Sure, people complain mindlessly. I'm not defending assholes who come here asking for everything on a silver platter. But I also think that the advice being thrown around is often only part of the story, thrown at those noobs as if it was "the" correct answer.

"Use heal reduction champs" ... well, do you mean actually build them? Like, take a shit-tier champ like rocktooth and put actual resources into them? that's a terrible idea! At most, you'd want to take him to level 40, throw as much speed and accuracy onto him, and hope to place the debuff before he gets killed. But that part of the advice gets left out. Or the fact that a 4* chicken is extremely valuable until you have at least 3-4 rank 6 champs.

"Just use a destroy set" ... again, same thing. How much stats is it worth giving up for wearing that destroy set? does this mean the champ in question is 100% dedicated to arena? Where do you get the millions of silver needed to make that build, and could that silver be spent elsewhere? Nope, none of that discussion.

About what you say in point 3. I actually agree! Arena is not content meant for month 1 players! But people suggest to throw more and more attention into arena. And the terrible design of the daily rewards makes this worse. From day 2 onwards, plarium is telling you to play arena every day. The climb is fast enough that people inevitably hit defenses they can't beat. Most people aren't interested in arena, but you don't get that energy refill (or eventually that sacred shard) if you don't do it EVERY DAY. And when it takes multiple refreshes to get those 5 one-man defenses, or even worse, conceding 5 battles on purpose, the huge, pointless time waste of it becomes apparent.

I know I'm going against the grain of the forum here, but asking people to "show their arena team" really isn't a productive direction. "Don't worry about arena, just cheese it until you organically end up building at least 75% of a team" is the advice I'd give.

The whole thing infuriates me because you're telling those players to waste a bunch of resources in non-essential areas, when PvE progress is way more important in that crucial early stage of the game. As I've said before: even small mistakes in resource allocation get punished severely by this game. Do you disagree?

Brutal 12.3 

Brutal 12.3 

Anyway, on to the substance:

I obviously disagree that investing early in arena is a good idea. The accounts I'm talking about are easily hanging out in silver II - IV. That's how far you get with zero investment, and I just don't think it's worth thinking about arena builds to get maybe 2-3 tiers out of it, at a point when your account still has huge holes like champs not even wearing +16 gear. Each tier of arena is +6% of base stats, about equivalent to a single substat on a single piece of gear for each champion. It's way, way easier to get that amount of improvement from gear than from arena, specially while you're in the early game with only 4-5 built champs.

Great hall progress is irrelevant in the short term for the same reasons. It only starts mattering when you hit the limits of where gear can take you, like the extremely high acc/res requirements of DT hard, hydra, twins. For those of us who consider arena a chore, spending time there just isn't worth it unless you get 4 gold medals out of it. At lower tiers (even gold I), you reap half that benefit.

And it's f... forking ridiculous that the progress quests force you into upgrading 3 bonuses to level 10 so soon (my current account has been sitting there for a month), when spreading around the medals would be a much better investment. Great hall is the kind of "content" that pushes me towards quitting the game. There's nothing fun about it, and I think a sober look at the benefit shows that you're essentially grinding now to get the benefit a year down the line. That's long even by raid standards.

Anyway, on to the substance:

I obviously disagree that investing early in arena is a good idea. The accounts I'm talking about are easily hanging out in silver II - IV. That's how far you get with zero investment, and I just don't think it's worth thinking about arena builds to get maybe 2-3 tiers out of it, at a point when your account still has huge holes like champs not even wearing +16 gear. Each tier of arena is +6% of base stats, about equivalent to a single substat on a single piece of gear for each champion. It's way, way easier to get that amount of improvement from gear than from arena, specially while you're in the early game with only 4-5 built champs.

Great hall progress is irrelevant in the short term for the same reasons. It only starts mattering when you hit the limits of where gear can take you, like the extremely high acc/res requirements of DT hard, hydra, twins. For those of us who consider arena a chore, spending time there just isn't worth it unless you get 4 gold medals out of it. At lower tiers (even gold I), you reap half that benefit.

And it's f... forking ridiculous that the progress quests force you into upgrading 3 bonuses to level 10 so soon (my current account has been sitting there for a month), when spreading around the medals would be a much better investment. Great hall is the kind of "content" that pushes me towards quitting the game. There's nothing fun about it, and I think a sober look at the benefit shows that you're essentially grinding now to get the benefit a year down the line. That's long even by raid standards.

  This started off short but turned into a long post.... sorry. 😁 

Urlibu, 

First of all I'm a "Noob" myself. As of right now I have exactly 68 days experience in Raid. I feel that this gives me a really good view on what the "New Player" Experience is.

Please don't assume that because I'm new to Raid that I am also ignorant when discussing games, game mechanics, game design ect. I was playing RPGs when they were text based. I have a good understanding of game mechanics, gearing, etc. as in those 68 days I've been able to accomplish the following: 

• Clear through 12-5 Nightmare Campaign (That last boss is a pain in the...) 
• 2 key Nightmare CB daily and looking to push into Ultra-Nightmare soon. 
• Hit Platinum Arena (my stay was short but long enough to get a screenshot 😁).  
• All the lvl 20 potion keeps on auto farm. 
• Dragon 25 on auto (although very slow). 
• Clear Spider, Ice Golem, & Fire Knight lvl 20s on auto. 
• 3 key the lowest Normal Hydra Chest. 
• Clear Normal Doom Tower. 

All of this was due to finding a supportive clan, TAKING ADVISE from veterans such as dthorne04, harleQuinn and others here on the forums (no one seems to want to do this anymore) and watching YouTubers such as Hellhades, Deadwoodjedi etc.  

So here we go:

I think giving new players OP Champions / Gear / Resources ect. hurts any game in the long run. Although it will draw in new players, the long-term consequences actually hurts player retention and sets these new players up for frustration and failure in the near future.  

*Disclaimer: I'm going to use UDK as an example since being relatively new to the Raid community this is the "free" legendary I have the most experience with and am most familiar with the issues involving him. 

100%... a Legendary given to new players does give them the ability to blast through content and makes the lower-level content much easier, in fact, it makes it trivial. The issue is...  that lower-level content was designed and tuned in a way that was supposed to assist players with progressing in not only Player Power but Player Skill and UNDERSTANDING of the Game and its mechanics.  

When new players get a Lego, such as UDK, who can solo steam roll through most, if not all, of that lower-level content (the content that was designed to teach them about things such as team composition, gearing, synergy, etc.) then those players don't gain the knowledge and experience needed to progress later in the game. 

It disrupts the way the game was designed in regards to champion gearing and leveling as well. I'm sure (as with most game design) that these levels were built to require a certain level of "team power" to complete and these levels give a set amount of XP and gear needed prepare that team for the next level. RPG games are not designed to run through every level on the first attempt (at least none of the ones I've played have been). You run a level, you die, you go to the previous levels and gain some XP / get better gear, then try the level you failed again. This cycle repeats as you progress and is really the heart of an RPG. It builds and devlops your champions. The thing is when you're playing these levels with the champions and gear the devloper had in mind when they designed the game and you fail a level, normally a few runs of previous levels is all you need to increase your champion's power through XP or gear enough to succeed. 

When a new player receives something OP for the stage of the game they are in and allows them to run through this leveling content in one shot, they don't get the XP and gear needed for the other Champions on their team. Since they ran through the campaign so fast, in order to progress their other champions they are forced to go back and basically "grind" to bring them to a sufficent power / gear level before they can progress. Grinding XP in Raid with a 10 sec campaign farmer on 12-3 brutal is boring enough. Now imagine you're 2 weeks into the game and realize that you need to run Hard campaign levels over and over @ 2 minuites per run before you are able to progress.

When players don't learn and understand the mechanics of the game, they will eventually hit a wall no matter what champions you hand them. If you don't believe that knowledge of game mechanics is greater than the champions you have on an account just go watch one of the 100 Hell Hades "Account Takeover" videos. Watch him take an account that is struggling to clear a lvl 20 Dungeon, tweak it with nothing but the gear and champions that player already had in their inventory, and proceed to put the same Dungeon on auto farm @ level 25. Watch him take an Arena team that is struggling in Gold 2 or 3, regear and SPEED tune it, then proceed to win 10 arena matches in a row. 

Another negative thing a Legendary like UDK does to new players is give them a false sense of their perceived power.  

They can't understand why they were dust rolling everyone through Bronze 4 on auto with their 5* UDK in free Lifesteal Gear and 3 level 30s but now that they've hit Silver 1 and encountered older accounts with actual gear, some semblance of team composition, speed tuning, etc. they can't win a single match. (I will say that Silver Arena is broken... it took me longer to get through Silver 4 than it did to go from Gold 1 to Platinum).  

They can't understand why they blasted through the Normal and Hard Campaigns and cleared through the first 10 Dungeon levels on auto but all the sudden their Lego isn't OP anymore and now they can't progress.  

At this point they either: 

Like the game enough that they go back and work on grinding gear and leveling the Rare / Epic Champions they've neglected up to this point (because they weren’t needed to progress until now). For a lot of new players this makes them feel like they are going backwards, they get bored, and they quit. 

OR  

Since everything so far has been "easy mode" then the reason they've hit this progression wall is because "the game is broken", "the game is designed to be unfair", "the game is designed to be PTW", etc. Since they've never had to do anything up to this point other than press "Start" in order to progress now they don't have a clue how to counter the new intermediate content. They become frustrated and they quit.  

I know everyone won't agree but as a new player to Raid but with a good bit of gaming experience in general this is what I see.   

@Urlibu 

 Can I ask how long you've been playing & your player level? 

I'm trying to understand your mindset. Is it to go through arena and never lose a match? Do you just want to auto battle through arena and win? Is it just that you see Arbiter there behind a long quest chain and feel like getting her should be easier or faster? I'm not being confrontational; I'm just trying to understand your view.   

I think we are coming from different perspectives when talking about arena engagement. I'm in your camp with that regard, but I don't think they're necessarily against it....I think they are simply talking in different time frames. 

To me, personally, Arena is very important to start as soon as you meat several criteria:

TM booster - you will need that champ everywhere in the game. Teaches you the importance of speed.

Debuffer - Decrease Defense, specifically. Again, you will use that champ everywhere else, and you will learn the importance of accuracy.

Nuker - properly built damage dealer, even if it's just your farmer, is crucial in this game, and it is where most mistakes are made. 

As soon as they have a handle on those 3 builds, they can begin dipping their toes in the arena....that's my personal opinion. 

Day 275, level 77. Low gold V with a non-specialized go 2nd team that can beat around 3 teams per page (in addition to one-man defenses obv).

I mostly just want to get arena out of the way. It's not the content I play the game for. And therefore, the all-or-nothing nature of daily quests annoys me. Even if you do all other quests, not doing arena would make you miss out on about 95% of the rewards. So I have to fight every day, even though I'm just treading in place without any interest (currently) in developing specialized arena teams.

Regarding progress missions, it bothers me that I was blasting through them at a good pace, mostly doing meaningful things like building dungeon 25 teams, then suddenly hit a wall of time-gated stuff. Getting a single great hall stat to level 10 is 4275 gold medals, which is over 200 days of doing the minimum required arena fights In gold IV / V. Mission 5.26 (where I'm at) requires you to do this 3 times, so we're talking about 600 days! Even if I go to the limit (39 fights per day without using gems), that's still 76 days. Those numbers are insane! Let them sink in. I will probably quit raid before I get past this mission. In fact, just the act of doing these calculations and seeing the numbers that come out makes me want to quit on the spot.

And the entire great hall is 8x that, so people who complete it have spent 615 days going balls to the walls arena, or spent a sh... truckload of gems to compress that effort into fewer days.

I can't relate because I love Arena, but I understand the struggle if it's something you hate doing. I use up all my arena tokens every chance I get simply because of GH bonuses. 

I think of it like this: I've been grinding dungeons for months to get decent gear for my champions. I think about how hard it is to find the right stats, substats, rolls etc. It's a pain to get all that for one champ, it's a nightmare to get a team properly outfitted for endgame. My Candraphon and Kymar are sitting partially dressed. 

Now think of GH as a piece of gear:

- All f2p

- upgrades costs no silver

- you dictate what rolls you want to improve

- covers every substat except c.rate and speed

- works for every champ in the game

If I told you there is a piece of gear with all those properties, and all it costs you is grinding Arena, and you can keep improving it gradually as you go (so it's not like you only get it in the end), wouldn't that be nuts? I think Great Hall is the single most valuable source of stats in the game. 

Regarding progress missions, it bothers me that I was blasting through
them at a good pace, mostly doing meaningful things like building
dungeon 25 teams, then suddenly hit a wall of time-gated stuff. Getting a
single great hall stat to level 10 is 4275 gold medals, which is over 200 days
of doing the minimum required arena fights In gold IV / V. Mission 5.26
(where I'm at) requires you to do this 3 times, so we're talking about 600 days! Even if I go to the limit (39 fights per day without using gems), that's still 76 days.
Those numbers are insane! Let them sink in. I will probably quit raid
before I get past this mission. In fact, just the act of doing these
calculations and seeing the numbers that come out makes me want to quit
on the spot.

Well, I stuck it out (still playing raid after all). This thread is now a bit more than 2 months old, and I finally got past mission 5.26. I had to pick up the pace quite a bit, doing about 15 arena fights per day average. It was boring. I'm mostly chilling in low gold V.

What's most galling about this is that it's so inefficient. upgrading 3 things to level 10 when the rest of great hall is stuck at level 3 or lower. One more instance of progress quests leading you astray rather than helping you along. Now I actually get to build great hall bonuses for real, i.e., taking up acc, res and cdmg to level 6 for all affinities.

The inefficiency of your GH progress has more to do with avoiding classic arena. I understand that it is utterly boring, but you can do 39 per day minimum for free. And in G5 that can be done fairly easily with all the solos/easy defenses. 

Note, the ramantu missions require further GH progress...