New E7 Players Tips - Farming Gold

I want to do a series of posts with some tips about things that newer players, or even some veterans, might not know or realize, that may make their E7 experience a little easier. First up is gold farming.

Gold is one of the most important parts of this game, but not as all-consuming as it can be in other games. Virtually everything in this game requires gold; leveling up with fodder, limit breaking your heroes, awakenings, and most importantly, gear leveling and crafting.

Every PvE battle you engage in will give you gold of some amount. Generally, the best return on energy investment is one of the Hunts; Wyvern, Golem, Banshee, or Azimanak. As a general rule, there is no reason to do a Hunt of a lower level than you are capable, so if you can do Wyvern 7 you shouldn't have any reason to do Wyvern 6, if you can do Azimanak 11 there's little reason to do Azimanak 10. The only exception is the instance of farming while dog-walking, but that is something I'll get into in another post.

The point here is, the higher level hunt you do, the more gold you get. Simple enough.

Things get a little trickier when you get outside of hunts or runes. When you start trying to farm gold in adventure or side story missions, your results are not quite so predictable. 

The video below is from a couple of runs (auto-battle, no auto-repeat, highest difficulty) I did on the last stage of the Halloween side-story event this year. As you can see at the top of the rewards screen, the EXP bonus (not relevant to this discussion) is 50%, and the gold bonus is 45%.

As you'll see in the video around the 3:04 mark, in that first run I get a little over 33K gold. The rewards screen shows this as one of 4 "Acquired Items" with the others being one 2* fodder, one piece of fodder gear, and 97 units of the event currency. On the award screen after the second battle (around the 6:38 mark) that took place right after the first, the gold haul is all the way down to 18K. Here, there are 7 drops, including an additional piece of fodder gear, 3 Skystones, and a lesser weapon charm. 

That is a 13K difference; a whopping 40% drop in gold income from one mission to the next. So, what was the cause? Why does it matter?

The why it matters part is easy; each of those runs was 30 energy. The first run yielded 1100 gold per unit of energy used up, while the second gave just 600. As limited a resource as energy is, the whole point of this discussion is how to make the best use of it. Knowing that your activities could yield a 40% difference in the outcome is important, especially for F2P (free-to-play) players. 

That leaves the critical question of why this happens. The reason is simple, if not particularly desirable. 

The Basics of Gold Awards

In every battle (that provides gold) there are three means of gathering gold. The first is by simply clearing the mission. There is a default base amount of gold that is available for every battle you finish. The second is defeating enemies. When you defeat a group of enemies in Adventure or the Side Stories, there is a chance of them either dropping gold, a piece of fodder gear, a fodder unit, homemade snacks, or a catalyst. The rarity of the other stuff all but guarantees that you will always get some gold. 

The third is through chests. Chests, similar to defeating enemies, has the chance to drop gold, equipment fodder, homemade snacks, and catalysts, Skystones replacing the 2* fodder. 

Because of this, the drops you get from the battle has a direct impact on the gold you get. Chances are that if you get no fodder, no catalysts, or anything else like that, you will have the maximum gold for that mission. Each drop that you get decreases the amount of gold you get. And because the chance of drops is random, you have no means of knowing for certain from one mission to the next how much gold you might get. Some runs you will get a lot of gold, some you'll get hardly any - it's all random at that point. 

The hunts are different because of the fact that drops are static. Every hunt you will get four things; gold, the relevant crafting material, stigma, and what I'll call "other". The "other" comprises energy, Skystones, gear, mystic medals, and bookmarks.

Pros and Cons

So, does that mean you should never farm gold anywhere other than a hunt? Not necessarily. The question of how to go about this is a little more complex.

Because our question is all about how to best get gold while not wasting energy, the answer is mostly dependent on how capable you are at doing multiple things. There is usually a pretty good chance that if you are running an adventure or side story mission, you can sneak a fodder unit or a dog into the formation. Doing that will allow you to train up that fodder for eventual use in leveling up some other hero you're working on - and there's almost always another hero you're working on getting up to max level. 

Also, as mentioned before, there's catalysts, and in the case of side stories, event currency, that you can get form those battles. Additionally, there's the potential for burst income as chests have the potential to give you up to 25k gold. Add in any bonuses and you're going to pull far more gold in that battle than you would from any other on those runs where RNG gets you one of the larger gold chests.

The whole debate boils down to this; hunts give you a high and stable amount of gold if you can do the more difficult hunts, but you're likely only going to be able to farm whatever the hunt drops. Farm adventure or side story and you are more reliant on luck to get you as much gold as if you were doing hunts, and lose out on gear, skystones, and mystic medals, but you can train your fodder up a little easier and get catalysts needed for awakenings or skill enhancements. 

In the end, here's my best advice - don't worry too much about it. The fact is, you will always need gold. How you get it is more dependent on what else you need to do. If you have a set of gear but your character isn't leveled up, and you don't have the catalysts to get them advanced, you'll have to get farming for catalysts or farming up fodder anyway. And if you have your hero max level and all their abilities maxed (or at least where you want them) you'll have to get to gear farming regardless. 

Pets

Do pets effect the equation? The answer depends. There are several pets whose passive effect gives you a chance to get extra stuff - extra gear drops in hunts, extra runes from the spirit altar, extra chance on catalysts. How this effects your gold depends on which pet bonus we're talking about. Generally speaking, if the effect is to give you an extra or bonus of the item, that drop is counted separate from all others. For example, a run on Wyvern 11 with no gold bonuses gives you 29.6k gold. I have an S rank pet that gives a 7.5% chance at getting an additional piece of gear per run. When this chance triggers, for that run I will get 5 drops instead of 4; the usual stigma, gold, and crafting material, as well as 2 gear drops. With that extra gear drop, my gold income remains at 29.6K. That is because the gear drop is an "extra" meaning it wasn't actually dropped by any enemies. 

If this were instead adventure and the effect of the pet was something like having an extra chance for a catalyst, that is actually manipulating the drop rate of the catalysts available in that battle. In this case, you run the chance of an enemy dropping a catalyst when they otherwise would not have. In this case, your gold haul would be impacted because whereas you might not have received a catalyst, and therefore received more gold, you now did receive a catalyst and therefore got less gold. 

There is also a pet that applies a chance for a bonus percentage to the gold you get after a battle. This would work just like the bonus in my video above - it would tack on to whatever total of gold from drops or chests you received in that battle. So, assuming it was a chance for 10% more gold, instead of receiving 45%, when the pet's ability triggered, for that one battle, I would have received 55% gold. 

Conclusion

In absolute terms, your better off farming hunts. It takes a lot to get good gear, so you'll need to keep at it a long time. The chance to get mystic medals in particular is extremely important, as there are few other ways to get them without spending real money. Any unwanted gear you get can be used to enhance other gear, used weekly in the Alchemist Steeple to make charms, or just sold for more gold. Furthermore, a stable and predictable rate of return from farming is better than the unpredictability of adventure where one or two really good runs can be offset easily by several poor ones. 

However, you will always need more gold. Everything you need gold to do has a form of battle that also lets you farm gold. And everything that you get from those battles is something you need to improve your heroes. Your best option most times is going to be to figure out what you need other than gold and focus on farming that. You'll see your gold supplies increase naturally that way. But, if you're looking for how to get a lot in as short amount of time as possible, hunts are usually your best bet.