as loading time etc…)
A 4 weeks period will yield your 42k Tokens at 11-12 hours total (give or take). Think about how much progress you just got for 12 hours of game-play over a 4 week period… This wont get you half a dragon past sapphire.
2. Gold runs: This depends a lot on your team but, lets use my team for example and lets also ignore taxes. Lets say you are aiming for a minimum of 1600 troop a day, this is actually meh, but it will get you some atlas progress. At 230kg per run, you will need about 8-10 runs per day, it also depends if you need 930k gold for revival or 800k gold for a new bash. Atlas has long bases, some dragons are faster than others but you cant always use them cause you need XP on other drags as well, average run is about 3 minutes.
Lets average it to about 25 minutes per day. 4 weeks time gets you about 45k troops.
3. Quests: The most utterly useless feature to get a slightly higher amount of rewards per event for an unjustified amount of work from each team member. I cant stress enough how dumb this feature is. First of all is more mindless grinding.
Revenge 5 times… just re-attack the same person for no reason with ember over and over again. Fun!.
Super-shots, defense quests => ask in league chat if anyone is bored enough to attack you and swap dragons a few times so you can randomly keep using SS.
Join your teammates 12/9 times using a specific class/type dragon (pray is hunter or fire so you can use ember and don’t have to swap to another red tier dragon) => run Ms.Mersey mindlessly swapping dragons.
Even doing the quests at the fastest mindless rate takes another good 10-20 minutes of my daily game-play.
At least make quests somewhat interesting, not another mindless grind, we dont need more of that in this game…
4. PvP’s: Out of this least, I think Pvp is the one I find the least boring, but i gotta add it cause is still a big time consuming daily grind. During PvP events If you are E2P you gotta use those Packs and Inner’s as efficient as possible. During 24 hour reset pvps I use 30 energy per day and do 10 supers, in addition to that I do maybe another 5 runs of normal attacks with the energy that gets naturally refilled. Since I’m not the highest level it takes me 2/3 dragons to defeat a base, which can take up to 4-5 mins per run but lets just average it to 3 mins per run.
15 daily runs is about 45 mins, I spend 30 energy packs per day and 45 inner’s, and I still wont get the 450 sigil prize.
In pvp like fight pits you’d want to spend 10 energy every 6 hours, that increases the amount of runs to 25+ per day. (this however will get you the 450 sigil prize).
In conclusion, you could spend 2 hours of daily mindless grind per day, and still make shitty progress at the end of the day. Keep in mind this just includes grinding tasks it does not include any time to socialize, glory runs, or any other fun activities the game offers.
Solution 1, make grinding a viable thing to do. If quests require every teammate to dedicate 20-30 mins of their day just for that, why the hell are you not offering bigger rewards for it? An entire team is working together in order to archive something, but we get shit at the end of it. 300 sigils at 16 events per season is less than 5k sigils is not even 17% of a branch. On top of that branches keep getting more and more expensive while overall rewards stay the same.
Solution 2, make it fun to grind, make it a challenge, give me something that I actually need to pay attention to rather than mindlessly doing while watching TV.