Topic

Spending tokens for speed

Now that my 9 day marathon of unable-to-be-sped-up BL5 is done, I have, for the first time, tons of emblems to go along with my donations. But...no clue how to use them.

If I want to speed up learning, how do I do it? Donate to main giant until capped, donate secondary giants until they cap as well, then click all the tokens I have in my inventory?

Thanks in advance...totally lost, but glad to be done with that bugged one.

Posted 14 months ago by Evadrepus Terramere Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Donating is different from "spending".  Once you "spend" an emblem, it is gone from your inventory. 

    Personally, I keep one emblem of each giant in inventory so I have a way to get xp every day.  The excess ones I'm holding on to for trades when I'm ready to go for an icon. 
    Posted 14 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • When spending emblems, it will only count as 1000 favour. If you can manage to get your favour for a giant just under the cap limit, and then spend that favour, the learning speed that is reduced is much, much more.
    Posted 14 months ago by Myuki Subscriber! | Permalink
  • When you spend an emblem (*) it goes straight to knocking time off your learning (2hr46min for the primary giant). All emblem spending counts towards your current skill - so don't go spending emblems of unaffiliated giants unless you're desperate for speed.

    The favour learning is capped, as you know. So you can only earn a certain amount of favour at each giant per day. But you can spend as many emblems as you want - up to the point at which the rest of your outstanding time for the current skill is sped up (ie learning time is reduced by 50%).

    So yep, if you're learning Gardening 5 for example, and you've got 5 emblems of Mab, you can spend them all at once and knock off 13hr50min from the total time at the beginning. Plus go to the shrine every day and earn favour reducing the time still further.

    The decision comes with what you do with that favour each day. You can either earn up to the emblem, take the emblem and spend it (always for 2hr46min at primary giant... the equivalent of 1000 favour points), or you can earn slightly less than the emblem amount and spend that. You'll always get a bigger advantage by spending the favour directly, but by taking the emblem route you increase the favour/emblem limit on that giant by 100 each time... which would allow you to earn more favour the next day. I haven't worked out which is the best route... I personally tend to take the emblems up to about 2000 & then just spend favour.

    And those first emblems are relatively cheap (as the emblem amount increases by 100 with each one) so maybe you want to keep those and think about an icon in the future rather than spending them?

    Decisions, decisions!

    (*) assuming you've already spent a first emblem of that giant - for those giants where the first emblem unlocks an advanced skill.
    Posted 14 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Every giant has a skill that you need to unlock by spending an emblem.
    Posted 14 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the detailed reply, Snazz.

    I'm working on one of my last epic duration skills, mining4, so taking time off at all would be nice (8 days remaining atm).

    Since I'm neither desperate for an icon but as not willing to sacrifice hard earned tokens, I think the best move would be to donate my max daily to each 3 impacted giants daily (these stack, correct?), burn a few available tokens (keeping one for daily CCC), then likely continue farming tokens and growing available piola on other giants.

    Is my logic sound?

    (edit - I've ling ago unlocked all icon capped skills, so that is not a concern.)
    Posted 14 months ago by Evadrepus Terramere Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Every giant has a skill that you need to unlock by spending an emblem.

    I'd always assumed that... for symmetry as much as anything else. But I was looking at my achievements yesterday & only spotted 8 "Spent First Emblem of..." achievements - so I assumed my assumption was wrong :-). Just went back & looked again... you're right... there are 11 of them... it's just the achievement tracker GreaseMonkey script moves 3 of them to somewhere else. Odd.
    Posted 14 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Is my logic sound?

    All makes sense to me at least. You get 10 seconds per point of favour at the primary giant, 7 seconds per point at the secondary giants (and 5 seconds at unaffiliated giants if you really want to go that far).

    You'll hit two limits. The first one is that, as well as the favour donation limit, there's an XP limit... donating to shrines is a good generator of XP, so there's a daily limit on how much of that you can earn... but you don't care... you're not doing it for the XP.

    The second limit is that you can only speed up skill learning by a maximum of 50%. The way I visualize it is that during faster learning, the rock is learning at double speed. When you spend 1000 favour points to reduce the overall skill learning time by 2hr46min, the rock doesn't jump forward by that time - it learns at double speed for that amount of time so that it effectively knocks that much time off the overall total. eg if you're on a previously un-accelerated 5 day skill with 10 hours to go, the maximum you can knock off it is 5 hours. Don't worry... when you try to spend favour points the giants won't let you spend more than you can usefully use.

    If you've got donations to burn, and you know what skill you want to learn next, I'd recommend also donating to the giant associated with that next skill and earn the emblems each day. By the time you come to switch to that skill, you'll have enough emblems to knock a day off up-front and, more importantly I think, you'll have pushed the daily favour donation limit waaay up and be able to take more time off faster.

    In fact you might find yourself in the same position that I was in with Alph... you switch skills and suddenly realize you've got 8 emblems for the new giant... seems a shame to waste them on learning when you've got such a high favour cap there anyway... hold on to them for an icon.
    Posted 14 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Very true....methinks I need to see what my currents caps are. I've done a lot of emblem trading recently, so I have no idea where I stand with each one.
    Posted 14 months ago by Evadrepus Terramere Subscriber! | Permalink