A quick analysis on the cost of geting a new lego to 60
I posted this somewhere else. I will not hide from it:
Plarium is the worst video game company I have ever experienced. The game has some potential as a strategy type game. I mean it's not an rpg at all like they pretend. The real interesting part is trying different masteries, gears, champions, and compositions to get different results. The problem is that every single resource in the game (gems, silver, energy, potions, scrolls, shards, glyphs, books, gear) is monetized and heavily gated.
To give an example, if you got a new champion, a legendary (the best result) you wanted to try out to level and get masteries you need about 7500 energy. This assumes double xp bonus but no other percent increases. You get about 500 free per day. That's 15 days of doing nothing else (which would be very suboptimal) to level this new legendary and get masteries. This doesn't include ascending, gearing, booking them. The ascending him will cost about 4-5000 energy. So you are looking at 25 days for ascending, leveling, and getting scrolls.
However you still haven't booked him. There is no mechanic for that. And you haven't geared him. Books for this champion go for $25, only way to get them is to buy them or hope on non farmable drops like clan boss and weekly arena reward. On average, they take about 11-12 books. Booking is random. So you may not have to get all the books to get the best item. But, thats about $500.
Then there is gearing. If you go to Dragon, there are 9 sets, a chance to get a shard, and if you are not on the hardest stage a chance get a negative value reward (1 brew, brews are basically negative value). The most important piece of gear is speed boots on a speed set. I will ignore the shard/brew chance and say you have 1/9 chance of getting a speed set piece, a 1 in 6 chance of getting a boot, and then you have a 1/7 chance of it being speed. 1 in 378 chances to get a speed set speed boots. But it gets worse. You can still have unusuable other stats, making the boots unusuable, we will ignore this for now. If you do any level below 20 (the hardest level), you are more likely to get a 4* gear (unusuable) than a 6* gear. I will calculate that as being 1/12 for it being speed set, 5* or 6* and not a brew or green/blue shards if you are doing level 19 instead of level 20 dragon. This results in 1 out of 504 attempts.
So the number of runs to have a 50% chance of not getting a speed boot set of speed on:
Level 20: .5 = (1 -1/378)^x --> log(.5) = x * log(1-1/378) --> 261.663 attempts from the 99.735% chance per attempt of not getting speed set speed boots
Level 19: .5 = (1 -1/504)^x --> log(.5) = x * log(1-1/504) --> 349.000 attempts from the 99.802% chance per attempt of not getting speed set speed boots
Each of those attempts cost 16 energy. So if you are doing dragon 20, you are looking at 4176 energy to have a set a rolls where there is only a 50% chance of you not receiving a suitable speed boot (and I am being generous with the definition of suitable). Hopefully from all these dragon runs, you actually got enough gear, but probably not. If you are doing level 19, may god have mercy on your soul.
And even then you still have to do Spider to get accessories.
So ignoring skills (which you can't farm) and ignoring accessories (i don't have good stats for this, but its actually pretty bad odds), if you can farm dragon 20 (most players can't, most end game players can) it costs to level one legendary in energy:
7500 for levels/rank/masteries
4500 for ascending
4176 for basic gear=
16176 energy
Assuming 520 free energy per day that can be spent on this, and that is being generous, that is 31.1 days for an unfinished champion.
But wait, there's more!!!!
Because of how bad the AI is in the game (like longbeard/lanakis charge into a crimson helm block damage on dragon 19 for example) is sooooooo bad, you have no clue if the champion will even work. Or that the composition will work. Or because plarium hides modifiers, numbers, etc, if the gearing you did was right, or if the champion is actually good. You might have just done all this on a champion that actually doesn't add value because of hidden modifier numbers. Reread that.
I ignored how miserable the gearing roll process is. Say you get an epic piece with a good main stat, but only 1 good substat. When you roll this piece, there is a good chance that the bad substats will get rolls. If you roll it to item level 8, 11% chance to get your most desired wish of 2x the good stat, a 44% chance to get only 1 good stat, and a 44% chance to not get any good stats. That means 44% of the time that rare pieces that looks get becomes unusable. You will continue to roll to 12 the piece that only got 1 roll that you liked and have a 67% chance of having another bad result. This means, that most of those epic items aren't very good. This costs tons of silver. Tons!!!!. I ignored this part of the analysis. But again, this is another gate that makes this even worse than the final results indicate.
The answer? Support plarium by spending money?!?!??! Okay.
The top MiniMax deal is $20. It includes 2million silver (we ignored silver for this analysis, so we will ignore it here), double xp bonus (assumed in the analysis, btw, they gate that as 20% of the time, so if you don't buy it, you won't have it all the time), 5x rank 4 chickens (we started with a lego, so no help here, and some other items brews (negative value), shards, clan boss keys, and arena tokens. The only thing that really helps for this analysis, outside of the double xp bonus, is the 10 energy potions.
If you are level 60, thats 130 x 10 = 1300 energy. That takes about 2.5 days off from the 31.1 days. Mind you the shards, silver (minimal), and xp bonus have other value. But really this doesn't help that much. And it is $20. And this is one of the BETTER deals. To put this $20 pack into context, you can go play a game like world of warcraft for $15 per month and there are no other charges to play as much as you want. That game has infinite amount of things you can do with minimal gates, and no purchasing advantages. It is a totally different type of game, but it is just an example of that amount of what you get versus what you get for $20 in Raid. You will burn through the energy of that pack in an hour or maybe 2-3. An hour vs a month.
Other deals you say? At the time of this post, there is a chained offer for $5 for 100 gems, 300k silver, 3 energy potions, and 200 energy. That results into about 5.5 energy potions (100 gems is worth 2.5 energy potions in the store) plus 200 energy, that's 905 energy. So about 1.8 days off. While this pack is better on an energy basis in this example, in terms of overall value it is worse.
The only other real option is to buy gems to use to buy energy. The $ rate for this is much worse than the previous offers.
So in the end, you either have to spend an incredible amount of money to use your new champion (not booked or fully geared) or just wait and wait and wait.
One last thing, if you decide to switch your style of play on your champion from say a speed tuned clan boss comp to a speed run comp, or maybe an unkillable comp, or a new champion comes out you makes you change your arena teams, or you just make a mistake because you misclicked or hidden/unclear game mechanics make a mastery choice poor, you will have to spend 150 gems to fix that champion. Gems are not farmable, there is a constant rate mine (that you buy with gems ironically) that at full power takes 10 days to generate 150 gems. That 150 gems is for 1 mastery reset for 1 champion. I.e. just to try your champions in new places on a regular basis, you have to spend a LOT of money.
All of this is because Plarium is the worst gaming company I have ever experienced.
****This section added and not in original post:
If you really want to fix this, it's not about adding new packs to buy its fixing things like crappy loot tables (remove flat stats from boots/gloves/chest, make shards/brews bonus rolls, etc), minimize some of the grinding (add more scrolls/potions to mino/affinity dungeons), increase gear rolling chances, and give more free/very low cost mastery switch options, lower the absurd cost for champion space increases, 6 million to go from 200 to 210 in the vault? Seriously?You won't do this, but that is because Plarium is the worst gaming company I have experienced.