I ran my first Helltide events today and IMHO, this is really not fun (especially when you are trying to get 350 cinders to take advantage of the Tortured Gift of Mysteries chest (which require a turn in of 175 cinders) which gives the most amount of Sacred items and mats. The issue is low mob density (so a lot of time is spent running around the zone over the course of the hour the event is up). It seems better to mark out events (like Jar of Souls) with the mob spawns, complete those, port back to town, and port back (to see if you get placed into a different server shard where you can do another event).
My defense right now is poor for WT3 (and if you die, you lose half of your cinders). So I’m going to have to run these for the time being since it is one of the fastest ways to get Sacred legendaries (and if one is lucky, uniques). I did manage to get two 175 cinder turn ins with just a minute left to spare (you lose whatever cinders you have unspent once the event ends) which yielded a nice haul of Sacred legendaries (I did two more Helltides . I also ran a few legion events where one of them dropped a really crazy rare focus with 714 item level that boosted my damage by 600.
End game wise, I’m really not feeling it so far with Tree of Whispers and Helltide. I guess next up on the evaluation are Nightmare dungeons (which I will tackle tomorrow).
NOTE: XP gains in WT3 are significantly better since I gained 3 levels from doing just the above open world activities. Similarly, gold acquisition isn’t a problem. I had 1.2 million after completing the Capstone dungeon, spent 200K for the second inventory tab, and gained that 200K back by just doing the above open world activities. Yes, if you spend time re-rolling gear and/or doing full re-specs, burning through gold will be easy. The point is that it’s pretty easy to generate gold from just playing, and if really in a pinch, one can sell Sacred (or Ancestral in T4) items since many sell for 5-6 digits (for T1/T2, one should be salvaging everything so that you have a healthy supply of materials).
So if you play non-stop, it’s not surprising that many are hitting level 100 in just a few days while sitting on several hundred million gold (there are probably some who have already broached a billion gold).
