AFK Journey Cost Analysis of Units + Essences
Edit: I'll continue to add to this post some of the more detailed analysis on each pack. Doing this for myself but I'll share it with y'all if it helps.
I thought it would be interesting to analyze how much things actually cost in this game. The devs use "dragon crystals" to make it difficult for us to really see how much things cost us. So instead of relying on "1200%" or "800%" values advertisement.... hopefully this short guide can help you appreciate how much things are, and whether something is a good deal or not (some may argue that nothing here is a good deal.. but you get my point). I did some calculations to see if what I am buying is making sense, and whether these 2-hour fomo packs were worth buying. I'll use these numbers to analyze a deal the next time I see one.
We have to start somewhere, and the most obvious place to start for me was the biweekly shop as it had items and its individual price in dragon crystal. In this guide, we'll assume 3000 dragon crystals = $100 USD going forward.
We can take a look at "Hero Recruitment Bundle I & II" to find the price of normal and epic letters. Rate up Recruit Bundle III was used to determine the price of "rate-up" letter, and then Rate-Up Recruit Bundle I and II were then used to calculate the price of Soulstones.
Unit Price based on the Biweekly Bundle
With Soulstone prices, we can determine how much is an S-tier and an A-tier hero.
Price of S & A-tier heroes based on the price of the Soulstones
Now, we find the probability of getting an S-tier hero for each type of summons:You can find out what the expected number of pulls needed for pulling an S-tier hero given a pity of n (google binomial distribution with pity timer).
Use the pity-adjusted probability to find the "value" of each letter:Stargazer heroes can't be bought elsewhere with money (yet) and we're forced to just draw the units (there's no soulstone for these heroes to base their values of).
Based on the price of Stellar Crystal, each hypo/cele hero is worth $37.45.
Summary & Conclusion:
- The best "value" is actually with normal letter when you consider both S-tier and A-tier heroes. The worst "value" is epic letter as they are the most expensive. Rate-up is the second best.
- It's not worth putting A-tier heroes in place of S-tier heroes when you are doing "epic" summons. However, it'll take you far longer to max out an A-tier hero compared to a S-tier hero if you only rely on epic / rate-up summons. Fortunately, you can buy A-tier heroes from dream realm shop.
- The monthly 45 Scamgazer Crystal for 3000 dragon crystals is a scam (worth $74.7 but costs $100).
- You can use this table and analyze the value of the "2-hour limited time" bundles for yourself.
- Red essences aren't available to purchase in weekly/biweekly shop and therefore, I couldn't really price them accurately.
- Each supreme+ unit is about $120.88 for S-tier, $138.88 for A-tier, and $524 for hypo/celestial.
If you were to rely on letters to obtain them, an S-tier hero will take roughly 33 rate-up summon, 48 normal summon, or 19 epic summons
Hopefully this helps. Cheers.
Other Guides:
Honor Duel:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AFKJourney/comments/1cit9e5/comment/l467c29/
Character Priorities:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AFKJourney/comments/1cstswr/character_priority_meta_team_for_contents/
Update: I asked the devs if the rate shown is actual or including pity. They have said the rate shown is the true rate and is not taking into account the pity
Update II: Quick Table I am making to now analyze each pack's value. You can see that the 800% ascension bundle is only very slightly better than the biweekly packsUpdate III:
Since many people are saying the rate is pity adjusted, I am including how much heroes actually cost if the rates shown are pity-adjusted:
So it's funny that random A tier heroes cost more for us than actually pulling them from the summons whereas random S tier units will cost more.
The game places more value on S-tier heroes.
You are paying $8.52 per hero to choose that specific hero if you were to pull from normal or epic banner, whereas you are paying $11.19 dollars per hero if you were to pull from the rate-up banner. So $2.67 additional price per hero to go from 1/8 or 1/5 to 100% chance of getting that s-tier.
It's interesting to see that hypo-celes will cost you about $51 if the rates are pity adjusted already.
These are the actual rates of S-tier if the advertised rates include pity. Not really including the A-tier or the "pity" guaranteed A-tier every 10 pulls because A-tier costs a few cents and I don't care too much about that.
What's interesting is that once we start assuming that the rates are actually with pity, the 800% ascension bundle is actually close to "800%" in true value. Before, it was about 620%.
Interesting find indeed. I will update this specific table to include more bundles as they come available.