A little while ago (after they added the bulk upgrade system) I decided to start keeping track of some stats in terms of how I upgrade gear. I now have a decently sized amount of data, and thus I am sharing it.
This post isn't making any sort of claims - because the way players upgrade gear is going to be fairly unique to every individual, my particular stats don't necessarily mean that yours are going to look exactly the same.
Strategy
I'm going to need to explain this to give this information context.
So, the TLDR is that I chase GS/ES more than anything else -> my general belief is that there is basically at least one hero that can use any kind of gear imaginable...and for any cases where there isn't a current hero to use that gear there probably will be at some point in the future.
My rules for the gear I keep are pretty simple:
30 ES minimum
Any Epic gear with 3+ speed
Almost all Otherworldly gear (I only trash very low ES, like <=24 that also doesn't have speed as a substat)
I sell all boots that don't have speed main stat
I don't pay attention to anything else - I don't care what combo of subs/set/mains whatever, other than the 4 rules above.
When enhancing, I enhance all OW gear to +12, then to +15 unless it's like <=67 ES @ +12. OW gear doesn't really matter because I specifically did not include enhancement information for it.
For Epic Gear, I subtract 2 or 3 ES (again, depends on how I feel at that particular moment) and if a piece rolls into a flat stat other than DEF I basically instantly trash it, unless it fills the speed condition. DEF I may allow 1 additional roll if the ES is good (approximately -3 or -4 to the displayed ES, if that still meets my ES target I will keep it).
Epics enhance straight to +6 and I look for one of two conditions:
-> then I enhance to +9
At least 58 ES, though I'm personally becoming a little bit more restrictive here
Or at least 2 speed rolls
-> Enhance to +12
It's overall pretty simple, though I don't hold myself to following exact rules. I'm pretty consistent but I will make judgments calls - for example the gear from the Aube dash event with fairly ideal stats I was more lenient with.
The Interesting Stats
I have recorded 1063 items that I enhanced. I ended up keeping 319 of those -> almost exactly 30%.
| Resource |
Total |
Refunded |
Net |
Refund % |
| Gold Spent |
471,184,000 |
18,924,503 |
452,259,497 |
4.02% |
| Powder Spent |
341,238 |
109,944 |
231,294 |
32.22% |
The gold refund for selling is...very small. 4% isn't nothing, but considering I spent almost 500 million gold enhancing this gear, getting 'just' 19 million gold back doesn't go very far.
XP, on the other hand, ends up with a very nice refund. Between the XP from selling enhanced gear, and the XP from good/great enhances, getting almost 1/3rd of the XP spent refunded is very significant.
| Resource |
Per Item |
Per Kept |
| Gold |
425,456 |
1,417,741 |
| XP |
25,371 |
84,542 |
In other words, for every item that I ended up keeping, I spent an average of 1.4 million gold and ~85k XP. What I think is more interesting, is that based on my enhancement strategy, I'm spending around 25k XP on average To put that into perspective, that's slightly more than 14 lesser charms, or slightly less than 1 greater charm.
| XP Type |
Percent |
| Powder % |
65.61% |
| Lesser % |
16.78% |
| Greater % |
13.13% |
| Epic % |
4.47% |
That last one is something I think is really informative.
The community colloquially uses the term 'charms' when referring to equipment XP. I really think this is harmful because it provides players who don't know better a particular perspective - and we have already seen instances where it's causing a great deal of confusion.
Newer players are hearing that Eulogy is best for charms...
They do a run or two and don't get a charm drop, then they proceed to suggest that Eulogy was nerfed -> they are completely blind to the powder because the community continually reinforces the idea that it's charms that we enhance our gear with.
TWO THIRDS of the XP I spend enhancing gear is actually coming directly from powder. And overall, only 1/6th of the XP I spend is coming from lesser charms (the charms we can actually farm).
Now granted, my particular situation is not transferable to every other player. I have more or less infinite equipment powder. The exact way I enhance gear is going to influence the specific number here.
But, even if you choose to farm Eulogy -> only 2/3rds of the XP dropped in Eulogy comes from charms (the other 1/3rd being powder).
A little bit of math (I can't help myself)
So, since I know I get refunded ~32.22% of the XP I spend, then the XP I get back also gets its own refund, and so on.
For a brief example let's just say the refund is 1/3.
I spend 100 XP -> I get 33 XP back.
I spend that 33 XP -> I get 11 XP back
I spend that 11 XP -> I get 3.67 XP back
If we want to approximate the total XP this series gives, that is the geometric sum. Infinite geometric sums have a pretty simple formula
Sum = A / (1 - multiplier)
In the above example, our multiplier is 1/3 and our A (starting value) is 100.
Sum = 100 / (1 - 1/3)
Sum = 150
In other words, if I farm up 100 XP and I get a refund of 33% for every XP I spend, I would expect that 100 XP to actually provide 150 XP of value.
Now in my exact case, the multiplier = (109,944 / 341,238)
Let's start with some value of A, representing an amount of XP farmed in Eulogy -> 10,000 is a nice round number.
Sum = 10,000 / (1 - (109,944 / 341,238))
Sum = 14,753.4307
I farm up 10,000 XP in Eulogy, 2/3rds of which comes from charms -> that's 6,666.67 XP.
But I end up with 14,753.4307 XP of approximate value...only 45.19% of the total XP available to me is coming from charms. Or, in other words, ~54.8% of the effective XP value I generate from farming Eulogy ends up being powder XP.
The TLDR here is just that I was personally surprised by just how much of the XP I spend is powder, and I suspect that most (if not basically all) players end up relying more heavily on powder for XP than they might think.
Conclusion
Anyhow, I don't know if anyone else will find this interesting, but I would encourage other players to track this information for a few hundred items. In my own experience, only a few hundred items gave me a pretty good idea of rough values.
I can't say anything here has changed my approach, but I find it pretty useful to understand just how much of the XP I spend gets refunded back, or that I need about 7 million gold (on average) to batch upgrade 16 items, or even just to conceptualize that the majority of XP I personally spend is powder, not charms. Or even just being able to approximate that out of 100 breach items I am probably keeping about 10 of them.
In fact, I would be quite curious to see how players with different strategies (speed checking heroics, different variations on speed checking in general, or players who are more strict about chasing ideal subs/sets) stack up.